American Rifle - Alexander Rose [77]
But not yet dead, since the calamitous decline of federal arms stock-piles after the battles of Shiloh and Second Bull Run and the bloodbath at Antietam necessitated keeping him on, simply because he was the only one capable of replenishing them.
Ripley might still have held gamely on and hoped for a change of personnel at the War Department to relieve him of the odious Stanton and Watson, but time was against him. The thing that really finished off the formidable chief was the one factor he could not control, despite his best efforts: for more than a year, in order to circumvent Ripley, individual commanders in the field had been securing their own repeaters and single-shot breech-loaders directly from the manufacturers, from friends in the War Department, or from navy stocks. Sometimes soldiers even used their own wages to pay for them in installments. General William Rosecrans, in charge of the Army of the Cumberland, a West Pointer who’d joined the Engineer Corps and was something of an inventor himself (kerosene lanterns and soap-making machines mostly), was a particularly keen customer, acquiring thousands of Colt revolving rifles for his cavalry and infantry. His subordinate, Colonel John Thomas Wilder, was still more enthusiastic: he once wrote directly to Oliver Winchester asking, “At what price will you furnish me nine hundred of your ‘Henry’s Rifles,’ . . . Two of my regiments, now mounted, have signified their willingness to purchase these arms, at their own expense.” Unfortunately Winchester didn’t have enough available, but Christopher Spencer was on a marketing tour of Tennessee at the time (March 1863) to drum up interest in his repeater, and he was only too glad to arrange a shipment to Wilder.133
On May 15, 1863, the first Spencers arrived at Wilder’s camp. The men were so excited by their amazing guns, they scarpered into the woods to try them out on any squirrels, rabbits, and turkeys unlucky enough to be in the vicinity. Three weeks later, on June 4, Wilder’s brigade engaged a small detachment of the First Kentucky Confederate Cavalry outside Liberty, Tennessee. The firefight was short but ended with twenty cavalrymen taken captive. It was the first time a Spencer had been used in battle.134
The second happened the following day. Wilder’s mounted infantry skirmished with a significant force of Confederate foot and horse and put them rapidly to flight. One southern lieutenant, a prisoner, couldn’t believe what he’d seen. He had to ask one of Wilder’s officers, “What kind of Hell-fired guns have your men got?” Near the end of June, after the Spencers again rattled a Confederate unit, one of the fleeing cavalrymen warned an advancing soldier, “Those Yankees have got rifles that won’t quit shootin’ and we can’t load fast enough to keep up.”135
By mid-August of that year Lincoln had heard enough of these colorful stories (and had read, as well, the laudatory press accounts of the Spencer’s performance at Gettysburg a month earlier) to prick his interest, and he summoned Spencer to the White House for a demonstration.136 Spencer arrived with one of his repeaters and handed it to the president. Betraying his curiosity in all things