Hancock nodded. “I’ll have a copy of this sent you in the pouch; wouldn’t do for some officious customs officer to find it on you. I think I will inquire into this Colonel Sharpe as well.”
Wolseley stopped his pacing and fixed his eye on Hancock. “Railroads can run in two directions, you know, Hancock.”
5
U.S. ARMY ORDNANCE BUREAU, THE WINDER BUILDING, SEVENTEENTH STREET, N.W., WASHINGTON, D.C., 10:35 AM, AUGUST 8, 1863
Sharpe discovered that Lincoln’s offer entailed more attendance on the President in his travels about Washington. Lincoln explained as they alighted in front of the Ordnance Bureau, “If I introduce you about town as someone in my confidence, you will be taken a lot more seriously. I don’t intend to do this thing by halves.”
On the drive from the Navy Yard, Lincoln had vented his frustration in working with the chief of the Ordnance Bureau, Col. James W. Ripley. The essence of that problem was found in the nickname he had acquired within his own bureau as “Ripley van Winkle.” Ripley rejected any new innovation in firearms technology as “new-fangled gimcracks” and a nefarious plot to slow down the production of the tried-and-true basic weapons determined by the Ordnance Bureau to be the proper and sufficient arms for the Army.
“I swear, Sharpe, the man defines stubborn and single minded. Every time I want a new idea tried, I must undergo the labors of Hercules to get him to do it. He reminds me of a story. During the Creek War a requisition was made on a certain lieutenant of ordnance, stationed at the South, which he refused to comply with, on the ground that it had not reached him through the channel pointed out by the regulations. He soon after received a message from Gen. Andy Jackson, the substance of which was that if he did not make the issue immediately he would send a guard to arrest him and bring him into camp, and there hang him from the first tree. The requisition was, of course, promptly complied with.
“What makes it so painful, Sharpe, is that it was Ripley who told this story about himself! As I said, I only retail my stories, and some of them come with thorns. I’m constantly suggesting he order some of these new breech-loading or repeating weapons, but he always argues against it, like a dog defending his last bone. I tell you, I envy Old Hickory’s willingness to hang a man to be taken seriously. We wouldn’t have had this war if a man like Jackson had been in office instead of Buchanan, who simply sold off the store before I took office. When South Carolina made its first threat to secede, Jackson announced if they dared, he would march the Army into the state and hang the first traitor from the first tree with the first rope. You never saw the chivalry come to heel so fast.
“But no one takes me seriously on that. The nearest I can come is to personally go to this office and give him a direct order to buy so many of these weapons. That is about as close as I can come to threaten to hang him. And it works but not as well as the specter of a tree and rope. He issues the contracts, but then in the fine print he stipulates that if the order is delivered even one day late, the contract is canceled.”
“Why don’t you simply dismiss and replace him?”
“Hah! Easier said than done. There were few truly qualified men in the Army when this war started. The people and Congress had been happy to keep the Army small and penurious. A pinched purse is no friend to a new idea. We planted lieutenants in a bed of punctilious forms and now have harvested colonels who cannot think beyond what has been done before. The motto of the Ordnance Corps might as well be the one coined by Voltaire-‘Learned Nothing and Forgotten Nothing.’ Do you know that he refused to purchase breech-loading weapons for [Hiram] Berdan’s rifles, the finest sharpshooters in the Army? Let me tell you how I finally got the 1859 Sharps rifle into the hands of his sharpshooters.
“The sharpshooters were barely settled into their camp when their prowess began to cause quite a stir among folks. Visitors buzzed around them like flies on molasses. So not to miss the fun, I showed up trailing Generals McClellan, [Irvin] McDowell, and [Joseph] Mansfield and a lot more stars, the Prince de Joinville and his considerable French entourage, and three cabinet officers. Quite a party.
“I reviewed the men, and then we went down to the rifle pits, where they had been practicing. Everybody got to fire at targets at six hundred yards. Well, all of these important people could only get about one in four rounds into the targets. They wouldn’t have made it on the frontier, that’s for sure. Then Tom Scott, the assistant secretary of war back then, and a friend of Ripley, sneered something powerful at Colonel Berdan, asking him how he could compare his knowledge of ordnance with the phalanx of ‘experts’ in the government. I knew what he was up to right off. You see, Berdan had hoped to get on the good side of Ripley by agreeing to the muzzle-loaders, but then changed his mind and ended up on Ripley’s bad side. I guess his boys gave him an earful. But he only earned Ripley’s ill will. Well, now, Berdan did not rise to Scott’s bait, so Scott challenged him to try a shot at the target himself. Poor Scott-he and bad judgment went together. A target of a man was set up at six hundred yards and they wrote the name of Jeff Davis on it.” Lincoln laughed. “Now Berdan said that he was a bit reluctant to take a shot at a chief executive in the presence of another, and I said, ‘Oh, Colonel, if you make a good shot it will serve him right.’
“Berdan borrowed his sergeant major’s personal breechloader. Then Scott, like the Serpent in the Tree, said, ‘Now, you must fire standing, for officers should not dirty their uniforms by getting into rifle pits.’
“Berdan answered as coolly as could be, ‘You are right, Colonel Scott. I always fire from the shoulder.’ It was a huge, heavy gun, too.
“‘What point are you going to fire at?’ Scott asked.
“‘The head.’
“Scott added, ‘Fire at the right eye!’
“Scott gloated as the target was brought in, thinking he had run a log through his spokes. Then, I swear, his face fell to his boots as everyone could see Jeff Davis’s right pupil had been cleanly shot through! Now Berdan is an uncommonly good shot, but even Davy Crockett or Dan’l Boone would have trouble with that shot. Who cared? I don’t know when I had laughed so hard, but I did control myself long enough to call back from my carriage, ‘Colonel, come down tomorrow, and I will give you an order for your breechloaders!’
“And you might think that was the end of that. Ripley simply refused to fill the order, and Scott backed him up.” Sharpe’s eyebrows rose in incredulity. “Yes, I thought so, too. And so did General McClellan, who tried to compromise the issue by requesting the Colt repeating rifle, but if Ripley could scorn the President, who was the general in chief of our armies? Ripley did not report to him. The matter rested as the boys in Berdan’s regiment stewed and fumed. They even offered to buy the Sharps and pay the difference between that and the Springfield, but Ripley had the same answer for that, too-no.
“About this time, I met this young feller from Connecticut named Chris Spencer. He was about as inventive as it is possible to be with this repeating rifle.4 Dahlgren gave it a test and couldn’t have been happier. Five hundred cartridges fired and one misfire-and that due to bad fulminate. Dahlgren didn’t hesitate and ordered seven hundred Spencers for the Navy. It was from Dahlgren that I heard about this marvel, and I went down to the Navy Yard to see it and meet the inventor. Then McClellan sets up a board to test it. The members of the board practically beat it to pieces; it still fired as well at the end as the beginning. Again McClellan recommended it enthusiastically. But Ripley whined that it was too heavy and too expensive and needed special ammunition, and insisted that the Army’s weapons must be standardized. He also, and I must say slyly, said that seventy-three thousand breechloaders had already been ordered, but these were only for the cavalry. I guess even he did not have the face to insist that mounted men carry muzzle-loaders.