The complete story of Federal and Confederate small arms: design manufacture, identification, procurement, issue, employment,
effectiveness, and postwar disposal.
By WILLIAM B. EDWARDS
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Enfields Made in America
The Ml853 Enfield long rifle was first manufactured in the United States. In a revolution was in progress—a revolution in manufacturing. That same Major Anderson, who later was Southern agent in Birmingham was, at the time, master armorer of Enfield. This factory had existed for a number of years principally as a barrel mill and parts storehouse. The trouble leading up to the Crimean War suggested to the Crown the advisability of putting arms procurement more directly under control of the government, by expanding the Enfield establishment and introducing machinery and mass production. The example of the Colt factory in Pimlico, and the growth of machine tool firms like Naysmith, Whitworth, and others, showed that the time was right for mass production.
The “Enfield Commission” visited the Springfield Armory and toured the Yankee gun mills. Of particular interest to the British experts was the Robbins & Lawrence works in Windsor, Vermont. The Enfield Commissioners were following up an initial order for Enfields which the Robbins & Lawrence firm is said to have completed. No specimen of this contract, reported to have been 20,000 rifles, has come to the attention of the author, but it is believed to be the Tower Minie rifle.
This contract, it is thought, was completed, and the rifles delivered. The War in the Crimea does not record many uses of rifled British muskets, but a few of the new .577 Enfield type did get into service and when used, were very effective with their long range accuracy potential. Certainly when the Enfield Commission came to the United States, Robbins & Lawrence had every reason to expect some business. They were given another contract, this time for 25,000 rifles. The locks were marked Windsor, the crown, and . Presumably these were the Ml853 long Enfield, with bands spring-fastened; a specimen in the author’s collection is a short sergeant’s rifle. They pushed ahead with the work and laid plans to turn out a further order of 300,000 rifles, but the order never materialized.
Robbins & Lawrence supplied machinery to the Enfield works in England. This was the source of their own collapse, since the Royal Small Arms Factory took over the job for the Crown, and Robbins & Lawrence did not have either the agents to promote nor the facilities to cheapen their work, to compete with the Birmingham and Liege trades. The month to six weeks minimum shipping delay alone cut them out of the European-Eastem-African market, and their interests were placed in bankruptcy and sold at auction to Lamson, Goodnough & Yale.
Other machine companies in New England contributed to the Enfield works. Operating by , Enfield was turning out, by machinery, long rifles of excellent quality. They became the standard by which others were to be judged.
Ager, Williams, Vandenberg, these have faded into history. The repeating gun most remembered from the war, and yet one which had a very confusing record of use therein, is that of Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling. I had the pleasure of witnessing how effectively Dr. Gatling had builded when I attended a meeting of the American Ordnance Association at Aberdeen the fall of 1957 . Mounted on a testing stand was a small bundle of barrels, dwarfed in seeming firepower by the huge cannon flanking it. But when the gunner pushed the button and that mighty mite whirred into action with a high-pitched snarling roar so rapidly that no individual explosions could even be sensed, I knew I had witnessed not only the world’s fastest-firing machine gun, and the world’s heaviest gun in weight of metal fired (a ton and a half in one minute), but a gun that was directly inspired by the Civil War special artillery General Butler bought from Dr. Gatling. First of Gatling’s guns was bulky wheeled carriage “c...
You place me in a most embarrassing position, Mr. Secretary. How is that, Mr. Wilkeson? the gaunt-faced Penn sylvanian queried, the lines of his expression amplified by the fatigue and, somewhat, disappointment with which he laid down his role as Secretary of War for Mr. Lincoln. Because, Mr. Cameron, the newspaperman re sponded, your contract for rifle muskets with the Eagle Manufacturing Company of Mansfield, Connecticut is for only 25,000 arms, and my friends there, whom I induced to engage in this business in expectation of your issuing a further order, as your assistant Mr. Scott assured me you would, will be sorely embarrassed in their operations on this small amount. Indeed this is bad news to me, Mr. Wilkeson, War Secretary Simon Cameron sympathetically observed, as he stuffed papers from his desk drawer into a large portfolio, scanning them briefly, consigning some to the waste basket. But as you can see, I am leaving office today; I believe Mister Stanton, who repla...
In justice to Justice, it must be said that a recent examination of one of the muskets, for the supplying of which to the Union he was so villified, proves to be a reasonably well-assembled hodgepodge of surplus parts and at least as strong and reliable as the American parts from which it was built. But when Philip S. Justice, gunmaker-importer of Philadelphia, tried to get aboard the Federal musket contract gravy train, he both got more than he bar gained for—and Holt and Owen conversely gave him less.
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