From Tredegar to Wilson’s Creek

When Abraham Lincoln stood aboard the Federal gunboat steaming up the James River to Richmond, he glimpsed along the shore the broken shells of long brick buildings which had lately housed one of the world’s most formidable ordnance establishments: the Richmond Arsenal, the Carbine Factory, the C. S. Laboratory, Richmond, and the great Tredegar Iron Works. In addition to private gunsmith contractors like Samuel Sutherland of Richmond, or fabricators large and small like the man at Wytheville who is thought to have remodeled the Hall rifles to muzzleloaders, the Virginia capability to wage War was equal to the capacity of any ordnance establishment of like size in any nation on the globe.

Though the secession of the western part of the state prevented any rebuilding of the burned United States Arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia had acquired a good share of the machinery for rifle muskets, and at the Tredegar Works possessed a facility for expanding production that was limited more by available manpower, than by intrinsic restrictions such as capital or know-how. What Lincoln saw had been systematically destroyed, by the Yankee captors of the vanquished citadel of the Lost Cause, and by the Confederate defenders themselves in the last days.
In a holocaust the like of which was perhaps not seen until the last days of Berlin in World War II, the most important capital enterprise of the Confederacy, the highly industrialized city of Richmond, was blasted into a Reconstruction Era from which it has taken many decades to recover. The removal of the Confederate seat of government from relatively well protected Montgomery, to Richmond, soon after the Virginia Legislature signed the Ordinance of Secession on April 17, 1861, was a move of double importance. Not only was Richmond the capital city of the richest and most populous state of the Confederacy, but she was also the center of capital, a great trading and shipping port, and possessed unusual manufacturing potential from the very first. Richmond and the Capital were synonymous—they would be defended to the very last!

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The Gatling Gun

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...

CHAPTER 6 Rifle Muskets: Civil War Scandals

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...

CHAPTER 7 Injustice to Justice

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.

Civil War Guns

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