Texas Fights Alone

In the Trans-Mississippi area after the fall of Vicksburg, supplies to Confederate forces in the West were cut off. But the western Confederacy was very much self-sustaining. More capacity for manufacturing existed there than has generally been recognized. Small manufactures in part owed their genesis to the large German population of thrifty and skilled farmers and craftsmen who had settled there in the 1840’s. By the end of the War one of the largest armories in the South had been begun at Tyler, Texas; construction plans for 1866 were surprisingly large. In a town which is now a suburb of Dallas, Lancaster, a pistol factory was started which had a capacity of 200 Colt-type revolvers monthly. Southwest of Galveston at Marion (now East Columbia) good-quality revolvers were made by machinery in quantity.
Actual production levels reached were far short of the needs of the times. But domestic manufacture in any War has only been supplementary to the arms in being at the commencement of the War. It is an axiom of warfare that weapons not in being at the beginning of the conflict, or procured or produced very soon thereafter, will be of little effect and influence during the next few years. In Texas, production lead time, spiralling prices or machinery and metals, and impressment of skilled hands into the Army, all contributed to low production rates.
Distance had created the autonomy of Texas and the autonomy had created the will of Texans to handle their own affairs. Thus the Act of January 11, 1862 created the Military Board of Texas, an Ordnance committee to spend $500,000 for buying and manufacturing arms; to establish a cannon foundry, and to appoint agents to oversee these operations. The board members were Governor F. R. Lubbock, Comptroller C. R. Johns, and Treasurer C. H. Randolph of Texas. This board was to greatly affect the fortunes of a Northern engineer, A. S. Clark, the family of Labon E. Tucker, Joseph E. Sherrard, and Pleasant Taylor. Embroiled in their activities was the Lieutenant Governor of Texas, John M. Crockett, ultimately concerned with the very peculiar failure of the Lancaster pistol makers.

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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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