The Human Spirit Endures

Of the treatment for the wounded available even in the last months of the War, Adams had little praise. He was taken to another part of the field where he lay without shelter, almost unnoticed among the hundreds of other wounded collected there. So diligent was the North in certain aspects of the blockade that medicines and drugs were “countraband.” The “Anaconda” systematically prevented shipments of drugs and surgical instruments to the South, a “measure which did not shorten the conflict by a day, but cost the Southern troops untold agony,” as Allen Nevins observes in his essay “The Glorious and the Terrible” Saturday Review, September 2, 1961. Adams had been among the lucky; he had been operated on under benefit of chloroform anesthetic. When he came to, “Of what happened about me during this ten or eleven days that I lay on this part of the Wilderness battlefield, I have but a vague rememberance. It seems like a horrid nightmare. The groans and complaints of the wounded sufferers, the foul stench, the tormenting gnats and flies, the pain and fever, thirst, vomiting and diarrhea, the

So they sang “From Atlanta to the Sea,” and it damn near drove me nuts! Courtesy Punch Magazine.

sense of loneliness and abandonment, every one around me being utter strangers, the back raw from lying on the ground, the hot sun against which the scanty foliage of the trees afforded little protection, the maggots which got into my wounds—how can I tell all the horror of that time! . .
This then was the end product of the guns of the Civil War. The 620,000 dead in both armies, North and South, were the lucky ones. Those who picked up a Minie ball and lived to regret it carried the terrible memories to the end. Yet somehow the fraternal strife to many was truly over, once the peace at Appomattox was signed. The tales of hospitality on the part of the Southern survivors in their later regimental fraternal associations, to the regimental survivors of their enemies who travelled over many of the battlefields in the 1880’s and even after, and the courtesy and spirit of forgiving friendship with which Northern veterans welcomed Southern parties of visitors, is an incredible sequel to the greatest conflict in the Western Hemisphere. The Nation divided against itself did not fall. Guns North and South boomed defiance and, ultimately, for one side victory and for the other, a curiously honorable defeat. It is this story which the collector, the student, the historian finds today in records of the guns of the Civil War.

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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...

French and Belgian Arms

French and Belgian materiel was considered next best to the Enfields, though the types and calibers were more varied than either Enfield or Austrian Lorenz arms. Basic pattern for the best rifles of both France and Belgium was the “carabine” of Captain Minie. Minie’s designs had exerted profound changes in the world’s small arms armament. That change was ably summed up by lexicographer Thomas Wilhelm after the War when he prepared his military dictionary. Said Wilhelm, “Minie Rifle. A species of fire-arm, invented by Capt. Minie, from whom it receives its name. It is certain in aim, and fatal in its results at 800 yards.” The claim was, if anything, inferior to the real capability of the Minie rifle. France in 1861 possessed a surplus of many arms. During the 1840 ’s the temporary procurement of guns designed by Thouvenin, Pontchara, Minie, and others kept the arsenals busy and the soldiers active testing them. Then came the Crimean War and France’s involvement on the side of Gr...

Civil War Guns

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