The Gun

the circumstances, this seems a reasonable approach, although standardization also thwarted the fielding of valuable weapons at a time when arms development was proceeding at a rapid clip. Ripley was hardly the first armorer who fought for standardization of infantry arms; the philosophy he embraced has become a foundation of modern military training and logistics. Standardization is part of the core of the Kalashnikov system, and one of the reasons for its martial success and its emergence, in the eyes of those who would more fully regulate the international small-arms trade, as a global scurge.

24. David Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George, 1915–1916 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1933), p. 81.

25. David A. Armstrong, Bullets and Bureaucrats: The Machine Gun and the United States Army, 1861–1916 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982), p. 10.

26. W. Reid McKee and M. E. Mason, Jr., Civil War Projectiles II: Small Arms & Field Artllery, With Supplement (Orange, Va.: Moss Publications, 1980), p. 8.

27. The rumor was not substantiated and is offset by evidence otherwise. The Confederacy was no more disposed toward rapid-fire arms than the North. Whether the rumor was a product of war hysteria or a malicious plant by a competitor is unknown. But history would show that Gatling lived in the North, worked from the North, and saw himself as a man of Northern industry. No scholar of the Civil War has yet turned up evidence that he worked surreptitiously for the South, or offered his weapons for sale to the Confederacy.

28. This letter has been reproduced in several books about machine guns, gunnery, and Gatling. Chinn’s work, The Machine Gun, is most useful, as it reproduced the original handwritten note, which shows Gatling’s own underlining for emphasis.

29. William H. McNeill, The Pursuit of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 232.

30. McKee and Mason, Civil War Projectiles, p. 10. The data on the velocities and penetrating powers of the era’s musket balls all come from this source, including the charts and text on p. 10.

31. Frank R. Freemon, Gangrene and Glory: Medical Care During the American Civil War (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Press, 1998), p. 48.

32. Ibid.

33. From Hannah Ropes, Civil War Nurse. The Diary and Letters of Hannah Ropes, John R. Brumgardt, ed., (Knoxville, Tenn.: University of Tennessee Press, 1980), p. 68.

34. Ibid., p. 88.

35. Nugent and Palmer litigated over the American patent from 1861. Ager received British patents for the gun in 1866. If the possibility of riches from future sales motivated the disputes, it was a battle over not much. There were no riches to be had. By the end of the war, in 1865, the Repeating Gun had been discredited due to its frequent jamming.

36. For many of the weapons described in these pages, a more thorough description of their design and operation can be found in Chinn, The Machine Gun, in this case, Vol. 1, pp. 37–40.

37. Robert V. Bruce, Lincoln and the Tools of War (Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1989), p. 119.

38. The prices were published by Lt. Col. Calvin Goddard, chief of the Historical Section of the U.S. Army’s Chief of Ordnance, in Army Ordnance: The Journal of the Army Ordnance Association, and were reprinted in The Machine Gun: The Period of Recognition, Ordnance Department, Washington, 1943.

39. In fact, neither the Ager nor the Gatling were true machine guns, but Mills was the first to succeed in closing a sale of a rapid-fire weapon, and his sale presaged the widespread distribution of weapons of this sort in Europe and beyond.

40. Kimball, “Machine Guns,” p. 406.

41. Armstrong, Bullets and Bureaucrats, pp. 18–19.

42. Test report of January 20, 1865, on file at Connecticut State Library, Record Group 103, Subgroup 12. Hereinafter referred to as “on file at Connecticut State Library.”

2. Machine Guns in Action

1. From a letter to the Royal United Service Institute in 1875 by Captain Ebenezer Rogers.

2. Copy of contract on file at Indiana Historical Society Collection.

3. Quoted from a letter of July 14, 1866, from T. G. Baylor, captain of ordnance, to Major-General A. B. Dyer, the army’s chief of ordnance. In Norton, American Breech-Loading Small Arms, p. 243.

4. Quoted from the report of three officers to Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy, May 30, 1868, in Norton, Breech-Loading Small Arms, p. 244.

5. Minturn, The Inventor’s Friend, p. 83.

6. On file at Connecticut State Library.

7. Tatiana Nikolayevna Ilyina, Voyenniye Agenty i Russkie Oruzhiye (Military Agents and Russian Weapons), (Saint Petersburg: Atlant, 2008), pp. 75– 83.

8. Peter Cozzens, Eyewitness to the Indian Wars, 1865–1890: Conquering the Southern Plains (Mechanicsburgh, Pa: Stackpole Books, 2003), p. 69.

9. Gatling’s System of Fire-Arms with Official Reports of Recent Trials and Great Success. This undated brochure, printed by C. W. Ames in New York, is on file at Indiana State Library.

10. The test results are published in Norton, American Breech-Loading Small Arms, pp. 268–74.

11. Copies of correspondence are on file at Connecticut State Library.

12. Fosbery, “On Mitrailleurs,” p. 547.

13. Letter from R. J. Gatling to General John Love, February 3, 1868. Gatling told Love that he expected the French to buy his guns. “The best of the officers are of the opinion that the 1-inch Gatling gun will supercede the ordinary field guns now in use,” he wrote. “If such should be the case, then making guns must soon grow [into] a large business.”

14. Cited in Norton, American Breech-Loading Small Arms, p. 238.

15. Brevet-Colonel Edward B. Williston, “Machine Guns in War,” Army and Navy Journal, May 20, 1886.

16. Major General Beauchamp, from the transcript of remarks at the Royal United Service Institution after a presentation, “Machine-Guns and How To Use Them,” by W. Gardner. In Ordnance Notes No. 198, 1882, p. 7. That mitrailleuses were carted off no one disputes. It seems unlikely, however, that the quantity was 600; another officer noted that the year before the war, the French had 190 mitrailleuses.

17. Kimball, “Machine Guns,” p. 413.

18. A series of letters in late 1869 between the secretary of state for war in Great Britain and officers of the Gatling Gun Company provide details. On file at Connecticut State Library.

19. Abridged Treatise on The Construction and Manufacture of Ordnance in the British Service, July 1877, p. 262.

20. Gatling’s System of Fire-Arms with Official Report of Recent Trial and Great Successes (C. W. Ames, printer, circa 1874), pp. 6–7. On file at Indiana State Library.

21. Letter from W. H. Talbott, August 31, 1871. On file at Connecticut State Library.

22. G. A. Henty, By Sheer Pluck: A Tale of the Ashanti War (Glasgow: Blackie & Son, 1884), p. 197.

23. H. A. Brackenbury, captain, Royal Artillery, The Ashanti War: A Narrative Prepared From The Official Documents By Permission of Major-General Sir Garnet Wolseley, Vol. II (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1874), p. 44–45.