including columns of Mahdist fighters in British campaigns along the Nile. It also suggested that he knew next to nothing of ballistics. Investors steered wide. The gun never went into production.
By the Civil War, the new manufacturing capacity in the United States was moving the craft of gunsmithing into the realm of mass production, putting it firmly on the terrain of the speculator and engineer. Puckle’s fancy fell to more practical men. Since the 1850s, with improvements in metallurgy, toolmaking, and precision labor, there had been a flurry of fresh design efforts, and war in the 1860s had proven to be a stimulant to arms makers and their salesmen. A six-barrel rapid-fire weapon known as the Ripley had been conceived of in Troy, New York, although it had not made it out of the prototype phase. General Origen Vandenburgh, of the New York State Militia, had been conducting tests of his own line of volley guns, and envisioned what he called “their life-destroying efficiency at every point.” An arms race had begun, although initially it was driven more by private designers and profit-seekers than by armies or governments. “We involuntarily look for the most deadly weapon by which men can destroy each other in the open field, and not without ample cause, for decisive struggles, on which national results will depend, will be decided there,” General Vandenburgh told an assembly of British officers in 1862.11 The general’s loyalty to the nation seems to have been less well developed than his desire for sales receipts. After the United States military refused to adopt his weapon, saying, among other things, that it took nine hours to clean after firing, the general took it to England, found a manufacturer, and offered his weapon’s “life-destroying efficiency” to the Confederacy, which bought at least one. He was not the only Northern businessman supplying the enemy. A firm in Rochester, New York, offered a new volley gun, the Requa, with twenty-five .58-caliber barrels arranged in a single row. The Confederate Army had incorporated a few of these weapons into its forces as well; a quick and well-supplied crew could fire seven volleys through a Requa in a minute, 175 bullets in all.12 Another gun, the Union Repeating Gun, fired repeatedly through a single barrel by the means of a hand crank. Then came Gatling.
The sketch that accompanied Gatling’s patent application showed that he had given the concept of rapid fire an ingeniously effective form. He had placed six heavy rifled barrels in circular fashion around a central axis, a design somewhat like a revolver in reverse, with the barrels spinning, rather than a cylinder behind them. A hand crank on the right side rotated each barrel through its turns firing, as ammunition was fed from a canister above. The weapon was a sight. It rested between two carriage wheels, like a small cannon. One writer gave it a name: “the little death angel.”13 It was an angel with curious parentage. Gatling appeared to have borrowed heavily from previous gun designers—the crank and hopper from the Repeating Gun, the six barrels of the Ripley. He also drew from himself. His first battery gun shared design elements with a cotton planter and rotary cultivator, except that it directed evenly spaced bullets, not seeds, where the handlers intended them to go. The result was still not a true automatic weapon. Gatling’s gun was manually operated. It required external assistance from the soldier at the handle to produce continuous fire, and it bore little resemblance to the automatic infantry arms in service today. But Gatling had created a weapon that fired with great rapidity and considerable accuracy, and was a technically sound step closer to the firearm manufacturer’s ideal of automatic fire. The term
Modifications to the battery gun followed, as did public demonstrations. Witness accounts and ordnance test reports show that nothing quite like the effect of a Gatling gun had ever been seen. With this bulky invention, two men could produce controlled and withering streams of bullets beyond the ranges at which infantrymen of the time typically fought. Newspaper editors in Indiana cheered the arrival of a mechanical killing tool. “The newly invented gun of Richard J. Gatling, of this city, was put through an experimental trial yesterday, with blank cartridges, at the State House square, in the presence of the Governor and a large crowd of citizens. It operates very successfully and will certainly prove to be a weapon of war both novel and deadly.”14 Indiana’s governor, Oliver P. Morton, had been impressed enough that he ordered state tests. The initial examination was promising. “The discharge can be made with all desirable accuracy as rapidly as 150 times per minute, and may be continued for hours without danger, as we think, from overheating,” the three reviewers wrote. The weapon’s endurance while firing was an essential improvement over the Repeating Gun, which, with a single barrel and the characteristics of metals of the time, was vulnerable to malfunction caused by extreme heat. (One test in England would find that the Repeating Gun’s “barrel grew first red and then nearly white hot, large drops of fused metal poured from the muzzle, and the firing had to be discontinued from fear of worse consequences.”)15 The Gatling gun’s evaluators were impressed. “The very low price at which the gun can be made, its superiority in every respect, induce us to hope that your Excellency will order enough to be immediately constructed for a fair experiment in the field.”16 Early praise did not spur sales on a significant scale, but Gatling’s prototypes had made him a leader in a pack of arms designers—many of them genuine, some charlatans—racing for business.
These designers sought customers, and Gatling hoped to manufacture his line for the Union Army, the institution most likely to make him a very rich man. He also had little choice. During the war, the United States had imposed an embargo on arms exports. Sales contact with the Confederacy would be treason, and aside from the War Department there were few potential customers. The great size of the Gatling gun, and its relative complexity, made it a tool for institutions, not individuals. Gatling had spent the war years trying to entice the army into a deal, and had been helped by Governor Morton, who urged Peter H. Watson, an assistant secretary of war, to consider the Gatling gun for Union Army service. Good connections did not matter. Always Gatling had failed. The army showed no interest in his bullet-spitting contraption. A limited trial in 1863 by the navy indicated that the design had merit. The battery gun, wrote Lieutenant J. S. Skerrett, who supervised the tests, “has proved itself to be a very effective arm at short range; is well constructed, and calculated to stand usage to which it would necessarily be subjected.”17 The navy ordered a small number of Gatlings. But the army did not budge.
The Union Army was engaged in some of the most ferocious fighting ever seen, the fate of the American experiment was at stake, and many other young technologies were being applied to wide-scale use in war: rail transport, the telegraph, the repeating rifle, and more. All that Gatling had managed was a side arrangement in 1863 with Major General Benjamin F. Butler, a politician turned general in command of the Massachusetts Volunteers. General Butler often acted according to his own whim, and at the request of Gatling’s agent in the East, a demonstration was performed for him in Baltimore as he made his way south toward the war. He bought twelve guns on the spot for one thousand dollars apiece, along with twelve thousand cartridges. It should have been a promising start, but much went wrong. Gatling claimed to have paid $769 per gun to the machine shop he had contracted to manufacture them. Had his company received one thousand dollars for each of the dozen guns, there would have been at best a small profit after his agent’s commission. But Butler’s cash did not find its way to the inventor. “I never got any of that money,” he complained. “My agent went to Chicago with it, where he failed in business before he had made a settlement. So you see I was, so far, badly out of pocket.”18 Moreover, if the weapons had ended up in the hands of a different and more experienced general, they might have been put to imaginative work, and Gatling’s full loss could have been offset by a rush of orders. But Butler is remembered more for his foul reputation among Southerners than as a tactician.19 He retains the distinction of being the first army officer ever to bring modern rapid-fire arms to war. Yet he used them little. Butler’s Gatlings were apparently employed in the defense near Richmond,20 where they were effective in repelling a Confederate attack, and again at a fight along the James and Appomattox rivers. But little else is known of them, and they did not leave a strong impression in the Union Army, or influence the direction of the war.
As Gatling pondered his business in February 1864, nearly three years into the Civil War and with no significant sales on his books, the only other known use of his battery guns had been in mid-July 1863 at the
