The Gun (6 page)

The deployment at the
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and the brief trial by Butler’s troops were anomalies. Whatever the merits of the battery gun—and as yet it was not perfected and the ammunition it fired was problematic—the bureaucratic obstacles against it were substantial. Throughout the war Gatling’s ambitions had been undermined by Brigadier General James W. Ripley, the army’s prickly and by-the-book chief of ordnance, who was nearing seventy years of age and was not inclined to entertain new ideas. Ripley had devoted himself to trying to standardize the Union Army’s mismatched collection of weapons, and was annoyed by the parade of salesmen with their gimmicks and untried wares, who were seeking to add ever more arms to an already sprawling assortment.
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(If war is an incubator for industry and weapons development, it is also a phenomenon that attracts profiteers and quacks. Ripley faced problems that will always accompany a government that has the power to make an arms salesman instantly rich. Several decades later, the British minister of munitions would describe the phenomenon perfectly; “I was, naturally being deluged at the Ministry of Munitions with letters and calls from people who had some new invention or improvement to propose. The great majority of these ideas were, of course, useless, and many of them came from cranks and
lunatics.”)
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In Ripley’s case, the forces working against standardization were extraordinary. Both sides had been unprepared for war when war arrived. The Union Army had grown from 16,000 officers and men to a force of 486,000 in a matter of months,
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and Ripley was tasked with finding them arms and ammunition. The arming risked becoming frantic and slipshod; as the war progressed, between the Union and the Confederacy there were no fewer than 370 different types of small arms on the battlefields, in at least sixty-five calibers. This count did not include the personal arms that many soldiers carried to the fighting.
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Gatling also faced darker problems. He had been born in North Carolina, to slave-holding parents, and had settled in the North. Rumors circulated that he was a Confederate sympathizer masquerading as a businessman, and had built his weapon in Cincinnati, near Southern lines, so that rebel troops might seize his arms stores in a raid.
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It was a peculiar form of war hysteria, and like most forms of hysteria, it was illogical. In the eyes of the federal government, the gun was not good enough for United States service, and yet the government feared that the other side might secure and use it against the Union’s troops. By February 1864, having invested heavily in a weapon that yielded little return, Gatling had had enough. He sought the ear of President Lincoln, to whom he composed a sales pitch, right down to the enclosed brochure. “Pardon me for the liberty I have taken,” the inventor began. “I enclose herewith a circular giving a description of the ‘Gatling Gun,’ of which I am inventor and patentee.

“The arm in question,” he added, “is an invention of no ordinary character.”
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As Gatling posted his letter, war had reached its bloodiest form yet. The Industrial Revolution, and the American zest for capitalism, were proving to be incubators for weapons development, and the soldiers of the time faced firearms and artillery that were becoming more powerful and more precise. Ordered into battle at close ranges, in solid-colored uniforms and in dense formations, they were easy marks at short distances, and suffered miserably from bullet and shrapnel injuries, as well as from diseases stalking both armies’ filthy camps. In the 1850s, the United States Army had switched from using round musket balls and chosen to issue Minié balls, which were faster and more accurate. The Confederacy, whose senior ordnance officers came from American service, chose Minié
balls as well. This meant that both Union and Confederate units, going into battle in close-order drill, were blasting away at each other with rifles of terrible power.
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Enormous amounts of lead were in the air. War records suggest that the Union Army alone procured more than one billion rounds from foreign and domestic suppliers. At two hundred yards, the Minié balls fired from most service weapons could penetrate from nine to eleven inches into white pine; at six hundred yards, they penetrated more than five inches. Experiments with cartridges of the time found that even stray rounds traveling far from the barrel, slowed to the speed of 362 feet per second, would pass effortlessly through an inch-thick pine board, or shatter the leg bone of an ox.
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Accounts of the carnage were accumulating. More than 50,000 casualties at Gettysburg, nearly 35,000 at Chickamauga, another 30,000 at Chancellorsville. And as arms and ordnance plants churned out new developments, the medical arts had not kept pace. Even the lightly wounded faced agony. Anesthesia was only beginning to enter widespread use, which, as one chronicler noted, often meant that “nine-tenths of surgical skill was speed.”
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Amputations were performed in tents and commandeered buildings at battle’s edge, at times by surgeons who sawed off shattered limbs from one partially sedated soldier while his wounded comrades queued up and watched, waiting their turns.
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This was also before the causes of infection were known. Working in ignorance of bacteria, the surgeons who accompanied the soldiers into battle often did not wash their hands or change instruments between patients, many of whom either expired from putrefying infections after their wounds were sutured or arrived at convalescent hospitals away from the front feverish, weakened, and at risk. “Our house is one of constant death now,” the chief nurse at the Union Hospital in Washington had written to her mother in New England, as Gatling was seeking his patent in 1862. “Every day some one drops off the corruption of a torn and wounded body.”
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Two days after Gatling’s patent was awarded, she lamented of laboring to save the wrecked and infected men in the hospital’s dim halls and cold rooms, an environment beset by “universal depression.” “When the day dawns one of my men has gone, and before the hour of supper time comes we close the eyes of two more, one the only son of his mother!”
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The names of these lost sons filled lists in the newspapers around the land, North and South. By the time Gatling wrote Lincoln, about half a
million Union and Confederate soldiers were dead, by far the largest toll that the nation had ever suffered in war, and ever would. Hundreds of thousands more men had been wounded. These were staggering numbers for a nation with a population of 31 million. (The proportionate equivalent would be roughly 5 million dead Americans in the first three years of the most recent war in Iraq.) They were even more staggering considering that neither the Union nor the Confederate tallies included civilian tolls. Gatling offered to help end the bloodletting through a counterintuitive means: more efficient slaughter. He hoped that President Lincoln would see that his weapon—“very simple in its construction, strong and durable and can be used effectively by men of ordinary intelligence”—was “providential, to be used as a means in crushing the rebellion.”

The decision to seek the president’s attention was not unwise, but it was poorly timed. In June 1861, at the outset of the war, Lincoln had expressed enough of a personal interest in the Union Army’s weapons that he had agreed to meet with the salesmen of the Union Repeating Gun, designed, depending on which patent application one believes, by either Wilson Ager, Edward Nugent, or William Palmer.
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Its vendors were no strangers to overstatement. They called their offering “an Army in six-feet square.” It was a single-barreled weapon with a revolving cylinder set just behind the stationary barrel, which made it more like a huge revolver than Gatling’s eventual development. The cylinder was turned via the working of a hand-crank. And as each of the .58-caliber projectiles flew from the thirty-five-inch barrel, at a rate of 120 rounds a minute, new paper cartridges rolled into place from a metal box mounted above.
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Lincoln believed in technology, and he thought that the right weapons, made with the Union’s industrial advantages, might hurry the fighting along toward victory. When the Repeating Gun’s salesmen arrived from New York and checked into the Willard Hotel in Washington, the president ventured down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to participate in a demonstration in the loft of a carriage house. Empty cartridges were used, but Lincoln, manning the crank himself, was able to see the cartridges cycle from the box above, through the cylinders, and drop out below. It was the first time a head of state had such a personal encounter with a rapid-fire firearm—a sales phenomenon that within a
few years would become common practice in Europe. Lincoln was impressed. He called the weapon the “Coffee Mill,” a homespun nickname coined at the sight of cartridges falling from the hopper and out onto the ground through the movement of a handle, which made the contraption vaguely reminiscent of a grinder.
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A few days later the president attended a firing trial with live ammunition at the Washington Arsenal. By the year’s end he had instructed the army to order sixty of the guns. The first fifty were bought for $612.50 apiece, plus 20 percent, the following July.
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With that order, J. D. Mills, the salesman, became the first arms dealer to sell a machine gun,
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a career path many would follow. Gatling hoped to be next.

The mood for revolutionary weapons in Washington, however, was different in early 1864 than it had been in 1861. More than two years of intense fighting had passed since Mills’s sales coup, and no fewer than twenty-five different “machine-gun devices,” as one American military officer called them, had been submitted to ordnance officials.
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Lincoln had pushed for another early machine gun, known as the Raphael Repeater, but General Ripley had stymied that weapon, too. And the Coffee Mills that Lincoln had managed to urge into service, and Butler’s Gatlings, had been of little consequence, for many reasons. Some were the weapon’s fault, others not. Paper cartridges were prone to failure. Coffee Mills had seen combat under Colonel John W. Geary in Middleburg, Virginia, in 1862, when they pushed back a Confederate cavalry squadron.
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But the colonel later returned the guns to Washington and complained they were inefficient and unsafe. The single barrel, firing heavy bullets and exposed to the bullets’ friction and the great heat of the powder that propelled them, was prone to overheating. The loads of ammunition required to supply the weapons were a heavy burden for the men and draft horses needed to move the weapon into position for a fight. There were also reports that the weapons’ parts broke, causing the entire system to fail. The rebels’ Requas had also not redeemed themselves. The Confederate volley gun weighed nearly fourteen hundred pounds and tended not to work when its ammunition was exposed to moisture. Rapid-fire weapons were too new, and the army’s officers too unfamiliar with them, for machine gunnery to find a place in the war.

Worries about logistics and performance were not the only factors that had dampened enthusiasm. An absence of imagination played a part.
The federal and Confederate officers had been unable to conceive of an essential tactical role for these new weapons. Officers were simply not sure what to do with them. They regarded them as offshoots of artillery, not as infantry arms. Rapid-fire arms stood garrison duty. They watched over bridges. Butler dragged them along as his unit walked across the South. They were not pushed to the center of battlefield duty, and, as near as the surviving records and accounts of the fighting tell, were never used in the offense. No one quite knew how, and no one was advocating for them from within.

Gatling sensed what he was up against. His claim to Lincoln—that the gun he offered was of no ordinary character—was certainly true. Unlike the guns his competitors sold, his weapon was showing signs in field trials that it did not overheat and was a step closer to making the elusive goal of rapid fire real. He wanted Lincoln to know that what he offered was not another curio, and far surpassed the lackluster machine that had intrigued the president almost three years before. He included a postscript in his letter: “I have seen an inferior arm known as the ‘Coffee Mill Gun’ which I am informed has not given satisfaction in practical tests on the battlefield. I assure you my invention is no ‘Coffee Mill Gun’—but is entirely a different arm and is entirely free from the accidents and objections raised against that arm.”

Performance did not matter. The Confederacy by 1864 had both bloodied the Union’s formations and become so weakened by the materially superior federal troops that the promise of a swift victory brought on by a new and terribly efficient weapon was neither as inviting, nor as believable, as it might have been before. Gatling waited for an answer from a president whose attention had drifted. Lincoln did not intervene on Gatling’s behalf. There is no record that he troubled to reply.

The time was not spent idly. Work on the Gatling gun line continued. Gatling had initially had his weapons manufactured in Cincinnati. In 1864, upon making another model with many refinements, he commissioned the Cooper Fire Arms Manufacturing Company, of Pennsylvania, to build an improved prototype. The new model was much more reliable and efficient. Gatling’s sales agent, General John Love, a well-connected retired army veteran and graduate of West Point, offered the weapon for trials to the Army Ordnance Department in January 1865. General Ripley, who had thwarted Gatling from the beginning, had retired.
His eventual replacement, Brigadier General Alexander B. Dyer, was twenty years younger than his former boss and more amenable to examining new submissions. The latest Gatling’s performance was of a much higher order, and new developments in ammunition meant the weapon now fired metal cartridges, rather than the paper cartridges used in the earlier guns. Trials were ordered. The army’s ordnance corps began to see its potential. “Dr. Gatling’s gun seems to possess all the good qualities claimed for it,” a test supervisor wrote. “It is therefore merely a question of whether such a piece would be of use in actual service.”
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