Wolseley’s eye bulged at the next sentence. “This line has the capacity to move 10,000 troops between Portland and Quebec or Toronto and Detroit in a single day.”20 It went on to describe the European and North American Railway, which from its Portland terminus ran through Bangor and Saint John to Halifax over a distance of 576 miles.
Without it the complete defense of our coast would be impossible, for the British fleet, holding command of the ocean, would prevent any attack on the lower provinces by water. Holding Halifax, the line to Quebec by the Saint John Valley would be kept open, and an overwhelming force would be thrown into New Brunswick, Canada, or Maine at any moment.21
Wolseley looked up, “And do you know if the Americans have taken any of this excellent advice to properly fortify Maine? My office has only the most superficial information on these matters. This, of course, is the purpose of my visit.”
Hancock responded, “None of the coastal forts in Maine were completed when this war began. There was a flurry of activity initially, but not much substantial improvement. Maine is far away from the fighting. None of the forts have their full complement of guns, and what they have are not all of modern types. There are three forts in Maine of any importance.” He brought out a map. “See, the northernmost, Fort Popham, guards the Kennebec River, and the other two, Forts Gorges and Preble, guard the entrance to Portland Harbor. As far as we can ascertain, the garrisons are home guards, frequently rotated.”
Wolseley stood up and began to pace up and down the office. “Hancock, when the Trent Affair nearly brought us to war, the government decided to reinforce our weak garrison in Canada with more than ten thousand men. They were sent over late in the year through dreadful weather. They had to travel by sled up the snow-covered trails paralleling the St. Lawrence and from there scatter to a dozen garrisons. It would be impossible to repeat this in wartime. We have eighteen thousand men in Canada now and a growing colonial defense force, but I’m afraid that any American attack would be with numbers that would overwhelm us, and Maine would be the logical starting place. It is the normal port of entry for much of Canada’s commerce, and as Governor Washburn has so carefully pointed out, railroads radiate from Portland throughout Canada. Invasion armies could ride the rails and splinter our defenses so rapidly that we would be unable to mass sufficient forces anywhere to successfully defend anything.”
Hancock nodded. “I’ll have a copy of this sent you in the pouch; wouldn’t do for some officious customs officer to find it on you. I think I will inquire into this Colonel Sharpe as well.”
Wolseley stopped his pacing and fixed his eye on Hancock. “Railroads can run in two directions, you know, Hancock.”22
5.
Sergeant Cline Gets a New Job
U.S. ARMY ORDNANCE BUREAU, THE WINDER BUILDING, SEVENTEENTH STREET, N.W., WASHINGTON, D.C., 10:35 AM, AUGUST 8, 1863
Sharpe discovered that Lincoln’s offer entailed more attendance on the President in his travels about Washington. Lincoln explained as they alighted in front of the Ordnance Bureau, “If I introduce you about town as someone in my confidence, you will be taken a lot more seriously. I don’t intend to do this thing by halves.”
On the drive from the Navy Yard, Lincoln had vented his frustration in working with the chief of the Ordnance Bureau, Col. James W. Ripley. The essence of that problem was found in the nickname he had acquired within his own bureau as “Ripley van Winkle.” Ripley rejected any new innovation in firearms technology as “new-fangled gimcracks” and a nefarious plot to slow down the production of the tried-and-true basic weapons determined by the Ordnance Bureau to be the proper and sufficient arms for the Army.1
“I swear, Sharpe, the man defines stubborn and single minded. Every time I want a new idea tried, I must undergo the labors of Hercules to get him to do it. He reminds me of a story. During the Creek War a requisition was made on a certain lieutenant of ordnance, stationed at the South, which he refused to comply with, on the ground that it had not reached him through the channel pointed out by the regulations. He soon after received a message from Gen. Andy Jackson, the substance of which was that if he did not make the issue immediately he would send a guard to arrest him and bring him into camp, and there hang him from the first tree. The requisition was, of course, promptly complied with.2
“What makes it so painful, Sharpe, is that it was Ripley who told this story about himself! As I said, I only retail my stories, and some of them come with thorns. I’m constantly suggesting he order some of these new breech-loading or repeating weapons, but he always argues against it, like a dog defending his last bone. I tell you, I envy Old Hickory’s willingness to hang a man to be taken seriously. We wouldn’t have had this war if a man like Jackson had been in office instead of Buchanan, who simply sold off the store before I took office. When South Carolina made its first threat to secede, Jackson announced if they dared, he would march the Army into the state and hang the first traitor from the first tree with the first rope. You never saw the chivalry come to heel so fast.
“But no one takes me seriously on that. The nearest I can come is to personally go to this office and give him a direct order to buy so many of these weapons. That is about as close as I can come to threaten to hang him. And it works but not as well as the specter of a tree and rope. He issues the contracts, but then in the fine print he stipulates that if the order is delivered even one day late, the contract is canceled.”
“Why don’t you simply dismiss and replace him?”
“Hah! Easier said than done. There were few truly qualified men in the Army when this war started. The people and Congress had been happy to keep the Army small and penurious. A pinched purse is no friend to a new idea. We planted lieutenants in a bed of punctilious forms and now have harvested colonels who cannot think beyond what has been done before. The motto of the Ordnance Corps might as well be the one coined by Voltaire—‘Learned Nothing and Forgotten Nothing.’ Do you know that he refused to purchase breech-loading weapons for [Hiram] Berdan’s rifles, the finest sharpshooters in the Army? Let me tell you how I finally got the 1859 Sharps rifle into the hands of his sharpshooters.
“The sharpshooters were barely settled into their camp when their prowess began to cause quite a stir among folks. Visitors buzzed around them like flies on molasses. So not to miss the fun, I showed up trailing Generals McClellan, [Irvin] McDowell, and [Joseph] Mansfield and a lot more stars, the Prince de Joinville and his considerable French entourage, and three cabinet officers. Quite a party.
“I reviewed the men, and then we went down to the rifle pits, where they had been practicing. Everybody got to fire at targets at six hundred yards. Well, all of these important people could only get about one in four rounds into the targets. They wouldn’t have made it on the frontier, that’s for sure. Then Tom Scott, the assistant secretary of war back then, and a friend of Ripley, sneered something powerful at Colonel Berdan, asking him how he could compare his knowledge of ordnance with the phalanx of ‘experts’ in the government. I knew what he was up to right off. You see, Berdan had hoped to get on the good side of Ripley by agreeing to the muzzle-loaders, but then changed his mind and ended up on Ripley’s bad side. I guess his boys gave him an earful. But he only earned Ripley’s ill will. Well, now, Berdan did not rise to Scott’s bait, so Scott challenged him to try a shot at the target himself. Poor Scott—he and bad judgment went together. A target of a man was set up at six hundred yards and they wrote the name of Jeff Davis on it.” Lincoln laughed. “Now Berdan said that he was a bit reluctant to take a shot at a chief executive in the presence of another, and I said, ‘Oh, Colonel, if you make a good shot it will serve him right.’
“Berdan borrowed his sergeant major’s personal breechloader. Then Scott, like the Serpent in the Tree, said, ‘Now, you must fire standing, for officers should not dirty their uniforms by getting into rifle pits.’
“Berdan answered as coolly as could be, ‘You are right, Colonel Scott. I always fire from the sho
ulder.’ It was a huge, heavy gun, too.
“‘What point are you going to fire at?’ Scott asked.
“‘The head.’
“Scott added, ‘Fire at the right eye!’
“Scott gloated as the target was brought in, thinking he had run a log through his spokes. Then, I swear, his face fell to his boots as everyone could see Jeff Davis’s right pupil had been cleanly shot through! Now Berdan is an uncommonly good shot, but even Davy Crockett or Dan’l Boone would have trouble with that shot. Who cared? I don’t know when I had laughed so hard, but I did control myself long enough to call back from my carriage, ‘Colonel, come down tomorrow, and I will give you an order for your breechloaders!’3
“And you might think that was the end of that. Ripley simply refused to fill the order, and Scott backed him up.” Sharpe’s eyebrows rose in incredulity. “Yes, I thought so, too. And so did General McClellan, who tried to compromise the issue by requesting the Colt repeating rifle, but if Ripley could scorn the President, who was the general in chief of our armies? Ripley did not report to him. The matter rested as the boys in Berdan’s regiment stewed and fumed. They even offered to buy the Sharps and pay the difference between that and the Springfield, but Ripley had the same answer for that, too—no.
“About this time, I met this young feller from Connecticut named Chris Spencer. He was about as inventive as it is possible to be with this repeating rifle.4 Dahlgren gave it a test and couldn’t have been happier. Five hundred cartridges fired and one misfire—and that due to bad fulminate. Dahlgren didn’t hesitate and ordered seven hundred Spencers for the Navy. It was from Dahlgren that I heard about this marvel, and I went down to the Navy Yard to see it and meet the inventor. Then McClellan sets up a board to test it. The members of the board practically beat it to pieces; it still fired as well at the end as the beginning.5 Again McClellan recommended it enthusiastically. But Ripley whined that it was too heavy and too expensive and needed special ammunition, and insisted that the Army’s weapons must be standardized. He also, and I must say slyly, said that seventy-three thousand breechloaders had already been ordered, but these were only for the cavalry. I guess even he did not have the face to insist that mounted men carry muzzle-loaders.
“Spencer came to see me and laid it all out. There was nothing for it. I sent him an order—buy those weapons. And you know Ripley even staved that off. And still Berdan’s men had no decent weapons. Those boys finally did what I could not. They threatened to mutiny in January ’62, and it came close to a fight right in the shadow of the Capitol. God knows he did not fear me, but I guess that scared Ripley. Ripley signed the order for the Sharps, probably with smoke billowing out of his ears.
“Replace him? Would that I could! But who would I find to replace him? There is no one else with his qualifications. Then even should I be able to find a replacement, the law requires a formal retiring board, and that would be drawn out and public. In fairness, I must admit that I owe to Ripley the fact that we are able to get a fine Springfield musket into the hands of every soldier by now, and the man has the uncanny ability to squeeze a penny until it screams, but we could have done so much better.
“Let me give you another example. I saw it early in the war in the loft of Hall’s Carriage Shop across from the Willard Hotel.” An observer would later describe Lincoln’s delight with the weapon.
Mounted on a two-wheeled slight artillery carriage, the Union Repeating Gun consisted of a single rifle barrel with an ingenious breech mechanism. On top was a hopper which Mills had filled with steel cartridge cases, designed to hold regular .58-caliber paper cartridges. Lincoln turned a crank on the side of the gun and delightedly watched the cartridge cases drop one by one into the grooves of a revolving cylinder, while the mechanism automatically tripped the firing pin, extracted the cylinders and dropped them into a receptacle for reloading. Seeing the level of the cases sink lower in the hopper while others were spewed into the receiving tray.6
“Yes, right then and there I saw its resemblance to a coffee mill with the hopper and all. That’s just what I called it, the ‘coffee mill gun,’ and the name kind of just stuck. The inventor, a fellow named J. D. Mills, called it the ‘Union Repeating Gun.’ Said it was ‘an army in six feet square.’ Why, he never got over the name change. Hurt his feelings something powerful.”
Lincoln interrupted himself to order the driver to stop next to a construction site. He got out of the carriage and walked over to a woodpile. He picked up an ax as the workmen recognized him and crowded around. “Sharpe,” he said, “you may talk about your ‘Raphael repeaters’ and ‘XI-inch Dahlgrens,’ but here is an institution that I understand better than any of the generals or weapons makers.” He held the ax out at arm’s length by the end of the handle. His arm did not betray the slightest tremble.7
So, thought Sharpe, Fox’s story was true. The man’s strength is phenomenal. He said, “No, sir, I think you understand a great deal more.”
Lincoln winked. “Care to try, Sharpe?”
“No, sir, not on my best day.”
Lincoln laughed and slowly lowered the ax to the ground without a tremble. The workmen crowded around to shake his hand until he waved good-bye and climbed back into the carriage. Still, he could not shake his unhappiness with the chief of ordnance.
“Ripley was badgered into a field test at the Washington Arsenal, and I made sure a good crowd was there—three cabinet officers, five generals, and the governor of Connecticut, too. Everybody but Ripley was impressed. I even sent him a note telling him it was worth the attention of the government. Still nothing happened. Finally, I bought ten of them on my own on the spot. I pushed McClellan into ordering another fifty. I put them in the hands of the generals, and do you know what happened? Nothing. Good ideas are laying around like chestnuts in the fall, Sharpe, and no one has the wit to pick them up.” Lincoln slumped back in his seat, “I just can’t do it all.”
Then he straightened up again. “There was small fight in Middleburg, Virginia, last October where the gun was actually used. It was turned on a squadron of cavalry and cut them up so badly that they fled the field.”
Sharpe commented, “It is a common problem. These weapons arrive, and no one has any idea how to use them, and more importantly, no one has the sole responsibility of seeing that they are used and used properly. Let me give you an example, sir. You godfathered the Balloon Corps and when Hooker was with the Army, Dr. Thaddeus Lowe’s balloons did great work. They were a vital source of intelligence, which I found most useful in supplementing the work of my bureau.” Sharpe referred to the hydrogen gas balloons invented by Dr. Thadeaus Lowe. It was only a demonstration with Lincoln himself that had resulted in their introduction into the Army. Hooker had been the first general ever to go up in a balloon. They proved critical in the survival of McClellan’s Army in the Peninsular Campaign. And so ubiquitous were they hovering over the Union lines, peering into the enemy’s depth, that the Confederates developed a healthy fear of them and went to great lengths to hide from their searching telescopes. Reports flashed from telegraphers in the balloons whose wires ran down the heavy tethering cables and directly across the battlefields to Army headquarters. “I tell you, sir, I have no other words than to describe their reports as ‘near-time’ intelligence. Nothing else at our disposal for the collection and transmission of intelligence was almost instantaneous.
“The corps just died of neglect, sir, neglect, and petty-minded spite. The officer appointed to supervise the Balloon Corps, since Mr. Lowe remained a civilian contractor, was as officious as he was small minded and rank conscious. He drove Lowe to resign by reducing his pay and refusing to seek funds to repair or replace the worn-out balloons. When Lowe left, the Balloon Corps died.”8
Lincoln’s jaw set. “I will tell you, Ripley is only a pale shadow to John Dahlgren when he was chief of naval ordnance. He was rich in invention, open minded, and with the knowledge of technical things that I found in almost no one else. Is it any won
der that I looked to him for shrewd advice and friendship? I must look after his poor boy now. But I don’t think we have heard the last of young Colonel Dahlgren, one leg or no.”
As they rode along, Lincoln said, “You know, Sharpe, Lowe told me the story of his first flight when he was a cobbler’s apprentice in Portland. That was just when his young imagination was all aflame with the idea of flight. Naturally, he did not have anything like a balloon. He did have a kite, and there was this ferocious old tom in the cobbler’s shop, a great, vicious rat killer. One night he cornered the beast and forced him into a cage. He tied the cage to the kite along with a lantern. He let the offshore winds blow it to a thousand feet and lashed it a post to let it sway in the wind. Ran around town, he did, looking at it from every angle and admiring his feat. When he finally pulled it down, the tom was a shrunk furry bundle. The mean had been scared clean out of him.”9
When they arrived at the Ordnance Bureau, the doorkeeper opened the double doors for them as a clerk ran up the iron stairs to tell Ripley the President was here. Ripley barely looked up from his pen to reply, “He knows where he can find me.”
The clerk had barely disappeared when Lincoln and Sharpe entered Ripley’s office. Sharpe was getting used to Lincoln’s disdain for ceremony. Ripley rose from his desk. “Good morning, Mr. President.”
“Good morning, Colonel.” Lincoln introduced Sharpe. “I wanted him to meet you, Colonel, because he has my entire confidence and will be monitoring the development of advanced weapons in other countries, especially breech-loading and repeating weapons. We have to know what possible enemies are up to. I understand the Prussians are quite happy with their new needle gun.”10 Ripley radiated hostility despite that play on words of being needled entirely escaped him.
Britannia's Fist: From Civil War to World War: An Alternate History Page 11
