Reprinted here is an editorial from The Evening Post on September 22, 1870, in which they criticize the conclusions from the Schofield board responsible for selecting the new breechloading rifle design for the Army to standardize upon. Some thoughts will follow. Enjoy!
Small Arms for Infantry
Recent inventions and campaigns have made the old smooth-bore musket, which was almost the only arm for infantry that was thought of for service in the field so lately as ten years ago, wholly worthless. Even the “improved Springfield rifle” (muzzle-loading), which stood the test of our civil war so well, and was thought so lately as 1865 to be the most formidable gun with which an army could be trusted, is now antiquated, and a regiment carrying it would be merely subject for butchery by a company supplied with the best breech-loaders. Thus, the army of the United States, in comparison with the French or German army of to-day, is an unarmed body of men; and, what is worse, the arsenals of the United States contain no arms which would be worth anything in a war with a great European power. We have not even the machinery to make the arms our citizen soldierly would need, nor is it fully decided what arms they ought to have.
The present war in Europe has been expected to decide, among other things, what is the best infantry arm now in use. Men in general seemed to agree that the palm of merit belonged either to the chassepot or to the needle-gun; and awaited the test of action to compare them. The results are already sufficiently definite, but not satisfactory. The needle-gun seems to lack nothing in simplicity, nor in accuracy at short ranges. The chassepot is less simple, more deranged, but far more efficient at long ranges, and even retains considerable accuracy at distances at which the needle-gun is worthless. Both may be fired very rapidly, so that nervous, impetuous or merely ill-trained soldiers will shoot away any supply of cartridges that can be given them, at the very beginning of an action. Several of the important successes of the Germans have been gained by their superior self-control, as shown in their habitual economy of ammunition. But, apart from the qualities of the soldiers themselves, the chassepot seems to be the superior weapon.
A large number of American inventors have devised breech loading rifles which they consider superior to any European gun. A board appointed by the War Department has made a series of experiments upon these guns at St. Louis, and has presented an elaborate report upon them, which is signed by Generals Schofield, J.H. Potter and Merritt, and Majors Van Voast and J. Hamilton, and expresses their unanimous judgment that the six best systems of small arms for infantry use, in the order of their merit, are 1, the Remington; 2, the Springfield (the new breech-loading rifle musket); 3, the Sharp; 5, the Morgenstern; 6, the Martini-Henry; 6, the Ward Burton, that only the first three have merit enough to warrant the adoption of them, without further trial in the hands of troops; and that the Remington is decidedly the best system, taking into account all the elements of excellence as well as cost, for the army of the United States.
Such a verdict, pronounced unanimously by a board of trained and skillful ordnance officers, will have great weight with public opinion, and might perhaps be regarded as decisive if it stood alone. Even then, however, there would be room for regret that neither of the arms now on actual trial in the great European war had included in the experiments. Indeed, it is curious enough that the needle-gun system, in which the cartridge is exploded by driving a sharp point into a small chamber filled with a metallic detonating powder, is regarded as the only satisfactory one in Europe — or the chasse-pot is also a needle-gun — but is apparently rejected here without any consideration whatever. It is curious, too, that a reader who comes to the consideration of the reported facts, without any knowledge of the special reasoning by which the board reached its conclusions, cannot discover the order of merit given above in the record of the experiments. Indeed, these seem to give at least as good an account of the sixth rifle on the list, the Ward-Burton system, as of the first.
But General A. B. Dyer, the chief of ordnance, in finally sending the report to the adjutant-general, quite unsettles the conclusions of the board by the remark that their opinion is not sustained by their own record of proceedings, “which shows that serious defects exist in the Remington arms not observable in the Springfield or the Sharp’s – such as frequent failure to explode the cartridges, occasional sticking of the empty shell in the chamber, and the difficulty of moving the hammer and breech-block after firing with heavy charges.” General Dyer recommends further experiments on a large scale. To complete the confusion the report bears two additional endorsements, one by General Sherman, the General of the army, “concurring fully with the report of the board,” and the other by Inspector-General Schriver, declaring that “the recommendations of the chief of ordnance are approved by the Secretary of War.”
We trust that the time is far distant when the merits of our infantry small arms will be tested beside those of other nations, in any other way than that of scientific experiment. But there is no excuse for shuffling or trifling with a question like this, which concerns at all times our national strength, and may at some time concern our national existence. Let it be decided what the best arm is, beyond all dispute, and by authority which will command public assent; and then let no more public money be wasted in the manufacture of any other.
One cannot help but have some reaction to the statement, “We trust that the time is far distant when the merits of our infantry small arms will be tested beside those of other nations.” An infant boy born the night this article was published would have just missed the draft for World War 1, if my math is correct. The Spanish-American War, too, was even nearer on the horizon.
My own reaction upon reading this and the subsequent rejoinder published in the Springfield Republican that October, was how focused these writers, and presumably their East coast audiences, were on the threat from Europe while the Plains Indian Wars were raging out West. It’s funny that even today when you do a basic Internet search for the US wars in the 19th century, you’re likely to only run across four – the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War. Where is Red Cloud’s War? The Souix Wars?
To their credit, it’s perhaps not widely known today that Napoleon III had campaigned in Mexico during the American Civil War (and backed the Confederacy). In fact, this campaign – the Second French Intervention in Mexico – is where the Cinco de Mayo celebration comes from – the defeat of the French army at the Battle of the Puebla. It was not entirely irrational to fear the French emperor setting his sites on the United States. We can all lift a margarita in celebration next month.
I’ve remarked in an earlier post that the 1870 board called for any design to be submitted, by anyone, from anywhere. This is probably related to the fact that General Dyer was lit up in 1866 over the results of a similar evaluation commission, where various inventors called shenanigans, claimed they got short shrift from the board, unfair evaluation, etc. Dyer was acquitted of these accusations after a board of inquiry looked into the matter, but you can bet that it would have left the man gun-shy. To an extent, one can interpret his abundance of caution as an over-reaction to his experiences in ’66.
At the same time, Dyer’s caution can be attributed to precisely the point that the editorial makes in its opening paragraph – the pace of change is staggering. And they all knew it.
It is common lore in collector circles that the fix was in during all these trials – that the outcome of going through all that work just to settle back on the Springfield Allin conversion was an example of resistance to change, overly cautious and conforming officers, malignant politics, and worse. However, it’s often unappreciated how brutal conditions were both for soldiers and their kit. One need only read through the field reports from the trial to see a sampling of abuses – yesterday a gun run over (presumably by a wagon), today a gun mangled by a mad wolf, tomorrow a gun lost in action, firing pins breaking, front sights breaking off, guns and ammo submerged. The memoir “War-Path and Bivouac”, by John Finerty, and similar works adequately describe the horrible conditions experienced by the men and their rifles in the Plains Wars. To put a rifle into service, to invest substantial sums of time and money to tool up national machinery and settle on one firearm, which Dyer and others fully appreciated would be challenged in the Western plains even if the East coast cities did not, meant you better be sure the rifle is going to be reliable when a man’s life depends upon it.
