Thomas K. Tate
Contrary to popular belief the Minie ball was not used by either side during America’s Civil War. Instead infantry soldiers fired the Harpers Ferry bullet, a hollow based, cylindro-conical bullet designed by acting master armorer James Henry Burton. His reward was to be driven from his position by partisan politics and into the lap of Great Britain where he helped to establish the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield. Based heavily on Burton’s own papers, this book explains the problems and solutions to the armory production of small arms. A complete inventory of machine tools used to manufacture the Springfield rifled musket is listed in an appendix along with details and diagrams of three patents awarded to Burton.
The author, a retired information management director and former computer programmer, is a competitive rifle shooter with a life-long interest in the Civil War. He is listed as a columnist in both The Accurate Rifle and Precision Shooting magazines and has been published in as diverse a range of publications as The New England Quarterly and the Thoreau Society Bulletin to America’s Civil War, Single Shot Rifle Journal and The American Rifleman. A veteran of the Cold War, he served three years in the U.S. Army as an intelligence analyst. He and his wife Marilyn are the parents of two married sons and with proper notification get to visit with their six very active grandchildren.
Introduction
The 1991 Gulf War introduced the world to the idea of the “smart bomb,” a weapon with a guidance system to direct it to its target. No longer was the missile’s trajectory the sole product of its weight and initial force of the propellant. No longer was the missile passive, its flight influenced by wind, air density and gravity that could drive it off target. Some ten percent of all the ordnance used to drive Saddam Hussein’s forces out of Kuwait was of this type, a bomb that could be guided to its target with some precision. Twelve years later “Operation Iraqi Freedom” employed a much higher percentage of these “smart bombs,” whose delivery systems were much enhanced. This improvement between 1991 and 2003 was a continuation of a goal that guided U.S. ordnance development for at least 150 years. James Henry Burton, the main subject of this work, was an influential pioneer in improving military small arms, working to make them more accurate and better able to put the bullet on target.
The early 1850s may be selected as the practical starting date for official interest in improved small arms fire. Writing to Secretary of War Jefferson Davis on May 27, 1856, Henry K. Craig, Colonel of Ordnance, reported on experiments conducted over the past several years that proved “the superiority in range and accuracy of fire of elongated balls, fired from grooved barrels . . .” Working at Harpers Ferry Armory James H. Burton designed a much-improved hollow based, elongated, conical bullet known as the Harpers Ferry bullet. In common parlance, however, it continued to be called the “Minnie ball.” During his time at Harpers Ferry Burton worked to introduce machines to improve the manufacture of small arms barrels and the machines that rifled them. These were important early steps in improved “weapons delivery systems.” Symbolically perhaps, one of his last projects for the United States Ordnance Department was to work on the rear sight for the Springfield rifled musket, model 1855. Though a long way from an electronically controlled “smart bomb,” Burton’s contributions -- the bullet, the rifled barrel and rear sight -- pointed the way to today’s technology that allows almost surgically precise placement of munitions on target.
When James Henry Burton, the future machinist, engineer and armorer to three nations, was born in 1823 the characteristics that defined nineteenth century America were forming. Some critics measured the fledgling United States with the wrong scale. American art and literature, admittedly sparse, was dismissed as trash. “Who reads an American book?” Sydney Smith asked rhetorically as well as sneeringly. Alex de Tocqueville wrote, “[I]n few [civilized nations] have great artists, distinguished poets, or celebrated writers been more rare [than in the United States].” Ralph Waldo Emerson, advocating an American intellectual independence, wrote, “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands draws to a close. The millions, that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests.” However he condemned mechanical skills, low on his scale of the human achievements necessary to produce the complete Man Thinking, Emerson’s term for his idea of the wholly unified man. “Perhaps the time is already come,” Emerson wrote in his “American Scholar” (that he presented to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, Massachusetts on August 31, 1841) “when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids, and fill the postponed expectations of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill.”
The sluggard intellect of America was not directed towards the creation of a literature to be appreciated by the few. In fact it was not directed towards creating much of anything for the few. The chief distinction of the emerging technology that went hand in hand with Jacksonian Democracy was production that could be sold at a low price to the many, rather than at high price to the few. When clocks, for example, were hand made the wealthy few had good ones. With early machine manufacture, the quality of clocks fell but more people had them. In time, machine manufacturing produced a product of improved quality at a lower price. Prices fell as quality rose. By 1860 machine-made watches rivaled the ones made by European craftsmen.
Timothy Walker, a lawyer practicing in Cincinnati, Ohio, was less transcendental than Emerson and saw value in the machinery of industry. His “Defence of Mechanical Philosophy” appeared in 1831 in the North American Review. He was answering Thomas Carlyle, who saw cause for concern for mankind’s moral and aesthetic future threatened by the mechanical philosophy that had become a sign of the time. Walker stated that leisure is what gives mankind the time to produce philosophers and poets. In the past, Walker argued, the few enjoyed leisure at the expense of slaves, serfs or peasants. “We maintain,” Walker wrote when James Burton was still a boy, “that the more work we can compel inert matter to do for us, the better will it be for our minds, because the more time shall we have to attend to them.” Walker, a young man of twenty-five when he wrote “Defence,” understood the machine as a liberator and a time saver. He did not quite understand the wealth that machines could produce or the improved standard of living for the general population who may not have used their leisure time for self-improvement. “The mechanical enterprise,” Walker continued, “with which our age is so alive, far from being unfavorable to our spiritual growth, is the one thing needful to furnish the freedom and leisure necessary for intellectual exercises.”
Some years before James Burton’s birth on August 17, 1823 the United States Army undertook a project that Burton himself would work to bring to completion. That project was to manufacture arms among the several armories with completely interchangeable parts. This dream was shared not only among military men but also civilian arms makers such as Eli Whitney, Simeon North and John Hall shared it as well. As a first step in this long journey Secretary of War James Monroe worked to get Congress to place the national armories under the Ordnance Department’s control. This marked a return to the original 1794 legislation that granted to the War Department direct control over all armory affairs. However because of the lack of ordnance staff, local officials made ordnance policy. Control of the armories between local civilians and army officers seesawed back and forth until the Civil War. On February 8, 1815 Monroe’s desired legislation went into effect. Congress passed “An Act for the better regulation of the Ordnance Department.” Among its provisions, the legislation empowered the Ordnance Department to devise a system for the uniform manufacture of arms, ordnance stores and implements as well as to maintain and preserve the same. Going farther than the bill of 1812 that created the department, the act of 1815 gave control of the Springfield and Harpers Ferry armories directly to the Ordnance Department.
Established in 1812 the Ordnance Department performed well during the War of 1812. The strict and able Colonel Decius Wadsworth commanded with the support of his able subordinate Lieutenant Colonel George Bomford. Guided by the motto “Uniformity, Simplicity and Solidarity” Wadsworth and Bomford established an elaborate agenda for both the Springfield and Harpers Ferry armories. Faced with many damaged small arms following the War of 1812 the Ordnance Department wanted an arm that could be repaired in the field by replacing broken parts with new ones. Though a tall order, the concept of uniform parts was not new. Eli Whitney worked to achieve arms manufacturing through interchangeable parts. Simeon North achieved some success in the manufacture of pistols. By 1809 at the latest French Major Louis de Tousard introduced to the American army the idea of parts uniformity. Tousard, an aide to the Marquis de Lafayette during the American Revolution, joined the Corps of Artillerists and Engineers in 1795. His work on uniformity was the result of work done earlier in 1765 by French General Jean-Baptiste Gribeauval. Under his direction French armorers made gun carriages throughout the various armories in France according to exact specifications.
Thomas Jefferson, while minister to France, learned of the work French gunsmith Honoré Blanc was doing. Blanc outfitted the armory at Vincennes with machines to produce uniform parts for small arms. Jefferson reported that parts for musket locks could be selected at random and fit together without any filing. Unable to entice the Frenchman to emigrate from France to the United States, Jefferson remained in contact with Blanc, monitored his work and sent six of his muskets to Philadelphia in 1789. Eli Whitney was one beneficiary of Jefferson’s efforts. Considering Colonel Wadsworth’s association with Tousard, his familiarity with the work of French ordnance and his close personal friendship with Eli Whitney whose interests he championed at the War Department, Wadsworth’s motto, “Uniformity, Simplicity and Solidarity” is easy to understand.
