[4v50 Gary]

Let's say that fogey Chief of Ordnance John Ripley resigned in '61 and all those orders for breech loaders, repeaters and hand operated "machine guns" weren't impeded. Would the war had been won sooner by the North?

Rosecrans wanted Spencer rifles for one brigade but Ripley delayed shipping them and when he did, they got no closer than Nashville. In the meantime, Rosecrans got whupped by Bragg (with Longstreet's help) at Chickamauga. Imagine if the Spencers were adopted earlier?

The same goes for all those crew served repeaters like the Coffee Mill gun, Gatling and the Rafael. The Generals in the field saw them, liked them but Ripley kept deferring them and kept them out of the hands of the troops.

Note: even if the Confederates did capture any of these guns, their limited capability to produce metallic cartridges would render them useless.

[Jim K]

I think Ripley has gotten a bum rap over the years. The truth is that very few of those "super guns" were suitable for military service. In addition, every inventor in the country (or at least in the North) had a bright idea, usually involving some complex mechanism and a whole new cartridge to go with it. Sure, in 20-20 hindsight, we can see that the Spencer was an advanced weapon, and that was recognized even by Ripley. But he also knew that Spencer could not produce anywhere near enough, and neither could any other maker. The idea of having the government get patent control and order contractors to make a standard pattern had not yet come into being. (Later, the Spencer was also made by Burnside, but a lot of lessons had been learned by that time.)

What Ripley wanted was to get guns into the hands of the troops, and he recognized that there were going to be a whole lot more troops than some other officials believed would be needed. It might be said that Ripley was one of the few who respected the determination and fighting qualities of the South, when many politicians were talking about sending a few Federal marshals to simply arrest Davis and the other leaders of the Confederacy.

Ripley knew that the rifle-musket was an easy gun to make, there would be no need to pay royalties, that Springfield was already tooled up to make it, and that many contractors had the knowledge and means to turn out satisfactory guns. Most of the "wonder guns" were being made in small factories without capability for expansion, were jealously protected by their inventors, and were too unfamiliar and complex to be easily made by contractors.

The ammunition situation was even worse. It is hard to imagine the chaos that ordnance and supply officers must have faced in trying to get ammo to the troops when one company of a cavalry regiment would have Spencers, another Burnsides, and so forth.

Ripley understood the overall situation very well. He wanted to provide every soldier with a simple rifle-musket, which nearly everyone already knew how to load and fire, and for which high quality ammunition could be provided at reasonable cost. Further, he understood that any rifle-musket issued by the Federals would be at least as good, if not better than, anything the enemy was likely to have.

It was his misfortune to be at one of those cusps of history when the world was changing, and he has taken a lot of heat for not being willing to adapt to what he saw as the latest fads when there was no reason to do so.

Jim

[4v50 Gary]

Funny about that Jim but I was going to say that Ripley hated wasting ammunition and was an advocate of the one-shot, one-kill school of thought and that marksmanship counted more than volume of fire in a battle.

Ripley had some validity to his concerns, but was entirely against any innovation or advancement of technology. The Spencer was proven reliable by the U.S. Navy at Fort Monroe when they buried it in sand immersed in salt water for 24 hours. It came up shooting. Still Ripley rejected it. McClellan's Chief of Staff had to intervene on behalf of Berdan's Sharpshooters to exchange their accursed Colt Revolver rifles for Sharps.

Factories did gear up for modern guns and did deliver. Over 10k Henrys were delivered before war's end as were over 100k Spencers. Had orders been given earlier, more would have been delievered. Funny but the great thing about metallic cartridge repeaters is that even when captured by the Confederates, their use would have been limited to the ammo at hand.

Returning to Ripley, if he was really a one-shot, one-kill kinda guy, he would have been the darling of the sniper & target shooter crowd today.

[RobW]

Ordnance officers in general are not known for their fascination of new gear. Why get something new when the old does the task, We did it this way for 50 years, why change?

Even private companies have their "ordnance officers". The fault of Riplay IMHO was, that he didn't listen to the officers that had first hand fighting experience.

It's in essence the very old struggle between "seat warmers" and fighting troops.

[MrAcheson]

Ripley had some validity to his concerns, but was entirely against any innovation or advancement of technology.

No the problem is that by the time the repeaters were coming into production, the Army already had huge logistical problems. In order to supply the troops at the beginning of the war they bought up all kinds of muskets and rifles in all kinds of calibers. Ripley had to support that already. If you can't get the people that are already fighting the war the kinds and amounts of ammo they need, what do you do when you have to support even more kinds of guns and even more types of ammo and in larger quantities? Keep in mind there were something like 3 or 4 types of spencer rifle ammo by the end of the war that were not compatible with each other. And thats just the spencer...

Ripley didn't believe the repeater would make that much of a tactical/strategic difference. He thought accurate aimed fire would be the better way to go tactically and logistically. Because of this, he went with what he had rather than adding to his huge logistical burden. Was he wrong? Yup, breach-loading repeaters are much better than muzzle-loaders in almost every way. So he is remembered as a fool.

[Jim K]

Well, Gary, the Spencer was accepted by Ripley and he ordered 10,000 of them very early on. But the Spencer plant, working full out, produced only some 200,000 rifles and carbines during the war. The Union army at its peak was over 2 million men; the Army of the Potomac alone was over 300,000. Those 200 thousand Spencers did not go far.

I know all the arguments that Ripley was a fuddy-duddy, an old timer who did not want any new-fangled guns in his army. But he was not confronted with a single, modern gun, rugged enough for service, that could be produced in quantity with its ammunition. He was confronted with hordes of screaming inventors, each of whom insisted that he and he alone had the "wonder weapon" of the century. Most had nothing but a patent, some had nothing but a sketch, some had only an idea. Few had a factory or had made even one gun. Even fewer had considered ammunition production or designed machinery for manufacture of the unique ammunition their weapons needed. Those few who were in the gun business were geared to sporting gun production, not to the vast quantities needed for a war.

Ammunition too would be needed, and in quantity. During the war, the Ordnance Department provided 1 billion 22 million rounds of small arms ammunition, and 1 billion, 220 million percussion caps. Allegheny Arsenal alone produced almost 77 million .58 cartridges. No "wonder gun" ammunition even approached those numbers or could have.

It is an assumption by most critics of Ripley that he had only to get out of the way, and the Union Army would have been fully equipped with rugged, easy to maintain repeating rifles. But guns are not called into being by magic or wishes or assumptions. They have to be made, and they have to be supplied with ammunition.

Also, don't forget one salient point. Even if none of those super weapons had ever been invented, the Union would still have won, and the war would not have lasted significantly longer. No Confederate arm was any better than the Union Springfield rifle-musket. The Enfield was its equal, but most Confederate weapons were inferior. The old fashioned rifle-musket was the mainstay of battle, and no one understood it better than the men who fought the battles.

Union cavalry, even when armed with breech loaders or repeaters, hesitated or even refused to take on Confederate infantry. They knew that muzzle loading muskets, in the hands of skilled men, presented nothing less than a wall of death.

Jim

[4v50 Gary]

Even after Custer's men demonstrated their effectiveness at Gettysburg, Spencer had to see Abe first. Abe had heard of the praises the men heaped upon the Spencer and decided to investigate into it himself. When two samples were delivered, they both jammed. :o Christian Spencer then went himself with a new & improved model and Abe tried it and liked it. Convinced that the Spencer was viable, Abe's legendary patience gave out on Ripley and he decided that Ripley must be retired. Conveniently, Congress passed a law that gave the President the authority to retire any officer with 45 years of service. Ripley got sacked and a new Ordnance Officer appointed.

Had Ripley placed an order earlier, more than 200k Spencers could have been produced. Recall that McClellan had seen a demonstration of the Spencer as early as Nov. 1861. Even that failed and it took the combined efforts Sect. of the Navy, the House Speaker and a direct order from Abe to have Ripley place the original order for 10k Spencers (@ $40 each).

Admittedly Ripley's job was a difficult one and his theory of aimed fire has validity. But why not aimed fire with a repeater? Ripley was too closed minded to accept new technology.

[Jim K]

IF everyone had agreed that the Spencer was the way to go and

IF all the other gunmakers had immediately agreed to set up their plants to make only Spencers and

IF Spencer had agreed to let free use of his patents for the war effort and

IF there had been no problems getting into mass production and

IF the ammunition factories had instantly tooled up to produce Spencer cartridges at the rate of a couple of billion a year and

IF while all this was going on, General Lee didn't take over Washington with his musket-armed men while the Union solidiers waited for their rifles,

I would agree. But it seems like a lot of IF's.

Jim