Buy American: Colonel Ripley and the English Enfield Rifles
1861: Washington, D.C., United States
William R. Forstchen
Colonel James Ripley, West Point class of 1813, might very well have been responsible for prolonging the bloody four-year American Civil War, a conflict that might have ended in a matter of months. Sixty-seven years old when he assumed control of the Ordnance Department of the U.S. Army in 1861, Ripley was disdainful of any new innovations proposed for arming the burgeoning armies of the North. Among Civil War buffs he is well-known as the man who used every bureaucratic means possible to block the introduction of breech-loading weapons for the infantry, especially the rapid-firing Spencer rifle, which he claimed would only encourage men to “waste ammunition which is expensive.”
His greatest folly, however, was not a sin of commission, but rather of omission. It cost the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers on both sides, and without a doubt prolonged the war.
The story actually begins in 1852, when England sponsored the first of the modern world’s fairs at the newly constructed Crystal Palace. The American display was opened with nothing more than boxes of machine parts; volunteers were taken from the audience, and within a matter of minutes guided through the assembling of these parts into a fully functional Colt revolver, a masterpiece of precision interchangeable manufacturing. So revolutionary was this demonstration that the British Parliament assigned a commission to travel to America to unlock the secrets of this new technology, and one of their first stops was at the Springfield (Massachusetts) Armory, which at this point was just gearing up for the mass production of the new 1855 model Springfield .58 rifled musket. Awed by this precision capability, the British government purchased a full working factory. Within three years the British began manufacturing their own rifled musket, the .577-caliber Enfield, which was in all ways nearly identical to the American Springfield except for slight modifications in the hammer and a three-thousandths-of-an-inch difference in caliber.
The advent of hostilities in America caught the Federal army completely flatfooted (though some would later claim that Jefferson Davis, secretary of war under President James Buchanan, had in fact deliberately sabotaged key decisions for preparation while still in office). The army was less than 20,000 strong, but far more important, the stockpile of modern weapons that should have existed was in fact nonexistent. The model 1855 Springfields that were on hand numbered only in the tens of thousands, of which many were in southern armories. Weapons dating all the way back to the Revolution in various state armories were all that were available.
Three days after the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers, and by the end of the summer further calls went out for an additional half a million men. The biggest problem facing the Union was not getting volunteers—in fact, men were being turned away—but rather how to arm, and this question landed on Colonel Ripley’s desk.
First off, Ripley announced that he saw no problem with smoothbore weapons. They had worked well enough for the army he had fought with in 1812, but if everyone insisted on rifled weapons, the rifled muzzleloader would be good enough to serve. There was one little wrinkle, though: it would take a year or more for the Springfield Armory and various subcontractors to manufacture the needed weapons. Any suggestion that the Union Army turn to private arms makers for the development or manufacture of high-tech repeating weapons was rejected out of hand.
Faced with this dilemma, a staff officer serving under Ripley presented a very simple solution to the crisis: go to England and purchase the needed Enfields from the British, who were offering the weapons at rock-bottom prices on a cash-and-carry basis since by this stage the British were already considering going over to breech-loading weapons. With such a solution, the Union Army could be fully armed within a couple of months.
Colonel James Ripley, however, went through the roof when he was approached with the idea. After all, he had once fought the British, and the mere thought of now running to them for weapons was an idea beneath contempt. Second, Ripley openly stated his opinion that the war would be over with by the end of the summer and the purchase of several hundred thousand rifles would thus prove to be a total waste since the armies would already be demobilizing by the time the new weapons arrived. And finally he presented the most telling argument of all: that this was an American war and he intended to buy American. Anything less would be unpatriotic!
The staffer retreated from this tirade, mulled things over, and then returned several days later with a far more convincing argument that he knew would win the old man over: intelligence sources were reporting that Confederate agents were already in England negotiating to buy up every Enfield in stock and were also contracting for additional production runs.
Ripley again hit the roof but not in panic. His response was that first of all, if the Confederates wanted to buy the damned English guns that was their business and not his. Moreover, he again asserted that the war would be over before the guns would even come into play and that American soldiers would go to battle armed with American-made guns. The staffer persisted, finally arguing that for the good of the cause, if need be the Federal government should outbid the Confederates and thereby prevent them from acquiring the stockpile. The comment was even passed that if Ripley was still so resistant to the acquisition of the Enfields, then at the very least the guns should be purchased and, if need be, dumped into the ocean in order to prevent the Confederate states from using them.
The staffer was dismissed and ordered never to bring up the subject again.
Three months later, at Manassas, more than 35,000 Union troops went into battle, primarily armed with aging smoothbores. Their final assault up Henry Hill came within mere yards of carrying the day and breaking the back of Confederate resistance. That final gallant charge, however, was shredded by the concentrated volleys of Stonewall Jackson’s men, armed primarily with newly issued Enfield rifles that could kill at four hundred yards and were murderous at a hundred yards or less, a range at which the smoothbores of the Union were all but useless.
Finally buckling to pressure from the administration, Ripley broke down and started to order Enfields, but by then it was too late: the initial stockpile was already in the South. One of the ironies of the war was that the British continued to manufacture Enfields, with both Union and Confederate purchasing agents waiting at the end of the assembly line. In desperation Ripley turned to the Prussians, who were more than eager to sell off their own muzzleloaders since the Prussian army had already converted to bolt-action breechloaders. These muzzleloaders, and additional arms purchased from the Belgians, were almost all condemned by the European armies as more dangerous to the man behind the gun rather the target in front of it. As to the far more advanced breechloaders such as the Sharps and Burnside rifles, or the highly advanced Spencers, many Union regiments simply stepped around the bureaucracy by purchasing the weapons with their own funds, accepting with a cold, simple logic that their very lives on the battlefield depended on superior firepower and they were willing to take money out of the twelve dollars a month pay to purchase it, along with the “expensive” ammunition Ripley kept complaining about.
One of the great mythologies of the American Civil War is that throughout the war the Confederate armies labored under the burden of inferior equipment. This was definitely not true in the first year of the war, thanks to Colonel Ripley. Right up until the summer of 1862, Union troops, especially in the western theater of operations, fought primarily with smoothbores, while the vast majority of Confederate troops were armed with English-manufactured Enfields. Without the Enfields, the southern cause might very well have collapsed on the battlefields of 1861 and early 1862. If they had been forced to confront a Union Army outfitted with breechloaders and been denied access to the Enfield as well, without a doubt there never would have been a Second Manassas, an Antietam, a Gettysburg, and the bloody killing match of the Wilderness Campaign.
Ripley’s army lost most of their first battles; they were outgunned and outranged by the very rifles he could have bought. He fought change so that the Gatling gun and repeating rifles barely appeared. Above all, more than any other person his decisions may have prolonged the American Civil War for years. As for Ripley, who was finally pushed out of office in 1863, it is doubtful if he ever considered that there was an alternative or a need to apologize. To his way of thinking, not buying British rifles was a good idea.