At the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in 1851, the United States won a greater share of prizes than any other nation. Of particular note were its firearms. Three years after the Exhibition, Britain's Board of Ordnance decided to stock its new national armory with American-made machinery.Footnote 1 The story of American success at this international display has been well told in studies of the American system of manufactures. But the question of how the United States developed technology that its former colonizer coveted has not yet been answered fully.
Part of the answer lies in the firearms industry and the ideology of “Manifest Destiny,” a phrase coined by magazine editor John L. O'Sullivan in 1845 to advocate the United States’ annexation of new territory.Footnote 2 The years surrounding the phrase's origins were a transitional period in the history of industrialization, and historians have done much to analyze the impact of major technological shifts on firms, regional markets, business management, and workers and communities.Footnote 3 They have done less, however, to explore these shifts in relation to the frontier violence that was endemic to antebellum territorial expansion. The frontier has long occupied American historians as a site of violence, opportunity, and exceptionalism. Frontier warfare did not make the United States “exceptional,” but the realities of military conflict in the pursuit of territorial expansion in North America had particular effects on its manufacturing. Americans’ ability to acquire land depended on an implicit commitment among settlers, manufacturers, and federal officials to improve firearms.
When O'Sullivan gave a name to Americans' territorial ambitions, he described a phenomenon—already underway—that would contribute to arms innovation. Warfare in Florida against the Seminole Indians in the late 1830s and early 1840s provided the first major experience for weapon adaptation and a military market for the private sector. Soon after, the United States declared war on Mexico, which became a testing ground and marketing platform for the firearms industry. Beyond their cultural contexts and ideological underpinnings, Manifest Destiny and the “frontier” matter for business historians because they provided the impetus for innovation in the arms industry, which laid the groundwork for developments in other industries.Footnote 4
Merritt Roe Smith's now forty-year old work on technological change at the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, is still the standard-bearer of scholarship on the development of the arms and machine tool industry. But while Smith focused on how local customs shaped industrial change, this article connects eastern firearms manufacturing with the conflict and violence that accompanied the ideology of Manifest Destiny.Footnote 5 The experiences of soldiers and citizens on the southern frontier prompted ordnance officials to undertake new experiments in weapon production, and arms makers to develop repeating firearms. These technological innovations helped contribute to the “American system of manufactures,” a term that likely originated in 1850s England to describe the interchangeability and mechanization that characterized American manufacturing.Footnote 6 This article does not enter into the debate about when, where, and if, true interchangeability developed. Instead, it shows how what became known as the “American system of manufactures” owed its development to manufacturers’ willingness to improve weapons in accordance with the demands of an expanding populace on the frontier.Footnote 7
The arms industry, in the United States and elsewhere, has always influenced civilian industries through technology spin-off. Some of America's major industries, such as the machine tool, sewing, and eventually automobile industries incorporated innovations from the arms industry's interchangeable production.Footnote 8 There were long-existing networks of machine workers, investors, and wholesalers that linked firms in firearms, textile, and metalworking.Footnote 9 Individual mechanical engineers moved between and among different industries and nations, often parlaying the technical skills acquired at an armory into employment and machine development elsewhere.Footnote 10 Nathan Rosenberg has shown how independent machinery-producing firms took off after 1840 because of technical convergence in metal-using industries, which faced similar problems related to power transmission, feed mechanisms, friction reduction, and metal properties. Specialized, high-speed machine tools such as milling machines and precision grinders grew out of the production requirements of arms makers. For example, a government contractor developed the turret lathe for the production of percussion locks for an army horse pistol in 1845. The lathe was later adapted and modified for the production of components for sewing machines, watches, typewriters, and locomotives. In particular, machining requirements of sewing machines were very similar to those of firearms production. One repeating rifle inventor also developed a machine for turning sewing machine spools, which spawned an automatic screw machine that was subsequently used in shoe machinery, hardware, rifles, and ammunition.Footnote 11
These sorts of inventions contributed to mass production, which had its start during the era of Manifest Destiny as a result of changes in the firearms market. Although comparisons between firearms production in England and the United States tend to associate American arms manufacturing with much more robust domestic demand than in England, a major civilian market did not exist prior to the 1840s.Footnote 12 Debates about gun ownership in early America miss the ways in which this market changed as a result of Manifest Destiny. If, as Pamela Haag argues, civilian consumption of firearms was limited until arms makers employed strategic sales and marketing to create a market for guns in the second half of the nineteenth century, this was only possible because of frontier experience.Footnote 13 Settlers in newly acquired territory demanded firearms, and private arms makers pioneered nationwide advertising techniques that linked revolvers and rifles with frontier warfare. At the same time that the civilian market was expanding, the federal government was subsidizing weapon improvements that brought national arms production to international preeminence. It then transitioned away from the regular contractors, who it had spent decades patronizing, to private firearms companies because of more flexible supply policies that included short-term contracts with new suppliers. Government purchases further bolstered mass production.
During the mid-nineteenth century, American firearms production caught up to and surpassed its British and French counterparts because the United States had military ambitions akin to Europe's in the preceding century. The way military conflicts influenced manufacturing decisions, however, differed.Footnote 14 Russia's outmoded weaponry during the Crimean War (1853–1856), for example, prompted its military to develop a first-line battle rifle, but by the 1860s, it slowed manufacturing initiatives and turned to the United States for arms purchases.Footnote 15 Impressed by the machinery and production of U.S. firearms manufacturers, Russian armorers adopted many of their techniques in the following decades. On the other hand, many British arms makers rejected aspects of the American System because mass production technologies did not fit the market they served.Footnote 16 To understand how and why industry changes, and in the American case the rise of the civilian arms market and the American system of manufactures, we have to look beyond the factory to the particularities of geopolitical ambitions and the battlefield.
Arms Production in the 1830s
For the first half of the nineteenth century, the majority of small arms manufacturing occurred at two federal armories in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and Springfield, Massachusetts, and at the private factories of federal contractors, mostly in New England. Although there were more than three hundred small shops that manufactured guns nationwide, most of these employed only a few workers. In 1840, the federal armories produced more than one-third of the nation's firearms and employed over five hundred workers.Footnote 17 The federal armories each received about $200,000 every year, plus additional monies as needed. An 1808 law stipulated that private manufactories, rather than the federal armories, supply state militia. This law, which provided $2,000 annually for contracts, was a compromise between congressmen who wished to expand the national armories and those who wished to allow states to outfit their own militia.
Despite ambivalence over the federal control of arms supplies, the federal government dictated the terms of arms production because the private sector lacked capital and markets. In the decades following the nation's founding, gunsmithing was still a small-scale, specialized trade. Gunsmiths spent about a month of labor on each weapon and often forged the barrel, assembled the gunstock, and completed grinding and filing tasks themselves.Footnote 18 Labor was expensive, and consumer demand did not warrant capital investment in the enlargement of gun factories.Footnote 19 Most families only purchased one gun for their households, if that. General stores and wholesalers’ inventories illustrate this: they were filled with foodstuffs, candles, and clothing items, not muskets and rifles.Footnote 20 The private merchant ships and occasional privateering expeditions that needed weapons on board did not provide reliable demand, either. Even manufacturers who had gotten some of the first federal contracts in the 1790s turned to other pursuits once their contracts ended. As Purveyor of Public Supplies Tench Coxe had recognized in 1807, only advance-sum contracts could “excite and promote the small arms manufacturing and bring the business to settled form.”Footnote 21 From the 1810s onward, manufacturers like Nathan Starr understood that the operation of a “large and expensive factory” depended on “steady encouragement from the government.”Footnote 22
Federal support of small arms manufacturing has been well documented; so, too, has the relationship between the arms industry and interchangeable production, which meant that all armories machine produced identical gun parts.Footnote 23 In the 1810s, the federal government, for example, paid for the expansion of Simeon North's Middletown, Connecticut, factory; North subsequently developed a milling machine that, according to Merritt Roe Smith represented “the first glimmerings of interchangeable production.”Footnote 24 The device achieved a high degree of precision by mechanically feeding a table holding the work piece (or part to be cut, shaped, and smoothed) into a rotary multiple-toothed cutter. Historians of technology have demonstrated that a factory needed to produce at least one thousand guns to make interchangeable parts production worthwhile.Footnote 25 In the early nineteenth century, only the federal government was willing and able to devote the resources to this. Private makers frequently modified the models they made, which made interchangeability impractical.Footnote 26 Their civilian consumers had little desire for interchangeable guns because they were unlikely to have multiple identical guns from which to scavenge parts. Soldiers, on the other hand, needed to be able to change and repair defective parts quickly in the field.
Despite all the advances in supply levels and manufacturing processes by the 1830s, there still existed a fair degree of insecurity surrounding the quality of American arms at the War Department, especially in comparison to Europe. Americans had long admired French arms making; following the Revolutionary War, the War Department ordered two volumes of a French guide to manufacturing weapons, complete with tables on standardized measurements. The French Charleville musket served as the U.S. standard up through the 1790s.Footnote 27 Even after the United States developed its own weapons standards and achieved self-sufficiency in arms production, it continued to look overseas. In the late 1830s, U.S. minister Richard Rush cautioned the War Department that, “we live in an age when the world is moving forward . . . the French have made improvements in guns.”Footnote 28 This was made worse by the fact that the French opposed U.S. expansionist policies and threatened to interfere with its presence in the southwest.Footnote 29 Americans were less envious of the technicalities of British arms making, but more concerned about the threat Britain posed to their consolidation of the North American continent. The U.S. government still had to import from Britain some of the firearms used as gifts for Indians, and those it contracted for domestically had to match the British northwest rifle, which treaty recipients preferred over American models.Footnote 30 This was especially irksome as the United States and Britain competed for control of the Pacific Northwest.
When conducting tests on a new breechloader in 1837, a board of U.S. army officers noted its susceptibility to explosion by writing that, “these objections may be overcome by those in Europe who are devoting great attention and consideration to this [style of gun]; if so, we should place ourselves on a footing with those nations who may adopt it, and to whom hereafter we may be opposed.”Footnote 31 A year later, Secretary of War Joel Roberts Poinsett received a letter warning him that, “we do not value mechanical and manufacturing industry enough.”Footnote 32 These warnings were not unfounded. There was a new sense of urgency from Americans on the ground in frontier areas who begged the War Department to push for more troops and arms because of “the increase of our population and fortifications, the extension of our boundaries, and the constant irritating disturbance on the frontiers.”Footnote 33
Firearms in Florida
The site of many of these “irritating disturbances”—violent skirmishes with Native American societies—was Florida.Footnote 34 The United States had acquired the peninsula in the 1819 Transcontinental Treaty with Spain, which extended the United States’ southern boundary to the Pacific coast. Florida's extensive coastline offered coveted commercial access to Caribbean and Atlantic markets; it was also a particularly violent battleground. Before the treaty with Spain, U.S. troops fought Seminoles in Spanish territory, which Secretary of War John C. Calhoun and President James Monroe advocated for the “safety of our fellow-citizens.”Footnote 35 Throughout the 1820s and 1830s, white settlers in Florida petitioned the federal government for protection from the native peoples living there.Footnote 36 Beginning in 1835, the second round of Florida Seminole Wars absorbed a tremendous amount of resources (between $30 million and $40 million—50 percent of annual expenditures—and forty thousand troops) with little at first to show for it.Footnote 37 Florida became a testing ground for American arms.
An inequitable treaty signed in 1832 required Seminoles to move west of the Mississippi over the ensuing three years.Footnote 38 Not surprisingly, they did not want to leave their land, a fact made brutally apparent by the murder of the officer appointed to superintend their removal, several days after Christmas in 1835. One night after dinner, General Wiley Thompson and another officer walked outside their garrison's perimeters, where a party of Indians ambushed them. Thompson was shot fourteen times and stabbed in the chest. The other officer died on the spot.Footnote 39
Following Thompson's death, the War Department requested federal appropriations to carry out a military campaign in Florida. Secretary of War Lewis Cass told the Committee of Ways and Means that, “the means of making anything like a detailed estimate of the expenses, are not within the reach of the Department,” but settled on $80,000.Footnote 40 (All told, the United States would spend $1,588,848.) The Ordnance Department scrambled to redirect supplies from the nation's arsenals to Florida.Footnote 41 Each year, the War Department distributed arms, usually muskets, to state militia in proportion to the number of men in service. The amount stayed constant at $200,000 up through the Civil War (as did the amount appropriated for the two federal armories) and was distributed according to the number of militia in service. Florida had about thirteen hundred of its own militia, plus about twenty-two hundred volunteers and militia from Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, Louisiana, New York, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, Missouri, South Carolina, and “friendly Indians,” and between two thousand and four thousand regular troops.Footnote 42 Regular troops received supplies from the federal armories.Footnote 43
In 1837, former President Andrew Jackson, who sought the removal of Seminoles from their homeland, wrote to the War Department that, “A well-chosen brigade with such officers as I could select, numbering 1,000 bayonets and rifles, in addition to the regulars now in Florida would destroy the Seminole Indians in 30 days from the time of their reaching Tampa Bay.”Footnote 44 Jackson was wrong, for the Seminole engaged in effective guerilla warfare. Former Adjutant General and Florida politician James Gadsden complained about their use of hiding places. The war, in his consideration, was “shamefully prolonged.”Footnote 45
The Arms Industry Changes
In part, as a response to the events in Florida, the War Department placed increased importance on the improvement and experimentation of arms during the late 1830s. It capitalized on decades of direct investment in private armories and on the network of artificers, ordnance chiefs, armory superintendents, and individual contractors. Labor transfer between and among the private and public sectors paid off as workers and officers shared technical knowledge and exchanged machine tools.Footnote 46 The War Department used federal resources to consolidate control over production by dispatching armory employees to contractors’ factories to observe machinists at work.Footnote 47 The Springfield Armory began to absorb much of the mechanical talent in the region, and by the 1840s, the quality of its employees was unparalleled.Footnote 48
Talent was not enough. The Ordnance Department had to learn to supply weapons for the type of fighting occurring in Florida.Footnote 49 Based on conversations with officers on the ground there, Ordnance officers decided to, for example, use buck and ball cartridges because they dispersed more widely than traditional ones and were best for camouflaged fighting among swampy forests.Footnote 50 In 1837, a board of officers conducted a series of experiments on guns produced at private and public armories, which involved target firing to determine celerity and penetration. The trials also involved physical examination for such qualities as “simplicity,” “utility,” and “durability.” The board's qualitative comments on the trials reveal a preoccupation with combat in Florida. The board noted that one particular rifle was superior because it could transition between infantry and cavalry seamlessly and hence would be useful in a place where many operations relied on dragoons (soldiers who fought as cavalry when mounted, as infantry when dismounted).Footnote 51
At the same time as the fears and realities of warfare in Florida informed officers’ experiments and conclusions, the federal government subsidized ordnance officials’ inspections of cannon foundries, small arms manufactories, and arsenals in Europe. The officials toured England, Scotland, Sweden, Russia, Prussia, Belgium, and France to determine what they needed to do to improve production in the United States. The U.S. officers returned satisfied that once all flintlocks were replaced with percussion locks, U.S. muskets would be superior to any made elsewhere.Footnote 52 It was increasingly becoming the case, in fact, that the United States, not Europe, was the hub of arms making. Europeans had begun taking notice of American guns and sending their own officials to visit U.S. armories.
These visitors were interested primarily in the national armories and the factories of government contractors, where the majority of improvements in gun production had occurred since the 1790s. Commercial production in the private sector, however, began to take off in the 1830s, albeit it in fits and starts. New weapon inventions were starting to appeal to investors, a marked change from earlier attitudes toward arms manufacturing and the time when, according to one patent attorney, “it was not so common to be looking for new things.”Footnote 53 Lowell, Massachusetts, textile capitalists, for example, were interested in investing in the production of John W. Cochran's “celebrated rifle.”Footnote 54 Cochran was an inventor from Lowell who manufactured rifles at a private factory in Springfield.
Another New England inventor helped establish the patent arms industry when he applied revolving techniques to rifles and pistols in the 1830s. Samuel Colt was the son of a Massachusetts textile manufacturer, who funded his first business ventures. Colt claimed to have conceived of the revolver while apprenticed on a voyage to India, but in all likelihood, he saw or learned about revolving guns from the Englishmen with whom he traveled. When Colt returned to the United States, he hired a mechanic in Hartford, Connecticut, to make his first “rotating gun.”Footnote 55 Because the early U.S. patent system was notoriously unprofitable, Colt traveled to England for his first patent. When he returned to the United States in 1836, the patent system was undergoing reforms that made patents more lucrative ventures.Footnote 56 Although Colt's first U.S. patent coincided with these reforms, he struggled to profit in the absence of a robust market for revolvers. Colt's manufacturing costs were high, which made his arms too expensive for the average consumer, who did not necessarily want a gun that could fire multiple times without reloading.Footnote 57 Additionally, the government was reluctant to purchase new inventions.
The military, however, was beginning to experiment with weapons developed in the private sector. Amidst a general climate of government reform and cost-effectiveness in the 1830s, the Senate required the War Department to conduct an examination of the improvements in firearms made by noncontractors.Footnote 58 Colt's and Cochran's firearms, along with those of John H. Hall, Daniel Leavitt, and Baron Hackett, were included in the government tests of 1837. These tests signaled the very beginning of changes in the relationship between private and public manufacture, even though the board ultimately selected arms made by a government contractor. The winning firearms were the breechloaders (which allow for quick reloading) developed by John Hall in conjunction with the federal armories.Footnote 59 The officers praised them specifically for their simplicity, “in order that those who use them may readily comprehend their principles and utility.”Footnote 60 Hall's guns were single-shot and did not have the “various appendages” that Colt's and Cochran's did. Again, the final decisions reflected a preoccupation with frontier warfare and the particularities of combat in Florida. The board recognized the advantage of Colt's continuous fire, but determined that Hall's and Hackett's arms could be loaded more easily on horseback than Colt's and Cochran's, whose parts had to be disconnected to charge them. Officers worried that the multichambered firearms were too complicated for the average soldier. Although Hall's flintlock breech-loading rifles were praised, they would not see much use in Florida, partly because of ignition difficulties in damp conditions. His percussion-ignition carbines (shorter-barreled rifle), however, were given to dragoons in Florida.Footnote 61
The War Department valued military applicability over novelty and in general erred on the side of safety and reliability. Officials were wary of inventors like Colt, who were motivated by profit rather than battlefield realities. It is not that War Department officials did not value innovation. Ordnance Chief George Bomford, for example, often ordered experiments for such inventions as improved iron for gun barrels.Footnote 62 For them, however, innovation mattered if it improved battle outcomes, while for Colt and other private arms makers, innovation meant potentially profitable patents. The Ordnance Department, for example, prized interchangeability because it made weapon repairs easier. Private arms makers, on the other hand, did not fully subscribe to interchangeable production methods because they were not yet cost-effective. David Meyer has shown how for all the attention paid to Colt's production of revolvers, their parts did not interchange. Instead, he and others made the parts as uniform as possible, but focused most attention on the final fitting process.Footnote 63
Colt, however, knew the government was a potentially lucrative customer and made adjustments accordingly. He spoke with a field officer in Florida who wanted a weapon that would overcome the Seminole strategy of making a feigned attack, followed by an intense onslaught, during which many soldiers died while reloading their single-shot muskets.Footnote 64 Although Colt's first revolvers were impractical for field use, they had the potential to permit U.S. troops to fend off a Seminole offensive. They fired more than ten rounds in a minute, and their ramrods, which many men dropped in the loading process, were attached to the body of the weapon.Footnote 65 Colt sold five hundred rifles to Quartermaster General Thomas Sidney Jesup in Florida in 1838, but continued to experiment with ways to improve the revolver.Footnote 66 Colt implemented a loading lever so that the hammer rested on a safety pin situated between two caps, rather than on the cap itself, to prevent the weapon from firing unintentionally.Footnote 67
The government tested Colt's repeating firearms again. On November 18, 1840, a board of officers of the first dragoons met in Pennsylvania to compare Colt's new repeating carbines with Hall's standard carbines. Military officers’ concerns with battle line applicability made them hesitant to adapt new inventions, and they were reluctant to relinquish control of the production process.Footnote 68 The board conducted ten experiments, an example of which involved the carbines “slung to a man mounted, who galloped rapidly for a mile, the piece swinging against the side of the horse.” Colt's carbines held up well to rough use by the experimenters and were faster than Hall's—firing eighteen rounds in two minutes forty-five seconds to Hall's eight minutes; they were less accurate, however. Hall's carbines hit the target eighty seven times, Colt's sixty nine.Footnote 69 Ultimately, the board reported that, “foregoing experiments were very successfully made, and have impressed us with the belief of the utility of these repeating fire-arms for military purposes.” Even so, they recommended a six-month trial period in the field.Footnote 70
As the government slowly embraced private arms makers, it changed its relationship with its regular contractors. By the 1830s, the federal armories produced about 80 percent of the nation's serviceable arms, which meant that the government no longer needed to sustain long-term relationships with manufacturers. Contracting in general did not end, but it issued the last round of advance-sum contracts in 1834.Footnote 71 Instead of investing in the factories of private arms makers, the government began altering contract terms to reap maximum military benefit at minimum public cost. In its 1839 contract with Simeon North for ten thousand carbines, for example, the Ordnance Department expected “perfect uniformity,” and to be able to “exchange parts without impairing efficiency,” but reserved “the right to annul any part of the contract.”Footnote 72 This was a stark change from the 1810s and 1820s, when Ordnance officials had negotiated extra funding for North's manufacturing pursuits. The Ordnance Department now reserved the right to nullify entire contracts if more than three-quarters were not filled, or if, in some cases, like Lemuel Pomeroy's 1840 contract for six thousand muskets, 100 percent of the annual amount was not met.Footnote 73 This new approach to contracts caused anxiety among regular contractors, who, unlike Colt, had dedicated their entire careers to government manufacture. Asa Waters, who had spent over a quarter century making contract muskets in Millbury, Massachusetts, begged Ordnance Chief Bomford for additional work in 1841, promising to produce pistols at 10 percent cheaper than could be done at the national armories. He even offered to forego payment for over a year if that would be more amenable to the ordnance budget.Footnote 74 Waters spent the next few years looking elsewhere for business, but never stopped applying for government work, even though, as he said to another contractor, “they keep applying the screws closer and closer to grinding harder upon the contractors.”Footnote 75
Another way the War Department consolidated its control over military production during the Seminole Wars, even as it started to purchase from the private sector, was to replace the civilian superintendents of the federal armories with ordnance officers. For New Englanders, far removed from war in Florida, this was an odious change. Springfield employees and town denizens petitioned Congress to avoid changes in the law. Changes, they argued, “may be proper in the organization of the army and navy, but are degrading, oppressive, and tyrannical when applied to intelligent and high-minded citizen mechanics.”Footnote 76 Civilian arguments were no match for War Department goals to appoint men with military experience to oversee weapon production.Footnote 77 Civilian James Robb was replaced by James Ripley, a major of ordnance who had fought in the First Seminole War. Some historians have described Ripley as averse to innovation due to his suspicion of weapons makers like Colt and his slowness to adopt new technologies, but earlier in his career, Ripley was responsible for improvements to artillery. Ripley's stance likely reflected his military experience and the fact that innovation was not necessarily compatible with security.Footnote 78 Either way, his appointment so infuriated workers in Springfield that they brought a lawsuit against him, accusing him of unfair layoffs, resource mismanagement, and the deterioration of the quality of arms.Footnote 79 Just as their petitions against changes in superintendence failed, so too did this lawsuit. The War Department, which sought to defeat the Seminoles in Florida, perceived military administration as a good thing.Footnote 80 The government kept Ripley on, and regardless of his management style, the Ordnance Department was able to meet requests for additional supplies and arm most of the troops with new guns. During Ripley's tenure, the M1816 (flintlock firearm, infantry musket) was replaced with the first conventional musket of interchangeable parts: the Springfield Model 1842.Footnote 81
The same year as adoption of the new Springfield model, Congress passed a law for the armed occupation of Florida by settlers who would receive federal subsidies for their own defense. Instead of negotiating a peace, the commander of U.S. troops offered the remaining Seminoles money and a rifle to move to a reservation in southwest Florida.Footnote 82
Proving Ground in Mexico
While U.S. troops battled Seminoles in Florida, Mexico and Texas loomed large on the national agenda. Once Texas became an independent republic in 1836, Americans debated admitting it to the union, along with other Mexican territory to which they had dubious claims. Insecurities about Britain, which urged Texas to maintain its sovereignty rather than join the United States, drove much of the discussion.Footnote 83 France also opposed annexation. Although the United States had supported France in a minor war against the British-backed Mexican government in the 1830s, the French government wanted unfettered access to Texan markets and feared the geopolitical consequences of an expansive United States.Footnote 84
Despite foreign opposition, the U.S. Congress made Texas a state in December, 1845, and declared war on Mexico less than six months later.Footnote 85 It was not a popular war, but it was one that the nation was prepared to wage. Indeed, a Mexican officer had visited the United States in the early 1840s to observe its first-rate artillery, even as Mexico had access to British arms.Footnote 86 Americans no longer worried about their weapon supply or anxiously compared their guns to foreign ones. As one Philadelphia area newspaper noted, the government had plenty of “muskets ready for shipment at a moment's notice.”Footnote 87 Two months after fighting commenced, the War Department reported that the number of arms produced at Springfield greatly exceeded that of the previous year.Footnote 88 By June the following year, the United States had over $8.4 million worth of small arms in its inventory.Footnote 89 Many of these arms represented the latest in firearm technology, including the first conventional musket made entirely of interchangeable parts.Footnote 90
Because of achievements in federal arms production and the rise of patent arms manufacturing, the Ordnance Department lessened its reliance on its regular private contractors. By 1846, only a handful of the Springfield Model 1842, for example, were manufactured outside of the federal armories. Ordnance adopted Simeon North's and John Hall's development of percussion lock technology and milling machines that made possible the manufacture of interchangeable parts, and then turned away from them. It spent the almost $1 million it received during the war to improve infrastructure at the federal armories and arsenals and to update its machine tool inventory, which included machines for introducing percussion cap technology to flintlock muskets and rifles.Footnote 91 At the same time, however, Ordnance alerted long-term contractors that they “must be prepared to reduce their quantity of work for the future.”Footnote 92 If they wanted to continue work, they could examine the new model musket at Springfield, but they “must expect increased vigilance in inspection of these arms, and also that, on account of the large stock of muskets on hand and the increasing demand of the states for other arms . . . orders for muskets will be diminished considerably.”Footnote 93
If the Ordnance Department did need more arms, it solicited them through advertisements, even as it recognized that the “system of advertising would result in the final ruin” of some of its regular contractors.Footnote 94 New government business helped private upstarts like Colt, whose Patent Arms Manufacturing Company had shut down in the early 1840s when it was unable to pay its debts after the markets for armed conflict in Florida and Texas dried up.Footnote 95 Colt no longer owned manufacturing equipment, or even a revolver on which to model new ones, but he anticipated profits from arming soldiers with repeating firearms. Samuel H. Walker, former captain of the Texas Rangers, advised him on dimensions and various mechanical issues, and Colt made improvements specifically for frontier service.Footnote 96 Walker negotiated Colt's first government contract during the Mexican-American War for one thousand revolvers in January 1847. Colt subcontracted the work to Eli Whitney Jr., whose armory had received decades of federal financial support. Colt then opened his own factory later that year, after entering into a second government contract in July.Footnote 97 From the government's standpoint, this arrangement worked particularly well. Colt bore the majority of manufacturing costs, while U.S. troops had success with his revolvers, which received glowing reports from the battlefront. D. E. Twiggs, Seminole War veteran and commander under both General Zachary Taylor and General Winfield Scott, endorsed them to Congress, which made the Ordnance Department's decision-making look good.Footnote 98
American officers credited the superiority of their arms for their ability to overcome enemy numbers. The Battle of Buena Vista in February 1847, was a U.S. victory that has largely been attributed to the superiority of American artillery over Mexican troop numbers, but it was not just howitzers that enabled the American success. Colonel Humphrey Marshall of the Kentucky cavalry reported that his regiment of four hundred, “armed with rifles, or with carbine, pistol and sabre,” was victorious against almost fifteen hundred men. Another commander noted that, “notwithstanding the great superiority of their numbers, [our] riflemen kept up a deliberate and well-directed fire upon them,” and General Zachary Taylor boasted that Americans “maintained their ground handsomely against a greatly superior force, holding themselves under cover and using their weapons with deadly effect.”Footnote 99 Civilians on the home front, too, took pride in the nation's ability to supply troops readily with guns and ammunition. One newspaper reported several days after the declaration of war that “we learn that over 2,000 muskets and over 700 kegs of ball and buck shot cartridges . . . are destined for the Rio Grande.”Footnote 100 The cartridges were the same kind used in Florida; their success in Mexico was a testament to the efficacy of weapon experiments in the 1840s.
Experimentation started to pay off for Colt, as well, as military officials became more amenable to his alterations. Toward the end of the war, an arms inspector had reported Colt to Ordnance Chief George Talcott for departing from the pistol pattern of his first delivery, but after only a mild scolding, Talcott allowed Colt to “serve as a guide” for the inspection process.Footnote 101 The Secretary of War approved Colt's modifications and Colt received payment shortly thereafter.Footnote 102 If, as Donald Hoke maintains, the private sector outpaced the public in innovation, especially in the 1850s, this was the result of battle experience.Footnote 103 An ordnance officer commented that the greatest improvements to Colt's arms were made in the years following the Mexican-American War, when their weight was significantly reduced.Footnote 104 One report stated that, “in the progress of improvement, complexity has yielded to simplicity, and delicacy to strength.” They had also become a lot safer than during the government experiments of the late 1830s. In a series of Ordnance tests in 1848 and 1849, the burst rate decreased from 5.6 to 1 percent. Although Colt was $2,000 in debt after completing his second government order during the war, these improvements would increase the marketability of his revolvers in the years following.
The New Market for Firearms
The war with Mexico changed the arms industry. Scholars have located the origins of mass production and mass marketing in the years preceding the Civil War, but while they have focused on the machinery and the sales and marketing techniques that accompanied and engendered these changes, they have neglected the influence of antebellum military conflict.Footnote 105 In addition to the fact that Mexico turned to U.S. arms makers to restock its arsenals after the military destroyed thousands of weapons at the close of the war, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the subsequent Gadsden Purchase added over 550,000 square miles to U.S. territory, which increased private and public demand for arms. In addition to the boost in population and security needs, the war also provided marketing testimony as Americans increasingly associated firearms with victory in Mexico. The experience of the Mexican-American War, combined with frontier defense in its aftermath, helped transform this market.
The War Department estimated that the United States needed at least a million arms in its arsenals to be available at a moment's notice because new territory required that U.S. troops be “almost constantly in the field.”Footnote 106 One colonel of ordnance said that, “although the supply of arms on hand may appear large, I am of opinion that it should be kept up and increased by manufacturing more annually than is requisite for ordinary consumption.”Footnote 107 The federal government had to “protect the lines of emigration to New Mexico and Oregon . . . with mounted riflemen.”Footnote 108 Settlers, too, wanted guns. Samuel Colt himself claimed that prior to the Mexican-American War, there did not exist a civilian market for revolvers.Footnote 109
By 1860, however, the number of guns produced for the civilian market was several times larger than that produced for or by the military.Footnote 110 Part of the reason for this change had to do with marketing. Colt, in particular, became known for his nationwide marketing and successful branding.Footnote 111 This success depended on the association of his arms with frontier conquest. Testimony from American soldiers who used Colt's revolvers in Mexico, for example, became a major selling point. Before the war had even ended, a Hartford, Connecticut, newspaper published an article—reprinted in other papers—announcing that Colt would be opening a new armory in the city to make guns for the government and for private sale. The article cited the use of Colt's arms, which fired at the rate of six thousand charges per minute, by the Regiment of U.S. Rifles in Mexico. It also quoted General Zachary Taylor's endorsement of Colt's revolvers as weapons that “may be relied upon under all circumstances,” and noted that Taylor's opinion had been formed by men who “have performed feats of almost romantic daring and gallantry with them, during the war with Mexico.”Footnote 112 After the war, newspaper stories credited Colt's revolvers for U.S. victory.Footnote 113 One of Colt's first print advertisements from the early 1850s depicted a scene from the Mexican-American war, and an advertisement from 1858 harkened back to their being “the first rifle fired” in Florida in 1837.Footnote 114 Frontier scenes were powerful marketing tools in the United States, and to some extent overseas.Footnote 115
Although Colt dedicated significant energies to overseas markets in the 1850s—opening a factory in London in 1852, and entering contracts with the British and Russian governments during the Crimean Wars—he increasingly focused on U.S. markets. He closed the London factory in 1857.Footnote 116 The U.S. government had rejected Colt's terms for a new contract immediately following the war, but soon recognized the superiority of his revolvers for “mounted and frontier troops.”Footnote 117 Officers linked Colt's revolvers with Manifest Destiny ideology in their endorsements: Colonel Charles A. May, captain of the 2nd Regiment Dragoons used Colt's revolvers in Florida, Mexico, and New Mexico, and said, “I should not hesitate, with ten men, armed with these pistols, to go anywhere across the plains.”Footnote 118
At the same time, federal officials told their regular contractors that demand did not warrant additional contracts.Footnote 119 At the start of the Mexican-American war, Eli Whitney Jr. had more than enough work for the military and was reluctant to take on work for Colt.Footnote 120 After the war, the government further minimized its use of regular contractors and relied on settlers to test new weapons out for them. Settlers and local soldiers in Oregon, for example, used Sharps rifles—an improved version of Hall's breechloader patented by Christian Sharps in 1848—well in advance of federal troops.Footnote 121
Oregon had fewer than 1,000 settlers in 1840; this population increased from 12,093 in 1850 to 52,465 in 1860 and was likely to purchase firearms.Footnote 122 Sharps's trip down South to drum up business had been unproductive, but he found the majority of his first sales in the West.Footnote 123 Emigration guides advised each party of wagon travelers to spend almost 20 percent of the total cost of the voyage on arms—purchasing one rifle and one pistol per person.Footnote 124 Cautionary tales from the frontier warned emigrants of the dire consequences of not being properly armed.Footnote 125
Colt's revolvers had “grown into general favor with the army and country” and now Sharps's were catching up, as Americans rapidly settled territory west of the Mississippi River.Footnote 126 The Mexican-American War had made Colt's arms famous; Sharps received press from the use of his rifles by antislavery emigrants and activists in Kansas Territory, a battleground over the fate of slavery between 1854 and the Civil War. Settlers in the territory owned firearms, but their squirrel rifles, buffalo guns, and old army muskets were not nearly as effective as the Sharps breech-loading rifles that wealthy New Englanders and emigrant societies funneled into the territory to combat proslavery inhabitants.Footnote 127 All told, antislavery groups spent over $40,000 on Sharps firearms and ultimately succeeded in making the territory a free state.Footnote 128 On the eve of the Civil War, Colt's and Sharps's factories in Hartford, Connecticut, the two largest private manufactories in the nation, pulled in over $1million and $325,000 per year, respectively.Footnote 129 While production at the two federal armories remained steady at around twenty thousand guns per year, Colt and Sharps produced about twice that number.Footnote 130
Other major private arms makers got their start during this period. Windsor, Vermont, arms maker Nicanor Kendall partnered with Samuel E. Robbins and Richard S. Lawrence in 1844. They performed some government contract work, but were informed, like Whitney and others, not to expect much business after 1848.Footnote 131 Robbins and Lawrence turned to building machinery for other armories, and for the British Government in 1854, and contracted to make Sharps rifles in 1850. They overextended themselves, however, and declared bankruptcy in 1855. Their creditors turned their armory into a sewing machine factory, but during the Civil War, returned to making firearms. Worcester, Massachusetts, rifle maker Edwin Wesson patented a revolver in 1848 and two years later, his younger brother Daniel formed the Massachusetts Arms Manufacturing Company with Horace Smith and Joshua Stevens.Footnote 132 Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson then founded Smith and Wesson, which Oliver Winchester purchased in 1855 and renamed Volcanic Repeating Arms in 1855. The company later became New Haven Arms Company, and sold rifles to the Union Army during the Civil War. In 1866, Winchester renamed the company yet again; the Winchester Repeating Arms Company emerged as one of the preeminent American arms manufacturers.Footnote 133
Conclusion
Acting on the belief that the United States had the right to expand across the continent, Americans unintentionally contributed to the industrial developments of the mid-nineteenth century. The relationships among military demands, markets, and innovation were not unique to the nineteenth-century United States, but the Manifest Destiny context points to the importance of understanding the particularities of military conflict and the changes it engenders.Footnote 134 As the federal government sponsored military action along its frontiers and in Mexico, manufacturers adapted the arms they produced to better suit combat experience. Although U.S. officials envied European arms manufacturing during the nation's first decades, in 1853, the British government sponsored an industrial reconnaissance mission to the United States, and several years later established an armory that used American methods and machines.Footnote 135
By the Mexican-American War, federal armories were capable of providing arms for troops within and beyond U.S. borders. The government lessened its dependence on contractors, but still did business with the private sector that it had helped develop. The private arms industry, meanwhile, thrived on frontier experience and demand. It came to be dominated by men like Samuel Colt, whose later business ventures, along with those of Oliver Winchester, grew to be the most iconic private arms suppliers of the American West. They benefitted from private and public sales in a way that earlier manufacturers had not and gained a national and international following.
