Lincoln and the Tools of War (review)

Book Reviews EDITED BY CHARLES T. MILLER B-Il University Hall Iowa City, Iowa Lincoln and the Tools of War. By Robert V. Bruce. ( Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. 1956. Pp. xv, 368. $5.00.) Abraham Lincoln's interest in weapons in general and novel hand weapons in particular has often been mentioned, but seldom if ever before has this subject been so thoroughly explored and at the same time so divertingly told. The list of inventions in which the President took a personal interest ranges from the highly practical to the utterly mad, and includes most of those which were later accepted for service. But no inventions were readily accepted, and the conflict between the inventors (usually with Presidential encouragement) and the officers of Army and Navy Ordnance grew so intense that this scholarly volume has some of the fascination of a novel. The Army Ordnance Department gets fuller treatment than the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance, not only because the Army was much larger but also because of the personality of one of its chiefs. Although Lincoln is the announced protagonist of this book, there is an antagonist who fully rates the billing in the person of Brigadier General James Wolfe Ripley. The real story begins when Ripley became Chief of Ordnance, and in a sense, the tale becomes anticlimactic after his retirement in September, 1863. Of the book's twenty chapters, only the last two concern the post-Ripley period. Mr. Bruce devotes his first three chapters to sketching the backgrounds of Lincoln, Ripley, and John A. Dahlgren of the Navy. From Lincoln's early life the author stresses his natural interest in things mechanical and his delight in handling and firing weapons. He reminds us that Lincoln, as a young Congressman , invented and patented a device for lifting vessels over shoals; this was never produced, but it might have been useful on the Red River. Despite his sketchy education, Lincoln possessed what Mr. Bruce calls "the engineer's exact and tenacious mind." In taking the part of any and all inventors, how- 90C I V I L W A R H I S T O R Y ever, the President revealed a certain lack of appreciation of the problems and pitfalls of contracts and production. The author then turns to the ordnance side of the picture. The history of the Army's Ordnance Department is presented briefly, and here one might wish for a few more pages, for a knowledge of the background and psychology of the Department is essential to an understanding of General Ripley and his outlook. Despite the youth of the Department — organized during the War of 1812, it had been abolished in 1821 and reestablished in 1832 - it was marked by the advanced age of its senior officers. A week after Fort Sumter the seventy year old Chief of Ordnance was eased out to make room for a younger man, and it is significant that his "young" successor was Ripley, only sixty-six. Few ordnance officers went South in 1861, and only a handful sought service in the line of the Volunteers, with the result that the Department benefited by no such accelerated promotions and new talent as fell to other departments or most of the Regular Army regiments. The senior officers of the Ordnance Department were intelligent, honest, and technically competent, but in the young new volunteer army they were undeniably old and relatively unimaginative. General Ripley, according to the author, considered himself "as preserver of the Union Army from newfangled gimcracks." This situation was not so prevalent in the Navy. A greater proportion of Naval Ordnance officers joined the Confederacy, and younger men came to the fore. The author focuses on two in particular: Dahlgren, inventor of the gun bearing his name, who was a youthful fifty-one in 1861; and Henry A. Wise, cousin of the fieiy Virginian, 3 mere forty-one. Commander Dahlgren appears as commandant of the Washington Navy Yard, in whom Lincoln found a kindred spirit; the two became friends, and the President spent many hours at the Navy Yard observing test firing. In the summer of 1862 Dahlgren reluctantly became Chief of the Ordnance...