Colonel Burton's Spiller & Burr Revolver: An Untimely Venture in Confederate Small-Arms Manufacturing (review)

One of the most significant ironies of the Civil War, well discussed in the work of Emory Thomas, is that the war effort began the industrialization of a region trying to preserve agrarianism. Outside Harpers Ferry only a single arms maker existed in the entire South in 1861. Another irony is that the Confederacy’s frantic efforts to promote gun-making required heavy government subsidies.

Matthew Norman focuses his attention on the people involved in those efforts. In 1854, Southern Democrats led by Secretary of War Jefferson Davis forced the Whig James H. Burton out of his position as master armorer at Harpers Ferry. Burton went to England and became the director of the highly successful Enfield rifle plant. At the very pinnacle of his profession, Burton suddenly quit and offered his services to the Confederate States of America. Norman never hints at why Burton would go to work for the Confederacy, being more interested in his efforts to establish a pistol factory in Georgia. Norman tells a story rich in detail but weak on larger questions of historical interest.

Burton became the key figure in the organization of the Spiller and Burr Revolver Company. Edward Spiller and Joseph Burr turned to Burton since neither knew anything about making pistols; “both men simply knew how to run a good business” (p. 17). Yet Norman also writes that Spiller did not know “how to maintain the books,” an odd contradiction within the space of a single page (p. 18). Norman himself has a little trouble with mathematics; he writes, for instance, that “brass casting in June was down nearly two-hundred percent” (p. 70), raising the fascinating specter of negative levels of production. Poor management led the Confederate government, on Burton’s advice, to buy Spiller and Burr and merge it with the new Macon Armory, under Burton’s control. Though Norman pursues this narrative with excruciating precision, more significant issues are lost. It is only in the appendix that the reader discovers that Spiller and Burr made a total of 1,875 pistols, the Macon Armory producing 1,500. By contrast, Colt alone made 400,000 pistols for the U.S. government during the war.

The real story in Colonel Burton’s Spiller and Burr Revolver lies in the enormous difficulty that Burton and his colleagues encountered in bringing any guns into production. Lacking capital, skilled workers, access to raw materials, machinery, and preexisting industrial sites, Burton had to reinvent the wheel to attain even the most modest production levels. Machinery rarely performed as intended; Burton had to make due with a “rifling machine [that] would not rifle a good barrel” (p. 31). To make matters worse, he had to work within the labyrinth of Confederate politics. Guns made for the Confederate Army were often seized for use by state forces; skilled workers were lost to service on the front lines. On the other hand, Burton could use what Norman calls “the socialism of the Confederate war industry” (p. 29), confiscating government materials and drawing upon slave labor in a mixing of private and public enterprise. The Southern economy was centralized during the Civil War but remained very confused. Essentially no one in the Confederacy could figure out how to organize a work force or maximize the use of resources. Burton spent weeks exchanging long letters with General Joe Johnston just to keep a single skilled worker. That is no way to run either a factory or an army. It is not too surprising that Spiller and Burr took a year to turn out their first twelve pistols, though Norman perceives “exceptional accomplishments” in the company’s producing those first pistols at all (p. 32).

The book chronicles a series of production disasters. Every single center pin made in May 1864 was condemned, which leads Norman to conclude...