With sales exceeding 20 million per annum recently, Americans have been buying more guns over the past few years than ever before. As with any other product, guns have to be designed, manufactured, and marketed. Those tasks must be performed on an industrial scale. Weapons don’t magically appear in homes and hands, at ranges and shops. John Bainbridge Jr.’s Gun Barons: The Weapons That Transformed America and the Men Who Invented Them is an entertaining and informative new history of the rise of America’s arms industry. It tells the story of how American gunsmithing went in the 19th century from the preserve of hobbyists and craftsmen in barns and on homesteads to an enterprise of dedicated factories and corporate entities.
“Americans love their guns. Hate them, too.” Bainbridge opens his study with this simple observation. During the period he covers, approximately 1844 to 1876, the public loved guns very, very much. The transformation of American gun manufacturing into an industrial concern occurred in a society already steeped in guns. The idea that colonial America lacked a “gun culture” he dismisses out of hand, quoting two legal historians who call the idea risible. “In the decades after the United States was born,” Bainbridge writes, “a mix of national pride, historic reality, and abundant myth cemented gun possession as part of the American character.”
It’s hard to imagine that the “keen inventors and wily businessmen” he focuses on could have emerged in a culture hostile to guns. These men, “who were among the founding fathers of American industry,” became household names. At least, the businesses they established did. Bainbridge ably and briskly recounts how they did so, through a combination of guile, ingenuity, mechanical acumen, and determination, and in the process became synonymous with American guns.
Eliphalet “Lite” Remington was a “daydreaming and versifying” youth who took to fabricating gun barrels in the forge his father had set up to make farming tools and other implements for their neighbors in New York’s Mohawk Valley. Daniel Baird Wesson was a shoemaker’s son from Worcester, Massachusetts, whose “preference for firearms over laces” led to his being apprenticed as an indentured servant in his older brother’s gun business. Horace Smith joined his father crafting weapons in the Springfield Armory before he moved on to other firms and a partnership with Wesson. Not all of Bainbridge’s subjects were old hands at the gun trade. Oliver Winchester was a Boston-born Baltimore clothing merchant who made a fortune from inventing a new collar for men’s shirts and got into the weapons business as an investment opportunity.
Nor did they all become household names. Some of the most important figures in the book are those who didn’t. Bainbridge retrieves the memory of gunmakers forgotten today because their businesses failed or because their names never adorned any to begin with. Yet often these men were responsible for the designs and innovations that brought their partners and/or employers fame and fortune. Men such as Christopher Miner Spencer, who waltzed into Abraham Lincoln’s office to extol the virtues of his lever-action repeating rifle and tested it with him at a makeshift firing range near the White House, Benjamin Tyler Henry, who invented the gun that would become the legendary rifle, and Rollin White, whose patent for a bored-through cylinder put Smith and Wesson into the revolver game.
Bainbridge’s tale has an ensemble cast. But if there’s a main character, it’s Samuel Colt, the flamboyant Connecticut native who made the revolver viable in practical and commercial terms. Colt was a born showman — he made his “debut in the world of public explosions” as a teenager — and salesman who spent years improving his designs while trying to start a new firm after his first folded. While waiting to get his gun business back off the ground, he dabbled in other schemes and sought various contracts from the federal government, including one for naval mines to defend the coast. Eventually, of course, his refusal to abandon hope of making a success of his revolver paid off, taking both Colt and his guns around the world. At the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, both the man and his pistols were a big hit. By the time Colt died in 1862 at the age of 47, he was “more than a man; he was a brand. More than a brand, he was a gun,” his name practically a byword for the revolver.
Colt’s travails were emblematic of those experienced by his peers and rivals. Bainbridge recapitulates the trial and error, false starts, bankruptcies and corporate reorganizations, dead ends, manufacturing delays, patent infringement suits and countersuits, and other pitfalls they encountered in pursuit of the goal that animated them all: creating guns that would reliably shoot multiple bullets before needing to be reloaded. Bainbridge also details the gun barons’ lobbying efforts, essential then as now to procure government orders.
Despite their quirks and idiosyncrasies, Colt, Smith, Wesson, and company were serious men who took the art of gunmaking seriously. Along the way, they made crucial contributions to the design and manufacturing of guns, either through their own inventions or by improving and combining processes and mechanisms already in existence. They revolutionized the arms industry. By the 1870s, the revolver and repeating rifle were the guns of choice for Americans in uniform and out. The days of having to reload a gun each time it was fired, the standard since the advent of firearms, were over.
Nor was their impact limited to the arms industry. The techniques they pioneered “were critical to the development of machine tools, interchangeable parts, and precision measurement throughout American industry.”
Bainbridge’s volume is more than a history of the origins of America’s gun industry, it’s a history of 19th century America. Among the events and episodes that feature in his story are the Mexican War, manifest destiny and westward expansion, the Civil War, the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and the Centennial Exhibition of 1876.
One of the surprises of the book is how New England-centric it is. Colt revolvers and Winchester rifles are indelibly associated with the American West, but their namesakes were Yankees through and through. Colt was born and died in Connecticut. New Haven is almost exclusively associated today with Yale University, yet in the 19th century, it was a substantial industrial hub, housing the New Haven Arms Company, the predecessor of what became the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. When it comes to guns now, New England is known primarily for having some of the most stringent gun laws in the country. Bainbridge reminds us that the past can be very different from the present.
Bainbridge presents his narrative in short chapters that function almost like vignettes. A couple that barely hit five pages do feel truncated, as if something’s missing. But on the whole, Bainbridge’s brevity allows him to maintain a breezy pace and keep his readers’ attention. The book is also well researched. I’m no fan of the long-standing convention of keying notes to page numbers, which is employed here, but there’s no gainsaying Bainbridge’s sourcing and documentation. He did his homework.
That is all to the benefit of anyone who reads the book. Whoever does will find in his or her hands a lively, enjoyable account of the men who created modern guns, the modern arms industry, and, in their own way, modern America.
Varad Mehta is a writer and historian. He lives in the Philadelphia area. Find him on Twitter @varadmehta.
