The Guns of the South Read online

  “The old homely saying is, look not a gift horse in the mouth. If you follow that saying, you will end up with a great many old, hard-mouthed horses in your barn,” Lee answered. “When the gift is of such magnitude as that which these men are giving us, I would examine it as closely as possible to learn if it is in fact as fine as it appears and to see if it comes attached to strings.”

  “Even if it does, you will have to accept it, Father, won’t you?” Mary asked.

  “You always did see clearly, my dear,” he said. “Yes, I think we must, if our Southern Confederacy is to survive, which God grant.”

  “Amen,” Agnes said softly.

  The slave woman brought in a tray with cups and a steaming pot. The spicy scent of sassafras tea filled the parlor. “Thank you, Julia,” Lee said as she poured for him. The tea made him think of the “instant coffee” Andries Rhoodie had brought up to the headquarters near Orange Court House.

  “Coffee,” his wife said longingly when he spoke of it. “We’ve been some time without it here.”

  “Surely it would come to Richmond more readily than to a small town like Rivington, North Carolina, especially if, as you say, Father, it was made in the United States,” Mary said.

  “That’s true, and I should have thought of it for myself,” Lee said. “Still, with gold, a great many things become possible. Rivington is on the railroad up from Wilmington; maybe a blockade runner brought it in there, rather than something more truly useful to our cause. Maybe.” He found himself yawning.

  Mary Custis Lee put down her needles. “There; this sock is finished, and a good enough place to call the day’s work finished as well. Knitting by the light of lamp and candle is hard on the eyes.”

  “Which does not stop you from doing so, Mother,” Agnes said reprovingly.

  “Not on most nights,” her mother agreed. “But tonight we find Robert here, so halting early is easier to square with my conscience.”

  “I wish I were here with you and my girls every night, both for the pleasure of your company and because it would mean the war was over and our independence won,” Lee said. He yawned again. “Tonight, though, I own myself tired. Riding the train with the rails in their present sadly decrepit state is hardly more enjoyable than driving a light buggy headlong down a corduroy road.”

  “Then let us seek our beds,” his wife said. “Surely you will rest better in a real bed and a warm house than in your tent by the Rapidan. Mary, dear, if you would be so kind?” Mary got up and wheeled her mother to the base of the stairs.

  Lee rose quickly too, to go with them. As he stood, he felt a probing pain in his chest. That pain had been with him now and again all through the winter. Doctors thumped his chest and made learned noises, without finding its source or doing him any good to speak of. He endured it stoically; Mary, he knew, suffered far worse.

  At the foot of the stairs, she used her left arm to push herself out of her chair and upright, then grabbed the banister with her right hand. Lee stepped up beside her, slid his arm around her waist. The feel of her body against his was strange from separation, yet at the same time infinitely familiar. “Shall we ascend, my dear?” he said.

  He took most of her weight as they climbed to the second floor. “You are smoother at helping me than anyone else, I think,” she said. “You have a gentle touch.”

  “Who is likely to know you better than your husband?” he replied as he guided her down the hallway toward the bedroom. He had nursed her many illnesses through their marriage whenever they were together; before that, his mother had spent her last years as an invalid. He was long practiced in dealing with the sick.

  He helped Mary change into a warm flannel nightgown, then put on the pajamas Julia had left out for him. “And a nightcap, too,” he exclaimed as he set it on his head. “Such luxury is bound to spoil me.” His wife snorted. He walked over to her bed and kissed her. “Good night, dear Mary.” He went back to his own bed, blew out the candle by it. The room plunged into darkness.

  “Sleep well, Robert,” Mary said.

  “Thank you. I’m sure I shall,” he answered. After so long on his cot, the bed felt almost indecently soft. But the room was warm, at least compared to a tent in the hills close by the Rapidan. He had no trouble dropping off.

  Luke and his carriage showed up in front of the house on Franklin Street at breakfast time. When Lee went out to him, he seemed none the worse for wear for however much drinking he had done the night before. “Where to today, Marse Robert?” he asked.

  “The armory,” Lee answered. “I need to confer with Colonel Gorgas.”

  “Whatever you say, Marse Robert.” Luke, plainly, could not have cared less whether Lee went to the armory to confer with Gorgas or with George Washington’s ghost. But he flicked his whip over the team and got them moving, which was what mattered.

  The carriage rolled down Seventh Street toward the James River. The armory sprawled at the foot of Gamble’s Hill, diagonally between Seventh and Fourth. The Kanawha Canal ran behind it. Luke pulled up to the columned central entranceway; the dome that surmounted it did not seem to be of a piece with the rest of the long, low brick building.

  The armory rang with the sounds of metalwork and carpentry. Drills and lathes and dies and punches and molds turned wood and iron and lead into small arms and bullets. No other Confederate arsenal came close to matching its production. Without the machines captured at Harpers Ferry and moved here in the first days of the war, the South would have been hardpressed for weapons.

  “General Lee.” Josiah Gorgas came up and saluted. He was a heavyset, moon-faced man in his forties, his close-trimmed beard just starting to be streaked with gray. “I’m very glad to see you, sir. I’d hoped to have the opportunity to speak with you, and here you are.”

  “And I with you, Colonel. I suspect we have in mind a similar topic of conversation, too.”

  “Likely we do, sir. Will you come up to my office, where we can talk more comfortably?” He led Lee up to the second floor.

  Lee took the stairs slowly, worried that the pain in his chest might recur. To his relief, it did not. He sat opposite Gorgas, pointed to the AK-47 on the ordnance chief’s desk. “Yes, there it is, the marvel of the day.” Gorgas looked at him sharply. “I meant no sarcasm, Colonel, I assure you. I am in your debt—the Confederacy is in your debt—for sending Andries Rhoodie on to me.”

  “I hoped you would feel so, General, after seeing it demonstrated. I certainly did, and I am glad to have my judgment vindicated by a soldier in the field. I do endeavor to give satisfaction so far as arms go.” He spoke with some diffidence; a shipment of cavalry carbines the summer before had been almost as dangerous to the men who held them as to those at whom they were aimed.

  Lee said, “My only possible reservation about these repeaters is that they have not yet seen combat. But I think they will answer. Though they are so different from our usual rifles, they are easy to learn and use and maintain, and the troops are much taken by the volume of fire they deliver. I like men to be confident in their arms; it makes them more belligerent.”

  “General, I think you yourself are the most belligerent man in your army,” Gorgas said.

  Lee considered. “Henry Heth said something to that effect to me once,” he remarked. “It may be so. Hemmed in as I am by responsibility, I have few opportunities personally to demonstrate it, if it is. But I would surely rather strike a blow than either flee of remain quiet, waiting to be struck. Enough of my ramblings now, sir—to business. I thank God for these gentlemen from Rivington and for the arms with which they are supplying us. I am not, however, eager to forever depend on them for weapons. If anyone, if any establishment in the Confederacy can manufacture their like, you are the; man, and this is the place.”

  Gorgas looked baffled and unhappy, like a hound that has taken a scent and then lost it in the middle of an open meadow. “General Lee, I do not know. I thank you for being thoughtful enough to provide me with more of these car
bines and a stock of ammunition. I already had one, and a couple of magazines, from Andries Rhoodie. I have been puzzling at it since before he departed for Orange Court House. And—I do not know.”

  “What perplexes you so about the rifle?” Lee asked. He had his own list; he wanted to see what the Confederacy’s ordnance wizard would add to it.

  “First, that it springs ex nihilo, like Minerva from love’s forehead.” Colonel Gorgas evidently had a list, too—he was ticking off points on his fingers. “Generally speaking, a new type of weapon will have defects, which may in some cases be ameliorated through modifications made in the light of experience. The next defect I discover in this AK-47 will be the first. The gun works, sir, which is no small wonder in itself.”

  “I had not thought of it in those terms,” Lee said slowly. “You mean it gives the impression of being a finished arm, like, for example, a Springfield.”

  “Exactly so. The Springfield rifle musket has a great number of less efficient ancestors, So, logically, must the AK-47. Yet where are they? Even a less efficient rifle based on its principles would be better than anything we or the Federals have.”

  “That is the case, I have noticed, with much of the equipment borne by Andries Rhoodie and his colleagues,” Lee said, remembering a tasty tin of desiccated stew. “Carry on.”

  “From the general to the particular.” Gorgas reached into a desk drawer, took out a couple of rounds for the AK-47. He passed them over to Lee. “You will observe that the bullets are not simply lead.”

  “Yes, I had seen that,” Lee agreed, putting on his glasses for a clearer look at the ammunition. The cartridges were surely brass. As for the bullets—”Are they copper an the way through?”

  “No, sir. They have a lead interior, sheathed with copper. We might be able to match that, though it is expensive, and we are short of enough copper even now to be commandeering coils from whiskey cookers’ stills. Then again, unsheathed lead might serve at need. But do you see the cleverness of this ammunition? It all but eliminates lead fouling of the barrel.”

  “Less need for Williams bullets, then,” Lee said. The Williams bullet had a zinc washer at the base of the lead slug, which served to scour away fouling from the inside of a rifle barrel when it was fired. Lee went on, “But would a copper-sheathed bullet not be too hard to take rifling well? And would it not wear away the interior grooves in short order?”

  “With any normal barrel, the answer to both those questions would be yes.” Gorgas ticked off another point. “The steel—or whatever alloy it may be—in the barrel of this weapon, however, Is hard enough to lessen the difficulties. Again, I doubt we could produce its like, let alone work it once manufactured.”

  “They seem to manage in Rivington,” Lee said.

  “I know they do, sir. But—I—don’t—know—how.” The colonel ground out the words one by one through clenched teeth. He was a man of sanguine temperament and great resource, as he had to be to keep the Confederacy supplied with armaments in the face of an ever-tightening Federal blockade and its own inadequate factories. When he said, “I am thwarted; I admit it,” it was as if he threw down his sword to surrender to superior force.

  “Tell me what else you do know,” Lee urged, not liking to see such a capable officer so downhearted.

  “Very well, sir. You mentioned the Williams bullet. As you must know, the chief fouling problem it is designed to alleviate comes not from the lead of the Minié ball but rather from the powder which propels it. Whatever powder is in these AK-47 cartridges, it produces far less fouling than even the finest gunpowder with which I was previously familiar.”

  “Has that a connection with the lack of smoke from this powder upon discharge?” Lee asked.

  “Exactly: fouling consists of smoke and tiny bits of unburned powder that congeal, so to speak, on the inside of a gun barrel. With this powder, there is next to no smoke and, thus, next to no fouling.”

  “I have sent a good deal of ammunition down to Colonel George Rains at the powder works in Augusta, Georgia,” Lee said. “With his knowledge of chemistry in general and gunpowder in particular, I thought him the man best suited to penetrate the mystery of these rounds, if anyone can.”

  “If anyone can,” Gorgas echoed gloomily. But after a moment, he brightened a little.” As you say, if anyone can, Colonel Rains is the man. Without his expertise, we should be much the poorer for powder.”

  “There I quite agree with you, Colonel. Chemical knowledge is too uncommon in the Confederacy. Of course, the same also obtains among the Federals.” Lee smiled at a memory. “When I administered West Point a few years ago, I had to dismiss from the academy a cadet who informed his instructor and fellow chemistry students that silicon was a gas. Do you know, Colonel, were silicon truly a gas, that lad would likely be a Federal general today.”

  As Lee had hoped, Gorgas also smiled at the story. His amusement, though, soon faded. He said,” And now, General, I come to the particular most baffling of all, and when I speak of this weapon, that is no small claim. Do you know, sir, what these Rivington men charge the Ordnance Bureau for each AK-47 carbine? Fifty dollars, sir.”

  “It hardly seems excessive. A Henry rifle goes for a similar price in the North, I understand, and this weapon is surely far superior to a Henry. Of course, the Treasury Department will doubtless be anguished at the prospect of discovering sufficient specie to purchase the number of carbines we require, but—what is it, Colonel?”

  Gorgas had lifted his hand, as if he wanted to speak. Now he said, “You misapprehend, General, not that I can blame you for it. The asking price is fifty dollars Confederate paper per carbine.”

  “You must be mistaken,” Lee said. Gorgas shook his head. Lee saw he knew whereof he spoke. “But how is that possible? While I love our country, I am not blind to our financial straits. Fifty dollars of Confederate paper will not buy two gold dollars.”

  “Nor much of anything else,” Gorgas said. “Save these AK-47s. The asking price for their ammunition is similarly, ah, reasonable.”

  Lee frowned ferociously, as if facing foes in the field. “You are correct, Colonel; the cost of an AK-47 is even more perplexing than any of its mechanical aspects, extraordinary as those are.”

  “Yes, sir. The only thing I thought of was ‘that these Rivington men are such strong patriots that they insist on our dollar’s equality to that of the North. But no one is that patriotic, sir.”

  “Nor should anyone be, with the manifest untruth of the proposition demonstrated every day of the year,” Lee said. “Yet the Rivington men, despite the money they surely lose on every repeater they sell us, seem to have plenty of it. When they came to Rivington, they paid gold for homes and warehouses and slaves, and I am given to understand they have also put down gold here in Richmond for offices across from Mechanic’s Hall.”

  “I’d heard that, too,” Gorgas said. “Even the rumor of gold, let alone the sight of it, will set tongues wagging here. What are we to make of it, though? That they have so much money, they care nothing for how much these carbines bring them? The notion is logical but not reasonable, if you take my distinction, sir.”

  “I do indeed, Colonel.” Lee started to rise, then paused and sat Down again. “May I please have a pen and a scrap of paper?” Gorgas passed him pen and inkwell. He sketched rapidly, gave his drawing to the ordnance chief.” Are you by any chance familiar with this emblem that Rhoodie and his comrades use?”

  “Yes, I’ve seen it. Funny you should ask, for it interested me. Not long after I first made Rhoodie’s acquaintance, I made a copy of it and showed it to a friend of mine who knows something of heraldry. He said it reminded him of the arms of the Isle of Man, save that those show three bent legs—don’t ask me for the proper terms, please, sir—instead of mere lines.”

  “The Isle of Man, you say? Most interesting. Manxmen have a distinctive way of speaking, do they not? Perhaps that is the accent Rhoodie and his comrades bear. It might form a useful basis from
which to begin inquiries, at any rate.”

  “So it might.” Gorgas smiled ruefully. “A pity to have to think about investigating men who are helping us so greatly, but they do seem rather too good to be true.”

  “You are not the first to use those very words about them, Colonel, and when something seems too good to be true, it is all too apt to be so. Well, now I have spent enough of your time this morning; with all my fretting about our benefactors, you will no doubt be thinking of me as Granny Lee—a nickname I assure you I was not sorry to lose after the first year of the war.”

  “I don’t blame you for that, sir,” Gorgas said, “nor for the other. Too many peculiar things hover about Rhoodie and his carbine for me to be easy with them, no matter how useful the gun may prove.”

  “That is exactly my view.” Lee really stood this time. Through the window in Gorgas’s office, he saw the white frame buildings of the Confederate laboratory on Brown’s Island, separated from the mainland by a thin stretch of the James. Pointing across to them, he said, “I trust everyone at the cartridge loading works is busily engaged.”

  “Yes, sir,” Gorgas said. “We have put last spring’s misfortune behind us and go on, as we must. My wife fatigued herself very much, visiting and relieving the poor sufferers injured in the blast.”

  “How many died?” Lee asked.

  “Ten women were killed at once; another twenty perished over the next several weeks. A considerable number more were burned but recovered.”

  “Terrible.” Lee shook his head. “And as terrible that we must employ women and girls to produce the sinews of war for us. But with even our armies ever short of men, I suppose no good choice exists. You and your wife have your living quarters here in the armory, do you not?”

  “Yes, sir, just a couple of doors down from here, as a matter of fact.”