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Ellsworth gun Value?
- Thread starter tal351
- Start date
White Feather
Private
- Joined
- May 29, 2014
For a start check "Field Artillery Weapons of the Civil War" by Hazlett, Olmstead, Parks. See Ch 14 "The Rare Ones . Quote from book reads: " The little-known Ellsworth steel rifles were the only breechloaders manufactured in the US during the CW. The reference goes on to state only 5 are now known. Can you get more info/pictures. Great post!
White Feather
Private
- Joined
- May 29, 2014
Big question. Is the gun on a carriage? No carriage is known to exist at this time.
Interesting - a dozen sent to Kansas before the war started.
p.158-159
https://books.google.com/books?id=t...page&q=Ellsworth breech loading rifle&f=false
L. W. Pond was building twenty light rifle-cannon of his invention, called the "Ellsworth Gun," at the shop of Goddard, Rice & Co. This was a "breech-loading rifle-gun, four feet long, six inches in diameter at the breech and 3J^ at the muzzle, with a V/i inch bore, carrying a chilled conical ball weighing eighteen ounces, which it would throw three miles. The gun weighed, carriage and all, four hundred and fifty pounds. Cost, three hundred and fifty dollars."
p.212 Industrial Worchester
https://books.google.com/books?id=B...page&q=Ellsworth breech loading rifle&f=false
Also, a nice little monograph - https://archive.org/details/curiosrelicsweaplinc_12
Here is what I pieced together on an article he did for Lincoln lore in 1976 on the gun he has. Sorry I didnt get pics:
Editor's Note: Important credits for this issue go to Dr. Jack P. Covell,
researcher, restorer, and owner of the piece under discussion; to Gary
L. Delscamp, researcher and photographer; to Russell E. Thornton,
who discovered the patent mark; and to Donald E. Thornton, who
helped his father.
M. E. N., Jr.
About a year before he won election to the Presidency,
Abraham Lincoln asserted that the three discoveries and in-
ventions of greatest value to the human race were "the arts of
writing and of printing — the discovery of America, and the
introduction of Patent-laws." These were of crucial impor-
tance, he said, because they served to facilitate all other dis-
coveries and inventions since. Probably only a few patent
lawyers would still rate the introduction of patent laws on a
par with the discovery of America and the development of
writing and printing, but this serves well to reveal a peculiar
trait in Abraham Lincoln's character: he was fascinated by
technological innovations.
Lincoln's weakness for inventions would have large effects
when he became President of the United States. The Army
was of the mind that no invention could be developed fast
enough to have any profound effect on the war at hand; there-
fore, it turned a deaf ear to the horde of inventors who
descended on Washington with their various, curious, and
sometimes efficiently lethal wares. These innovative Yankees
quickly learned that their chances for a real hearing by the
War Department were much enhanced if they could only get to
Lincoln, persuade him of the merit of their schemes, and then
be sent to the War Department with a request from the Presi-
dent that they be given a fair hearing. So much of this activity
went on, in fact, that Robert V. Bruce managed to write one of
the more ingenious (and lively) books in the whole field of Lin-
colniana, Lincoln and the Tools of War, in which he related
the stories of dozens of inventions and their encounters with
President Lincoln and the War Department.
Among those inventions the acceptance of which spoke well
for Lincoln's ability to forecast the technological future, was a
curiously elusive piece of artillery called, for no very good rea-
son, "The Ellsworth Gun." Muzzle-loaders and smooth-bores
were very quickly a thing of the past after the American Civil
War, and this little cannon was, therefore, a milestone in the
history of American artillery: it was the only American
breech-loading rifled cannon purchased by the War Depart-
ment during the Civil War.
Unfortunately, the Ellsworth Gun was not as epoch-
making in American military history as it was in the histroy
of American technology. Fewer than fifty of the cannons were
produced, and despite their association with some of the war's
more colorful commanders, Elmer Ellsworth, Benjamin F.
Butler, and John C. Fremont, they proved to be rather ill-
starred in combat. A number were captured by the Con-
federates in the Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1862
against General Fremont, and others found their way to out-
of-the-way and inglorious theaters of combat. As Professor
Bruce puts it, "By 1863 all the Ellsworth guns had vanished
into limbo or Dixie." Until recently, none has been seen, but a
candidate for being one of the long-lost little cannons has
come to the attention of Lincoln Lore, and we are happy to
have the exclusive right of reporting this find.
Courtesy G. L. Delscamp
FIGURE 1. This is a photograph of the recently discovered barrel of a small cannon. Taken just two months ago,
it shows a small square hole near the breech in the lower left-hand corner of the picture. Two metal wedges and a
tray to hold them have been removed to expose the holes. FIGURES 2 and 3 on page 2 show the breech before the
wedges and other attachments were removed. Note the number "5" which appears on the trunnion, the metal
sleeve around the middle of the barrel from which the cylindrical rods which rested on the carriage protrude.
LINCOLN LORE
FIGURE 2. This photograph shows
the right side of the breech. The
two metal wedges rest one atop the
other in the tray. The lower wedge
had a handle which protruded
parallel to the axis of the barrel. By
pushing it away from the barrel, it
caused the wedges to work against
each other, loosen the interior
breech mechanism, and finally
slide out into the tray. The rings
probably had chains on them
which kept the wedges from being
lost from the barrel.
All modern accounts of the Ellsworth gun, for which no
patent models, drawings, or plans have ever been found, are
based on Brace's pioneering study, and here is the substance
of that account:
Having bought manufacturing rights to B. F. Joslyn's
new breech-loading rifle, the imaginative Yankee [Eli
ThayerJ applied the same design to a little breech-loading
fieldpiece and sent a dozen specimens out to chastise the
Kansas "border ruffians." In April 1861, when the conflict
flared up again on a continental scale, Thayer sold two of
his little cannon to the Union Defense Committee of New
York, for the use of Elmer Ellsworth's Zouave regiment.
Thereafter he called his cannon the "Ellsworth Gun."
This curious hybrid, somewhere between a Brobding-
nagian rifle and a Lilliputian cannon, fell under Lincoln's
interested scrutiny in September 1861. The gun Lincoln saw
Courtesy G. L. Delscamp
was four feet long, had a 1 1/2-inch bore and weighed about
three hundred pounds without its carriage. Like the Joslyn
rifle, its breech mechanism consisted of a cone and expand-
ing rings, held in place by a tapered steel key which passed
through the shank of the breech and was operated by a com-
pound lever. A handle opened the breech piece. The conical
chilled-iron ball, wound with tallow-soaked cord, fitted into
a cup at the end of a brass cartridge; and the 3-ounce charge
was ignited through perforations near the other end. In-
stead of a limber, the carriage had a drag rope attached for
hauling by manpower.
Thayer made much of the gun's maneuverability, cheap-
ness and rapidity of fire; and Lincoln at last consented to
order twenty guns at $350 each, subject to the inspection of
McClellan's chief ordnance officer ....
From 1863, when the cannons disappear from the official re-
FIGURE 3. This is the left side of
the breech. The two wedges
protrude slightly above the surface
of the barrel, just behind the device
which must have cradled a sight of
some sort. The bore of the rifled
cannon was so small that it fired a
very small projectile which could
not have been very destructive and
had, therefore, to be accurately
placed. The hole above the breech
is a mystery, but it may have held a
level. Since the rifle had a range of
three miles, it doubtless had to
have a telescopic sight on it.
(
Courtesy G. L. Delscamp
LINCOLN LORE
^ords, until June, 1974, when a cannon barrel was purchased
by two gun collectors from a man who had acquired it to
decorate his rock garden, there has been no evidence of the
Ellsworth cannon. The barrel in question did not provoke
much interest at first. The two gun collectors made a five-
minute examination, decided that the little piece must have
been the sort used to throw lines of rope from distressed ships
to shore or vice versa, and within half an hour sold the barrel
to a local firearms dealer as a curiosity or advertising piece for
his store. The dealer had the barrel for six days. He removed
some of the coat of thick black paint which covered the barrel
and found a patent mark. Having been in the gun business for
thirty years, the dealer had acquired some standard
references on the history of weapons. Checking The Hreech-
Loader in the Service, he found the patent date listed there
and realized that he had probably acquired a breech-loading
Civil War piece rather than a line-throwing gun. He had no
reason to believe that these were not produced by the thou-
sands and happily sold the gun for about 700% profit to two
men who frequented his shop.
These two men, Dr. Jack Covell and G. L. Delscamp, were
better equipped to evaluate the significance of the little field-
piece. Dr. Covell is a gun collector with a solid technical know-
ledge of the practical workings of firearms, though twentieth-
century weapons are his specialty. Mr. Delscamp is a recent
college graduate with a degree in history and an ability to find
his way around a library. Between them, they decided that the
cannon barrel was no ordinary piece from the standard
arsenal of Civil War weapons but the rare Ellsworth cannon,
and they went to work to clean up the gun and prove their
point. This work has taken two years of incredible efforts in
garages and machine shops. Along the way, Mr. Delscamp
lost interest and sold his share to Dr. Covell, who has con-
tinued the machine-shop work and the thankless process of
writing and telephoning experts in the history of weaponry.
Of course, there can be no real expert on a gun no one has ever
seen so much as a picture of, and these efforts have not been
altogether successful. Moreover, the desire to keep the barrel
in good shape for posterity and the limited means available to
an ordinary citizen who does not own a foundry have pre-
vented exerting the kinds of force and violence on the piece
that might open it up and prove the way its mechanism works.
Nevertheless, the evidence for Dr. Covell's little cannon is
substantial.
The dimensions seem to fit the existing word descriptions of
the Ellsworth Gun. The barrel weighs around 290 pounds, is
four feet long, and has a 1 1/2-inch bore. It is no line-throwing
gun because the barrel is rilled, and the spin imparted by
rifling would only serve to snarl a rope flying through the air.
Although the breech plug is apparently firmly shut with rust
and corrosion and the breech has not yet been opened, the can-
non must be a breech-loader. Otherwise, there is no reason for
the presence of the curious-looking compound wedges which
protrude from the side of the piece and penetrate through the
other side. These wedges operated by a handle which, though
broken off and stuffed in the muzzle (along with a lot of rocks,
debris, and what looked like red Georgia clay), extended
parallel to the axis of the barrel from the circular protrusion
on the breech-side of the upper wedge. Strenuous efforts have
caused these wedges to move and, in fact, be removed from the
cannon. But they did not do what doubtless they were meant
to do before the breech plug rusted, force the breech plug out so
that the barrel could be loaded from the rear.
All of these pieces of evidence might add up only to the fact
that the barrel is that of a small old rifled cannon with ;:
curious system of wedges near the breech. The important
piece of evidence, however, is that patent date which first
made the gun dealer realize he had something more than a
seacoast curiosity. Stamped on the breech near the protuding
plug is:
From the Lincoln National Life Foundation
FIGURE 4. This page from the plates of the Report of the
Commissioner of Patents for the Year 1X55 contains the dia-
gram of the B. F. Joslyn patent in the upper right-hand
corner.
PATENTED
AUG. 28TH, 1855
A check ofthe Report of the Commissioner of Patents for the
Year 1855 reveals that only one patent was issued on that date
for a firearms device. It was patent number b'S,507, issued to
B. F. Joslyn for an "Improvement in Breech-loading Eire-
arms." It was the Joslyn patent which Eli Thayer purchased
and adapted for use in a small rifled cannon.
In a letter to President Lincoln written on September 21,
1861, Thayer advised the organization of companies of
soldiers armed with twenty of these weapons, which, he
claimed, combined the advantages of artillery and infantry
rifles. So light in weight ( he claimed they weighed in at some-
thing like 200 or 225 pounds — quite an underestimate) that
they could be pulled into place by men rather than horses and
so small that they could be placed anywhere a rifleman could,
the Ellsworth Guns nevertheless fired a seventeen-ounce ball
a distance of three miles (at three degrees elevation), that is.
artillery and not infantry range. Moreover, only a small num-
ber of men was required to operate the guns (he did not say pre-
cisely how small a number), and they could easily get off
twenty rounds per minute. Thayer gave as his address Wil-
LINCOLN LORE
FIGURE 5. This close-up photograph of the muzzle
shows the rifling (visible at the edge of the shadows at
the lower right of the bore).
lard's Hotel in Washington, and he had doubtless come down
from Massachusetts to lobby for the purchase of the Ells-
worth cannon — at what he claimed was a very low price,
especially when compared to ordinary field artillery.
Thayer, an ex-Congressman and a maverick Republican
who had voted for Lincoln's nomination at the Wigwam, had
some influence. Three days later Lincoln drew up a memoran-
dum for purchase of "twenty guns, . . . made equal, or superior
to the Ellsworth gun" at $350 each. Lincoln noted that the gun
had recently been exhibited to him. The twenty cannons were
manufactured in Thayer's home town, Worcester,
Massachusetts, by L. W. Pond at the factory of Goddard, Rice
& Company. Some improvements were made on the model
Lincoln had seen, because Charles Kingsbury, who examined
the guns in November for the Army, reported that the "can-
non rifles" were superior to what he had seen before with Lin-
coln. The improvements were wide-ranging enough for L. W.
Pond to claim that the cannon was his own invention, or so, at
least, The Scientific American reported in December.
The barrel under discussion here has no other identifying
marks than those already mentioned — except the numeral
"5" which appears in five different places on the barrel. This
numeral, if a serial number, is consistent with the small num-
ber of cannons known to have been produced. Whilein itself it
provides no conclusive evidence, it at least does not have to be
explained away, as a higher number, in the hundreds, say,
would have to be. The device on the side of the breech opposite
the wedges is not mentioned in any of the literature on the
Ellsworth Gun, but it might be a part of a sighting device, per-
haps added as an improvement by L. W. Pond.
The positive proof of the identity of the barrel still lies im-
mobile in the breech. Only the system of rings, pin, and cone
will provide sure identification for the Ellsworth Gun, for it is
distinguished by its B. F. Joslyn-patented breech device.
From all other outward appearances, however, this could well
be the long-lost Ellsworth cannon. If it is, it is a significant
artifact for Lincoln students (as well as military historians
and students of the history of American technology).
Abraham Lincoln seems to have been very keen on the little
cannon's possibilities, and when a Mr. Hegon visited him
later, the President instructed Colonel George I). Ramsay to
"show him one of the little breech-loading cannons 1 got of
Hon. Eli Thayer." It was quite an innovative piece of
weaponry, and President Lincoln had personally seen to its
acceptance by the Army, even to the point of drawing up the
terms of the contract and, on December ■'?, 1861, signing the
manufacturer's bill for $HJS1 1 .ST, "I advise that the above ac-
count be paid. A. Lincoln."
(
FIGURE 6. The all-important pat-
ent mark appears, alas, in an
awkward place. It is just above the
breech plug. Early owners of the
barrel apparently damaged the
mark in trying to remove the plug.
The "T" is partly obliterated, as is
most of the "8"; however, the
beginnings of both of the loops in
the "8" are visible on the side near
the "2".
Editor's Note: Important credits for this issue go to Dr. Jack P. Covell,
researcher, restorer, and owner of the piece under discussion; to Gary
L. Delscamp, researcher and photographer; to Russell E. Thornton,
who discovered the patent mark; and to Donald E. Thornton, who
helped his father.
M. E. N., Jr.
About a year before he won election to the Presidency,
Abraham Lincoln asserted that the three discoveries and in-
ventions of greatest value to the human race were "the arts of
writing and of printing — the discovery of America, and the
introduction of Patent-laws." These were of crucial impor-
tance, he said, because they served to facilitate all other dis-
coveries and inventions since. Probably only a few patent
lawyers would still rate the introduction of patent laws on a
par with the discovery of America and the development of
writing and printing, but this serves well to reveal a peculiar
trait in Abraham Lincoln's character: he was fascinated by
technological innovations.
Lincoln's weakness for inventions would have large effects
when he became President of the United States. The Army
was of the mind that no invention could be developed fast
enough to have any profound effect on the war at hand; there-
fore, it turned a deaf ear to the horde of inventors who
descended on Washington with their various, curious, and
sometimes efficiently lethal wares. These innovative Yankees
quickly learned that their chances for a real hearing by the
War Department were much enhanced if they could only get to
Lincoln, persuade him of the merit of their schemes, and then
be sent to the War Department with a request from the Presi-
dent that they be given a fair hearing. So much of this activity
went on, in fact, that Robert V. Bruce managed to write one of
the more ingenious (and lively) books in the whole field of Lin-
colniana, Lincoln and the Tools of War, in which he related
the stories of dozens of inventions and their encounters with
President Lincoln and the War Department.
Among those inventions the acceptance of which spoke well
for Lincoln's ability to forecast the technological future, was a
curiously elusive piece of artillery called, for no very good rea-
son, "The Ellsworth Gun." Muzzle-loaders and smooth-bores
were very quickly a thing of the past after the American Civil
War, and this little cannon was, therefore, a milestone in the
history of American artillery: it was the only American
breech-loading rifled cannon purchased by the War Depart-
ment during the Civil War.
Unfortunately, the Ellsworth Gun was not as epoch-
making in American military history as it was in the histroy
of American technology. Fewer than fifty of the cannons were
produced, and despite their association with some of the war's
more colorful commanders, Elmer Ellsworth, Benjamin F.
Butler, and John C. Fremont, they proved to be rather ill-
starred in combat. A number were captured by the Con-
federates in the Shenandoah Valley campaign of 1862
against General Fremont, and others found their way to out-
of-the-way and inglorious theaters of combat. As Professor
Bruce puts it, "By 1863 all the Ellsworth guns had vanished
into limbo or Dixie." Until recently, none has been seen, but a
candidate for being one of the long-lost little cannons has
come to the attention of Lincoln Lore, and we are happy to
have the exclusive right of reporting this find.
Courtesy G. L. Delscamp
FIGURE 1. This is a photograph of the recently discovered barrel of a small cannon. Taken just two months ago,
it shows a small square hole near the breech in the lower left-hand corner of the picture. Two metal wedges and a
tray to hold them have been removed to expose the holes. FIGURES 2 and 3 on page 2 show the breech before the
wedges and other attachments were removed. Note the number "5" which appears on the trunnion, the metal
sleeve around the middle of the barrel from which the cylindrical rods which rested on the carriage protrude.
LINCOLN LORE
FIGURE 2. This photograph shows
the right side of the breech. The
two metal wedges rest one atop the
other in the tray. The lower wedge
had a handle which protruded
parallel to the axis of the barrel. By
pushing it away from the barrel, it
caused the wedges to work against
each other, loosen the interior
breech mechanism, and finally
slide out into the tray. The rings
probably had chains on them
which kept the wedges from being
lost from the barrel.
All modern accounts of the Ellsworth gun, for which no
patent models, drawings, or plans have ever been found, are
based on Brace's pioneering study, and here is the substance
of that account:
Having bought manufacturing rights to B. F. Joslyn's
new breech-loading rifle, the imaginative Yankee [Eli
ThayerJ applied the same design to a little breech-loading
fieldpiece and sent a dozen specimens out to chastise the
Kansas "border ruffians." In April 1861, when the conflict
flared up again on a continental scale, Thayer sold two of
his little cannon to the Union Defense Committee of New
York, for the use of Elmer Ellsworth's Zouave regiment.
Thereafter he called his cannon the "Ellsworth Gun."
This curious hybrid, somewhere between a Brobding-
nagian rifle and a Lilliputian cannon, fell under Lincoln's
interested scrutiny in September 1861. The gun Lincoln saw
Courtesy G. L. Delscamp
was four feet long, had a 1 1/2-inch bore and weighed about
three hundred pounds without its carriage. Like the Joslyn
rifle, its breech mechanism consisted of a cone and expand-
ing rings, held in place by a tapered steel key which passed
through the shank of the breech and was operated by a com-
pound lever. A handle opened the breech piece. The conical
chilled-iron ball, wound with tallow-soaked cord, fitted into
a cup at the end of a brass cartridge; and the 3-ounce charge
was ignited through perforations near the other end. In-
stead of a limber, the carriage had a drag rope attached for
hauling by manpower.
Thayer made much of the gun's maneuverability, cheap-
ness and rapidity of fire; and Lincoln at last consented to
order twenty guns at $350 each, subject to the inspection of
McClellan's chief ordnance officer ....
From 1863, when the cannons disappear from the official re-
FIGURE 3. This is the left side of
the breech. The two wedges
protrude slightly above the surface
of the barrel, just behind the device
which must have cradled a sight of
some sort. The bore of the rifled
cannon was so small that it fired a
very small projectile which could
not have been very destructive and
had, therefore, to be accurately
placed. The hole above the breech
is a mystery, but it may have held a
level. Since the rifle had a range of
three miles, it doubtless had to
have a telescopic sight on it.
(
Courtesy G. L. Delscamp
LINCOLN LORE
^ords, until June, 1974, when a cannon barrel was purchased
by two gun collectors from a man who had acquired it to
decorate his rock garden, there has been no evidence of the
Ellsworth cannon. The barrel in question did not provoke
much interest at first. The two gun collectors made a five-
minute examination, decided that the little piece must have
been the sort used to throw lines of rope from distressed ships
to shore or vice versa, and within half an hour sold the barrel
to a local firearms dealer as a curiosity or advertising piece for
his store. The dealer had the barrel for six days. He removed
some of the coat of thick black paint which covered the barrel
and found a patent mark. Having been in the gun business for
thirty years, the dealer had acquired some standard
references on the history of weapons. Checking The Hreech-
Loader in the Service, he found the patent date listed there
and realized that he had probably acquired a breech-loading
Civil War piece rather than a line-throwing gun. He had no
reason to believe that these were not produced by the thou-
sands and happily sold the gun for about 700% profit to two
men who frequented his shop.
These two men, Dr. Jack Covell and G. L. Delscamp, were
better equipped to evaluate the significance of the little field-
piece. Dr. Covell is a gun collector with a solid technical know-
ledge of the practical workings of firearms, though twentieth-
century weapons are his specialty. Mr. Delscamp is a recent
college graduate with a degree in history and an ability to find
his way around a library. Between them, they decided that the
cannon barrel was no ordinary piece from the standard
arsenal of Civil War weapons but the rare Ellsworth cannon,
and they went to work to clean up the gun and prove their
point. This work has taken two years of incredible efforts in
garages and machine shops. Along the way, Mr. Delscamp
lost interest and sold his share to Dr. Covell, who has con-
tinued the machine-shop work and the thankless process of
writing and telephoning experts in the history of weaponry.
Of course, there can be no real expert on a gun no one has ever
seen so much as a picture of, and these efforts have not been
altogether successful. Moreover, the desire to keep the barrel
in good shape for posterity and the limited means available to
an ordinary citizen who does not own a foundry have pre-
vented exerting the kinds of force and violence on the piece
that might open it up and prove the way its mechanism works.
Nevertheless, the evidence for Dr. Covell's little cannon is
substantial.
The dimensions seem to fit the existing word descriptions of
the Ellsworth Gun. The barrel weighs around 290 pounds, is
four feet long, and has a 1 1/2-inch bore. It is no line-throwing
gun because the barrel is rilled, and the spin imparted by
rifling would only serve to snarl a rope flying through the air.
Although the breech plug is apparently firmly shut with rust
and corrosion and the breech has not yet been opened, the can-
non must be a breech-loader. Otherwise, there is no reason for
the presence of the curious-looking compound wedges which
protrude from the side of the piece and penetrate through the
other side. These wedges operated by a handle which, though
broken off and stuffed in the muzzle (along with a lot of rocks,
debris, and what looked like red Georgia clay), extended
parallel to the axis of the barrel from the circular protrusion
on the breech-side of the upper wedge. Strenuous efforts have
caused these wedges to move and, in fact, be removed from the
cannon. But they did not do what doubtless they were meant
to do before the breech plug rusted, force the breech plug out so
that the barrel could be loaded from the rear.
All of these pieces of evidence might add up only to the fact
that the barrel is that of a small old rifled cannon with ;:
curious system of wedges near the breech. The important
piece of evidence, however, is that patent date which first
made the gun dealer realize he had something more than a
seacoast curiosity. Stamped on the breech near the protuding
plug is:
From the Lincoln National Life Foundation
FIGURE 4. This page from the plates of the Report of the
Commissioner of Patents for the Year 1X55 contains the dia-
gram of the B. F. Joslyn patent in the upper right-hand
corner.
PATENTED
AUG. 28TH, 1855
A check ofthe Report of the Commissioner of Patents for the
Year 1855 reveals that only one patent was issued on that date
for a firearms device. It was patent number b'S,507, issued to
B. F. Joslyn for an "Improvement in Breech-loading Eire-
arms." It was the Joslyn patent which Eli Thayer purchased
and adapted for use in a small rifled cannon.
In a letter to President Lincoln written on September 21,
1861, Thayer advised the organization of companies of
soldiers armed with twenty of these weapons, which, he
claimed, combined the advantages of artillery and infantry
rifles. So light in weight ( he claimed they weighed in at some-
thing like 200 or 225 pounds — quite an underestimate) that
they could be pulled into place by men rather than horses and
so small that they could be placed anywhere a rifleman could,
the Ellsworth Guns nevertheless fired a seventeen-ounce ball
a distance of three miles (at three degrees elevation), that is.
artillery and not infantry range. Moreover, only a small num-
ber of men was required to operate the guns (he did not say pre-
cisely how small a number), and they could easily get off
twenty rounds per minute. Thayer gave as his address Wil-
LINCOLN LORE
FIGURE 5. This close-up photograph of the muzzle
shows the rifling (visible at the edge of the shadows at
the lower right of the bore).
lard's Hotel in Washington, and he had doubtless come down
from Massachusetts to lobby for the purchase of the Ells-
worth cannon — at what he claimed was a very low price,
especially when compared to ordinary field artillery.
Thayer, an ex-Congressman and a maverick Republican
who had voted for Lincoln's nomination at the Wigwam, had
some influence. Three days later Lincoln drew up a memoran-
dum for purchase of "twenty guns, . . . made equal, or superior
to the Ellsworth gun" at $350 each. Lincoln noted that the gun
had recently been exhibited to him. The twenty cannons were
manufactured in Thayer's home town, Worcester,
Massachusetts, by L. W. Pond at the factory of Goddard, Rice
& Company. Some improvements were made on the model
Lincoln had seen, because Charles Kingsbury, who examined
the guns in November for the Army, reported that the "can-
non rifles" were superior to what he had seen before with Lin-
coln. The improvements were wide-ranging enough for L. W.
Pond to claim that the cannon was his own invention, or so, at
least, The Scientific American reported in December.
The barrel under discussion here has no other identifying
marks than those already mentioned — except the numeral
"5" which appears in five different places on the barrel. This
numeral, if a serial number, is consistent with the small num-
ber of cannons known to have been produced. Whilein itself it
provides no conclusive evidence, it at least does not have to be
explained away, as a higher number, in the hundreds, say,
would have to be. The device on the side of the breech opposite
the wedges is not mentioned in any of the literature on the
Ellsworth Gun, but it might be a part of a sighting device, per-
haps added as an improvement by L. W. Pond.
The positive proof of the identity of the barrel still lies im-
mobile in the breech. Only the system of rings, pin, and cone
will provide sure identification for the Ellsworth Gun, for it is
distinguished by its B. F. Joslyn-patented breech device.
From all other outward appearances, however, this could well
be the long-lost Ellsworth cannon. If it is, it is a significant
artifact for Lincoln students (as well as military historians
and students of the history of American technology).
Abraham Lincoln seems to have been very keen on the little
cannon's possibilities, and when a Mr. Hegon visited him
later, the President instructed Colonel George I). Ramsay to
"show him one of the little breech-loading cannons 1 got of
Hon. Eli Thayer." It was quite an innovative piece of
weaponry, and President Lincoln had personally seen to its
acceptance by the Army, even to the point of drawing up the
terms of the contract and, on December ■'?, 1861, signing the
manufacturer's bill for $HJS1 1 .ST, "I advise that the above ac-
count be paid. A. Lincoln."
(
FIGURE 6. The all-important pat-
ent mark appears, alas, in an
awkward place. It is just above the
breech plug. Early owners of the
barrel apparently damaged the
mark in trying to remove the plug.
The "T" is partly obliterated, as is
most of the "8"; however, the
beginnings of both of the loops in
the "8" are visible on the side near
the "2".
White Feather
Private
- Joined
- May 29, 2014
Thank you for all your effort.
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