Casual Conversation June 11th with John Bainbridge about Gun Barons

On Sunday, June 11 at 3 pm Eastern Time, my good friend John Bainbridge, Jr. will discuss with us his new book, Gun Barons: The Weapons that Transformed America and the Men Who Invented Them (St. Martin’s Press 2022).
 
If you signed up for John Avlon’s Casual Conversation, then you should sign up for John Bainbridge’s, for they tell complementary stories about, in good measure, the Lincoln who fought the South for unconditional surrender and the Lincoln who planned for a magnanimous peace.  John A. focuses on the latter, seeing the former as an indispensable precondition for a just and lasting peace.  John B. tells an important tale about the former, and a key aspect of how it was achieved: Northern superiority with revolvers (handguns with rotating barrels) and repeating rifles and the men who invented, perfected, manufactured, and sold them.   Often not necessarily in that order.
 
Could the North have emerged victorious without the deadly advantage achieved by the craftsmanship, invention, and manufacturing might applied to the equipping of its soldiers with arms that were unequaled anywhere else in the world, much less below the internal border that divided our Nation?  We don’t know, but we can hazard some informed guesses from the stories of how one man became a company, a company became a brigade, and a brigade became an army when that man, that company, that brigade was handed a Spencer.
 
John B. tells stories about the Union mastery of battle with its advanced personal weaponry.  Like the battle over Hoover’s Gap led by Wilder’s Lightning Brigade.  Or the Fifth Michigan Volunteer Cavalry, the Wolverines, who, armed with Spencers, prevented J.E.B. Stuart from reaching Lee in time at Gettysburg.
 
Lincoln has an important role in this saga.  Our only President granted a patent, Lincoln also litigated patents, including one for a baby’s cradle that rocked itself with a system of weights and pulleys.  Lincoln said: “The [U.S.] patent system . . . added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things.”  Lincoln tested two Spencers and found them wanting.  Finally, he was prevailed on by Spencer himself to try again, and Lincoln went with the inventor to target practice near the White House where the gun performed beautifully, one shot after another for a total of seven balls fired.  Lincoln went back the next day to try again.  He apparently was sold, and so was the repeater.
 
There is much more, and the book is certainly not all about the Civil War.  It is as the book jacket states, “a narrative history of six charismatic and idiosyncratic men who changed the course of American history through the invention and refinement of repeating weapons.”  History as biography, the old-fashioned way, just as John A. locates his history in the character and personal history of Abraham Lincoln.
 
Gun Barons does not take a side on the current debate on gun control.  It tells the story, “colorful” is the word to use, of the men who built the gun industry in the United States.  As John B. writes at the very opening of the book: “Americans love their guns.  Hate them, too.”
 
Let’s gather to speak with John Bainbridge about the men whose names are now attached to modern corporations, but who were once real people on this earth: Colt, Winchester, Remington, Smith, and, of course, the man after the ampersand, Wesson.
 
The usual rules apply:  let me know by the close of business this Friday, June 9 whether you plan to join us.  Email me at arthur.fergenson@ansalaw.com .
 
Arthur
 
P.S.  John B. also co-wrote (with Stephen Hunter) an excellent book on the attempt to assassinate Harry S. Truman at Blair House.  We all have heard of this incident and were reminded of this by the pardon of the assassins.  If you are interested in discovering what really happened, buy John’s book: American Gunfight: The Plot to Kill Harry Truman and the Shoot-out That Stopped It.