Samuel Colt's revolver: A mixed blessing

The father of the modern personal firearms industry, Samuel Colt (1814-1862), grew up at a remarkable moment in global history: an era of relative peace and pacifism that lasted (with a few minor exceptions, like the Texas War of Independence) for more than thirty years, from the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 until the Mexican War in 1846.

For fear of a military dictatorship, the U.S. Congress had authorized a standing army of barely 8,000 men, charged solely with guarding the nation's borders. On the very day that President James K. Polk sent his war message to Congress in 1846, Congress was debating whether to close the U.S. Military Academy at West Point altogether.

In such a setting, Colt's childhood fascination with guns and explosives— which might strike us today as normal (if regrettable) behavior for a young boy— was considered not merely perverse but downright inexplicable.

Shooting at a king

In those days the cumbersome process of re-loading a flintlock pistol or rifle rendered it worse than useless if you fired it once and the angered target— human or animal— responded by charging toward you. When Emerson observed, "If you shoot at a king, you must kill him," he merely reflected the conventional assumption that a potential assassin would have only one shot before he was struck down.

Yet this peaceful world of ineffective guns wasn't necessarily a happy place. Precisely because guns were unreliable, men tended to settle their differences with knives and fists instead. As a further consequence, the physically small and weak, no matter how smart, were at the mercy of the physically large and strong, no matter how dimwitted. And women, of course, were at the mercy of men.

By the same token, Great Britain's empire seemed impregnable, thanks to the well-drilled synchronization of its infantry, by which one line of flintlock musketeers fired at the enemy while a second line reloaded.

Settlers vs. Indians

In the U.S., some 10 million American citizens— 90 percent of them living on farms— were confined to a relatively narrow strip of largely depleted soil east of the Alleghenies. The rest of the vast North American continent— including the "American bottom," an incredibly fertile section of the Mississippi River basin in what we now know as Ohio, Indiana and Illinois— was monopolized by fewer than a half million American Indians.

The Indians needed all that territory because, unlike Europeans and Asians— who had mastered agriculture and consequently lived in permanent homes located in fixed villages and towns— the Indians found food mainly by hunting for it, so their nomadic lifestyle was unattached to a specific plot of land; the slim poles that supported their teepees and the bark that covered them could be taken down and moved with ease at any time.

Nor had Indians learned to domesticate animals, which not only provided Europeans and Asians with food (both meat and milk) but also expanded their transportation capacities — the critical factor in the exchange of goods and ideas. (Even horses were unknown to American Indians until large herds were brought over by the Spanish conquistadores in the 16th Century.)

Arrows vs. pistols

America's white settlers wondered, not illogically, why God would leave such a bounteous land in the hands of people who made such poor use of it. Yet that status quo persisted because Prairie Indians were so dexterous in discharging arrows from their bows that a single Indian, galloping at full speed, could keep an arrow constantly in the air between himself and his enemy. Without better weaponry, there seemed no way to break the Indians' land monopoly, just as there seemed no way to challenge the British Empire.

Samuel Colt's revolutionary innovation— in 1836, when he was still only 21— was his invention of a pistol capable of firing six shots in succession from a revolving chamber. Yet the army's procurement officers, uncomfortable with new technology, at first showed no interest in it, and Colt was forced to close his Connecticut factory in 1842. But four years later, with the onset of the Mexican War, Colt took an order from the War Department for a thousand revolvers and soon was operating the greatest arms factory in the world.

Pioneer envy

By 1848 war and revolution broke out across Europe. Migration to the American West was just around the corner. As the thirty-year era of peace and pacifism ended abruptly, Colt's revolver— "The Equalizer," as it was acclaimed— became the critical tool of a new era of armed force, revising previous notions of what might or might not be possible.

Crossing the Iowa plains in 1852, an 18-year-old youth named Granville Stuart stared enviously at his father's small five-shooter revolver. "This was the first one I had ever seen," he recalled later, in his memoirs, "and I longed for the day when I could possess one, and bid defiance to whole villages of Indians, little knowing that the Indian with his bow and arrows was quite beyond the reach of such a puny weapon."

American technology would erase that handicap sooner than Stuart could imagine. Among its many unintended consequences, Samuel Colt's Great Equalizer would drive the Indians from their ancestral homelands altogether, and its successor weapons would enable countless physically puny (not to mention mentally unbalanced) adolescents to wreak horrible vengeance upon their perceived tormentors, most recently last month in Newtown, Connecticut.

And now, the moral

So what is the moral of this story? There is no such thing as an unmixed blessing. Colt's revolver solved many problems so effectively that we now forget that such problems ever existed. It also created a whole new set of problems with which we are now all too familiar.

I don't own a gun. I've never used one. I look forward to the day when people will find some less violent way to settle their grievances. But I don't kid myself into thinking that such a day, if it ever comes, won't bring a whole new set of problems beyond our current imagination. ♦


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