American Gun: A History of the U.S. In Ten Firearms by Chris Kyle, William Doyle Read Free Book Online

if to confiscate the guns and arrest the shooters. It looked like the Second Amendment was about to face its very first challenge in Washington, D.C.
    Lincoln peered down the barrel and squeezed the trigger. Then, smiling shyly, he rose from the ground.
    “Here comes the fun!” thought Stoddard, watching his boss get up. Or as Stoddard put it later, “Lincoln’s tall, gaunt form shoots up, up, up, uncoiling to its full height, and his smiling face looks down upon the explosive volunteers.
    “Their faces, especially that of the sergeant . . . look up at his, and all their jaws seem to drop in unison. No word of command is uttered, but they ‘right about face’ in a second of time. Now it is a double-quick, quicker, quicker, as they race back toward the avenue, leaving behind them only a confused, suppressed breath about having ‘cussed Old Abe himself.’ His own laugh, in his semi-silent, peculiar way, is long and hearty, but his only remark is:
    “Well, they might [have] stayed to see the shooting. . . .”
    Abe Lincoln was a gun buff and a technology whiz. Other presidents before him—including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson—were highly gun-savvy, as were most Americans at a time when the nation was primarily rural. But Lincoln took presidential involvement with gun technology to a new level. Fiddling with another experimental repeating gun on his firing range one day, he shot off a few rounds, then announced, “I believe I can make this gun shoot better.” He produced a hand-whittled wooden sight from his vest pocket, clamped it on the rifle, and let loose at a piece of congressional stationery pinned more than eighty yards away. He hit the paper almost a dozen times out of fourteen.

President Abraham Lincoln (directly below flag) observes Union troops in front of the White House.
Library of Congress
    Another time, Lincoln showed up at a target practice for the 2nd U.S. Sharpshooters, one of the few specialized Union marksmen units. He borrowed a rifle from one of the surprised soldiers in Company F and scored three good shots as the men whooped and hollered. A witness reported that Lincoln “handled the rifle like a veteran marksman, in a highly successful manner, to the great delight of the many soldiers and civilians surrounding.”
    “Boys,” said the President to the cheering troops, “this reminds me of old-time shooting!” Now, that’s a commander in chief any combat vet would be proud to serve.
    Lincoln was also a man who loved machines of all kinds. Abe liked to roll up his sleeves, get dirty, and take contraptions apart. He scoured magazines like Scientific American for the latest technology. He was the first chief executive to embrace telegraph communication. He personally heard pitches from gun inventors and entrepreneurs, tested products, reviewed plans and machinery, and battled bureaucrats. Abe pushed his underlings for research and development, threw his weight and opinions around like a seasoned CEO, and managed the equivalent of a multimillion-dollar firearms investment fund through the U.S. military. He was a venture capitalist of weaponry.
    Lincoln seems to have admired the Henry Repeater he fired that spring morning, putting him in line with a lot of soldiers. As the war progressed, many would dig into the patched pockets of their woolen pants to purchase a Henry for themselves. Officers would outfit whole units with them, raiding the family treasury in hopes of giving their men an edge in combat. But Lincoln eventually turned his favor to a rival model—the Spencer Repeater. He did this even though his own experiment with the gun was something of a failure: Testing two models supplied by the Navy, he had one misfeed and the other lock up after a double feed. Reports by others who raved about the gun apparently convinced Lincoln that his experiences were just flukes, and so it was the Spencer’s manufacturer, Sharps, that got the prized Union contract