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mass-produced standard infantry gun as the conflict revved up. By the time Lincoln went out that fine morning, both North and South were trying to get as many of them as they could. But there’s one thing every soldier knows: the quicker your reload time, the better your odds of living to fight another day. Ol’ Abe had spent a bit of time in the militia during the Black Hawk War, and I suspect that lesson was still fresh in his mind some thirty years later out on the White House lawn. The weapons he was testing were capable of firing several rounds before a soldier had to stop and reload.
    The first gun Lincoln picked up was believed to be a Henry Repeater. It was a lever-action rifle that could reliably fire sixteen shots in stunning succession using a tube magazine that ran down beneath the barrel of the gun to the breech. It could be loaded relatively fast through an opening at the end of the tube.
    The weapon had been manufactured by the New Haven Arms Company. New Haven had been purchased by a man named Oliver Winchester a few years before. Winchester was pretty wily for a Yankee; he’d bought the company for a song from two guys named Smith & Wesson when they hit financial problems in 1857. We’ll come back to Misters Smith & Wesson later.
    Oliver Winchester had made his money manufacturing shirts. It’s said that he didn’t know all that much about guns, but he certainly understood a lot about manufacturing, which in mid-eighteenth-century America was more important. And he also must have been a good judge of talent, because he quickly entrusted a man named Benjamin Tyler Henry with improving the factory’s most promising but tempermental product, the Volcanic repeating rifle.
    Henry made a host of improvements to the design, but the most important was arguably in the type of ammo it packed. The Volcanic repeater fired a Rocket ball. The bullet was similar to a Minié-ball, except that the hollow base was filled with powder, then sealed with a primer cap. The closed metallic cartridge gave the gun a complete piece of ammunition. Unfortunately, the small size of the bullet limited the size of the charge; the bullet didn’t have quite enough pop for the bloody but necessary business of killing an enemy on the battlefield.
    Henry changed that by providing his repeater with a hefty rim-fire cartridge. His copper cartridge fit some twenty-five grains of powder behind a 216 grain, .44-caliber bullet. It had pop to spare.
    Back at the target range near the White House, Lincoln was impressed by the Henry. The multi-shot, fast-loading rifle was a potential game-changer for the Union army. It took about half a minute to reload; a soldier could then squeeze off another sixteen shots as fast as he could jerk the lever back and forth. There were downsides—among others, you had to move your hand out of the way of the cartridge follower after a few shots, and the barrel got awful hot if you shot fast and long enough. Still, it was an exciting weapon with a lot of potential.
    After firing the Henry, Lincoln gazed at the plank of wood he’d perforated with a contented smile. The repeater concept was sound, the execution good. Lincoln’s aide, William O. Stoddard, handed him a second weapon. This was a modified Springfield smoothbore musket that used a screw-on adapter to feed nine high-powered rounds into a breech, rather than a single round rammed down the muzzle. It was called a Marsh rifle, after its inventor, Samuel Marsh.
    As the president was kneeling down to line up a shot, a voice began cursing loudly behind them. “Stop that firing!” bellowed a pissed off man in uniform. Trailed by four enlisted soldiers, the captain marched toward the two amateur civilian marksmen who were not only interrupting the peaceful Washington, D.C., morning, but were violating a presidential order forbidding shooting in the capital city. Swearing up a storm—cussin’ like some Navy SEALs I know—the captain reached his hand out as