Weapon Maintenance Quotes
Plantng tobacco was a much more lucrative endeavour than fixing guns so many gunsmiths abandned that trade for tobacco farming.
This quotation is particularly interesting because it belies the image of America as a society where almost everyone was familiar with guns and firearms—that we had a gun culture. In reality most Americans from Colonial times on, could not afford guns and many that could afford them preferred other weapons for defense due to the lack of reliability of firearms. Guns were always a status symbol however. This quotation shows that most American soldiers did not know how to properly care for guns even in fundamental ways and could not be trusted to care for them much less repair them—a far cry from the image of the American rifleman alone in the first with his trusty weapon with which he was familiar and skilled.
This quotation is referred to by these who debunk the myth that everyone was armed in early America. This was so on the frontier where there were potential Indian hostilities but in the rest of the country guns were not a part of everyday life or the culture. Even hunting was not that common an activity as raising cattle and farming was a much more reliable method of assuring a good food supply. The quotation is also often referred to in discussions regarding preparedness. This was an early example where the effect of peace and quiet was to diminish government budgetary commitment to military preparedness. . Floyd was very modern in his economic views, so much so that he, even as a Southern politician, opposed slavery on the grounds that it was economically inefficient and the South would never develop industrially if it had no incentive, as existed in the North and England, to reduce the amount of labor required for economic opportunity. He was right on that point as well.
This is yet another quotation demonstrating that the image of early America as a gun culture where most men were armed, skilled with those arms, and ready to come to the defense of the country. It turns out that none of the three corresponded to any historical reality for most Americans.
The Factory had been established by the State of Virginia in 1775 to make guns. America filled with armed Americans in the Colonial era was a myth. Early America was not a gun culture. Guns were expensive, needed maintenance, took too long to reload, and were not as effective for most purposes as other weapons like hatchets and knives. American Colonial war was mostly hand to hand combat with relatively little shooting. Less than one fourth of the men joining Washington’s army owned guns. Gun factories could not survive for want of customers and gunsmiths went into other occupations. See {613052}. With the rebellion, it was critical to manufacture guns to arm the soldiers who had not their own. But the efforts like this were relatively feeble. The factory director who made not a single gun in over a year was then promoted to Commissary General of Munitions in the Continental Army. He was married to George Washington’s sister. He did however finance much of the munitions he procured with his own personal funds so made up in wealth and patriotism what he lacked in manufacturing skill.
Planting tobacco was a much more lucrative endeavour, so many of the few gunsmiths abandned that trade for tobacco farming.
