MENE MENE TEKEL UPHARSIN

One of the secondary focuses of this blog is on smugly drawing attention to the continual instances  where additional primary evidence piles up in favour of our positions, or where secondary sources confirm what we have already noted. In light of that - and also of the complaint that there is insufficient peer-reviewed material covering this topic - it seems only appropriate to juxtapose the following two quotes:

Rob Craufurd, 'Rifles, Trade and Blockade,' 26 August 2016:

Most damningly, the Springfield Armoury – the only government armoury remaining to the North, responsible for 89% of the modern weapons manufactured to 30 June 1862 – obtained its iron from England... It was only after Hewitt travelled to Staffordshire on a personal project of industrial espionage, pleading with off-the-clock Marshall and Mills workmen in a local pub to give him the secret of making their iron, that the United States was capable of producing its own gun-barrels... By February 1864, Springfield was complaining about the uneven quality of the new product; Remington ‘found inspection losses on contract barrels so great as to make it necessary either to abandon this iron or ask that the inspection be made less rigorous.’ Even after Trenton began to produce iron, British exports remained significant. They were almost the sole source of steel for gun barrels, as well as producing the majority of files required to finish domestic guns.

Michael Raber, '“It would be impossible to estimate the value of these works...” Mass Production at Springfield Armory during the American Civil War,' Arms & Armour, vol. 14 no. 1 (Spring 2017), p.83:

For critically-important supplies of files, English makers from Sheffield remained dominant... When the war began, Springfield was in the awkward position of being entirely dependent on English sources for gun iron as well as steel. Abram Hewitt, whose Cooper, Hewitt & Company operated the Trenton Iron Company, bought English iron for the Armory at the Marshall works. In the Fall of 1862, he convinced the Ordnance Department and the Secretary of War that he could make iron of comparable quality if guaranteed a price no less than that paid for English iron. He succeeded in making usable iron only after a visit to Birmingham and much technical difficulty, and by the Fall of 1863 secured all orders for Springfield Armory barrel iron. Within a few months of this contracting coup, the Armory and the Remington Company found deficiencies in the Trenton iron for barrels, but this domestic source continued as Springfield’s sole iron supplier through the war and beyond.

How nice that both the Springfield Armoury (or the National Parks Service which now controls the site) and the Royal Armouries (in the form of the journal which it publishes) agree that the Union was 'entirely dependent on English sources for gun iron'!

(The title, incidentally, relates not to any claim of prophetic status, but because I've been listening to Richard Coyle's absolutely fantastic reading of H.P. Lovecraft's The Shadow over Innsmouth. After nearly 200 posts dealing with bad fiction, it seems only fair to pass on something good instead.)