Firepower: A Civil War Spy Novel

by Philip Leigh

Repeating and breechloading rifles that could shoot up to seven times faster than the standard muzzle-loader of the American Civil War might have given Northerners the victory in the first year of the four-year war. Even though the repeaters were a Union monopoly that had been patented before the war, few were deployed until the final year of fighting. Manufacturers could not understand the bureaucratic resistance and historians have argued over it ever since.

That's because they did not know that the Confederate Secret Service was involved. Southerners operated clandestinely to cause the Union Army Ordnance Bureau Chief to dismiss the weapons as unreliable "new fangled gimcracks." Firepower unravels the mystery of why the US Ordnance Bureau only slowly adopted them by revealing a family secret involving the Ordnance Chief, General James Ripley.

233 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 18, 2023