Comte de Paris, History of the Civil War in America. Vol. 1.
Henry Coppee , LL.D., Ed.

The task of supplying the Federal troops with arms and ammunition, which devolved upon the ordnance department, was the most difficult of all. In fact, both the government armories and private manufactories were insufficient to meet the demand, and it required time to establish additional ones. The wonderful machines by which the most complicated rifles now in use throughout Europe are constructed almost without the aid of man are of American invention, and have given a well-deserved reputation to the expansion rifles manufactured at the government armory in Springfield. But this establishment had only capacity for producing from ten to twelve thousand yearly, and the supply could not be increased except by constructing new machines. The private workshops were equally insufficient; the Federal factory at Harper's Ferry had been destroyed by fire, and the depots were empty. It was important, however, to supply the most pressing of all the wants of the soldier, that of having a weapon in his hands.

During the first year of the war the ordnance department succeeded in furnishing the various armies in the field, not counting what was left at the depots, one million two hundred and seventy-six thousand six hundred and eighty-six portable firearms (muskets, carbines, and pistols), one thousand nine hundred and twenty-six field—or siege-guns, twelve hundred pieces for batteries in position, and two hundred and fourteen million cartridges for small-arms and for cannon. But it was obliged to apply to Europe for muskets and ammunition; this was the only war commodity that America procured in considerable quantities from the Old World, and it was this supply which proved to be the most defective. Agents without either experience or credit, and sometimes unscrupulous, bought in every part of Europe, on account of the Federal government, all the muskets they could pick up, without any regard to their quality or price. The English and Belgian manufactories not being able to satisfy their demands fast enough, they procured from the little German states all their old-fashioned arms, which those states hastened to get rid of at a price which enabled them to replace them with needleguns.