In “The Gun the Army Can’t Kill” (August/September 1983,) Mr. Andrews is thoroughly in error by opening the .38 versus .45 debate by stating that “ever since the 184Os the standard Army sidearm had been the .45-caliber single-action pistol.” This is not so. In the 184Os the standard Army sidearm was a muzzle-loading cap-and-ball, single-shot pistol of caliber .54. This big-caliber, black-powder percussion pistol was the standard sidearm of the U.S. Army from 1842 until the Civil War, when the Union ordnance certified no fewer than ten makes of sidearms, all of them blackpowder, cap-and-ball revolvers of .36 or .44 caliber. A .45-caliber single-action pistol did not become a standard Army sidearm until 1873, when the U.S. ordnance placed a trial order of eight thousand Colts for cavalry use. These handsome revolvers were continuously produced by Colt until 1941 and were later reinstated after popular outcry. This particular weapon was the gunfighter’s gun, of which we have seen so much in the movies.
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Peter Andrews replies: Mr. Kinzer’s corrective letter breaks down into three main points. He is right on the date of the acceptance of the .45 caliber pistol, and I am glad for the correction. The reasons for the inadequacies of the .45 are a matter of interpretation. I have read sources citing both stopping power and the complicated double-action mechanism. Perhaps both should have been listed, even though most contemporary accounts stress stopping power. The rest of Mr. Kinzer’s complaint seems taken up with my use of the term “bowl over” instead of simply “stop.” In view of the firepower Mr. Kinzer has brought to bear on a point of semantics, I yield.
By the time the Treaty of Paris officially ended the Revolutionary War in September 1783, the Continental Army had been almost entirely disbanded. We were now free and independent states, and the question arose: Do free and independent states need an army? The Congress debated the point with some heart—not only the need but the cost were at issue—and decided yes. On June 3, 1784, a resolution was passed that established a “body of (700) troops … assembled into one regiment.” This, with the addition of fifty-five men at Fort Pitt and twenty-five more at West Point, constituted the entire army of the United States. Pennsylvania had supplied the most men and therefore was allowed to select the new commanding officer. He was Josiah Harmar. He called his troops the First American Regiment, as indeed they were. In December they took up quarters at Fort McIntosh, built in 1778 in the small, western Pennsylvania town of Beaver. This was the first peacetime post of the United States Army.
About the Normandie (“The Ship That Died of Carelessness,” December 1983 issue), I think Walter Winchell had the last word. After the courts had rendered a decision that no one was to blame for the disaster, he wrote in his column that “if no one was to blame, all they had to find out was who pushed it over.”
In the Normandie poster (December 1983, page 60) the ship is not clearing the harbor as it says in your picture caption. She is making no steam or smoke except the amount necessary for support of internal heat and electricity, and it is easy to see that her port bow anchor is down. Craft of this size seldom try to move with their anchors down. Also, even in her day, it was most uncommon for a large vessel to proceed through the harbor without tugs along.
NOW AS IN 1817 , Thomas Jefferson’s plan for the University of Virginia combines form and function in elegant simplicity. His academical village —a complex of ten pavilions and connecting student rooms flanking the central Rotunda —is now well into the second half of its second century. Today, it combines the roles of working university, popular attraction for travelers and the “models of good taste” and architectural specimens Jefferson intended. A 1976 poll of the American Institute of Architects cited the academical village as the outstanding achievement of American architecture, and it has been designated a Registered National Historic Landmark. THROUGH 167 YEARS of daily use the buildings have borne up under constant wear with only routine —and sometimes piecemeal —maintenance. Now the strains are beginning to show. Important structural work has been left undone, plumbing and wiring are substandard and roofs and flooring are badly in need of rehabilitation.
THE YOUNG MAN at the left is Paul Morphy, the god of American chess players and perhaps the greatest natural genius the game has ever produced. Photographs of Morphy exist, but daguerreotypes, such as this one, are extremely rare. It was discovered in a flea market in New Jersey by Dr. Enoch Nappen, who bought it without knowing that it was, indeed, Morphy. Neither Nappen nor we, the editors, know who the other young man is (apparently he is in the act of resigning by turning down his king). We would be glad to hear from any reader who can enlighten us. Dr. Nappen believes the picture was made in 1857 when Morphy was in New York for the first American Chess Congress. He was twenty, but contemporary descriptions all stress that he looked younger.