For soldiers, to be ordained into the Ordnance Dept. or Corps of Engineers before the Civil War was a glorious honor. One became a member of a hand-picked intellectual aristocracy crammed with the country’s most proficient masters of scientific and technical detail. Rank, power and privileges showered down upon them. Believed exclusively suitable for this elite were West Pointers, and not just “any” West Pointers either, but only those graduating at the top of their class.

Nevertheless, few of these technocrats achieved the renown of the great battlefield commanders. (The ones who did, such as Robert E. Lee—who ranked second in his class and joined the Engineers—gained fame by transferring to the cavalry or infantry.) Among these obscure individuals was Maj. Alfred Mordecai of Ordnance. Yet while fame continues to elude him to this day, Mordecai’s influence is still felt on American shooting and soldiering.

The Mordecais were a Jewish family long settled in America: Alfred’s grandfather signed the anti-British Non-Importation Agreement of 1765, and his father served as a sergeant during the War of Independence. Alfred himself, born in 1804, was a scholarly boy fascinated by the campaigns of Napoleon, and in 1819 Mordecai achieved his dream: a West Point cadetship.

Though Mordecai hardly enjoyed “the stiffness caused in my left arm by carrying for two hours a day the unaccustomed weight of the heavy old line musket” during drill at the Academy, he excelled at calculus and relished his courses in “Civil Engineering & the Principles of Machines.”

Graduating first in his class, it was his right to select his field of specialty. Mordecai, like the other stars, plumped for the Corps of Engineers. After his promotion to captain in 1832, he joined the Ordnance elite and stayed there for the following 29 years. Distinguishing himself from the outset, Mordecai took command of the important Washington arsenal in 1833, then Frankford in 1836, then Washington again, and finally Watervliet in 1857. In 1854 he was promoted to major. In the 1840s alone, sealing his reputation as America’s finest ballistician, he published the influential tracts, “The Ordnance Manual,” “Report of Experiments on Gunpowder,” “Second Report of Experiments on Gunpowder,” and “Artillery for the United States Land Service.”

But Mordecai’s most important work was done at the behest of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis in 1855. Davis, who would later become president of the Confederate States of America, was concerned that the United States was beginning to lag in arms technology. “Though our arms have heretofore been considered the best in use,” he reported, “recent inventions in Europe have produced changes in small arms, which are now being used in war.” The “war” he referred to was the Crimean, then being fought between the Russian Empire and an alliance of Britain, France, and Turkey.

He dispatched Mordecai and two colleagues (Maj. Richard Delafield and Capt. George B. McClellan) as part of a commission to survey the state of European armaments and discern whether there was any truth to his suspicions.

Davis chose only the best for his roving investigative team: Delafield (also first in his class at West Point) was an Engineer, and McClellan, later an undistinguished commander of the Union forces but then regarded as highly promising, graduated second in his class and was a former Engineer. And then there was Mordecai. As the leading American soldier-technologist of his time, Mordecai’s brief from Davis was to explore the “practical advantages and disadvantages attending the use of the various kinds of rifled arms” in European service so that the war secretary could assess American procurement policy.

The commission steamed from Boston on April 11, 1855, its first landfall being Britain. France and Prussia were next, followed by Poland and Russia. After returning to Berlin, they traveled through Austria and arrived in Constantinople on Sept. 16. Through the next several months, the trio made their way back across Europe and arrived home almost exactly one year after departing.

On their return, the commissioners began compiling their separate reports, Mordecai submitting his in April 1858. His “Military Commission to Europe” in 1855 and 1856 is a landmark in military literature. Its most striking aspect is Mordecai’s fascination with the minute variations between the arms issued by each nation to its soldiers, and their almost infinite complexity and splendor. To him, the differences and degrees of deviation—imperceptible to the uninitiated—between, say, the Hanoverian seven-grooved rifle-musket, the Hanoverian eight-grooved rifle and the English two-grooved rifle, were endless forms of the most beautiful and wonderful kind.

His comprehensive treatment of European military science is also a masterpiece of unbiased scholarship. Mordecai carefully weighs the pros and cons of each system, compiles intricate charts to demonstrate their degrees of differences and similarities, traces every historical variation in bullet design back to its original source, and agglomerates dense tables of barrel lengths, angles of elevation and ranges.

Most interestingly, the worldview of the antebellum soldier is perfectly preserved in Mordecai’s report. Take, for instance, his curious blind-spot toward repeaters and breechloaders.

Of repeaters so little is said that it appears as if Mordecai hoped that studiously ignoring them would make them go away. He has no time for the rapid-firing products of such new manufacturers as Spencer and Colt, let alone the truly revolutionary all-in-one metallic cartridges being developed by Smith & Wesson that enabled them to work. From Ordnance’s point of view, repeaters were underpowered, extravagantly wasteful of ammunition and contributed to sloppy shooting.

As for breechloaders, Mordecai mentions them here and there, but really, he thought them merely faddish. About the Prussian “needle-gun” he restricts himself to the unenthusiastic comment, “its complicated structure, and other objections, seem to have prevented it from finding favor in any other country.” This would be the very same gun that would soon propel Prussia to devastating mastery over France and Austria in the 1860s—not so long after Mordecai wrote those dismissive words.

Mordecai makes other similar remarks. For instance, referring to the breechloading rifle being tested by the French imperial guards, he judges that their arms might work tolerably well “under cover of a roof; but it would not seem to be adapted to use in the ordinary vicissitudes of military service.” Mordecai was even unwilling to compare the American-made, breechloading Sharps rifle against any European design, despite the Sharps working rather better than “tolerably well” in the outdoors. (After all, the grizzled guards for the U.S. Mail coaches bumping over the hazardous trail between Santa Fe, El Paso and San Antonio swore by them.) Ultimately, Mordecai concluded that although one or two of the Great Powers were experimenting with breechloading rifles, nevertheless “the great body of the infantry of all the armies engaged used the ordinary [smoothbore] musket.”

In short, in the years before the Civil War, Ordnance’s collective wisdom was that breechloaders, repeating or otherwise, were endemically flawed; the technology was an evolutionary dead end. Consequently, all efforts should be directed toward developing the best possible muzzleloading single-shot rifle.

This is not to say that the Department was comprised of last-ditch reactionaries dedicated to turning the clock back to, say, the year 1800. The muzzleloading products made by its Springfield and Harpers Ferry factories from the 1850s onward integrated an advanced French technology known as the Minié bullet, which was a great leap forward in projectile design. The cylindro-conoidal Minié permitted far greater range and accuracy than its centuries-old predecessor technology: spherical lead balls propelled by combusting blackpowder.