When a gun, or set of guns, earns its own nickname, it’s a good sign you’ve encountered something beyond the ordinary, and the Parsons Armies certainly qualify.

While their moniker immortalizes their underappreciated Civil War recipient, surprisingly the Parsons Armies draw most of their value and fame within the fine arms community from qualities the revolvers themselves bring to the table: a classic model, rarity, an astonishing level of embellishment, and superb condition.

The Parsons Armies are a pair of Colt 1860 Army revolvers and a giant in the fine arms world.

The Parsons Armies

What Makes the Parsons Armies Special?

Ordered by Philo Parsons for his brother Colonel Lewis B. Parsons, the factory letters state this pair was factory engraved on November 13, 1862, and bracketed together in the records, indicating that they were always intended to be a true, consecutive pair. Whether Philo intended them as a lavish Christmas gift or as congratulations for his brother’s recent military promotion, he clearly spared no expense.

The engraving work is some of the finest to leave the factory and, save for those with gold inlay generally reserved for heads of state, represents Colt’s highest level of artistry. Foliate scrollwork flows seamlessly across them, and those with an eye for elite level Colts will quickly take notice of the hand-cut cylinder scene and the prominent hand-checkering at the end of each loading lever – each instantly placing this Colt among very select company. The scrollwork itself is an ornate departure from typical Colt engraving, but does still come with a familiarity, including the animal and bird’s heads secreted away among the many lines – as one might expect from a Germanic master engraver. The work is frequently cited in books as performed by Master Engraver Gustave Young, but Young was working as a private engraver in Hartford at the time the Parsons Armies were cut. The work could very well be Young based on its excellence, but it could also be that of Georg H. Sterzing, or even the two men working together. Whichever master completed the work, both revolvers end in the warmth of deluxe walnut grips bathed in Colt’s high gloss “piano” varnish finish.

Their deluxe treatment is outstanding in every way, but it’s their model that sets them apart even among the top percussion Colts. The Parsons Armies were ordered at a time when every available Colt 1860 Army was being purchased by the Union for use in the Civil War. Most Civil War era presentations are not a model under military contract, and Colt’s Model 1860 Army is no exception. Not only are the Parsons Armies objectively beautiful, not only is their level of embellishment seldom seen in the world of Colt collecting, but for such work to be done on a military model revolver is a level of rarity that instantly strikes Colt collectors as spectacle. It’s the sort of defiance of convention that turns heads from across the room.

If all that wasn’t enough, their condition is superior. The historical inscription, markings, and engraving all remain wonderfully crisp. Original finish is abundant on both gun and grips. The original silver plating is over 95% complete, and the case colors and shades of nitre blue give the guns a near ethereal hue to their frames and loading levers. Perhaps the highest testament to their condition is the fact that this consecutive, cased pair remains complete to this day.

The case coloring on the Parsons Armies is nothing short of spectacular.

There are comparable revolvers that Colt created such as the pair for General W.S. Rosecrans (SN 111592 & 111594) and the pair for General George B. McClellan (SN 100359 & 100362), both of which are also well-known examples pictured in numerous books. However the Parsons Armies are a step beyond even these admirable examples.

The pair presented to Rosecrans, while excellent in many ways, are not consecutive nor have they survived in as excellent condition as the Parsons Armies. The McClellan set, despite being issued to a prominent Civil War figure, are a matched pair, but not consecutive. Plus they were split up many moons ago when the case and single revolver were placed in the Smithsonian in 1870. Rock Island Auction had the more recent pleasure of offering the remaining McClellan revolver in 2019 when it sold for $299,000.

General George McClellan's Colt Model 1860 Army. Sold in 2019 for $299,000.

The completeness, condition, special level of engraving, and historical ties have earned the Parsons Armies a place in some of the most respected collections of this century and the last. When Parsons passed, his daughter Julia placed them in the care of Parsons College, a Fairfield, Iowa institution founded by Lewis B. Parsons with two of his brothers. There they remained until they became the property of Bill Sisney, a gentleman and good friend of Rock Island Auction Company.

Mr. Sisney sold them fairly quickly to George S. Lewis who built one of the most respected Colt collections of the 20^th century, a claim without hyperbole that places Mr. Lewis in rarefied air. They remained with Mr. Lewis for nearly half a century before finally selling them into the collection of Mr. Greg Lampe. Mr. Lampe made a significant investment to obtain the Parsons Armies, but not without cause. His collection already outstanding in many ways, Mr. Lampe wanted that all-star piece to stand atop his excellent congregation of Colts and the Parsons guns more than fit the bill.

George Lewis proudly displays the Parsons guns with his family at a Kansas City, MO gun show c. 1973.

It is from Mr. Lampe’s collection that the Parsons Armies are now being offered at Rock Island Auction Company. They have never before been publicly sold.

Who was Lewis B. Parsons?

In short, Lewis B. Parsons was the Union’s “Mover of Armies” during the American Civil War. A logistics phenom, Parsons didn’t just oversee the Union’s troop movements and supply lines, he overhauled the system resulting in never before seen levels of efficiency, punctuality, and quantities of goods and men shipped along the rails.

Lewis B. Parsons in a Civil War era photo

It would be impossible to list his every achievement and contribution to the war effort in a single blog. There have been books dedicated to the task, and they are remarkably thorough thanks to the copious notes and documents of Parsons that were also provided to Parsons College upon their founder’s death.

Before we dive into specifics, the following quote on Parsons summarizes things quite succinctly.

“Were trains to be employed in carrying troops to a distant point, Lewis B. Parsons provided them; were the great rivers to be used for the needs of the army, Lewis B. Parsons assembled flotillas and fitted them for their purposes; were food or clothing or forage or arms to be supplied, Lewis B. Parsons gave the orders that carried them to their destination; were Grant or McPherson or Sherman to be fitted out in the midst of great enterprises, they rested with absolute reliance upon the work of Parsons, and he never failed them.”

Parsons graduated from Yale in 1840 and Harvard Law four years later. An educated man from some of the nation’s highest institutions, he traveled west to practice law in Alton, IL. Fast forward to 1857, Parsons began working in St. Louis for the banking firm of Page & Bacon which helped finance the Ohio & Mississippi Railroad. It was in that role he became friends with the railroad’s vice president and future Union general, George B. McClellan.

It was near Lewis B. Parsons' entry into the Union Army that his brother Philo presented him with the consecutive, cased pair of Colt 1860 Army revolvers.

When the Civil War began in 1861, Parsons wrote to his friend McClellan offering his services. McClellan quickly accepted and Parsons, at 43 years-old, was brought to Washington D.C. as a Captain. Despite Parsons’ desire to serve in a combat role, McClellan recognized his friend’s intelligence and gifts for business and reorganization and sent him to related duties. It was to be a recurring theme in Parsons’ military career. This time, no doubt in part due to a letter from President Abraham Lincoln himself which stated, “I personally know Mr. Parsons & have no doubt he would make a good Paymaster, Quartermaster, or Commissary.”

The Parsons Armies in the brassbound, velvet lined, rosewood case.

Parsons' Civil War Work

McClellan sent him in November to the Chief Quartermaster in St. Louis. Parsons was wading into an office rife with corruption via inflated prices, padded payrolls, kickbacks, nepotism, forged vouchers, and more. If the criminal fleecing wasn’t damaging enough, there were also inefficiencies so gross and negligent that actual theft might have been a welcome relief. Both cost the Union untold millions in dollars and in precious time. Food, arms, and ammunition sat in railroad depots or warehouses, while railroad executives haggled with the military over rates. Everybody wanted to cash in on the country’s sudden great need for transportation.

In Parsons’ own words,

“My first object was to introduce, as far as possible, such system as should combine uniformity with responsibility, and efficiency with economy, not then existing, owing to the confusion generally prevailing at the commencement of the war, and especially in the Western department…”

By December 6, 1861, Parsons was ordered to take charge of all river and rail transport in the Department of the Mississippi. This was an area that stretched from Pittsburg to New Orleans and as far west as Yellowstone – no small order.

Parsons' work involved him intimately with the logistics of river transportation.

As an example of his reforms, one can turn to his early work regarding the use of steamships. His predecessor General Frémont was chartering boats for transport. Parsons wrote,

“Satisfied, on a cursory examination , that this mode of conducting the service was as wrong in principle as it was extravagant in practice; that a small proportion of the boats then in service were actually required, (many of them being either idle or unprofitably engaged, according to the caprice of officers in command,) with the approval of General Allen, I made temporary contracts by the hundred pounds or by the piece for government transportation, and discharged all boats from charter, with the multitude of employees connected therewith. The result was that half the boats were at once put out of service and lying idle at the levee, while government transportation was not only performed at a less cost, but in a much more prompt and satisfactory manner.”

Such changes were implemented throughout Parsons’ area of command. He wrote rules and regulations, set pricing fair to both the government and the railroads, established responsibilities and accountability for transportation officers, made information widely available, ensured railways were paid promptly, solicited open bids for government contracts, and so on.

If that weren’t enough, he began coordinating efforts not only between the myriad of competing railway companies, but also with the steamboat operators.

Railroads became complex yet powerful resource for the Union.

It wasn’t all smooth sailing for Parsons, who saw no small amount of push-back mostly from those railways and boats that were profiting under the old system. However, money talks and the government was listening. The simple difference of charting boats per diem and paying to have them on call regardless of their workload or effort compared to paying them per poundage is quoted in one report which states, “…it can be easily shown that the Government saved one to two millions of dollars in its operations in this department alone.”

Reports from other, independent officers make similar statements. One particularly convincing example from Captain F.S. Winslow reads,

“Although the figures I shall now present will appear almost fabulous, yet I am honestly convinced they are too low. I wish to establish the difference of cost of the above 158,016 tons, if it had been transported on chartered vessels, instead of, as it was, on boats contracted at a given price per hundred pounds… The cost for transporting the above 158,016 tons would have consequently have reached the sum of $4,740,493… the transportation cost the Government the sum of $1,896,192. Consequently, the change from the charter to the contract system saved the government the enormous sum of about three millions of dollars.”

…and those figures cited by Winslow only cover, “the amount of work done during the season of navigation, at Nashville, from February 1 to May 27, 1864.” One can only imagine the effect and dollars saved when considering his changes implemented across a whole nation, for both rail and waterways.

It wasn’t just his cost savings, but also improvements to speed as well. Some of his greatest feats are equally well documented.

1. “His greatest single achievement, the most picturesque and startling in the annals of the war, was in the movement of Schofield’s army from the neighborhood of Nashville to the Coast near Wilmington, North Carolina, passing over the Ohio River, eastward over the Alleghenies, and down by the way of the Atlantic Coast to its destination; and the men who had stood fighting splendidly with Thomas at Nashville appeared in front of their astounded and bewildered foemen at a new and far distant point in the theater of war.” That's over 20,000 men in 11 days during frigid weather without a single accident or loss of life.
2. "When supporting Grant’s Fort Donelson campaign, Parsons moved more than 10,000 men, over 5,000 horses and mules, 56 guns and caissons, thousands of tons of supplies, and 9,000 Confederate prisoners during one week in February 1862.” (Hess, 82)
3. In December 1862, he moved General Sherman’s army of 40,000 men, cavalry, artillery, and livestock from Memphis to attack Vicksburg, helping the Union capture the last key Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi and giving Parsons greater ability to utilize the Mississippi and its tributaries for the Union war effort. This took 80 steamers and was completed with only seven days notice.

It’s no surprise that during his tenure, Parsons was promoted numerous times, always with “in charge of rail and river transport” in the title. In a bit of lesser-known trivia Parsons was one of the last officers promoted to brigadier general of volunteers. This appointment was pushed along by President Lincoln who made no secret about his urgency when he wrote Secretary of War Edwin Stanton on March 9, 1865, “I have long thought Col. Lewis B. Parsons ought to be promoted, and this impression has been deepened by his great success in the recent matter of transporting troops from the West to the East. Is there any legal obstacle in the way? If not let the promotion be made at once.”

A copy of Abraham Lincoln's first letter to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton regarding Parsons' promotion. A less diplomatic follow-up letter was sent two days later inquiring why the promotion had not yet been made.

Yet for all his promotions, Parsons never stopped wishing to serve in the field. The New York Times aptly stated in 1865, “Gen. Parsons repeatedly solicited permission, during the war, to quit the department he was in and go into the field. But his superiors, while admitting his eminent fitness for success in the field, would never consent to spare him from the position he filled. When every department of the public service during the war comes to have its true place in history, there will be few with a more brilliant and enduring reputation than Gen. Lewis B. Parsons.”

Lewis B. Parsons' enduring legacy - The Parsons Armies.

Lewis Parsons’ Lasting Legacy

There are a wide number of sources that attribute the Union’s victory in the Civil War, in no small part, to the superiority of their rails.

General William Tecumseh Sherman mentions their efficacy several times in his memoirs, and specifically states, “The value of railways is also fully recognized in war quite as much as, if not more so than, in peace….Therefore, I reiterate that the Atlanta campaign was an impossibility without these railroads.”

President Lincoln saw the advantages of railroads so clearly, he began Federal support for the transcontinental railroad in 1862.

According to the Smithsonian, “Every major Civil War battle east of the Mississippi River took place within twenty miles of a rail line.” While author Tommy Franks succinctly states, “The geography of the railroads became, almost overnight, the geography of war.”

These iron veins were lifelines for troops, moving supplies, food, equipment, horses and their food, medical supplies, transporting casualties and, of course, the fighting men themselves.

But this giant advantage for the Union had just as much potential to be a tangled rat’s nest of disorganization or even a budgetary albatross around its neck. Thanks to Lewis B. Parsons, it wasn’t, and the Union could move its vastly superior stores of guns, men, and supplies with unprecedented ease.

The Parsons Armies are a fitting legacy for a man so meticulous and detail oriented. Everything is in its place, even after 160 years. Their rosewood and brassbound case holds a spectacular consecutive pair that radiates with high condition, superlative engraving, brilliant nitre and case colors, historical significance, and a rarity that strikes a spark in the hearts of collectors.

In the field of 19^th century American fine arms, percussion Colts are king, and one of the elite members of that group are the Parsons Armies.

SOURCES:

https://americanexperience.si.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/How-the-Railroad-Won-the-War.pdf

Hess, Earl J. Civil War Logistics: A Study of Military Transportation. Louisiana State University Press, 2017.

In Memoriam. General Lewis Baldwin Parsons. 1908.

PARSONS, LEWIS BALDWIN. Reports to the War Department by Brev. Maj. Gen. Lewis B. Parsons, Chief of Rail and River Transportation. George Knapp & CO, 1867.

Pratt, Harry E. “Lewis B. Parsons: Mover of Armies and Railroad Builder.” 'Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1908-1984)', vol. 44, no. 4, 1951, pp. 349–54. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40189175.

Sherman, William T. Memoirs of General William T. Sherman. Appleton, 1875. p. 398.

Unknown author. “Gen. Lewis B Parsons.” The New York Times, 31 July 1865, p. 4.

Wilson, R. L. Colt Engraving. Beinfeld Pub., 1982.