‘MANSON’ and ‘SHEFFIELD’ were stamped on Bowie knives that have survived from the American Civil War era.   Several feature in the study of Civil War knives by Marc Newman (1998)¹.  Manson Bowies are usually plain spear-points, with occasional acid-etched patriotic slogans.   One knife in Newman (and also shown on the website of Ford’s Theater, Washington, DC) is of particular interest, because it was said to have been carried by John Wilkes Booth, when he assassinated President Abraham Lincoln.  It is stamped ‘MANSON / SHEFFIELD and etched:  ‘AMERICA LIBERTY INDEPENDANCE [sic]’ ‘THE LAND OF THE FREE AND HOME OF THE BRAVE’.  According to Dave Taylor (2013)², however, that knife was more likely to have been collected from the house of Mary Surratt and that Booth’s actual weapon was a ‘Rio Grande Camp Knife’ made by Wm. Jackson & Co.  Unfortunately, ‘Manson’ has proved impossible to track either in Sheffield or the US.  Probably, he was an American import agent, who operated in the Civil War years.   His knives belong to the same era as those produced by Westa and Wilson Swift – also unidentified makers.

^1. Newman, Marc, Civil War Knives (Boulder, Colorado, 1998)

^2. Taylor, Dave, ‘Cloak and Daggers’, Knife World (4 April 2013)