CHAPTER 18. Manhattan Firearms Goes To War

Almost unrecorded is the important part which a company more distinguished for making copies of famous guns played in making an original contribution to manufacturing in the North. This firm, the Manhattan Firearms Company, variously of Norwich, Connecticut, and later of Newark, New Jersey, fabricated single-shot pistols and pepperbox arms quite similar in appearance to the Allen guns built by its neighbor firm of Allen & Thurber, of Norwich. Then, with the cessation of Colt’s exclusive patent rights in 1857-8, Manhattan turned to manufacturing .31 and .36 percussion revolvers that closely resembled Colt’s arms but which contained many patented detail improvements. And lastly, in 1860 Manhattan introduced a 7-shot .22 square butt tip-up revolver which was a dead ringer for the tip-up Smith & Wesson. Though the big octagonbarrelel .36 Manhattans are commonly called secondary U. S. martial pistols, in that they are the size most to be expected in the hands of troops buying for their own use, the only actual purchase by the Union of Manhattan arms yet traced deals not with the big military-caliber Navy Manhattan revolver, but relates instead to the tiny vest-pocked sized seven shooters!

Confiscated Arms

  In September of 1861 the United States surveyor of the Port of New Albany, Indiana, Jacob Anthony, had seized a large quantity of arms as contraband. Among

Model IV Manhattan revolver is common version of .36 five-shooter which many collectors look upon as a secondary martial pistol. Made from April 1864 to June, 1867, approximately 24,000 of this later variation were sold. The Union did not buy any.

these was a shipment of Manhattan revolvers and ammunition consigned to the company’s sales agent, S. H. Harrington at New Albany; 36 revolvers caliber .22.
Governor Oliver P. Morton was frantically sending telegrams to General Ripley and to anyone else who could, he thought, supply his state troops with arms and ammunition. When he learned that Mr. Anthony had a lot of arms, he wired Salmon P. Chase, Secretary of the Treasury, and got Chase’s permission to have from Anthony, all revolvers in his hands not absolutely needed for effective discharge of office duties.
Anthony retained two pistols and 400 cartridges presumably for office duties and delivered to Governor Morton 33 pistols. The one pistol different was later the subject of some conjecture, but as there was no record or trace of it the matter was not delved into very deeply. Morton also received 4,600 pistol cartridges. A claim was made against the United States by the Manhattan Firearms Company for $423.80 under the premise that the pistols having been incorrectly seized should be returned or paid for. It was stated that the pistols were sent as samples to Stephen H. Harrington as agent.
Facts have come to my knowledge which satisfy me beyond all doubt that this box of pistols was never intended for Rebel use, the owners being loyal; and this box was a sample which this agent was using in effecting sales to Union men, reported the United States district attorney John Hanna to Secretary Chase. I therefore unhesitatingly state that the amount realized by the governor ought, in justice to the claimant and owner, to be paid, as the pistols received in exchange are now in the service of the United States.
While these pistols of Manhattan make were technically military pistols by reason of circumstance, Morton was not entirely satisfied with their caliber. Shortly after they were received, I exchanged them for Navy revolvers, now in the service of the United States, Governor Morton wrote to Chase on December 7, 1861.
In order to obtain redress of this loss, for the pistols had been dispersed by Morton’s use and later exchange, possibly with some Ordnance office, for Navy pistols, Manhattan sought to get payment for the guns. To do this it was necessary for the works manager, Albert Beach, who was at this time also secretary, to make a deposition as to the nature of the guns and their value, which he testified was $378.60.
The money in question did not total millions, but it was dear to the heart of Manhattan’s president, Frederick H. Smith of Newark, and he went to Washington to see Mr. Chase upon the matter of settlement. The case had the distinction of being the last one of the many controversial disputes over ordnance and ordnance stores to be brought routinely to Secretary of War Stanton’s notice. Following the Manhattan case, No. 7 as it was listed by the Commission on War Claims, Major Hagner issued an informational order, By direction of the Secretary of War the reports in future are to be addressed to the chief of ordnance for execution, without reference to the War Department. Stanton did not want to be bothered by such favorable reports as the Commissioners sent in:    .    . they find
the prices charged are reasonable, and they therefore recommend that this account be paid to the full amount of the claim, $423.80.”

Imitations of a Smith & Wesson

These little pistols, the only ones which can lay claim to having been (so far as is presently known) officially purchased by the United States, were not the only arms made by Manhattan. But they were among the most controversial. They are substantial imitations of Smith & Wesson’s First Model of 1858, and are of a bored-through cylinder construction to be considered an infringement of the famous Rollin White patent. Of a number of firearms fabricants brought into the courts by the litigious Rollin White in protecting his patent rights assigned to Smith & Wesson, Manhattan was the only firm to make an almost literal copy. Other arms such as the Moore which resembled the Colt pocket model, infringed in a detail of construction; a cylinder bored to load at the rear end for cartridges. But Manhattan was not named directly though was an indirect party in an action brought by White against Herman Boker.
Boker had apparendy wanted to secure an agency for the main big companies of the time, for United States and possibly for foreign sales. But although he sold Uncle Sam over two million dollars worth of guns, only 22 were United States make: Sharps carbines. Of revolvers, he sold but 52 Lefaucheux revolvers to the Government in five years. Waldo E. Nutter, author of the comprehensive volume Manhattan Firearms, conjectures that Boker was hurting because he didn’t have a good line of handguns to sell, and that soon after the Manhattan Company was organized in 1855 by a group of New York and New Jersey industrialists, he sought them out and signed them up with him as New York agent. When Smith & Wesson brought out their first cartridge revolver, it was phenomenally successful but Boker, familiar with the European market, was in Nutter’s opinion convinced that the Rollin White patent was a fraud. He knew of a host of continental revolvers loading their cylinders at the back end and believed that White had no patent of value. We suspect that Boker was influential in the initial decision to manufacture the .22caliber revolvers, says Nutter.
Beginning in 1859, Manhattan moved their office to Boker’s address at 50 Cliff Street, New York. Some of the first of the little cartridge pistols which Boker had to market were not stamped on the barrel at all— were plain. While many questions could be raised about the existence of the unmarked Manhattans, we also would like to suspect something: that prior to the actual shooting at Fort Sumter, Manhattan was not adverse to shipping their pistols South, but appreciated the anti-North sentiment that would be aroused by a stamping of any name so closely identified with New York as Manhattan, and purposely left the tops of the barrel ribs blank. Soon there was no longer a need for disguises, and the familiar horseshoe name-address stamp, also found on bullet moulds for Manhattan percussion revolvers, made its appearance at the widened part of the barrel at the hinge. Decorative engraving stands out as one of the distinctive characteristics of Manhattan’s First Model .22 caliber revolvers, notes Nutter in a brief description of the salient features of their wartime pistol. The vertical flats of the barrels were hand engraved with a scroll design . . . Barrels were usually finished blue, occasionally were silver plated; the seven-shot cylinders, ^s/s inches in length, were not engraved, had only one cylinder stop per chamber, with no provision for safety rests and were finished blue. The cylinder stop (in the frame top strap) has a nose which is set at an angle to the nose on the hammer, so that cocking the latter raises the former (lifting the locking stud out of the cylinder notch), but, in firing, the two noses pass one another.
The top of the cylinder stop release also served as the rear sight; it was an improvement upon the tiny groove in the top of the corollary Smith & Wesson top-frame cylinder stop. Hammers were case-hardened in colors; the iron frames and grip straps were usually silver plated and the grips of walnut or rosewood were varnished and polished to a high finish. Serial numbers of very small size were stamped on the breech of the barrel, on the rear of the cylinder, and on the grip frame, underneath the grips; the inside surface of one grip was marked with the serial number, usually in pencil but occasionally die-stamped in the higher ranges of serial numbers.
Variations of early production are noted; a first type of the First Model is considered to have a frame plate of iron instead of brass, and the tension screw to set up the mainspring, usually located in the inside handle strap, may be lacking. The front cylinder bearing is a round pin instead of the adjustable round-head screw. Rifling is six grooves right hand, instead of three grooves as is almost the rule in later .22 Manhattans, and the barrel may lack the company name. Many
other minor engineering changes can be traced through the production of this little pistol, to its unhappy demise at the hands of Rollin White vs. Herman Boker in litigations.

A Second Model

A second model .22 having a distinctive flat frame of brass, usually silver plated, was made between June of 1861 and October 1862. Most distinctive feature of this arm was the cylinder stamping scene, a fight between settlers and Indians showing one of the settlers’ hair being lifted. About 8,000 of this second model were made up to the time of the court’s decision against Boker.
White and Smith & Wesson sued Boker under the terms that one selling could be liable to prosecution for patent infringement, as well as one making the article said to be an infringement. Why Smith & Wesson did not go after Manhattan is not known; Nutter thinks Boker was a more prosperous target for White to collect damages from, and they launched into the German-American gun merchant with a will. White claimed Boker had sold 12,000 pistols for a profit of $60,000 since November of 1856; and that All consisted of extended chambers through the rear of the cylinder for the purpose of loading them at the breech from behind, either by hand or by self-acting chargers from a magazine placed in the rear of said cylinder. (Nutter quoting Colonel Roy Kuhn’s extract from case record.) The 12,000 revolvers estimate is probably close to the actual quantity; Nutter dismisses the $60,000 profit as ridiculously high. An impressive battery of witnesses was paraded before the court, including Charles H. Pond, B. F. Hart (whose name appears on a Bacon-manufactured revolver as an agent or sales outlet), William J. Syms of Blunt & Syms, John J. Spies a prominent gun importer, Joseph Cooper, Marcellus Hartley, Charles Folsom, George G. Moore, Jacob Rutsen Schuyler, Jubal Harrington, Thomas P. Wheelock, Ben Kittredge, James Warner, Bacon of Manhattan, William Reed (Boston gun merchant), Christian Sharps, and John P. Lower.
A permanent stop order was issued by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, October 31, 1862, restraining Boker from infringing White’s patent by making or selling guns of the Manhattan kind. Whether White ever received damages is not known; apparently not, since none were credited to White by Smith & Wesson on this account. But the trial did have a salutary effect so far as Smith & Wesson was concerned. Other cartridge pistol makers now came to terms with the Springfield pistolmen and paid the royalties demanded or surrendered their pistols to be marked Made for Smith & Wesson. No Manhattan gun is known with this mark, so evidently the firm of Fred Smith and Albert Beach did not comply to that extent with the court’s order.

Other Business

An aura of immunity in some respects surrounded Manhattan, for their principal business was not simply firearms manufacture. They also made the highly specialized machinery for fabricating guns. One of their star designers, a Swiss, Augustus Rebetey, is credited (Patent 26, 641 Dec. 27, 1859) with designing the intermediate or double cylinder stops on the Manhattan percussion revolvers. In fashion worthy of the nonsense drawing of Sam Colt’s reconstructed 1836 patent specification, in which the picture is more difficult to understand than the broadness of the claims, Rebetey and co-inventor Joseph Gruler neglect to make a full drawing of the details of their invention. They claim very clearly:
The use of the intermediate recesses, r r, in combination with the stop d, actuated by the hammer, in pistols where the cylinder is revolved in the act of cocking the pistol, as herein described, thereby effecting a self-acting lock of the cylinder, midway or otherwise between any two cones.
The artist however did not show the double stops familiar to the gun collector; he illustrated only one stop per chamber. The drawing does nothing to alert the patent searcher for a competitive pistol firm, to the novelty in the patent. Apparently Manhattan did not believe in giving unnecessary publicity, even through the necessary publication by means of a patent, to some of their ideas.
More important in their scheme of business was their machine tool fabrication. Andrew R. Arnold, formerly a top level workman or contractor for Colts, was General Superintendent of the Manhattan Company’s mechanical business, as he testified in the case of White vs. Boker. Nutter seems to make this out as some hint that Manhattan was engaged in matters other than their chartered gun-making business. This theory is not at all necessary to explain Arnold’s choice of words; he very simply was the general superintendent in charge of the mechanical aspect of Manhattan. Sales, billing, contracts, and all the routine of business affairs exclusive of design and manufacture, were handled by other people, Mr. Arnold would inform us.
Arnold sought to buy from Colt’s a drop hammer of a type recently invented by Elisha King Root. His letter to Colt’s is couched in friendly terms and refers to his past association with the firm. Whether Colt’s sold Arnold the drop forging hammer he wanted is not known, but it appears likely that they were not exactly trade enemies. A degree of cooperation appears to have existed in connection with an unusual Manhattan pistol known as the London Pistol Company revolver.
London Pistols were Manhattans Briefly, collectors had long noticed the existence of a Colt-like percussion revolver having a cast iron frame and removable sideplate like the Manhattan arms, and with extra intermediate cylinder stops on the cylinder to lock it between chambers as a safety precaution. The barrel marking is London pistol company and the octagon barrel with hinged loading lever is a dead ringer for the barrels manufactured by Colt in the midfifties on pocket pistols, such as the London pocket model fabricated at the Colt factory at Thames Bank.

London Pistol Co. was Manhattan trade mark stamped on this flared grip .31 five shooter. Supplementary cylinder stop slots were for safety allowing capped cylinder to be locked between chambers with hammer down. Cast iron frames were often engraved.

Pimlico, London, England. There a factory was in operation between 1853 and December, 1856. Along with Navy revolvers and experimental rifles, just over 10,000 pocket .31 revolvers distinguished by having iron handle straps were made. The company closed down manufacturing, the Hartford plant having enough productive capacity directly under Colt’s personal supervision to satisfy the world needs, and British workmen being difficult to get along with. Many dealers had parrotted the belief that the left-over parts were sold to a firm which assembled them for a time under the cognomen of London Pistol Company. It was not until after World War II that collector-researcher Sam Smith, of Markesan, Wisconsin, thought to determine why, if these pistols were London manufacture, there were no British proof marks on them? Proof house laws were quite strict; a British make gun, or one to be sold in the United Kingdom, had to have British proof marks. The London Pistol Company arms simply bore a patent date; on the frame under the cylinder is stamped Patented Dec. 27, 1859. When Sam Smith got his 25$ copy of the patent he had solved a riddle of the ages. It was the patent to Gruler and Augustus Rebetey for the extra cylinder stops, and was assigned to Manhattan Firearms Company. The London Pistol Company guns were at last recognized as being American work, but the source of the rumor remained to be identified by Sam Smith. Quoting Major H. B. C. Pollard, a prolific and pioneer but not always accurate British gun writer, Smith noted Pollard as stating in A History of Firearms (p. 135) that: Colt’s invasion (of the British gun trade) was not a success, and the London factory was closed in 1857. The relics were taken over, and a small company appears to have used up the surplus of parts, as The London Pistol Company, a name I have seen impressed over an almost obliterated London Colt stamp.
Says Smith in conclusion, but slightly in error, I believe we may judge from that that the true English London Pistol Company product is one of leftover Colt parts and that few were manufactured. It is significant that J. N. George’s book, English Pistols and Revolvers, the best book on that subject, makes no mention of the
London Pistol Company which succeeded Colt.
Smith makes a fundamental error in considering that there was any firm other than a Colt firm in London, which succeeded Colt’s closing down of the London factory.
The stopping of the engines at Thames Bank did not stop the business entity of Colt in London. The offices and warehouse at 14 Pall Mall continued to be used for a number of years thereafter. The depot was a customs-bonded storage area at the 14 Pall Mall building, in which without payment of duty Colt’s workmen and sales agents could manipulate guns, do reblueing and rebuilding, conversions to cartridge, repack and reship for export, and all manner of business activities. A complete stock of parts was maintained also for repairs, and there was absolutely no question but that Colt under no conditions and under no circumstances would have sold his actual Colt patent parts to some London handy man for marketing in direct competition with the identical article still fabricated in Hartford and finished for the London export trade.
That London fabricated parts were returned to Hartford is suggested by the existence of a barrel for a 5-inch pocket pistol which was broken from a mass of fused scrap that later was salvaged from the ruins of the Colt fire in Hartford in 1864. The barrel has the regular address col. colt/london stamping though the word London’ is all but obscured by a blob of fused brass trigger guard. The barrel is finished through the filed stage, rifled; and the bore, except for scale, is perfect. That it is not a second hand barrel returned for some cause is revealed by the absence of the front sight pin; instead, the hole for the sight is perfectly clean. If there had been a pin, in spite of the molten heat, the brass of the sight would have remained smeared at the front sight hole. This is an unfinished London Colt barrel, from storage in the parts wareroom at Hartford in 1864.
Given this fact we must return to the observed great similarity between the London Pistol Company barrels and the Colt barrels, and to Major Pollard’s statement, incredible though it is. We need not try to deny the existence of a London-based “London Pistol Company,
for the absence of this name in all listings of British arms firms is sufficient. But Major Pollard states categorically and not as supposition, that he has seen this marking impressed over an almost obliterated London Colt stamp. It may be that this is the shape of the story:
Colt could not by snapping his fingers cause the dissolution of the Manhattan Firearms Company. As he was engaged in hiring principal workmen from other firms, such as a barrel straightener from Remington, so others found it desirable to hire key workmen away from Colt. It was in the nature of the trade. Hence, Andrew R. Arnold left Colts for perhaps Norwich first; then to the Newark enterprise of Manhattan. With him he may have taken some top level information, such as the contents of the Colt parts storerooms, including the large amount of finished and semi-finished work returned from London. (There is enough documentation for the return of many key Colt parts from London, in addition to the pocket London barrel cited, to lay low once and for all the notion any firm other than Colt’s in London assembled Colts parts there.) Possibly the pocket barrels could be bought from Colt’s? Arnold seems not afraid to ask for a critical gun manufacturing tool of great value, e. g. Root’s drop hammer, from his former associates. Purchase of the odd scrap from London, if otherwise valuable, might have been negotiated. No mass buying was done, only the obviously London parts. Those parts not bearing a London stamp, such as cylinders or frames, could easily be used in the Hartford production. But perhaps the London barrels existed in a quantity surplus to estimated use. Purchase by Manhattan of London barrels from the Hartford pistolmakers would account for the ephemeral but sometimes reported barrel stamping of London Pistol Company over an almost obliterated London Colt stamp.
Why this name was used is puzzled over by Nutter. He has examined many of these guns (though probably not over 1,000 were made with the London Pistol Company mark) and concluded these were assembled from seconds or rejected parts not incorporated in Manhattan’s first line pistols. While certainly minor defects seem to exist in the London Pistol Company guns that Nutter examined, it would be very difficult for this to be the case, that the guns represent a conscious culling out of these defective parts. Rather, since we are open to speculation in this deal, it is equally possible that the marking was Manhattan’s tentative bid for British trade. By identifying the Colt-made barrels as London make through linking them always with the London Pistol Company stamp, Manhattan, through Boker or anybody else, would gain a commercial advantage by shipping them into the United Kingdom. Their value at which duty would be paid would not include the value of the barrel, since the barrel was already of British make and could be shown as such, supported by affidavits. Perhaps a few London Colt barrels were purposely not fully polished, so as to prove beyond all doubt this fact. Today, the only way to prove it would be by polishing and etching the top barrel flats of a series of these guns to try and raise any latent Colt-London stampings which may have been erased. Collectors will wait long and in vain for a group of public spirited Manhattan enthusiasts to douse their pistols with acid, disproving or proving this conjecture. Equally plausible is that these guns may have been marked for Manhattan’s bid for Southern trade, fabricated as they were in 1859-60 period of the cold war, and that they were dumped on the Northern market when it appeared that the Southern states were not to be allowed to depart peacefully from the Union. Nutter concludes that Smith’s estimate of quantity produced is less than 1,000: estimate that only a very few hundred were so marked. This would seem to lend credibility to the idea that it represented a tentative effort of the Manhattan marketing endeavor suddenly disrupted, as if by the beginning of war.
War did not bring to Manhattan the unmitigated flow of profits that some fabricants enjoyed. During the spring of 1862, after the hard knocks from Rollin White’s team, they were in a sense looking for work. Rifle musket contractor R. H. Gallaher came to them with a proposition that they cooperate with him in the fabrication of the Springfield rifle. Gallaher, president of the newly-formed Union Firearms Company, was offered a large quantity of machinery and space in the Newark plant. It is tabulated here to show the nature of equipment in a typical middle-sized gun factory of the time:
List of machinery ready to be turned over by the Manhattan Arms Company to the Union Fire-arms Company
6 milling machines
3    four-spindle drill presses, finished
1    rifling machine
2    edging machines, finished
4    screw and cone machines, ready April 1, 1862
6 plain engine lathes, ready April 20, 1862
4 drilling lathes, ready April 20, 1862 4 small drill presses, ready April 15, 1862
3    edging machines, ready April 20, 1862
3    screw and cone machines, ready May 1, 1862
1 quadruple drop (four drops) ready May 1, 1862 1 polishing machine (6 spindles) finished 1 machine for tapping lock-plate, finished 1 tumbler milling machine, finished
4    cone lathes for drilling cones, ready April 20, 1862 30 milling machines, ready May 1, 1862
New York, March 24, 1862
The above tabulation clearly indicates Manhattan included among its mechanical business affairs the fabrication of gunmaking machinery on a large scale. Thirty milling machines are promised within two months; many other tools were finished or nearly so. Specialized equipment good only for the U.S. rifle musket, such as lockplate drilling machine and tumbler milling machine are finished, ready for Gallaher’s call. The things which set these machines apart from ordinary machine tools of lathe and drill nature are the specialized fixtures attached or in-built adapting them to work on the U.S. rifle musket. The edging machine is believed to be a profile miller, perhaps a vertical double spindle type. Gallaher was hardly the first or only customer of Manhattan in this field.
A second list of machinery in the pistol factory of the Manhattan Arms Company ready for use by the Union Firearms Company included non-specialized machinery otherwise similar to that noted above, and also All small tools and a large amount of vacant room. It would seem that Judge Taney’s order severely curbed their pistol manufacturing for the time being, though causing them to emphasize machine tool manufacturing.

Late Manhattan Pistols

  Throughout the remainder of the War years, in the absence of any more detailed records, it seems safe to assume that Beach, Rebetey, Gruler, Arnold, and Smith concentrated on the design and construction of machine tools. Ultimate change of Manhattan into a
company known as The American Standard Tool Company in Newark at the close of the War reveals this to be a reasonable assumption. But percussion revolvers were safer than cartridge arms, and Manhattan stressed also manufacture of fine .36 caliber pistols, lighter and more elegant in frame than the Colt but of similar form.
Western agent Ben Kittredge of Cincinnati, Ohio, took out a patent on a novel attachment for these midwar period .36 revolvers of Manhattan’s. He conceived of the application of a steel plate behind the percussion cylinder, so arranged (as the patent specification #41,848, March 8, 1864) between the cock and the nipple to throw the fire laterally from the nipple. The patent claim was an odd one, since discharge of more than one shot from a percussion gun in good condition had generally gone the way of the dodo and the aurochs when the compound loading lever had been applied by Colt in 1839-40. The great merit of Kittredge’s plate is overlooked in the patent, but may have been appreciated by users in combat. By fitting a plate between hammer face and nipple, the inventor prevented broken cap fragments from working back into the hammer cut. A flattened bit of cap on the frame where the hammer curve comes to rest would halt the hammer short of detonating the next cap, causing a misfire. Or a fragment of brass wedged inside the lock frame could snap the thin limbs of the stop bolt or cause a real jam. The Kittredge plate prevented this accident, otherwise common with percussion revolvers.
Some of these later .36 caliber Manhattans were sold in England. The arms are London proved. Apparently Boker found a market. One of these larger .36 revolvers, a handsomely engraved specimen encased with an unusual eagle-pattern flask, was presented to General Grant in 1863. In August, Grant went to New Orleans to confer with General Banks about changes in Army organization and regimental assignments.
During this visit, Grant wrote in his Memoirs, I reviewed Banks’ army a short distance above Carrolton. The horse I rode was vicious and but little used, and on my return to New Orleans ran away and, shying at a locomotive in the street, fell, probably on me. I was rendered insensible, and when I regained consciousness
I found myself in a hotel nearby with several doctors attending me.
It was when the great commander was laid up in sick bay that the Manhattan revolver, ordered by the officers and men of Company B, 21st Regiment Illinois Volunteer Infantry, caught up to him and was presented. This regiment was Grant’s first command of the war, and was known as Grant’s Own.
A pistol possibly having a little more active career than the Grant Manhattan, which is now preserved in the collection of William Locke, is one of the tiny ,22’s the backstrap of which is engraved O. Moulton from his Friend C. B. Whiting/Apr. 13, 1861. Though there is no guarantee of the men being one and the same, there was an Orson Moulton, a captain of Massachusetts cavalry, mentioned a number of times in dispatches and reports. From New Berne, North Carolina, on 24 July, 1862, he, together with two companies of the 25th Massachusetts, two of the 27th, one section of artillery and 20 cavalrymen under his command, moved out on the road to Trenton. Perhaps it was en route to this place bearing the name of another New Jersey town that Captain Moulton carried his Newark-made Manhattan revolver.