Civil War Guns

If General Ripley had set out to deliberately em barrass a fellow officer who had reached a zenith in his career, he could not have done it better than by selling the Hall carbines in New York for $3.50. Gen eral John Charles Fremont, commander of the De partment of the West at St. Louis, the romantically labeled Pathfinder, who had numerous times crossed the wastes of the Great American Desert in his travels, who had a guiding hand in the short-lived California Bear Republic of gold rush days, was stopped as short in his career that might have led (as Grant’s did) to the White House, as if he had run into a brick wall. What did it was Fremont’s purchase at $22 each of 5,000 Hall carbines obsoleted by order of General Ripley and sold out of Governor’s Island (in the midst of a frantic scramble for arms) for only $3.50 each. That the guns were new, that they were rifled at an additional charge of only a dollar, and then sold to Fremont, served merely to aggravate the situation. Ci...

Fertility of invention bloomed in fitting out the Northern cavalry. By war’s end, so many as 44 different breech-loading carbines could be presented to the Ordnance Department for test. Several—the Henry, the Spencer—were old favorites. Others were known by the names of the men who presented them, but reflected the workings of large contractors (Wolcott, of Starr Arms, and E. A. Straw, of Amoskeag) in a bid for postwar business. All proved unsuccessful in attracting the attention of the Federal Army for any re-equipping. No dangerous enemies were in sight. The greatest army the world had seen marched for three days in review in the Capital of a reunited nation. There were a million Springfields and Enfields on hand. Why bother to get more than the barest essential transformation? Accordingly, the Cavalry wielded the Spencers while the Infantry and Artillery right-shouldered their Allin transformed M 1865 , M 1866 , and later new-make Springfields, with the Civil War dates on the lockp...

Ultimately, this was a War between breechloaders. Though the transitions, the development of technology in manufacturing and gun design which permitted abandonment of the single shot muzzle-loader, were rapid in coming, most informed military men realized the replacement of the musket by the rapid fire breech loader was inevitable. In the line, the needs of War for cannon fodder caused resistance to novel forms of small arms being used. But in the elite corps, the cavalry, inheritor of the dandy troop reputation of the famous 1st and 2nd Dragoons, considerable variation in equipment was permitted. The enlisted men’s uniform for cavalry was similar to that of infantry and the other arms, officially. Instead of the infantry’s hip length blouse the cavalryman wore a waist-long jacket of dark blue laced with yellow; high standing collar and trousers of sky-blue ( 1857 regulation) or dark blue ( 1861 regulation) bearing a yellow stripe down each leg. About his waist was wound twice a r...

On the outbreak of war, Caleb Huse was asked to come to Montgomery to confer with General Gorgas on ordnance matters and, accepting a commis sion as captain, Huse proceeded to go to Europe early in April 1861 to buy arms and cannon for the South. He was equipped with a letter of credit for £10,000 on Fraser, Trenholm & Company of Liver pool, arranged through Confederate States Treasurer Memminger. According to General Gorgas later, The appointment (of Huse) proved a happy one for he succeeded, with very little money, in buying a good supply, and in running my department in debt for nearly half a million sterling, the very best proof of his fitness for his place, and of a financial ability which supplemented the meagerness of Mr. Mem minger’s purse. The young munitions buyer had some adventures and one or two narrow escapes during his travels, but he accomplished his mission to an astonishingly satis factory degree. He made the Enfield Rifle the standard Confederate arm, aided in ...

When Secretary Stanton called to the colors a partner of the gun-sales firm of Schuyler, Hartley and Graham of New York, he could have let himself in for a peck of trouble. He proposed to place in Marcel lus Hartley’s hands virtual control of the supply of arms from abroad. Yet a most searching scrutiny of the record reveals in the person of the youthful Hartley, furnished with the emoluments if not the dignity of a brigadier general, one of the most zealous and honest Union men to emerge from the history of the war. Pre ceding him as arms buyers were the reckless General Fremont and Colonel George L. Schuyler, whose name is the same as one of Hartley’s silent partners, but is not that man. It was to Colonel Schuyler that Cameron turned first, possibly through recommendation of the Ord nance officers stationed at Governors Island. On June 3, 1861 , General Ripley signed his famous letter to Cameron of estimates. Though he was kept in the dark about the other plans for the number of m...

In justice to Justice, it must be said that a recent examination of one of the muskets, for the supplying of which to the Union he was so villified, proves to be a reasonably well-assembled hodgepodge of surplus parts and at least as strong and reliable as the American parts from which it was built. But when Philip S. Justice, gunmaker-importer of Philadelphia, tried to get aboard the Federal musket contract gravy train, he both got more than he bar gained for—and Holt and Owen conversely gave him less.

You place me in a most embarrassing position, Mr. Secretary. How is that, Mr. Wilkeson? the gaunt-faced Penn sylvanian queried, the lines of his expression amplified by the fatigue and, somewhat, disappointment with which he laid down his role as Secretary of War for Mr. Lincoln. Because, Mr. Cameron, the newspaperman re sponded, your contract for rifle muskets with the Eagle Manufacturing Company of Mansfield, Connecticut is for only 25,000 arms, and my friends there, whom I induced to engage in this business in expectation of your issuing a further order, as your assistant Mr. Scott assured me you would, will be sorely embarrassed in their operations on this small amount. Indeed this is bad news to me, Mr. Wilkeson, War Secretary Simon Cameron sympathetically observed, as he stuffed papers from his desk drawer into a large portfolio, scanning them briefly, consigning some to the waste basket. But as you can see, I am leaving office today; I believe Mister Stanton, who repla...

The new arms which Jefferson Davis had authorized were not fully formed. Neither Burton nor Allin had quite finished with them in both detail and final speci fications. The pistol-carbine barrels as eventually issued were 12 inches long, not 10. And in addition to the con tinuation of the U.S. Rifle Ml841, significantly modi fied, as the Ml855 Maynard primed rifle, a new carbine was prepared and a few constructed. The new carbine exists in at least two minor sub-types; both are super ficially alike, and both resemble in their furniture and stock shape the discontinued Sappers and Artillery Musketoons, Models of 1847 . The lock is common military bar lock, front action, without the new tape primer, but the ramrod is fastened to the muzzle of the barrel by a double swivel somewhat like that which permanently affixed the ramrod to the pistol-carbine barrel. The stock extended only half way to the muzzle, and nose cap and band are like those of the new series, in brass. A ring for the sh...

The rifle was the major tactical weapon of the war. Rifles were issued to armies both North and South. These were mainly new weapons, of novel pattern. Basic to both fighting forces were Springfield rifles Models 1855 and 1861 , and the British 1853 -56 En fields bought by the hundred thousands from abroad. Despite the scarcity of many goods in the South as the conflict dragged on, rifles were usually in ample supply. But the significant thing was that the rifle, as a weapon of war, was brand new. A rifle could fire a bullet with man-killing accuracy over 800 yards, much farther than the effective range of the smoothbore muskets which had been supplanted by rifles in the infantry for only a half dozen years. And the battles of the War were fought with tactics adapted to musketry engagements. The slaughter created by this mixing of old and new patterns of fighting was terrible, and re sulted in making the American Civil War the bloodiest conflict of modern times.

The militia system was for many years the under pinning of the small-arms procurement system in the United States. Both national armories’ output was gen erally reserved for issue to Regular Army troops. For the militia, six private armories furnished arms under the Militia Act of 1808 . Under this sinecure there was appropriated annually $200,000 to be apportioned among the several states in proportion to the number of militia enrolled. For convenience of accounting, each state had a quota of arms established annually in terms of so many muskets. Thus, for example, South Carolina for 1850 might be allowed 200 muskets, but during the first part of the year had only drawn 100 actual muskets from among the private armories’ production in the depot at Gov ernor’s Island or Washington Arsenal. South Carolina’s militia authorities therefore would have a credit of 100 muskets still due, and could draw their value if desired in harness, cannon, field forges, or other military goods on an a...

Few men doubted that War would come. The decision of whether to serve the Union or one’s native state was a much more difficult choice to make in 1860 than it might be in 1960 . Taking “the steam cars,” the railroad, from one capital to another, was not a certain method of travel throughout the whole settled East. When Jackson’s VMI boys went from Lexington to Harpers Ferry and Charleston during the John Brown incident, they traveled by wagon and foot to Staunton, west of Rockfish Creek Gap, and then were able to entrain for the Harpers Ferry. Not even in so settled and prosperous a state as the Old Dominion was there anything like a complete network of railroads between market towns and cities. In the North the situation was somewhat better, but many changes of gauge from one company’s line of tracks to another reduced the pleasures of travel. Express men were constantly on the go, and barge men or other members of the water commerce of the nation —canal boatmen, sailors, post coac...

“John Brown, Aaron C. Stevens, Andrew Coppoc . . . evil minded and traitorous persons . . . not having the fear of God before their eyes, but being moved and seduced by the false and malignant counsel of other evil and traitorous persons and the instigation of the devil ... are hereby charged with: “One: Confederating to make rebellion and levy war against the State of Virginia . . . “Two: Conspiring to induce slaves to make rebellion and insurrection . . . “Three: With committing murder . .