Civil War Guns

The first gun made was not full sized, but a tiny working model about 10 inches broad in the wheel track. Five octagon pistol barrels some six inches long were mounted with a very slight dispersion onto the frame plate. Behind their open breeches was mounted a sliding breechblock or bar in which was mounted a single percussion nipple. The sliding bar was shoved foward by toggle joint handles, which blocked the chambers at the back after loading. This model stood in the window of Billinghurst’s store in Rochester, New York, for many years.

The origin of rapid fire weapons equal to the machine gun of the paper cartridge era is lost in antiquity. There are Biblical references to weapons shooting many arrows, and Leonardo da Vinci, millenia later, planned a device of that class of arm known as orgue des bombards, or organ of bombards (small guns). In the ordinary “organ” of the late medieval ages, a row of barrels was placed parallel, or with breeches converging, to be fired by a single touch of the match in a volley. Tactically, this primitive device and the “machine guns” used by the North in 1862 were virtually identical in purpose. The machine gun as employed by regular forces was looked upon as a “fortress or flank defense gun,” a sort of large buckshot cannon to be placed within the outer defences of a fortress, and turned loose in the event enemy soldiers breached the walls. The orgue des bombards of the Middle Ages was such an arm, intended for use inside the castle outer wall or at the head of steps, to sweep it...