Civil War Guns

It is odd that “the man who invented the revolver” kept his factory going by making single shot muskets. But deliveries from the Hartford works reveal a cessation of revolver production for the Government with a last delivery of 955 Colt’s holster pistols, new model, at $14; 155 of them being without bullet moulds at only $13.73. These arms were received November 10, 1863 ; no more are shown as bought by the North from Military Navy Colt is US stamped on frame and bears inspection seal on grips. Backstrap of this pistol now owned  by Tom Parvin of Illinois is inscribed to Col. Pleasants who  was supervisor of the Crater mining in Union siege of Petersburg, Va. Pistol is said to have been presented to Pleasants  while he was Provost Marshal of Lexington, Ky., by the  “citizens.”

The 1860 Army was but one of a series of handguns in all calibers, characterized by the creeping lever and usually by a round “streamlined” barrel. The creeping lever was designed by Elisha Root in 1849 , and he applied for a patent on December 3. The patent was withdrawn and Colt for some years after that dallied with inadvertent slips of publicizing the design of his employee, Root, by picturing or suggesting it in patents but never quite saying it. At last in 1855 he allowed Root to take out a patent on a solid frame spur trigger revolver which embodied as its patentable features a system of rotating the cylinder that was not very practical, and on reissue, the creeping loading lever. The lever as fitted to the Army had six studs which bore in sequence in cavities drilled along the underside of the barrel, a rack and pinion device. At any given moment in the working of the lever maximum thrust was concentrated on one stud. Hardened, these studs Some Colt’s stayed South. This ...

Colt’s greatest contribution to the Union was the production of the New Model Army 1860 revolver, .44 caliber. This big-handled 8-inch round barrel six-pistol was carried in the fight at Brandy Station, saw service in the hands of Major General Custer; was a gift of supreme elegance to General Andrew Porter, General McClellan, and others “from the Inventor,” and has been a favorite of cap-and-ball shooters in this century, as it was a weapon of necessity in the last. Early in September, 1861 General Ripley realized there was going to be one hell of a scrap to “save the Union.” He began issuing purchase orders and telegrams which had the force of contracts. Ordnance Office, Washington, September 17, 1861 Samuel Colt, Hartford, Connecticut: Deliver weekly, until further orders, as many of your pistols, holsters, new pattern, as you can make. James W. Ripley

Of Special Models, Colt’s fabricated 75,000 which they delivered under their own contracts: 5 July, 1861    25,000 contracted    25,000 delivered 5 June, 1863    50,000 contracted    12,500 delivered 19 March, 1864    37,500 contracted    37,500 delivered In Haven & Belden’s A History of    the Colt Revolver it is stated that they delivered 75,000 on contract, and “nearly forty thousand more on sub-contracts for others who could not fill their orders.”

The demand for arms was great that spring of ’61, and Colt obtained a sample “old Harpers Ferry rifle” as he wired Ripley on June 22, “and on hasty examination believe they can be bored up with sword bayonets so as to be useful to Mi(li)tia.” Asking the price, he was told by Ripley he could have those on hand in the various arsenals at $10 each. Colt’s letter of the next day, June 23, asked for a box of rifles to be sent from each place where stored. Coloney Ripley so ordered, telling Colonel Colt there were 11,500 of the rifles on hand at Watertown, Watervleit, Governors Island, and Washington arsenals.

Why Colt had so much trouble in turning in the first muskets cannot now be surmised. In the development stages, everything went smoothly. On April 19, the day after Fort Sumter was bombarded, Colt took the cars to Washington, but was stopped in New York by a flare-up of his sickness. He wrote to his friend Gideon Welles, offering the services of his factory, saying he would send Root to see him, and “shall suspend individual orders for military arms.” The mails were interrupted but Welles queried his peer, Cameron, on the matter and Cameron responded that he could not say until he knew what kinds of arms Colt proposed to make, but that of his revolving pistols, “it is the opinion of the department that a sufficient supply should be kept constantly on hand, and we have none now.”

Chief engineer Elisha King Root had been with Colt since 1849 . He became president of the company after Colt’s death, January, 1862 . Root was a quiet and methodical person, but a go-getter in his way. He had plenty of work cut out for him; Sam Colt on December 26, 1861 , had signed an additional contract for 25,000 muskets, although not one had been delivered on the first contract by that time. No arms had been produced, but the Colt factory had not been idle. Three large buildings totalling 160,000 square feet had been erected to the rear of the original pistol making buildings which dated from 1854 . But Colt’s machinery suppliers were not always prompt and the entire rifle musket program was far behind schedule, complicated by the second contract for 25,000 guns, which Root agreed to accept as soon as Colt’s death put the decision in his hands. By February of 1862 , 1,500 men were at work day and night on two 10-hour shifts. The massive flywheel Sidehammer rifle design is attr...

The lock differences are most pronounced. Colt’s design is 100 per cent Enfield in the interior, and the hammer form is influenced by the Enfield shape, but is stronger, less liable to damage if dropped on the spur. Enfield and Colt musket springs will interchange, giving to Colt at once, without additional capital invested, all the spring resources of the English spring specialists in London and Birmingham. The “bridle,” that part which supports the pivot of the hammer tumbler, and the sear screw, is heavier on the Colt model at the upper lockplate screw, than in the Enfield. Sears are about identical. The round stud of the Enfield plate, inside, which is cut across its diameter and against which the fixed limb of the mainspring bears, is much altered in the Colt plate. The Enfield piece is actually pressed into the plate as a separate piece; is liable to loosening or shearing straight across. In Colt’s plate, the base stud for the spring is a solid rectangular lump made integral with...

To the field of musket-making, Sam Colt brought novel engineering and quick, and large, profits. Collectors have lately been surprised that the Colt Special Model rifle musket resembles the British Enfield. Harking back to the ill-fated Robbins & Lawrence project on Enfields for the British Government, they seek to explain this resemblance by suggesting that Colt used spare parts which he could buy cheaply from the junk dealers. They also suggest that Lamson, Goodnow & Yale, successors to Robbins & Lawrence, and Amoskeag, who worked in the same technical “atmosphere” as the famed and defunct Windsor makers, could somehow use the R & L Enfield tools in the production of the Special Model which they undertook. All this is unreasonable to the reasonably informed mechanical person.

To accomplish this, Colonel Colt delegated authority to his brother-in-law, John S. Jarvis, to go to England and arrange many matters. Mitchell (James H. Mitchell, Colt, the Man, the Arms, the Armory, 1959 ) reproduces a great many interesting letters in full from this period. They reveal a picture of a man, Jarvis, not fully briefed by Colt, and of Colt fatigued and harassed by so many different demands upon his attention, and pulled out of his activities for a month or two by illness, that Jarvis wound up quite confused. In the letters there is more than hint of displeasure of the Colonel at some of Jarvis’ actions; yet between one condemning letter the pace of events moved so rapidly and the boom in arms buying increased so much that the next letter rescinds the first. The Mitchell letters must be integrated with the correspondence, offers, and contracts, of Colt to the Ordnance Department, to determine what he really had on his mind.

Apparently, he planned on going ahead in his new musket armory to build not only the U. S. musket, but militia rifles of an Enfield pattern. Yet the record is confusing, with the increasing severity of his illness incapacitating him from work. From the master bedroom at Armsmear overlooking the great expanse of nearly 300 acres of green valley he had reclaimed from the spring ravages of the Connecticut River, to his new buildings being added to the factory by the dyke, Colt falteringly ruled his armsmaking empire. Daily conferences with Major Hartley; with James Dean Alden, captain in the Light Guard and Colt’s personal secretary; with Hugh Harbison, secretary of the firm, kept affairs moving. While the fires of Mars glowed bright on the hearths of New England industry, work at the Colt factory was seriously hampered by Colt’s indecision.

The records reveal the instant response of “Colonel” Sam Colt to the President’s call for volunteers. But on the production front he was equally responsive. Without a single tool in his armory adapted to the production of United States Rifle Muskets, Colt nevertheless was the first private arms manufacturer to receive a rifle order from the Government.

Back in 1837 , the legislature of New Jersey, when young Sam Colt then managed a primitive factory for making his guns, passed an act authorizing the raising and equipping of a regiment of volunteers, to be armed with Colt’s Paterson revolving rifles or carbines. The legislature neglected to appropriate the funds to buy these rifles, and no regiment was raised; but Sam made known his wish to be the officer commanding, for he felt convinced the firepower of his rifles would prove devastating against troops with conventional arms. In the dark and slim-pursed years of the early 1840 ’s, his younger brother, James B. Colt, later a judge in St. Louis and at the time of the War in 1861 an employee of Colt’s in Hartford, chided him about his wish. Several letters (at a time when there was no War and Colt held no commission) from Jamie are addressed to him as “Col. Colt.” The title was facetious, based on Colt’s wish for a command in the field, a deep-seated desire. After Sumter he propose...

The role of Colt in the Civil War might be considered by some as an enviable one. The company had by the late 1850 ’s “attained the status of a National Work,” according to Secretary of War John B. Floyd; and it was to grow even larger. But the stress of War was a real thing to man and machines. Sam Colt, weakened by illness, was killed by the pace of War .