The First Government Contracts

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.

On July 5, 1861, Samuel Colt contracted with Brigadier General James W. Ripley, Chief of Ordnance, to supply 25,000 rifle muskets, Model 1855, with the first delivery to be 1,000 muskets in six months. It must have given General Ripley a certain sense of satisfaction to have the upstart revolver maker producing Ripley’s pet, the “Springfield.” Certainly the price which Colt was to get, $20 for each musket with “appendages,” gave the worthy Hartford gunmaker considerable satisfaction, too.
Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers for three months. Colt, amateur student of war, and professional supplier of weapons of War, foresaw a million men under arms for five years. When he received the rifle musket contract, he laid his plans accordingly. But he was a manufacturer competing in a market for workmen and equipment that was rapidly becoming flooded with other manufacturers, each possessing an arms contract from Ripley. While worry gnawed at him, more so did “inflammatory rheumatism,” a syphilitic condition of the leg and arm joints.
In February of 1861 he had taken a leisurely trip to Cuba on a steamer chartered for a pleasure cruise. The voyage was not entirely profitless leisure. In addition to relishing the warm weather instead of the bitter chill of Hartford, he had a chance to take the temperature of the nation on his way South. “Run the Armory night and day with double sets of hands” he instructed Elisha Root and Horace Lord, his works superintendents, February 18, 1861, “until we get 5,000 or 10,000 ahead of each kind. I had rather have an accumulation of our arms, than to have money lying idle, and we cannot have too many on hand to meet the exigencies of the times.” The warmth invigorated the Colonel and he returned ready to push ahead.
But April 20, 1861, with the shots over Sumter shattering the nation, found him putting up at the St. Nicholas Hotel, his favorite hostelry in New York, writing to Navy Secretary Gideon Welles, an old Hartford man; “I started for Washington with the purpose of ascertaining to what extent the Federal Government might desire to employ the forces of our manufactory in Hartford and am stopped here by sickness. We can produce if required 100,000 military arms this year, which amount may be afterwards increased to an indefinite number.” Though the War Department replied to this query seeking to learn exactly what kind of arm Colt designated by the expression “military arms,” single shot rifles appear to have been the theme.
A single shot “Colt” was first proposed by Major Wm. B. Hartley during a February 7, 1860 visit to Richmond. Virginia proposed resurrecting the defunct State Arsenal and equipping it to make guns—what kind, they were not sure, though proposals were many. Hartley urged Colt to consider leasing the Richmond Arsenal to assemble Hartford-made arms that could be finished and marked in Virginia. “A cheap rifle should be made for the militia at from $10 to $15 each, say .52 or .50 caliber, and I believe many thousands would be ordered.”
There is a strong indication in later correspondence that Colt took the major’s suggestion and a model arm and tools were prepared. For one year later, writing from Havana, on February 18, 1861, Colt instructed the factory that “it is not unlikely we will soon be changing to the machinery of the plain rifles of the sword bayonets . . . make hay while the sun shines.” Colt’s choice of the word “plain” is a strong hint he meant exactiy that, a plain rifle, not a Colt’s Patent Repeating Rifle with Rotating Chambered Breech, but a plain militia rifle, adapted to sword bayonet. Though no general issue of such a rifle is known, the absence of what might be no more than a half dozen prototypes from the ken of collectors is not strange. For, if such a rifle existed, it was modified considerably before Colt’s first produced a single shot arm.