Seven cartridges against a ramrod
In the summer of 1863, the President of the United States walked out onto the lawn behind the War Department building and picked up a rifle. Lincoln fired a brand new Spencer, a lever-action seven-shot rifle capable of firing twenty rounds per minute instead of the usual three. By the end of the war, such a rifle would remain in the hands of only a portion of the cavalry. The bulk of soldiers would continue to use a cleaning rod, as they had a hundred years ago. This gap between the demonstrated capability and accepted practice is the root of the problem. story small weapons Civil war
Musket, ramrod and three shots per minute
In 1861, a Union infantryman received Springfield Model 1861, a muzzle-loading rifled musket of .58 caliber (about 14,7 mm), weighing 4,1 kg. Confederate - the same, only captured or imported: British Pattern 1853 Enfield under almost the same caliber or Austrian Lorenz M1854 .54 caliber (13,9 mm). During the war, between 600 and 900 Enfields were imported to America, and, according to literary estimates, over 300 Lorenzes were shipped to both sides. The difference in calibers seemed trivial, but it turned supply chains into a nightmare: a Springfield bullet wouldn't fit in a Lorenz, and vice versa.
By 1861, this system was known by heart and it was known that it fired slowly.
To fire a gun, a soldier measured out gunpowder from a paper cartridge and poured it into the barrel. A bullet, usually the same conical one, went in there too. Minié ball, which is discussed below. The ramrod rammed the charge into the breech. Next, the hammer was cocked, the primer was placed on the priming rod (the fire tube with the ignition channel), aiming, and firing. At the training range, this took 20-30 seconds: two to three shots per minute. In real combat, with shaking hands and a barrel clogged with smoke, the rate of fire dropped below two.
By 1861, this design had remained unchanged for almost a hundred years. It was in 1861 that they began to break it from both ends: the bullet side and the bolt side.
The Minié bullet and the silent revolution in the barrel
The first strike under the old scheme occurred ten years before the war and concerned not the rate of fire, but accuracy.
In 1849, French Captain Claude-Étienne Minié proposed a bullet that resembled a small lead acorn with a deep cavity at its base. When loaded, it passed freely into a rifled barrel with a clearance; a cleaning rod pushed it in without effort. When fired, the powder gases expanded the soft lead skirt, and the bullet "seated" in the rifling, creating a spin. This effect is called obturation—sealing the barrel by deforming the projectile itself. French documents from 1849–1850 about Minié are in places contradictory: which army commission approved what remains a source of confusion in the literature. But by the time the design reached America, these disputes were no longer relevant.
Before Minié, rifled weapons had existed for a long time, but they were the weapons of lone gunners: the bullet had to be driven into the rifling with a hammer and ramrod, taking a minute and a half. In 1855, Captain James Burton at Harpers Ferry refined the French design to industrial standards: he simplified the chamber and made the bullet suitable for mass production from pure lead.
The result: the effective range of a rifled muzzleloader increased to 300–400 meters, compared to eighty for a smoothbore musket in line combat. In practice (as we'll discuss later), the actual combat range remained around ninety meters, and the reason wasn't the weapon itself, but the smoke from black powder and regulations written for a different era.
The Minié provided range and accuracy, but the rate of fire had to be dealt with by other means and other people.
Henry, Spencer and their single-shot predecessors
Between the cleaning rod and the magazine, there was an intermediate link: single-shot breech-loading carbines. The Sharps was breech-loaded by moving a lever, firing five to eight rounds per minute without a cleaning rod. The Burnside used a conical brass case of its own design—without a cap in the case itself; ignition occurred through a hole in the base—from a standard cap fitted to the carbine's fire tube. These rifles armed the Union cavalry en masse: over one hundred thousand Sharps rifles and carbines alone were produced. The magazine rifle did not emerge from nowhere, but rather filled a niche already occupied by the single-shot breech-loader.
By 1860, two working designs of magazine-fed rifles using a single-barrel metal cartridge existed in America. Both appeared almost simultaneously, both used a lever action, and both took different paths to the war.
Henry rifle designed by Benjamin Tyler Henry, chief designer New Haven Arms Company, a company that will grow into a company in a few years Winchester.44 rimfire caliber (rimfire cartridge, no separate primer), 216-grain bullet (grain is a traditional unit of powder and bullet weight, approximately 0,065 g), 25-grain black powder charge. Tubular magazine under the barrel – 15 rounds plus one in the chamber. Sixteen shots almost in a row versus two or three per minute for the neighbor with the Springfield.
Union Army soldiers during the American Civil War armed with Henry rifles.
The army almost never bought this rifle. Soldiers bought them at their own expense, through private dealers. There were two reasons. The first was the weak cartridge: 25 grains of powder produced a range of no more than 150 meters. The second was the thin rim of the rimfire case: when jostled in a saddlebag, it could dent, causing the cartridge to fail. While tolerable for a foot soldier, risky for cavalry.
Spencer rifle Christopher Spencer designed the Henry rifle, which was designed differently. It was chambered for the .56-56 cartridge (later rifles used the .56-52 and .56-50), also a rimfire, but with a propellant charge of 26–28 grains of powder and a 350-grain bullet. The shot's energy was almost three times greater than that of the Henry. The magazine was located not under the barrel, but in the buttstock: a seven-round tube loaded through a hole in the buttstock. This design centered the weapon closer to the shooter and simplified reloading from the saddle: the carbine was compact and suitable for cavalry.
The Spencer Cavalry Carbine from Chiappa Firearms, based on the Model 1865
The rate of fire is consistently over twenty rounds per minute, up to thirty in short bursts. The federal government ultimately ordered 12 rifles and 94 carbines, plus 58 million rounds of ammunition, for a total cost estimated at approximately $4,2 million. In total, Spencer Repeating Rifle Co. и Burnside Rifle Co. More than 200 thousand units of both types were produced.
The Henry held more rounds in its magazine, while the Spencer held almost three times the power and was made of simpler metal. The Army ultimately chose the Spencer. It was cruder, but more reliable, and for military contracts, that was the deciding factor.
Hoover Gap and the White House: How the Repeating Rifle Went to War
The story of Spencer's entry into the army is almost textbook: first at his own expense, then a random high-profile battle, and only then the attention of the ministry.
In May 1863, Colonel John Wilder, commander of a mounted infantry brigade in the Army of the Cumberland, pushed through the rearmament of his four mounted infantry regiments with Spencer rifles. The War Department refused to provide the funds. Wilder mortgaged his own property to an Indiana bank as collateral for the loan; the soldiers agreed to pay the cost of the rifles from their pay. The details of the mortgage vary widely among sources: the loan amount is sometimes stated as $50, sometimes more, sometimes less. But the fact that the colonel personally signed off on the rearmament of his brigade is not disputed. Thus came into being the brigade that would later be called Lightning Brigade - "Lightning fast."
Loading sequence of the Spencer carbine. Illustration from "Cavalryman 1776–1943: The U.S. Army Cavalryman—Volume 2, 1851–1880" (Randy Steffen, 1977)
The first serious action occurred on June 24, 1863, at Hoover Gap in Tennessee. Bushrod Johnson's Confederate brigade, accustomed to the rhythm of muzzleloaders, encountered a wall of gunfire from a distance where, according to the rules, no one should have fired at them. Wilder's brigade held the gap until the main force arrived. Three months later, the same brigade, armed with the same weapons, covered the retreat of Rosecrans's shattered right wing on the first day of Chickamauga. According to regimental reports, the brigade's ammunition expenditure was about one hundred rounds per rifleman per day, compared to the usual forty for a soldier with a Springfield. This expenditure was three times higher than usual, but the brigade remained in a position where the infantry with Springfields would likely have retreated.
Through which channels exactly? news It's unclear exactly when the rifle reached Washington. By August 1863, Rosecrans' reports and publications in the Northern press made Spencer's successes a major topic. In the second half of August, Abraham Lincoln stepped out onto the lawn behind the War Department building and personally tested the rifle. The president, according to memoirs, was a keen firearms enthusiast and wasn't the first high-ranking official to try one, but it was his shots that became a political argument in a dispute with the Ordnance Department.
The dispute was with James Ripley, Chief of Ordnance from 1861 to September 1863. He entered military history journalism as a retrograde, holding back progress. In reality, things were more complex. His arguments were as follows: the new weapon would consume too many rounds; these brass rounds required a machine tool fleet and a centralized supply; in the field, a metal case was unreliable; standardizing the army's supplies with a variety of imported calibers was already nearly impossible, and then—almost a miracle: the South established a stable production of muzzle-loading copies of the Springfield through the Richmond, Fayetteville, and Atlanta arsenals, using equipment taken from captured Harpers Ferry. Richmond made rifled muskets by the thousands, Fayetteville—carbineer versions, and Atlanta Cook & Brother They tried to establish a full production cycle. But it all came down to the same thing: brass, precision stamping, mercury fulminate—three items the South didn't have in sufficient quantities. Enfield rifles were being shipped from Britain through the blockade, and the South had neither the money nor the capacity to service repeating rifles.
Union cavalry soldiers armed with Spencer carbines. Illustration from "Cavalryman 1776–1943: The United States Cavalryman—Volume 2, 1851–1880" (Randy Steffen, 1977)
Third, tactics. Black powder blanketed the battlefield with thick white smoke after just a few volleys: visibility dropped to tens of meters. The actual range of firefights, according to the works of Earl Hess and other historians, remained around ninety meters, despite the theoretical range of a rifled musket of three to four hundred meters. The "volley!" command remained the basic unit of fire control; the regulations did not provide for high-density individual fire because they were written for a different weapon.
The trenches near Petersburg in the winter of 1864–1865 were the first clear sign that the density of fire had broken the old linear tactics. But military thinkers would only realize this half a century later.
What came out of this?
Of the two repeating rifles from the Civil War, only one survived directly. The Spencer system proved to be a dead end: by the late 1860s, its cartridges were obsolete, and the company folded. The Henry, on the other hand, New Haven Arms was Winchester Model 1866 rifles, later Model 1873 and went his own way into the history of the American frontier.
Soldiers of the 4th United States Colored Infantry. Armed with the Springfield Model 1861 Rifle-Musket.
But the idea that both rifles proved on the field (magazines, lever or slide-action reloading, a single-piece metallic cartridge, a rate of fire an order of magnitude higher than before) became the direction infantry weapons would take for the next half-century. Twenty years later, smokeless powder (Lebel, 1886) would be added, eliminating the problem of smoke and sooty barrels. Ten years later, European armies would switch to magazine-fed rifles chambered for small-caliber cartridges: the Mauser, Mosin, and Lee-Metford. By the time the first echelons reached the Marne in August 1914, everything that defined infantry firefights would be what Wilder's brigade demonstrated at Hoover Gap in the summer of 1863: a magazine, a metallic cartridge, and rapid fire. Over the course of four years of World War I, this rapid fire would transform the skirmish line into something for which the regulations of 1861 would have found no name.
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