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  Smith & Wesson Model 1

  Smith and Wesson would give it another shot, founding the Smith & Wesson Revolver Company in Springfield less than a year later. It was here that they brought together many of the ideas they had worked on in the past decade to create the Model 1, the first revolver to use rimfire cartridges instead of powder, ball, and percussion cap. The cartridges would make the gun easier to reload than any ever made. The Model 1 held seven .22-caliber bullets that were mounted in copper casings that held the black powder. At the bottom was a hollow rim with priming compound. When the firing pin on the hammer hit the rim of the cartridge, the priming powder was ignited, leaving a spent copper casing in the chamber but propelling a cylindrical bullet. The gun fired a small .22-caliber, so it did not interest the Army. But the revolver soon became a favorite of many gun slingers and went through various iterations: the Model 2 featured a .32-caliber, and then the Model 3, a .44-caliber.

  The duo also began experimenting with innovations like an unsnapping latch that allowed both barrel and cylinder to drop down and forward, or a spring-loaded ejection that would clear the used casings from the cylinder. All of which made reloading faster. While the Colt company outdid them with a gate-opening mechanism that pushed out all the spent casing when opened, soon every new revolver was utilizing the cartridge technology, and guns would never be the same.

  In 1862, Winchester wrote stockholders to say that, since “the commencement of our organization, till the past three months, five years and a half, there has not been a month in which our expenditures have not exceeded our receipts.”10 Winchester’s company teetered on the edge of insolvency for years. That is, until a Winchester employee named Benjamin Tyler Henry, an engineer who had worked with Smith and Wesson, cobbled together a number of existing patents and invented his namesake, the Henry repeating rifle. The obsessive Henry would have a complicated relationship with Winchester, who was impatient with the slow development of his firearm. Henry was, in modern parlance, a workaholic. Perhaps even this is an understatement. Henry lived virtually full-time in the factory and worked inhumane hours for years trying to perfect his ideas.

  In 1860, Henry finally fixed all the problems with his gun and gave Winchester what he wanted: a lever-action (behind the trigger) breech-loading rifle with a sixteen-shot tubular magazine that could repeatedly fire. During one Navy test, the Henry fired 187 shots in 340 seconds. In time, the Ordnance Board placed an order of nearly 1,700 of his rifles for use, mostly by the cavalry.

  Although it proved less sturdy in wartime conditions than some of the repeaters that would come, many soldiers purchased the gun on their own dime. Rather than rely solely on federal purchases, Winchester took a page from Colt’s book and made inroads with local editors, politicians, and military men, showering them with praise and gifts—and always selling the new technology. Winchester’s company, the New Haven Arms Company, reorganized after the Civil War and was renamed the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, with Oliver taking the helm as president, treasurer, chairman of the board, and about everything other than janitor. Winchester became a tireless advocate for his weapon.

  The year after the Civil War ended, Winchester introduced the Model 1866, nicknamed the Yellow Boy due to the bronze-brass alloy receiver.11 (Western Indians often referred to it as “many shots” and “spirit gun.”) The rifle found a big market on the western frontier. Initially, the brass-framed rifles and carbines used .44 rimfire caliber. The “rimfire” cartridge is shot when the firing pin strikes the rim cartridge base, igniting the primer. Most of the future models featured “center-fire” ammunition, which is still today’s predominant style of cartridge, in which the pin strikes the center of the cartridge base.

  As the revolver made the flintlock pistol obsolete, the repeating rifle—and the cartridge that fueled it—would add a new, dangerous dimension to firearm technology.

  11

  THOSE NEWFANGLED GIMCRACKERS

  “That damn Yankee rifle you load on Sunday and shoot all week.”

  —Confederate soldier

  Frank Leslie’s scenes and portraits of the Civil War, 1894

  On August 17, 1863, the inventor Christopher Spencer arrived at the White House to meet President Abraham Lincoln. The president would later refer to the inventor as “a quiet little Yankee who sold himself in relentless slavery to his idea for six weary years before it was perfect.”1 Lincoln, who typically had great curiosity about the functioning of firearms, was, unsurprisingly, distracted that day. The Battle of Gettysburg, the bloodiest of the Civil War, may have thwarted Robert E. Lee’s hopes of invading the North only a month earlier, but the end of the war was nowhere in sight. Draft riots had recently broken out in New York City and elsewhere in protest of the newly passed conscription law. Busy, the president asked the inventor to return the next day so he could shoot the carbine himself.

  It was the next morning that the two men, surrounded by cabinet members and a smattering of other government officials, strolled to a spot not too far from where the Lincoln Monument now stands to have a shooting contest. “The target was a board about six inches wide and three feet high, with a black spot on each end, about forty yards away,” Spencer recalled. “The rifle contained seven cartridges. Mr. Lincoln’s first shot was about five inches low, but the next shot hit the bull’s-eye and the other five were close around it.”

  “ ‘Now,’ said Mr. Lincoln,” according to Spencer, “ ‘we will see the inventor try it.’ The board was reversed and I fired at the other bull’s-eye, beating the president a little. ‘Well,’ said he, ‘you are younger than I am and have a better eye and a steadier nerve.’ ”2

  The Spencer rifle that Lincoln shot that day would take less nerve to use than any of the muzzle-loaded rifles being fired by the soldiers battling in the Civil War. To comprehend its importance of functionality, consider that of the more than 27,000 rifles recovered from the field of Gettysburg, the Annual of Scientific Discovery reported that a staggering 24,000 were still loaded. Of the guns found loaded, 12,000 had been loaded more than once without firing, and half of them had been loaded between three and ten times without shooting—one of them twenty-three times.3 There are numerous theories to explain these statistics, but the most convincing is that men felt safer with loaded weapons. The Annual, for instance, points out that muskets “in the hands of cowardly or incompetent men are actually useless.” (One wonders if the author of that judgment had ever seen action himself.) It is almost certainly true that there were many soldiers who had tried to create the impression of fighting, while looking for avenues of retreat. Some, with fouled rifles, had been unable to shoot. Other men, no doubt, preferred holding on to a loaded gun to protect themselves to being caught by a bullet in the midst of reloading.

  Repeating rifles helped eliminate many of these fears. Even in the best of conditions, the bravest and most competent soldier could fire a single-shot, muzzle-loaded gun—the dominant gun of the Civil War—perhaps three times in a minute. The Spencer rifle offered the soldier a spring-loaded, seven-shot tubular magazine in the butt of the gun. Its lever action ejected a spent cartridge and chambered a fresh one. A man could empty his entire magazine well within a minute and already be reloaded. The “Blakeslee cartridge box,” invented by Union infantryman Erastus Blakeslee, was a leather-covered box that could fit up to ten tubular Spencer magazines with seven cartridges each. It made reloading even faster.4

  When a captain named Alexander Dyer tested the Spencer rifle for the Union Army, he fired it more than eighty times without a single misfire. He then let the gun sit outside in the rain and sun. No problem. It still fired perfectly. Dyer buried the weapon in the sand, yet there was still no clogging of the mechanisms—even without cleaning. When he put the breech mechanism in salt water for twenty-four hours, it still worked. “I regard it,” he would write, “as one of the very best breech-loading arms I have seen.”5 Most people who used it agreed. General Ulysses S. Grant called Spencer’s rifl
es “the best breech-loading arms available.”6

  Like many of the other major gunmakers of the eighteenth century, the Connecticut-born Spencer was entirely self-taught. At eleven, Spencer moved in with his grandfather, Josiah Hollister, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, who taught him basic woodworking and blacksmithing skills. At thirteen, Spencer recalled, he picked up a hacksaw and cut his grandfather’s Revolutionary War musket to carbine size to see if he could make it fire faster for hunting purposes. By the time the boy was fifteen, he was said to have fabricated a homemade steam engine.7 With these skills Spencer found himself serving an apprenticeship as a mechanic. He was soon working for numerous plants in America’s first industrial age, including, for a short time, the revolver-fabricating machinery of the Colt factory in Hartford. By the time Spencer met with the president, he had created a horseless steam-powered buggy, allegedly driving it back and forth from his Manchester home to Hartford until local officials asked him to stop, since the noise was disconcerting to locals.

  It was Spencer’s association with one of New England’s wealthiest families, the Cheneys, that became one of the most beneficial relationships in his professional life. It was in their factory that he invented a revolutionary automatic silk-winding machine and there that he became obsessed with inventing a breech-loading gun.8 Although such a mechanism might seem obvious to us, making breech-loading work was one of the big innovations in gunmaking in this era. The idea had been fermenting for hundreds of years. For example, in London Tower sits a sixteenth-century breech-loading carbine that belonged to King Henry VIII. The gun used by the oft-married English monarch was probably for hunting and showing off. Others, in France and elsewhere, had experimented with guns with a chamber that could be exposed so as to load loose powder and a ball. Because gas leaked, and black powder created residue, intricate parts necessary for such a gun corroded easily. Only the advent of the cartridge made it possible.

  By 1859, Spencer had completed his design for a lever-action breech-loading rifle. The Cheneys helped back the production of prototypes of the weapon.9 When the Civil War broke out, they underwrote Spencer’s operations, securing meetings with Lincoln administration officials. According to lore, the president was so impressed by the functionality of the Spencer rifle the day they went shooting that he was moved to personally intervene and override the wishes of the close-minded ordnance general James Wolfe Ripley, ensuring that the gun would become a mainstay of the Union Army and change the complexion of the conflict. The truth is a bit more complicated.

  Before the Civil War, Ripley had been the commanding officer of the national armory at Springfield, Massachusetts, which had for the most part been governed by civilians powerless to make demands of the government employees. “Every day at eleven in the morning and four in the afternoon, the men would drop work, go down to the spring back of the shops and regale themselves with rum, cider brandy and impromptu wrestling matches,” Civil War historian Robert V. Bruce noted.10 Ripley would bring much-needed order to Springfield, and with it improved morale and production. In 1854, Ripley hosted a delegation of British engineers and military men curious to adopt production methods with interchangeable parts for the Royal Small Arms Factory in Enfield, north of London, as a means of improving production of the 1853 pattern Enfield rifle-musket for the Crimean War. Within ten years the British would be sending the Confederacy 400,000 Enfield rifles.

  As a brigadier general in the Union Army during the Civil War, the rigid Ripley instituted a number of successful upgrades, including modernizing supply chains and artillery ordnance. Yet it was Ripley’s dislike of breech-loading repeating rifles—he called one a “newfangled gimcracker”11—for which he is best remembered. Ripley had been witness to numerous allegedly game-changing inventions that failed during his time in Springfield, which made him skeptical of new loading techniques. Specifically, he believed breech-loading guns promoted waste and undermined discipline in battle. Anticipating a short war, Ripley was also concerned about funding and training troops to use brand-new weapons. He did not believe in complicating supply lines and was a proponent of reconfiguring guns already in the armories.

  None of these concerns were particularly outlandish. Yet many historians blame Ripley for prolonging the Civil War and costing lives with his archaic views on weaponry. Robert V. Bruce argued in his book Lincoln and the Tools of War that if the Union had adopted the repeating rifle earlier, “Gettysburg would certainly have ended the war. More likely, Chancellorsville or even Fredericksburg would have done it, and history would record no Gettysburg Address, no President Grant, perhaps no carpetbag reconstruction or Solid South.”12

  Counterhistories are interesting to debate but ultimately unsatisfying. For one thing, even if the North had been able to ramp up production to arm enough troops to make a difference, it is unlikely the military would have been able to instill the principles and training necessary to make it the dominant gun of the war. Moreover, Ripley was not very different from military leaders throughout history who have valued tradition, doctrine, and logistical concerns over new technology. The truth is that in this age of invention there were plenty of false starts and terrible creations that wasted the military’s time.

  So whether Ripley had stayed or not, the move to breech-loading and repeating rifles, though slow, had already begun. Lincoln, after all, had already directed Ripley to order Spencer repeating rifles: more than 10,000 of them would be delivered to the Army and Navy by 1862,13 and another 37,000 had already been ordered.14 The gun, in fact, had already seen action by the time the two men were shooting at their targets. Union troops commanded by Colonel John T. Wilder’s “Lightning Brigade” had defeated the notably larger Confederate forces at the Battle of Chickamauga using some of the new repeating guns.15 One dazed Southern prisoner asked a Union officer, “What kind of Hell-fire guns have your men got?”16 The gun fared well at the Battle of Hoover’s Gap as well: the Union drove the Confederates from central Tennessee, which was two months before Lincoln challenged Spencer to a contest of aim. Within a week, regiments of the Michigan Cavalry carried Spencer repeating rifles at the Battle of Gettysburg, as did General George Armstrong Custer’s brigade.

  In fact, President Lincoln had shot a repeating rifle more than two years before he met Spencer outside the White House. While reviewing Hiram Berdan’s green-coated marksmen of the 1st United States Sharpshooters, a company put together to harass Confederate lines. Lincoln asked to shoot one of the men’s rifles. Berdan, a nondescript mechanical engineer from the urban environs of New York City, happened to also be one of the best marksmen in America at the start of the Civil War. As soon as the conflict began, he hatched plans to pull together the North’s best shots to aid in the war effort. When the War Department finally took him up on his idea in 1861, Berdan circulated an announcement in papers across the North. “No man would be enlisted who could not put ten bullets in succession within five inches from the center at a distance of six hundred feet from a rest or three hundred feet off hand” read the call for marksmen published in local newspapers.17 When the would-be sharpshooters showed up in Weehawken and various other locations in the Northeast, they were asked to shoot ten times from 200 yards, as fast as possible, and hit a ten-inch bull’s-eye. If a participant missed the shot by more than five inches on average, he was disqualified. There were so many good shooters that the Union ended up creating two regiments, one commanded by Berdan (ten companies) and one by a colonel named Henry A. V. Post (eight companies).

  For a number of reasons, including the comfort they felt with their personal weapons, Berdan’s marksmen were initially allowed to bring their own rifles. The government promised to reimburse the men $60 for each of these usable weapons (and later reneged). However, the self-arming idea immediately became problematic. Without standardized weapons, the Army had difficultly providing the array of ammunition and parts necessary to keep the regiments stocked and ready to fight. So Berdan decided that what he needed was bree
chloaders with new hair triggers and sights. Instead the men were equipped with Springfield muzzleloaders.

  Berdan’s continued aggressive push to arm his men with repeating rifles made him detest the military and the armament office. One general referred to Berdan as “most unscrupulous” and “totally unfit for a command.” The head of the Springfield Armory at the time also thought him “unscrupulous,” adding that everything Berdan said should be taken with “a grain of salt.”18 Still, Berdan had Lincoln and popular opinion on his side. As with the Revolutionary War–era Kentuckians, civilians were soon coming out to see the marksmen do their thing. When the regiment toured Washington, crowds came to watch them. It was then, in September 1861, that Lincoln, accompanied by a contingent of cabinet members and family, took a look at the sharpshooters himself. Berdan walked with the president as he reviewed the troops and then invited the party to the rifle pits where men were training. Lincoln reportedly fired three shots “like a veteran marksman,” to the cheers of the big crowd.

  One of the onlookers, then–assistant secretary of war Thomas Scott, a skeptic of breechloaders, asked Berdan, who until recently had been a civilian, what he knew of war and shooting, challenging him in order to prove the worthiness of the repeating gun. Berdan, no doubt happy to show off his marksmanship, took up the challenge and a target labeled “Jeff Davis” was set up six hundred yards away.

  Berdan initially expressed some concern about targeting the head of the Confederacy, but Lincoln reportedly told him, “Oh, Colonel, if you make a good shot it will serve him right.”

  “Now,” Scott instructed him, “you must fire standing, for officers should not dirty their uniforms by getting into rifle pits.”