The Pennsylvania rifle was usually custom-made. Held vertically, it needed to be no higher than its owner’s chin, so that he could effectively ram powder and ball down its long barrel.
The Pennsylvania rifle was usually custom-made. Held vertically, it needed to be no higher than its owner’s chin, so that he could effectively ram powder and ball down its long barrel.
Boys learned to hunt from a young age on the Pennsylvania frontier. Their fathers taught them to steady their guns on fallen logs or along tree branches, firing from a sitting or lying position as well as standing up. The gun they used, often as tall as they were, was the most deadly weapon in the world at a distance: the Pennsylvania rifle.
Also known as the Kentucky rifle, or the long rifle, it had a particularly American pedigree. Like so many of its users, the Pennsylvania rifle was a hybrid, a perfect combination of German engineering and English style. It would play a vital role in giving America its freedom.
German gunsmiths had been cutting spiraled grooves in their muskets since at least 1450 to prevent gunpowder residue from building up and fouling the pieces. They discovered an added benefit: the spirals propelled the gun’s lead ball with the range and the accuracy of an arrow, something no musket—with its smooth barrel—could do. Over the next two hundred years, they added an advanced flintlock firing system and a butt that enabled shooters to hold these “rifles” against their shoulders and aim them more accurately than ever.
By 1719, German gunsmiths were well established in Pennsylvania—thanks, ironically, to the religious tolerance practiced by the colony’s pacifist Quakers. Soon they could be found all along the Great Wagon Road, where wagon teams (see Rolling Across a Continent: The Prairie Schooner) of pioneers pushed west and south into Kentucky and the Blue Ridge mountains, and from there out across a continent. They usually made their rifles from scratch, a trade that required them to master a half dozen crafts, as blacksmiths, whitesmiths, brass and silver workers, carvers, engravers, and finishers of wood. Their guns would become works of art, and over the years they also developed a crucial innovation, adding the longer barrels of English smoothbore hunting rifles, called fusils.
Unlike the peasants dragooned into European armies who had never used a gun before in their lives, Americans on the frontier had been shooting from the time they were at least thirteen. Knowing how to fire a rifle could be a matter of survival, and everything had to be as light as possible to carry on their hunting and exploring forays into the wilderness. The barrels of Pennsylvania rifles, now routinely four feet long, burned black powder more efficiently, which allowed their shooters to fire lower-caliber ammunition that was still not only more accurate but more deadly than heavier musket balls, thanks to the added velocity.
Compared to modern rifles, Pennsylvania rifles were not very accurate. But in the eighteenth century they were much more deadly than the musket. In a 1920 experiment, a Pennsylvania rifle hit a target five times out of ten at a distance of three hundred yards—or three football fields—while a musket hit it only once. Where a musket fired by a European soldier of the line could kill at a hundred yards (and was not truly accurate at any distance), a trained marksman with a Pennsylvania rifle could kill easily at two hundred yards—maybe even twice that distance.
George Washington saw the advantage such marksmen could provide from the outset of the Revolution. By 1777, he had placed five hundred of the Continental Army’s best riflemen under the command of Colonel Daniel Morgan, a frontier character who liked to call Washington “Old Horse” and himself “the Old Wagoner.” The son of Welsh immigrants to New Jersey, Morgan had left home at sixteen after a fight with his father and settled in Winchester, Virginia. He loved to drink, gamble, and fight, could barely read, and possessed a volcanic temper. But he was an easy disciplinarian and a beloved father figure to his men. Like them, he refused to stand on military ceremony and preferred to dress in buckskin shirts and leggings, moccasins, and coonskin caps, or full Indian gear.
Despite his homespun ways, Morgan was a military prodigy—according to one historian, “the only general in the American Revolution, on either side, to produce a significant original tactical thought.” He also had a grudge to settle. Working for the British in the French and Indian War, the Old Wagoner was shot through the cheek and neck, leaving his face permanently scarred. Nonetheless, he had received five hundred lashes for striking a British soldier. He liked to joke that his flogger had miscounted and that “the king owes me a lash”—an account he would settle with interest.
During the Saratoga campaign, the turning point of the Revolution, Morgan’s riflemen systematically shot down as many of British general “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne’s Native American guides as possible, speeding their departure and leaving the British without useful reconnaissance. On September 19, 1777, as Burgoyne’s men started to cross a fifteen-acre clearing known as Freeman’s Farm, Morgan’s riflemen fired from the woods, instantly killing or wounding every British officer in the front line.
This sort of warfare, shooting officers and specialists from cover, was considered “assassination” by the British and little better than a war crime. But Morgan and his men were not about to give it up. When Burgoyne led 1,500 of his best men out into an uncut wheat field at the Battle of Bemis Heights on October 7, Morgan’s sharpshooters shot Gentleman Johnny’s horse from under him and sent balls whistling through his hat and waistcoat. When Burgoyne’s best officer, General Simon Fraser, rallied his troops, Morgan told his men, “That gallant officer is General Fraser. I admire him, but it is necessary that he should die. Do your duty.”
Tim Murphy, the twenty-six-year-old son of Irish immigrants to Pennsylvania, climbed into a tree and took aim. His first shot severed the crupper of Fraser’s saddle, the next grazed the mane of his horse. His third shot hit the gallant general in the chest, mortally wounding him and halting the British advance. Saratoga would be a crushing victory, one that brought France into the war and eventually assured the rebels their independence, thanks in no small part to a piece of uniquely American technology.
The firing mechanism on a Pennsylvania rifle demonstrates what highly prized tools these guns had become by the 1770s, often as ornately decorated as valuable pieces of furniture, with baroque and rococo inlays and leaf scrollwork.
The American Civil War would last four years, but its weapons and tactics would traverse a century and a quarter of warfare, from the field at Waterloo to the trench combat of World War I to Hitler’s blitzkrieg. At the start of the conflict, armies maneuvered very much as they had in the Napoleonic Wars, striving to bring massed infantry fire to bear at as close a range as possible. Troops still used muzzle-loading muskets or rifles, with which they might get off one or two shots a minute until the lead residue fouled the barrel.
Since at least 1808, European gunsmiths had been inventing breech-loading guns with “self-contained” cartridges—that is, guns loaded at their middle or back, with cartridges that included the bullet and its propulsive fuel all in one package, so that the shooter didn’t have to ram powder and shot separately down the barrel. In 1848, New York inventor Walter Hunt (see “The Song of the Shirt”: The Sewing Machine Wars) introduced his “Volition Repeating Rifle,” which boasted the first practical, lever-action repeating mechanism, and his “Rocket Ball,” caseless ammunition that was loaded with a tubular magazine. But Hunt’s prototype was a fragile beast, and by the time the Civil War broke out, both sides were still relying on antiquated muskets and rifles.
Christian Miner Spencer would change all that. The grandson of a Revolutionary War veteran, he was first apprenticed to a silk manufacturer, then worked as a machinist for Samuel B. Colt and some of the other gunworks clustered throughout the Connecticut Valley—shops that bore the names of men like Oliver Winchester, Eliphalet Remington, and Smith & Wesson. By the late 1850s, he was working eleven hours a day, six days a week, perfecting a machine he’d patented . . . to stick labels on spools of silk ribbons. In what spare time he had, though, he labored at a design for a better breech-loading rifle, and he had produced and patented one by 1860.
In 1861, Spencer got an audience with the navy. Lincoln’s secretary of the navy, Gideon Welles, was looking for a lighter, rapid-firing gun for his sailors to use. The navy put Spencer’s rifle through its paces, burying it in sand and immersing it overnight in salt water. Still, it fired 251 times, with only a single misfire. Impressed, Welles put in an order for seven hundred guns.
Lincoln’s chief of ordnance, Gen. James Ripley, however, refused to authorize it. Though Lincoln had ordered him to seriously consider new inventions from citizens, Ripley, like many older officers, considered all breech-loading weapons to be “newfangled gimcracks” and worried that they would inspire soldiers to fire “too rapidly.”
Spencer took to the field, demonstrating his weapon for any Union commander who would see him. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant attested that it was “the best breechloading arms available.” In January 1862, the innovative Col. John T. Wilder, a nationally known inventor himself before the war, armed his “Lightning Brigade” of mounted infantry with Spencer rifles, and the next year they swept all before them in the campaign that took the key city of Chattanooga. On the strength of such trials, Spencer eventually wrangled an appointment in 1863 with none other than President Lincoln, who was fond of watching new weaponry being tested in the Civil War and when possible would do the job himself at a makeshift firing range of old lumber just south of the White House. (He was “a very good shot, [who] enjoyed the relaxation very much,” according to one of his secretaries.)
When Spencer brought his repeating rifle into the White House, Lincoln asked him to disassemble it “and show me the inwardness of the thing.” The president was immediately impressed with how quickly Spencer was able to take his gun apart and reassemble it, needing only a screwdriver. He invited the inventor to shoot it with him the following day at another makeshift range out on the Washington Mall. There, firing from forty feet away, the president hit the bull’s-eye with his second shot. The next day he was back out firing the Spencer again.
A Spencer seven-shot repeating rifle, complete with Blakeslee cartridge box to be loaded through the stock.
Gen. Ripley was reassigned to inspecting forts. Soon some 144,000 Spencer rifles, including a smaller, lighter version called a carbine, were pouring out of factories.
The Spencer was not the only breech-loading rifle or carbine. The Sharps rifle was considered a better weapon for snipers, with a longer range, but it still fired just one shot at a time. The Henry rifle had a larger magazine but a shorter range and less punch. The Spencer was the perfect weapon in that it combined all the best features of other carbines and rifles. It was cheap and easy to make, very easy to use, and incredibly durable, almost never breaking down and proving to be generally waterproof. The carbine version (also tested by Lincoln!) was just eight and a quarter pounds and thirty-nine inches long, short enough not to interfere with the cavalryman’s arms or tangle in his horse’s legs. Its seven-round magazine was spring-loaded from the back of the stock, allowing even green troops to fire off thirty .56-caliber rounds per minute with a range of two hundred to five hundred yards. Reloading was facilitated by the Blakeslee cartridge box, which held six to ten tubes of seven cartridges each that one could simply pop into the Spencer as if he were loading a giant stapler.
With the war in the east bogging down into the sort of murderous trench stalemate that would presage World War I, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman put into play his theory that cavalry was best deployed across the limitless American landscape by riding to the battle, then dismounting to fight as infantry. The Spencer carbine, light, powerful, and travel-worthy, made such tactics possible. Sherman organized an enormous Western “Cavalry Corps” of some 13,500 men, all of them armed with Spencers. After devastating rebel forces in the battles of Nashville and Franklin, they let rip across Georgia and Alabama, destroying what remained of the Confederate heartland, crushing the command of the previously invincible Nathan Bedford Forrest, and punctuating the end of the war by capturing rebel president Jefferson Davis and vice president Alexander Stephens.
It was all due to the firepower of the carbines they carried, according to their foes, who decried “those damned guns the Yankees can load on Sunday and fire all week.”
the genius details
In a morbid irony, Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth, would be mortally wounded in a tobacco farm in Virginia, trying to hold off a contingent of Union cavalry with a Spencer carbine.
Spencer rifles helped Gen. George Armstrong Custer beat back Confederate general Jeb Stuart’s assault on the rear of the Union lines at Gettysburg in 1863 and helped Gen. Phil Sheridan’s cavalry to smash rebel resistance in the Shenandoah Valley in 1864.
Facing a sudden drop-off in business, the Spencer Repeating Rifle Company went bankrupt in 1868, with its assets eventually bought up by Oliver Winchester, for whom Spencer made further improvements on his rifle.
Christian Spencer would later invent the first practical pump-action shotgun at his new firm, the Spencer Arms Company.
The machine gun’s deadly predecessor: the Gatling gun.
While the invention of the carbine added mobility to the end of the Civil War (see Mobile Warfare: The Repeating Rifle), the Gatling gun contributed something else: overwhelming firepower. Accepted too late by the Union Army to make much of a difference in the war itself, it would play a critical role in other facets of our history, including the preservation of the New York Times, the making of one of our most popular presidents—and Winston Churchill.
Richard Jordan Gatling was born into an extraordinary family of inventors, planters, and slaveholders in Hertford County, North Carolina. He patented a rice-seed planter in 1844 when he was just twenty-six and moved to St. Louis to manufacture and sell his new invention. There he turned it into a wheat planter and made a fortune in the rapidly industrializing farm economy of the Midwest (see Breadbasket to the World: Mechanized Farming). Unstoppably inventive and self-sufficient, Gatling would soon invent a hemp-making machine and a steam plow. During the winter of 1845, he contracted smallpox while trapped on an icebound riverboat for two weeks—and after surviving the ordeal went to college and earned a medical degree, mostly for the purpose of being able to treat himself and his family.
With his medical training, though, he was also able to inspect the trains full of dead and wounded Civil War soldiers pouring back into Indiana. He could see that only about one-sixth of the dead were killed by actual combat wounds. The rest died from the usual camp diseases of the time: cholera, dysentery, pneumonia.
“It occurred to me if I could invent a machine—a gun—which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished,” he would write, in a rather cold-blooded spirit of philanthropy.
What Gatling did was essentially adapt his old rice planter into a machine gun. Ideas for such “coffee-mill” guns—named for the household device they most closely resembled—had been around for a long time, but Gatling’s was uniquely simple, effective, and foolproof. The Gatling gun consisted of six (later ten) rifled barrels mounted around a central shaft. A hand crank both rotated the barrels and dropped cartridges into each barrel from a “hopper” or “stick magazine” mounted above them. The machine did the rest, firing the cartridge and ejecting the casing. The rotation of the barrels allowed each one to cool before the next shot—a vital necessity in Civil War–era weaponry—and if one barrel jammed the rest would keep firing. It required only two men with the most basic instruction to work the gun, which fired as many as two hundred rounds a minute.
Gatling had his gun ready for battle by 1862. Soon he was corresponding with a very interested President Lincoln, who often involved himself with new advances in ordnance. Deployed then, the Gatling gun might have shortened the war by years.
Like many other such inventions, though, Gatling’s ran afoul of the War Department’s bureaucracy. Specifically, the army was suspicious of his family’s slaveholding, southern background. The army would not officially purchase his gun until the Civil War was over. If he was a secret Southern sympathizer, he had an odd way of showing it. Individual Union officers bought at least a dozen Gatling guns with their own money, and it proved brutally effective in action, mowing down Confederates trying to break through the Union lines at the siege of Petersburg late in the war.
Yet the greatest contribution of Gatling’s gun to the war was off the battlefield. During the bloody Draft Riots in New York City in 1863, an antiwar mob gathered in City Hall Park, determined to destroy the pro-Union establishments of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune and the New York Times. A major Times stockholder was a wealthy Wall Street trader and sportsman named Leonard Jerome, who saw to it that three Gatling guns were posted in the windows of the Times and who manned one of them himself. The mob took a good look at them—and decided to attack the Tribune. The Times went on publishing, and Jerome lived to take his daughter, Jennie, off to England, where she married a British lord and became the mother of Winston Churchill.
Gatling sold his gun to Colt in 1870. The Gatling gun, alas, proved no more a deterrent to warfare than Alfred Nobel’s dynamite and was used mostly by colonial European powers to crush uprisings in their empires.
During the Spanish-American War of 1898, though, Col. Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, two regiments of all-black “Buffalo Soldiers” under Lt. John “Black Jack” Pershing, and other US troops were pinned down by Spanish fire during the Battle of San Juan Hill. The day was saved when a battery of three Gatling guns, brought to the battlefield at the insistence of Lt. John H. “Gatling Gun” Parker, opened up on the Spanish trenches and blockhouses, thus enabling the heroic charges up San Juan and Kettle Hills. The guns later helped to halt a Spanish counterattack and force the surrender of the city of Santiago—as well as saving both Pershing, the commander of all American forces in France during World War I, and Roosevelt, our twenty-sixth president.
“I think Parker deserved rather more credit than any other one man in the entire campaign. . . . He had the rare good judgment and foresight to see the possibilities of the machine-guns,” reported TR, the man the rest of the world was calling the hero of San Juan Hill. “He then, by his own exertions, got it to the front and proved that it could do invaluable work on the field of battle, as much in attack as in defense.”
the genius details
The Gatling gun was not technically a machine gun, since it was hand-operated. The first recoil-operated machine gun was the Maxim gun, also invented by an American, Hiram Maxim.
Guns with revolving cylinders and chambers go back at least as far as the British “Puckle gun” of 1718, and the Confederates introduced a five-shot “revolver cannon” at Petersburg. But all such inventions used the same barrel.
“It’s the Gatlings, men! Our Gatlings!” Teddy Roosevelt cried, rallying his troops. They and the other American forces surged up San Juan Hill, yelling, “The Gatlings! The Gatlings!” Later, Lt. Parker’s Gatlings loosed a deadly fire on Spaniards trying to retake Kettle Hill, killing an estimated 560 of 600 attackers. They took out a Spanish artillery piece and fired some seven thousand rounds into Santiago, hastening its surrender.
The Gatling gun would eventually be made automatic. Its modern, helicopter-mounted descendant, the Vulcan minigun, was widely used by the United States during the Vietnam War, firing 6,000 rounds a minute.