The precision of the Sharps meant that marksmen could play an important role in the battle. Special units were created. Among the most effective were Colonel Hiram Berdan’s 1st and 2nd U.S. Sharpshooters regiments, whose weapons of choice were the Sharps rifles. These specialized, highly trained marksmen, skirmishers, and long-range snipers wore green camouflage, and, thanks to the easy-loading Sharps design, shot safely from concealed positions, such as flat on the ground or from behind trees. They also carried rifles equipped with the earliest telescopic sights.
To qualify to join the elite unit, you had to be able to put ten shots inside a ten-inch-wide circle from two hundred yards. The Sharpshooters gave the Union army a powerful combat edge and fought effectively in many major battles of the Civil War, including Mechanicsville, Gaines’s Mill, the Second Battle of Bull Run, Shepherdstown, Antietam, Gettysburg, Yorktown, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, Atlanta, Spotsylvania, and Petersburg.
But as fine a weapon as the Sharps and other breechloaders from the period may have been, in my opinion the real badass infantry weapon of the Civil War was the Spencer Repeater. And in early 1863, it made its first big appearance on the battlefield. It was a shocking debut.
By now, small batches of at least 7,500 Spencers had made it into the regular Army pipeline, and some commanders were even shelling out their own money to equip their units with the gun. One Colonel John T. Wilder of Indiana was so impressed by a field demonstration of Spencers that he lined up a loan from his neighborhood bank to buy more than a thousand Spencer repeating rifles for his “Lightning Brigade” of mounted infantry.
Colonel Wilder’s commander was Major General William S. Rosecrans, whose Army of the Cumberland was tasked to rout the Rebs from Middle Tennessee. Though slow to move against Confederate General Braxton Bragg and his Army of Tennessee, once Rosecrans got moving he did so with style. In the last days of spring 1863, Rosecrans began a series of maneuvers that are still studied today for their near flawless execution. Wilder and his men, now armed with those Spencers he financed, were smack in the middle.
The brigade was a one-off outfit, a hybrid of cavalry and infantry at a time when those two forces were very separate animals. Colonel Wilder was a bit of a different beast himself. Hailing from New York’s Catskill Mountains, he commanded a collection of infantry units totaling some fifteen hundred foot soldiers, along with a detachment of artillery. His first assignment was to run down a rebel cavalry unit that had made mincemeat of Rosecrans’ supply line. You don’t need to know much about combat to guess how that went; pretty much every horse I’ve seen is faster than any man I’ve met. Wilder came away from the assignment a wee bit frustrated.
Possibly a member of Colonel Wilder’s “Lightning Brigade” of mounted infantry—armed with a Spencer rifle.
Library of Congress
But from that setback came a solution—he asked permission to mount his infantry. Wilder wasn’t transforming his brigade into horse soldiers. He wanted a force that could move at lightning speed, then dismount and fight. And when he said fight, he meant fight. Besides the repeaters, he armed his men with long-handled axes for hand-to-hand combat. Here was an officer who fully understood the phrase violence of action.
Colonel Wilder also appreciated the meaning of the word charge, which is what he did on June 24, 1863, when tasked to take Hoover’s Gap, a key pass Rosecrans needed to outmaneuver his enemy. Wilder’s men slammed through the gap like a bronc busting out of its gate. They routed the 1st Kentucky Cavalry, then pushed well ahead of the main body of infantry they were spearheading.
The Rebs counterattacked ferociously, sending two infantry brigades and artillery against the Northerners. Though badly outnumbered, Wilder’s men held their ground. The volume of fire poured out by the Spencers—nearly 142 rounds per man—was so large that the Confederates thought they were facing an entire army corps. The rebel lines collapsed into retreat.
“Hoover’s Gap was the first battle where the Spencer Repeating Rifle had ever been used,” Wilder later wrote, “and in my estimation they were better weapons than has yet taken their place, being strong and not easily injured by the rough usage of army movements, and carrying a projectile that disabled any man who was unlucky enough to be hit by it.” He added, “No line of men, who come within fifty yards of another armed with Spencer Repeating Rifles can either get away alive, or reach them with a charge, as in either case they are certain to be destroyed by the terrible fire poured into their ranks by cool men thus armed. My men feel as if it is impossible to be whipped, and the confidence inspired by these arms added to their terribly destructive capacity, fully quadruples the effectiveness of my command.”
One of Wilder’s soldiers wrote of the Spencer that it “never got out of repair. It would shoot a mile just as accurately as the finest rifle in the world. It was the easiest gun to handle in the manual of arms drill I have ever seen. It could be taken all to pieces to clean, and hence was little trouble to keep in order—quite an item to lazy soldiers.”
“Those Yankees have got rifles that won’t quit shootin’ and we can’t load fast enough to keep up,” said a Confederate soldier who was on the losing end of the Battle of Hoover’s Gap. After another Tennessee battle, a Confederate prisoner asked his captors, “What kind of Hell-fired guns have your men got?”
The performance of the Spencer Repeater that June day in Tennessee marked the true dawn of the multiple-shot infantry gun, an era that would dominate the battlefield of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
A week after Hoover’s Gap, North and South faced off in an epic battle destined to be remembered for centuries. It was the Battle of Gettysburg, and while the vast majority of guns fired there were rifle-muskets, breechloaders and repeaters appeared at critical moments to help tip the scales in favor of the North.
Fighting was reaching its climax on the third day of the battle, July 3, 1863, when Confederate General James Ewell Brown “Jeb” Stuart and his legendary cavalry force prepared to smash deep into the rear of the Union forces guarding Cemetery Ridge. Stuart’s maneuver was intended to support the Rebs’ frontal assault on the Ridge, flanking the Northerners and cutting their supply lines. If Stuart’s cavalry managed to penetrate the Union rear, there was a good chance that Union General George Meade would be forced to siphon off troops and leave the main force disastrously exposed to what is now known as Pickett’s Charge.
The only thing between Stuart and the vulnerable Union rear was a cavalry division commanded by General David McMurtrie Gregg. His forces included a brigade of cavalry temporarily attached to his command and led by the Union Army’s newest and youngest general, twenty-four-year-old George Armstrong Custer. Custer has gone down in history as a peacock of a leader, a commander who dressed so flamboyantly that one observer compared him to “a circus rider gone mad.” He’s also considered a ridiculously bold general, rash or daring depending on your point of view. But no matter how you look at it, he had courage and guts in spades.
An artist’s depiction of the vast Gettysburg battle scene. Union troops armed with the newly adopted Spencer Repeaters held their own against the Rebel flank, helping keep the main force intact to repel Pickett’s Charge.
Library of Congress
Even more important than courage and guts on that day were the Spencer repeating rifles in the hands of the dismounted 5th and 6th Michigan Cavalry brigades that were part of Custer’s command. They bore the brunt of Stuart’s attack at Rummel Farm. Stuart’s idea was to plow through the skirmishers and plunge into the weak underbelly of the left side of the Union line. He might have done it, too, had the Michigan men not been equipped with Spencers. Their ferocious fire turned the Confederates back. Finally Stuart decided to send the 1st Virginia Cavalry down their necks. Exhausted by nearly two hours of fighting, the Blues buckled and were overwhelmed. The thin skirmish line broke.
Gregg ordered a counterattack to turn back the Rebel swarm. Shouting, “Come on, you Wolverines!,” Custer person
ally led the 7th Michigan Cavalry against the Rebs. Horse flew at horse, man at man. Bullets were followed by sabers, then knives, then fists. Men fought with every breath and heartbeat they had. Custer’s horse was shot out from under him. He grabbed another. As one historian noted, it was “the most dramatic, largest man-to-man, horse-to-horse, saber-to-saber galloping cavalry engagement ever fought in the Western Hemisphere and the final horse battle fought on a scale of this magnitude in the entire world.”
It was also the end of Stuart’s assault; his goal of outflanking the Union lines had failed. Pickett’s Charge collapsed later that afternoon.
Gettysburg, like many large battles, was a series of turning points, decisions, and movements made and not made. Any one of them might have changed the course of history. Take away the Union Spencers and maybe Jeb Stuart gets far enough to ruin the Yankee defense. Then maybe Pickett’s charge gets through . . .
Any way you think about it, those Spencer Repeaters proved that volume of fire was one important key to winning a battle that’s been called a turning point of the Civil War.
Back in the White House, President Lincoln learned of the superb performance of the Spencers in combat, and decided he wanted to take another crack at shooting the gun himself.
Christopher M. Spencer arrived at the White House on August 18, 1863, bearing a new rifle as a gift. Take it apart, Lincoln suggested, and show me the “inwardness of the thing.”
Spencer complied. The next day, the two men went out to Lincoln’s target range to do some shooting. With the inventor personally demonstrating the mechanism and the four basic movements to load and fire, the Spencer performed beautifully for the president.
Lincoln cradled the rifle, lined up his shot, and fired from forty yards away. He hit the bull’s-eye on his second try, and, rapidly cranking the lever, placed four more shots close by. The inventor shot even better.
“Well,” said Lincoln good-naturedly, “you are younger than I am, have a better eye and a steadier nerve.”
Lincoln’s secretary wrote in his diary, “This evening and yesterday evening an hour was spent by the President in shooting with Spencer’s new repeating rifle. A wonderful gun, loading with absolutely contemptible simplicity and ease with seven balls & firing the whole readily & deliberately in less than half a minute. The President made some pretty good shots.”
Lincoln and the inventor parted with hearty handshakes. Now that Lincoln was personally convinced of their effectiveness, the Union military put through purchase orders that would eventually bring nearly 100,000 Spencer carbines and rifles into the Union armories and onto the shoulders of its troops. Don’t be too impressed by that number, though. It’s a tiny thing compared to the roughly two million total Union muzzle-loading rifle-muskets in the field.
Late in the war, Major General James H. Wilson led an audacious raid through Alabama and Georgia to defeat the infamous—though innovative—General Nathan Bedford Forrest at Selma, Alabama. Forrest was a scourge of the Union. He took mobile warfare to new heights and is reputed to have even killed one of his own officers following a “discussion” over orders. To beat Forrest, Wilson relied not just on superior numbers but a large number of Spencers. Using the rifle as an early “force multiplier” and employing tactics nearly as aggressive as Forrest’s, the Northern general managed to break the Confederate defenses at Selma, sending the better part of the militia there running. That forced Forrest to sue for surrender, and in effect ended the war in that section of the Deep South. Wilson gave full credit to the gun that got him there.
“There is no doubt that the Spencer carbine is the best fire-arm yet put into the hands of the soldier,” wrote the Northern general, “both for economy of ammunition and maximum effect, physical and moral. Our best officers estimate one man armed with it [is] equivalent to three with any other arm. I have never seen anything else like the confidence inspired by it in the regiments or brigades which have it. A common belief amongst them is if their flanks are covered they can go anywhere. I have seen a large number of dismounted charges made with them against cavalry, infantry, and breast-works, and never knew one to fail.”
Historians have argued that without the Union’s Spencers, the war would have gone on another six months more, with tens of thousands of additional fatalities on both sides. That point puts me in mind of a simple but I think obvious question: What would have happened if more advanced weapons like the Spencer and Sharps had been adopted earlier in the war? If our friend General Ripley had not been around to delay and doom Abe Lincoln’s early wishes, would the bloodiest war in our nation’s history have ended sooner?
I’m not the only one who’s given that some thought. A number of soldiers on both sides expressed the opinion that the Spencer or another multiple-shot, easy-firing gun would have turned the tide earlier on. Some of their comments are the sort of exaggeration you hear about Texas weather—for instance, a Michigan cavalry officer who served under Custer at Gettysburg was said to claim that Spencers would have ended the war in ninety days. But even a respected Civil War scholar like Robert Bruce thinks that advanced rifle technology would have had a huge impact on the war.
This assumes (maybe overoptimistically) that the Northern generals could have adapted their tactics to the new weapons fairly quickly. The rifle-musket was an improvement over the Revolutionary War–era musket, but both firearms led generals to mass their troops in tight lines where their inaccurate fire could be effective. That in turn dictated a series of other decisions and tactics.
You can criticize the generals for being stuck in old and inefficient ways of thinking, but step back in their boots and you start to see the world from a whole different perspective.
The average soldier in the Civil War had scant firearms training. A good number probably never even knew that their rifled weapons sent their bullets in a parabolic arc, often over their target. Then again, individual targets were often impossible to pick out through the smoke-curtained battlefield. Most of the infantrymen on both sides simply pointed their gun in the general direction of the enemy and prayed they hit something when they fired.
Change the technology and you have to change the training that goes along with it. Or more correctly, initiate some, since weapons training at the time was poor to nonexistent. A few weeks of basic work with the weapons would have done it, so long as General Ripley or one of his minions wasn’t standing by tsk-tsking about the number of bullets being “wasted” in practice.
The end result would have been an army of men who could hit what they were firing at, more or less, from a greater distance at a much faster rate of speed than the enemy. Given that, you could alter your tactics appropriately. The possibilities are endless with that sort of advantage. Small, mobile forces emphasizing speed like the cavalry or mounted infantry would have played an even bigger role in the fight. I know I’m expressing my prejudices as a SEAL—what are special-operations forces but mobile and fast? Still, the success of such units throughout the war practically makes the argument for me. Spencer Repeaters would have shortened the war, maybe by a lot.
But there is an old saying that’s worth remembering: Be careful what you wish for. Meaning, there’s no way to tell what the future will bring. Alter one thing, and a host of others will change. Good, bad, somewhere in the middle.
Mr. Bruce, who won the Pulitzer Prize for history, put it this way: “If a large part of the Union Army had been given breech-loaders by the end of 1862,” he speculated, “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. Instead, it might have had the memoirs of ex-President Lincoln, perhaps written in retirement during the administration of President Burnside or Hooker.” So who knows?
A friend of a good friend of mine by the name of John Navaro has shot any number of weapons from the period. Mr. Navaro is your basic weapons
expert. He’s worked for movies, television shows, and the like. If you’ve watched Walker, Texas Ranger, and paid any attention to the weapons the characters are packing, you’ve seen his work—he’s the prop and weapons master responsible for getting it right. He also does a fair amount of historical reenacting as a hobby.
John really likes the Spencer, calling it a “gun before its time.” But he pointed out that maybe, just maybe, its real advantage was psychological. The way he puts it, knowing that the gun gave you more shots than your opponent couldn’t help but boost your morale. “Stronger, bolder—you just felt like you were going to come out on top,” he says. That edge is important to a fighter, especially someone in the cavalry where the tactics demand that the troopers be aggressive and hard-charging.
You can’t win a war in your head, but if your head ain’t right, you’ve got no chance at all.
The Civil War was the world’s last muzzleloader war. By its end, breechloaders increasingly dominated the battlefield. The potential of multiple-shot rifles was also clear. The Spencer Repeater anticipated some of the watershed gun platforms that would arrive in the future, like the automatic rifle, magazine-feeders, self-loading rifles, and the Tommy gun.
But while it helped end the Civil War, the Spencer would not have a major role in the next great American challenge, the winning of the great frontier. Two other revolutionary firearms stepped up to meet the challenges posed by the wild American West.
3
THE COLT SINGLE-ACTION ARMY REVOLVER
“The good people of this world are very far from being satisfied with each other and my arms are the best peacemakers.”
—Samuel Colt, 1852
On the morning of June 8, 1844, a Texas Ranger spotted a beehive up in a tree near a creek in the Hill Country of central Texas. With the scent of honey tempting his taste buds, the young lawman climbed the branches halfway up to inspect the bounty. Then he froze.