Spencer repeating rifle

• 1. Introduction

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  The Spencer repeating rifle arrived at the White House lawn in the summer of 1863, and Abraham Lincoln was the man holding it. A few weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg, Christopher Spencer had managed to secure a personal audience with the president. Lincoln invited him to a shooting match, watched the demonstration, and came away deeply impressed. He ordered General James Wolfe Ripley to adopt the rifle for production. Ripley disobeyed the order and kept issuing the old single-shot weapons. He was replaced as head of the Ordnance Department before the year was out.

  That chain of events captures something essential about the Spencer: a weapon so capable it forced a confrontation between military tradition and battlefield reality. It was the world's first military metallic-cartridge repeating rifle, and it arrived during one of history's most destructive wars. More than 200,000 examples were manufactured between 1860 and 1869. The questions worth pursuing are how it worked, why the Army resisted it so fiercely, and what finally happened when it was let loose on the battlefield.

• 2. How the Spencer Worked

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  Christopher Spencer designed the rifle in 1860, and the mechanism he settled on was unlike anything in common military use. At its heart was a falling breechblock mounted in a carrier. Working the loading lever caused that breechblock to drop, and as it cleared the receiver, the carrier rolled downward. In a single motion it ejected a spent cartridge from the chamber and collected a fresh round from a tubular magazine housed inside the buttstock.

  That magazine held seven rounds. Originally it had been designed for nine, but the count was reduced to lower the mass of cartridges and cut the risk of an accidental discharge if the weapon was dropped on its butt or jolted by recoil. Reloading the magazine required rotating its end, formed as a lever, a quarter turn, then pulling the tube and spring assembly free from the butt plate. A soldier could load rounds individually, but Erastus Blakeslee made that process much faster. He invented a cartridge box carrying six, ten, or thirteen tubes, each holding seven cartridges. A soldier could empty one of those tubes directly into the magazine tube in moments.

  The rifle was initially chambered for the .56-56 Spencer rimfire cartridge, loaded with 45 grains of black powder. The cartridge designation worked differently from later conventions: the first number referred to the diameter of the case just ahead of the rim, and the second number was the diameter at the mouth. Cartridge length was constrained by the action size to about 1.75 inches. Later calibers used a smaller, lighter bullet with a larger powder charge, squeezing out more power and range than the original round, though the .56-56 had already come close to matching the .58 caliber rifled muskets it competed against. The Spencer produced a sustainable rate of fire in excess of 20 rounds per minute, against 2-3 rounds per minute for a muzzle-loading musket.

• 3. The Army's Resistance

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  When the Spencer was offered to the Union Army just after the Civil War broke out, the Department of War's Ordnance Department refused to issue a government contract. Their stated concern was that soldiers would waste ammunition by firing too quickly with a repeating rifle. That worry was not invented from nothing: armies of tens of thousands of men were being supplied over distances of hundreds of miles, and the logistics chain was already strained to its limits.

  A weapon capable of firing several times faster would require a vastly expanded supply network. That meant more ammunition, more wagons, more mules, more wagon-train guards, and greater pressure on railroads that were already overburdened. There was also the question of cost. The unit price of a Spencer ran several times higher than a Springfield Model 1861 rifled musket.

  The Ordnance Department did encourage breech-loading carbines, which were also single-shot but faster to reload than cap-and-ball muskets and better suited to cavalry because of their shorter length. The repeating rifle was a different calculation entirely. It was Ripley's defiance of Lincoln's direct order, and his eventual removal, that finally cracked the institutional resistance open.

• 4. Fire and Smoke in Combat

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  Colonel John T. Wilder's "Lightning Brigade" of mounted infantry was among the earliest units to demonstrate what the Spencer could do. At the Battle of Hoover's Gap, Wilder's men showed the firepower that repeating rifles could concentrate in a single engagement. At the Gettysburg campaign, two regiments of the Michigan Brigade carried Spencers into the Battle of Hanover and at East Cavalry Field. Those regiments were under the command of Brigadier General George Armstrong Custer.

  At the Battle of Nashville, the Spencer's potential was deployed on a larger scale. Major General James H. Wilson, chief of cavalry for the Military Division of the Mississippi, commanded 9,000 mounted infantrymen armed with Spencers. Wilson rode that force around General John Bell Hood's left flank and struck from the rear.

  Critics raised a practical objection that had nothing to do with tactics or logistics: smoke. A Spencer firing at its sustainable rate produced enough smoke to obscure the enemy from view. The counterpoint was that muzzle-loaders already produced enough smoke to blind whole regiments and even divisions, reducing visibility to something like standing in thick fog on a still day. The Spencer's smoke was not a new problem but a familiar one.

  One genuine advantage the Spencer held over paper-and-linen cartridge weapons showed itself on the march. The story circulated that every round of Sharps paper and linen ammunition carried in supply wagons was found useless after long storage on the road. Spencer's metallic cartridges were waterproof and hardy, and survived the constant jostling of a long march. Wilson's Raid is cited as an example of conditions where that durability mattered.

• 5. Cavalry Beyond the Civil War

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  Argentina purchased 500 Spencer carbines between 1865 and 1869, issuing them to the Argentine cavalry, including the President's Escort Squadron, and a small number to the Navy. They were used against indigenous peoples.

  In 1867, Brigadier General James F. Rusling of the Quartermaster's Department returned from a one-year tour of the western territories and issued a formal recommendation: cavalry should use the carbine exclusively when operating against mounted Indian raiders. The following year, in September 1868, Major Frederick A. Forsyth led a small force of veterans described as an "elite mounted attack-and-pursuit force" and met a much larger group of Cheyenne warriors led by Roman Nose. The engagement became known as the Battle of Beecher Island. Forsyth's men were each carrying a Spencer repeating carbine and 150 rounds of .56-50 Spencer cartridges. They held off and turned away a force that far outnumbered them. The outcome was attributed largely to what one account called the "rapid firepower of the seven-shot Spencer carbines."

  In the summer of 1870-1871, Chilean cavalry adopted Spencer rifles, a shift that substantially widened the military gap with Mapuche fighters who were at war with Chile. On the 25th of January 1871, mounted Mapuche warriors armed with spears and bolas attacked Chilean cavalry. The Mapuche panicked when a second round of shots came; they had not anticipated it, and casualties among them were high. From 1873-1874, the firm Falisse and Trapmann in Liege produced just under 1,000 carbines for Brazil, chambered in .56-50 Centerfire.

• 6. After the War

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  John Wilkes Booth was carrying a Spencer carbine at the time he was captured and killed, making the weapon an unlikely footnote to the assassination of the president who had championed its adoption.

  In the late 1860s, the Spencer company was sold to the Fogerty Rifle Company and then to Winchester. Surplus Spencer carbines were sold to France, where they saw service during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. The Spencer company itself went out of business in 1869, but ammunition continued to be manufactured in the United States into the 1920s. Many rifles and carbines were later converted to centerfire, which allowed them to fire cartridges made from centerfire .50-70 brass. The original rimfire cartridge can still be found on the specialty market, a trace of the technology that made the Spencer the first of its kind.