This post describes the speediest means of reloading firearms in the 19th century. The main focus is not the ammunition capacity of any particular type of arm, but rather how quickly various arms could be reloaded after the initial ammunition was spent.
As the post also explains, although the 19th century was, by far, the century of the greatest advances in firearms, many of those advances were not truly new. Rather, the advances were the results of improvements in manufacturing that greatly reduced the price of gun types that previously had been very expensive.
The post covers, in order:
- Spencer lever-action rifles (fast reloads of 7-round tubular magazines);
- Girardoni rifles (20-round tubular speedloaders);
- bolt-action rifles (reloads via detachable box magazines or stripper clips);
- double-barreled shotguns (over 30 shots per minute);
- semiautomatic handguns (detachable box magazines or stripper clips);
- metallic cartridge revolvers (via circular speedloaders);
- cap-and-ball revolvers and pepperboxes (for revolvers, cylinder swaps starting with an 1858 Remington patent);
- finally, and perhaps most surprisingly, the large progress in reloading speed of single-shot muskets and rifles, thanks to the replacement of muzzleloading with breechloading.
Spencer lever-action rifles
The first repeating long guns that became a major commercial success were lever-action rifles. They were introduced in the late 1850s. The first commercially successful lever action was the Henry Rifle of 1860; it held 15 rounds in a tubular magazine under the barrel, plus one round in the firing chamber.
Lever action rifles are fast shooters. Today, the champions of the Single Action Shooting Society can fire 10 shots in 2 seconds. The competition requires use of unimproved replicas of common 19th century arms. Once the user had fired all 16 shots from a Henry -- or all 18 shots from its successor, the Winchester Model 1866 -- reloading would take some time, as the user would have to drop cartridges one at a time into the magazine.
Much faster reloads were possible with the Spencer lever action repeating rifles and carbines), which was also introduced in 1860. During the Civil War, the Spencer Repeating Rifle Company, of Boston, made 144,500 rifles and carbines (short rifles), including 34,000 subcontracted to the Burnside Rifle Company of Providence, R.I. Burnside also made the Burnside Carbine, similar to the Spencer but with different rifling. The company's founder, Ambrose Burnside, was a Union general, strong advocate of using black volunteers in combat, future R.I. Senator and Governor, future first President of the National Rifle Association, and the namesake of "sideburns."
Of the Boston production, 107,372 were sold to the U.S. government, as were 30,052 of the Providence production. The disposition of the rest was presumably private sale, which would almost certainly include some Union soldiers buying arms for themselves. The Spencer was a preferred firearm for cavalrymen. Norm Flayderman, Flayderman's Guide to Antique American Firearms 633 (9th ed. 2007).
The Spencer held 7 rounds in a tubular magazine in the buttstock. After firing 7 rounds, the user could pour in 7 fresh rounds using the Blakeslee speedloader, patented in 1864. The Blakeslee cartridge box kit could hold up to 13 tubes, with 7 rounds each.
The principle of the detachable magazine had been put into use long before, albeit not on a scale as large as Spencer's. After the American Revolution, American inventor Joseph Belton moved to England, where starting in 1786 he created 7-shot breechloading repeaters with detachable metal magazines for the British East India Company. The 1786 gun had 7 separate firing pans, each of which needed to be reprimed after a magazine change.
In America, Belton is most famous for a prior 1777 invention. During the Revolution, in Philadelphia he demonstrated a gun that fired 16 shots at once. The observing committee --which including two American generals and scientist David Rittenhouse--wrote to the Continental Congress urging adoption of the gun. Letter from Joseph Belton to the Continental Congress (July 10, 1777), in 1 Papers of the Continental Congress, Compiled 1774–1789, Petitions Addressed to Congress 139 (1957). The Continental Congress ordered a hundred, but could not come to terms with Belton on the price. J. Cont. Cong., at 324, 361 (May 15, 1777). He insisted on £130 per gun, equivalent to £27,258 today, or $34,174--too much for a government that already couldn't make ends meet.
Another ancestor of Civil War Spencer was the lever-action Kalthoff repeater of 17th-century Europe. Some of them could fire 30 rounds without reloading. They "spread throughout Europe wherever there were gunsmiths with sufficient skill and knowledge to make them, and patrons wealthy enough to pay the cost. . . . [A]t least nineteen gunsmiths are known to have made such arms in an area stretching from London on the west to Moscow on the east, and from Copenhagen south to Salzburg. There may well have been even more." Harold L. Peterson, The Treasury of the Gun 230 (1962).
However, like all repeaters of the time, the Kalthoffs were much more expensive than standard infantry firearms. This is because repeaters, by their nature, have more intricate internal parts than single-shot guns, and the repeater's parts must fit together more precisely than in single-shots. If a Kalthoff part broke, the gun could only be repaired by a specialist gunsmith. The widespread adoption of lever action repeaters was impractical until the American industrial revolution, when, as described in a previous post, federal government industrial policy created a firearms industry that could mass produce high-quality intricate and interchangeable parts.
Although many Union soldiers provided their own firearms, as did Confederates, the majority of Union soldiers used firearms issued by War Department. When the Civil War ended, the U.S. government owned many more firearms than it would need for the soon-to-be much smaller post-war Army. Pursuant to General Order no. 101 (May 30, 1865), Union soldiers were allowed to buy their government-issued firearm for a deduction from their monthly pay. The most expensive was the Spencer, for $10. Muskets were $6, and revolvers or non-Spencer carbines $8. In 1865, the monthly pay for a Union private was $16. For sergeants it was $17 to $21, for lieutenants $105.50, and more for higher ranks.
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