Repeaters  "15 Rounds A Minute"

"My God," said a stunned Rebel prisoner, "we thought you had a division there." He had just found out that only 535 men had delivered the unbelievable amount of fire- 43,550 rounds in five hours- that had helped save the retreating federal army at the Battle of Chickamauga. The repeating rifles that delivered that astonishing rate of fire had been invented at the beginning of the war, but the U.S. Army's stodgy Ordnance Department had dismissed the new inventions because they thought the rapid-firing rifles would cause the soldiers to waste ammunition and the operating mechanisms might be a maintenance problem. The Ordnance Department put its faith in the single-shot muzzle-loading rifled musket, a weapon that good soldiers could fire only three times a minute. A few units managed to equip themselves at their own expense with repeaters, but it was late in 1863 before many federal soldiers received army-issued repeating rifles, and then only the cavalry, not the infantry, got the new weapons.

The Spencer and the Henry were the most popular repeating rifles. Both were breech-loading and fired new metallic cartridges with built-in rimfire primers. The bullets were loaded into tubular magazines that fed them to the breech, where a lever-action mechanism seated the bullet into the firing chamber. The mechanisms would extract the empty cartridges and, in the case of the Henry, would even cock the gun.

A soldier with a repeater could fire 15 or more times a minute, and with the Spencer, quickly reload by replacing the spent magazines with full one carried in a special 13-tube cartridge box. Northern soldiers equipped with repeating rifles enjoyed an enormous advantage over Confederates with muzzle loaders during the last year of the war. The more powerful federals gained confidence, and the Confederates receiving the rapid fire grew more demoralized.

Fascinating Fact:  The new metallic cartridge, though more expensive to manufacture, had one great advantage over the old paper cartridges used in muzzle loaders: they were not affected by moisture.


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