American Gun

2 THE SPENCER REPEATER

Abraham Lincoln was thinking about guns.

It was a clear, beautiful morning in the spring of 1861, and the recently elected President had two things on his mind—firearms, and the survival of the United States of America. So he left the hubbub of the White House, with its long line of petitioners and politicians, and went out to do some target shooting. Walking into a weed-and-garbage-strewn field east of the White House that served as his personal gun-testing range, he took stock of his weapons, a pair of new-fangled long guns. Both purported to let a man fire several shots before he had to stop and reload. That was a powerful promise under any circumstances, but especially on the field of battle. It was a promise that, if kept, could determine the course of the Civil War and help preserve the Union.

The weapons of war had evolved in the four score and odd years since independence had been won, but they would have still been recognizable to anyone who’d marched at Yorktown. The primary weapon of the U.S. Army and the recently formed Confederacy were smooth-bore muskets like the Springfield Model 1842. Unlike their Revolutionary War forebears, these modern muskets used percussion locks. In a flintlock, as you may recall, a piece of flint held in the hammer is struck to make a spark, creating a fire in a pan of fine priming powder, which in turn ignites the gunpowder charge and sends the bullet flying. Anyone who’s tried to light a match in the middle of a rainstorm knows the downside to that. Damp primer, wet powder, a worn flint—so many steps almost guarantee complications.

It might not have been foolproof, but the percussion cap simplified the process, making the gun less vulnerable to bad weather and random voodoo. A hammer hit a small cap, causing the material it held to explode. (That mercury fulminate your chemistry teacher warned you about was used as a primer at the time.) The explosion ignites the gunpowder charge, and off we go.

Increasing the dependability and simplicity of infantry weapons was an important step in the evolution of firearms, but other improvements were needed. The most obvious was accuracy. Bullets fired from smooth-bore muskets were notoriously fickle. To have any chance at all of striking his opponent, a soldier had to get pretty close to him. That’s not a popular activity on a battlefield.

Rifles were a solution. Loading bullets into a rifled barrel became much easier with the invention of the Minié-ball. Named after its inventor, the French gunmaker Claude-Étienne Minié, the cone-shaped projectile fit loosely enough to be easily inserted down a rifled muzzle. Its hollowed lead base expanded once the gun was fired, snugging it up against the barrel. The bullets had a side benefit—or a side horror, depending on whether you were on the receiving end of one or not. The .58-caliber projectile common at the time flattened and deformed on impact, shredding organs and bones and tearing out gaping exit wounds. Given the state of battlefield medicine at the time, the Minié-ball was truly an angel of death.

Rifle-muskets such as the Springfield 1861 and the 1853 Enfield quickly became the mass-produced standard infantry gun as the conflict revved up. By the time Lincoln went out that fine morning, both North and South were trying to get as many of them as they could. But there’s one thing every soldier knows: the quicker your reload time, the better your odds of living to fight another day. Ol’ Abe had spent a bit of time in the militia during the Black Hawk War, and I suspect that lesson was still fresh in his mind some thirty years later out on the White House lawn. The weapons he was testing were capable of firing several rounds before a soldier had to stop and reload.

The first gun Lincoln picked up was believed to be a Henry Repeater. It was a lever-action rifle that could reliably fire sixteen shots in stunning succession using a tube magazine that ran down beneath the barrel of the gun to the breech. It could be loaded relatively fast through an opening at the end of the tube.

The weapon had been manufactured by the New Haven Arms Company. New Haven had been purchased by a man named Oliver Winchester a few years before. Winchester was pretty wily for a Yankee; he’d bought the company for a song from two guys named Smith & Wesson when they hit financial problems in 1857. We’ll come back to Misters Smith & Wesson later.

Oliver Winchester had made his money manufacturing shirts. It’s said that he didn’t know all that much about guns, but he certainly understood a lot about manufacturing, which in mid-eighteenth-century America was more important. And he also must have been a good judge of talent, because he quickly entrusted a man named Benjamin Tyler Henry with improving the factory’s most promising but tempermental product, the Volcanic repeating rifle.

Henry made a host of improvements to the design, but the most important was arguably in the type of ammo it packed. The Volcanic repeater fired a Rocket ball. The bullet was similar to a Minié-ball, except that the hollow base was filled with powder, then sealed with a primer cap. The closed metallic cartridge gave the gun a complete piece of ammunition. Unfortunately, the small size of the bullet limited the size of the charge; the bullet didn’t have quite enough pop for the bloody but necessary business of killing an enemy on the battlefield.

Henry changed that by providing his repeater with a hefty rim-fire cartridge. His copper cartridge fit some twenty-five grains of powder behind a 216 grain, .44-caliber bullet. It had pop to spare.

Back at the target range near the White House, Lincoln was impressed by the Henry. The multi-shot, fast-loading rifle was a potential game-changer for the Union army. It took about half a minute to reload; a soldier could then squeeze off another sixteen shots as fast as he could jerk the lever back and forth. There were downsides—among others, you had to move your hand out of the way of the cartridge follower after a few shots, and the barrel got awful hot if you shot fast and long enough. Still, it was an exciting weapon with a lot of potential.

After firing the Henry, Lincoln gazed at the plank of wood he’d perforated with a contented smile. The repeater concept was sound, the execution good. Lincoln’s aide, William O. Stoddard, handed him a second weapon. This was a modified Springfield smoothbore musket that used a screw-on adapter to feed nine high-powered rounds into a breech, rather than a single round rammed down the muzzle. It was called a Marsh rifle, after its inventor, Samuel Marsh.

As the president was kneeling down to line up a shot, a voice began cursing loudly behind them. “Stop that firing!” bellowed a pissed off man in uniform. Trailed by four enlisted soldiers, the captain marched toward the two amateur civilian marksmen who were not only interrupting the peaceful Washington, D.C., morning, but were violating a presidential order forbidding shooting in the capital city. Swearing up a storm—cussin’ like some Navy SEALs I know—the captain reached his hand out as if to confiscate the guns and arrest the shooters. It looked like the Second Amendment was about to face its very first challenge in Washington, D.C.

Lincoln peered down the barrel and squeezed the trigger. Then, smiling shyly, he rose from the ground.

“Here comes the fun!” thought Stoddard, watching his boss get up. Or as Stoddard put it later, “Lincoln’s tall, gaunt form shoots up, up, up, uncoiling to its full height, and his smiling face looks down upon the explosive volunteers.

“Their faces, especially that of the sergeant… look up at his, and all their jaws seem to drop in unison. No word of command is uttered, but they ‘right about face’ in a second of time. Now it is a double-quick, quicker, quicker, as they race back toward the avenue, leaving behind them only a confused, suppressed breath about having ‘cussed Old Abe himself.’ His own laugh, in his semi-silent, peculiar way, is long and hearty, but his only remark is:

“Well, they might [have] stayed to see the shooting….”

Abe Lincoln was a gun buff and a technology whiz. Other presidents before him—including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson—were highly gun-savvy, as were most Americans at a time when the nation was primarily rural. But Lincoln took presidential involvement with gun technology to a new level. Fiddling with another experimental repeating gun on his firing range one day, he shot off a few rounds, then announced, “I believe I can make this gun shoot better.” He produced a hand-whittled wooden sight from his vest pocket, clamped it on the rifle, and let loose at a piece of congressional stationery pinned more than eighty yards away. He hit the paper almost a dozen times out of fourteen.

Another time, Lincoln showed up at a target practice for the 2nd U.S. Sharpshooters, one of the few specialized Union marksmen units. He borrowed a rifle from one of the surprised soldiers in Company F and scored three good shots as the men whooped and hollered. A witness reported that Lincoln “handled the rifle like a veteran marksman, in a highly successful manner, to the great delight of the many soldiers and civilians surrounding.”

“Boys,” said the President to the cheering troops, “this reminds me of old-time shooting!” Now, that’s a commander in chief any combat vet would be proud to serve.

Lincoln was also a man who loved machines of all kinds. Abe liked to roll up his sleeves, get dirty, and take contraptions apart. He scoured magazines like Scientific American for the latest technology. He was the first chief executive to embrace telegraph communication. He personally heard pitches from gun inventors and entrepreneurs, tested products, reviewed plans and machinery, and battled bureaucrats. Abe pushed his underlings for research and development, threw his weight and opinions around like a seasoned CEO, and managed the equivalent of a multimillion-dollar firearms investment fund through the U.S. military. He was a venture capitalist of weaponry.

Lincoln seems to have admired the Henry Repeater he fired that spring morning, putting him in line with a lot of soldiers. As the war progressed, many would dig into the patched pockets of their woolen pants to purchase a Henry for themselves. Officers would outfit whole units with them, raiding the family treasury in hopes of giving their men an edge in combat. But Lincoln eventually turned his favor to a rival model—the Spencer Repeater. He did this even though his own experiment with the gun was something of a failure: Testing two models supplied by the Navy, he had one misfeed and the other lock up after a double feed. Reports by others who raved about the gun apparently convinced Lincoln that his experiences were just flukes, and so it was the Spencer’s manufacturer, Sharps, that got the prized Union contract to supply 10,000 repeaters later in 1861.

Named after its inventor, Christopher Spencer, the repeater was a marvel of both advanced design and (comparative) simplicity. Handling this weapon or even a replica today, you can sense the careful smithing as soon as you pick it up. It has weight to it, and when you move the trigger guard down, the smooth action of the metal components, all expertly fitted, reminds you of a fine watch.

The Spencer fired a .52-caliber metallic rimfire cartridge. Seven cartridges fit into its magazine, which loaded through the back of the weapon’s stock. Using an innovative dropping-block design and lever action, all seven rounds could be quickly and accurately fired. When you pulled down on the trigger guard, the breech opened and the spent cartridge was ejected. Push the guard back on up and the new cartridge slipped into place, ready to fly. Spare magazines could be kept ready for speedy loading in combat. Sharing parts with the single-fire Sharps rifle—another classic American gun—it was easy to manufacture, and proved very reliable in field tests and in combat.

But like presidents before and after him, Lincoln would soon find that executive power was often more theory than promise. Even though his War Department placed initial orders of 25,000 of the Marsh guns and 10,000 seven-shot Spencer Repeaters before the end of 1861, they didn’t reach Union troops. Or anyone else.

If I were writing this up as fiction, I might spin a yarn about a daring Confederate attack against the factory, complete with 1860s-style special ops work, fine explosions, and general pandemonium. But the Rebs had nothing to do with it.

No, a Yankee was responsible for sabotaging Lincoln’s plans to get modern technology into the hands of his men. And not only was he on the Union’s side, he was one of its highest ranking officers.

Head shed’ll get you every time.

James Ripley was an ultrapowerful bureaucratic monster, a cantankerous, backward-looking, sixty-seven-year-old Northern Army general. He was the chief of Army procurement, and he was a wizard of red tape, delay, and obfuscation. Truth be told, he was also a master at supply logistics and standardizing artillery ammunition, but he was an idiot when it came to guns. He hated breech-loading weapons, even the superb Sharps rifle, considering them “newfangled gimcracks.” And he absolutely detested repeating rifles like the Spencer Repeater. By his convoluted logic, soldiers would only waste ammunition with a multi-shot gun. He wasn’t crazy about the prices, either: he could buy good muskets for $18 each from multiple vendors, but a Spencer Repeater was $40.

Through the end of 1861 and much of 1862, General Ripley conducted a one-man mutiny of disobedience and delay against President Lincoln, General-in-Chief George McClellan, and many other officers and regular troops who were begging for breechloaders and repeaters. He refused to approve production orders, threw gun inventors out of his office, and repeatedly slow-tracked Lincoln’s orders. Lincoln couldn’t fire him, because Ripley had powerful friends on Capitol Hill. The delays and the threat of a patent suit sunk Marsh’s gun and his company, rendering him and his weapon a footnote to history. And what would have been the largest order for breech-loading rifles to that point was never fulfilled.

Some historians accuse Ripley of dooming many thousands of American troops to unnecessary carnage and death by prolonging the war. I’m inclined to agree. Thanks to the untalented Mr. Ripley, hardly any breechloaders or repeaters were in the hands of Union forces by the end of 1862, a full year and a half after the President’s early tests. Pretty much the only repeaters in Unions hands at all came from a small order for Spencers by the Navy, which was out of Ripley’s reach, and the guns soldiers bought themselves.

I suppose you could take Ripley’s side by saying he had no way of knowing how long the war would go, or what gun platforms would gain traction. Besides worrying about paying for everything—a unique and unusual concern for a government official, in my experience—he was also trying to avoid the headache of figuring out new supply pipelines to feed multiple forms of ammunition to the far-flung troops.

But let’s face it: the guy was a threat to national security.

Luckily for America, Lincoln eventually managed to fire him, aided in part by an anti-Ripley revolt that erupted in 1862 as some units demanded to be armed with the latest guns, especially the Sharps rifle.

The Sharps was a breech-loading, single-shot, percussion-cap rifle that a trained soldier could load and fire up to ten times a minute, or three times faster than a Springfield. A sleek forty-seven inches long, a trained marksman could reliably hit targets at six hundred yards or more with it. The gun was easy to handle and reliable, and it became a favorite of civilians as well as professionals heading toward the frontier. “The Sharps mechanism made the gun so easy to use, anyone could fire it and stand a fairly good chance of hitting something—or someone,” wrote historian Alexander Rose.

Even more popular in the Army was a carbine version, which featured a shorter barrel—which is, after all, the main difference between a “rifle” and a “carbine.” The highly accurate and easy-to-carry weapon was a favorite with mounted cavalry, both North and South. It should be said that one of the reasons the Sharps was liked by soldiers was its reliability. The gun was well-designed and well-made. The quality of manufacturing was one reason for the higher price; you get what you pay for. Ripley might not have thought so, but the less-well-produced Southern clones proved the point. They didn’t hold up nearly as well.

That’s one of the things historians are talking about when they write that the North’s manufacturing abilities won the war. The days of hand-built guns were past. Armies were now too big to be supplied by a handful of craftsmen toiling away in local workshops. An industrial base and skilled factory workers were nearly as important to winning a battle as great generals were.

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.

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.

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 personally 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.