Colt 1851 Navy Revolver

Origins

Samuel Colt's first revolver company failed in 1842, and his revival came through Texas: the Texas Rangers' use of his Paterson revolvers against the Comanche led to the Walker Colt of 1847, a four-and-a-half-pound .44 horse pistol, and the Dragoons that followed it. What Colt needed was a revolver a man could wear on his belt, and in 1850 he produced it — the "Revolving Belt Pistol of Naval Caliber," .36 inch, which the company began selling in 1851. The cylinder's roll-engraved scene of the Texas Navy defeating the Mexican fleet off Campeche in 1843 gave the gun its popular name; it was never a naval issue arm in any special sense, and the Army bought far more than the Navy did.

Design & Construction

The 1851 Navy is a single-action, six-shot percussion revolver with an open-top frame — barrel and frame joined by a wedge through the cylinder arbor — a 7.5-inch octagonal barrel, a loading lever hinged beneath it and a brass or iron trigger guard and backstrap. Each chamber is loaded from the front with loose powder and a .375-inch round ball or conical bullet, seated by the lever, and capped at the rear; a 6-inch or 5-inch barrel was rare. It weighs about 2.6 pounds and balances beautifully, the reason for its reputation as a pointing gun. Hartford made the great majority; a London factory produced some 42,000 in 1853-57, and the Navy was manufactured in four models distinguished by their frames, screws and barrel lugs, the subject of intense collector study. Confederate makers such as Griswold & Gunnison and Leech & Rigdon copied it, often in brass frames.

Combat Use

The Navy went west with the Forty-Niners and the Texas Rangers, east with the British to the Crimea, and everywhere with the American Civil War: the Union bought Navies by the thousand as a supplement to the .44 Model 1860 Army, and Southern officers, cavalrymen and guerrillas prized whatever they could get. Robert E. Lee owned one; the Confederate raider John Mosby's men carried several apiece. James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok wore a pair, butts forward, to the end of his life in 1876, long after cartridge revolvers were available, and killed Davis Tutt in Springfield, Missouri, in 1865 at seventy-five yards with one. The .36 ball was light but the revolver was fast and accurate, and in a mounted fight six shots without reloading were worth more than any single-shot pistol's power.

Legacy

Colt ended the Navy in 1873 as the Colt Single Action Army and cartridge conversions took over, and the design's direct heir is the Richards-Mason conversion. Its afterlife has been enormous: Italian makers such as Uberti and Pietta have built hundreds of thousands of reproductions since the 1960s for re-enactors, cowboy-action shooters and the film industry, and original Hartford and London Navies, especially early models and inscribed or cased examples, are cornerstones of American arms collecting.