Ferguson Rifle

Origins

Patrick Ferguson was a Scottish officer who had served in Germany and the West Indies and was fascinated by the problem of the rifle. Rifles were accurate but slow to load, because the tight ball had to be forced down the barrel from the muzzle. Breech-loading systems had been tried before; the French engineer Isaac de la Chaumette had patented a screw-plug breech in 1704. Ferguson improved it and in December 1776 received a British patent. He demonstrated the rifle at Woolwich in June 1776 before senior officers, firing, in the rain and against a strong wind, at a target 200 yards away at a rate of four shots a minute and more, and also while walking forward and lying on the ground. The army ordered about a hundred rifles, and Ferguson was given command of a company of riflemen to test them in America.

Design & Construction

The heart of the Ferguson rifle is a threaded plug that passes vertically through the breech. The trigger guard serves as a handle: one full turn lowers the plug until its top is level with the bottom of the bore, opening a hole in the top of the breech. The soldier dropped in a ball, which rolled forward to the rifling, poured powder in behind it, and turned the trigger guard back to close the breech. Multiple threads cut in the plug meant that a single turn was enough, and grooves in the plug helped clear it of powder fouling. The rifle fired a ball of about .65 caliber from a barrel about 34 inches long, and it weighed about 7.5 pounds, lighter than a musket. It took a sword bayonet. The military rifles were made by four London and Birmingham makers, including Durs Egg, and are fine and expensive pieces of work.

Combat Use

Ferguson's riflemen, about a hundred men, fought with the British army in the campaign against Philadelphia in 1777. At the Battle of Brandywine on 11 September 1777, they were engaged on the British left. Before the battle, Ferguson later wrote, he had an American officer in a hussar uniform in his sights but chose not to shoot a man who had his back to him; some have suggested the officer was George Washington, though that is uncertain. During the battle Ferguson's right elbow was shattered by a musket ball. While he recovered, the rifle company was disbanded and its men returned to their regiments, and the rifles were put into store. Ferguson himself was killed at the Battle of Kings Mountain in October 1780, leading Loyalist militia against frontier riflemen armed with the Kentucky Long Rifle; there is no record that he had his own rifles with him there.

Legacy

The Ferguson rifle showed that a practical breech-loading military rifle was possible, but it was expensive to make, its stock was weak around the breech, and the army of the day had no doctrine for using it. It would be seventy years before breech-loaders such as the Sharps Rifle entered general service. Only a few of the original military rifles survive, and they are among the most valuable British firearms, while replicas are popular with shooters and reenactors of the American Revolution.