M1865 Spencer Rifle

Origins

Christopher Miner Spencer was a young Connecticut machinist working at the Cheney Brothers silk mills when he designed his repeating rifle. He patented it in March 1860, and with the Cheney family's backing the Spencer Repeating Rifle Company set up production in Boston. The Navy placed the first order in 1861, and the Army followed. Spencer's great advantage was the metallic cartridge. Most soldiers of the time still loaded paper cartridges and percussion caps into single-shot muzzle-loaders such as the Springfield Model 1861, but the Spencer's copper rimfire rounds were waterproof and could be fed from a magazine. In August 1863 Spencer himself demonstrated the rifle to Abraham Lincoln on the White House grounds, and the President was impressed.

Design & Construction

A tube magazine holding seven cartridges slid into the butt stock through a hole in the butt plate. Lowering the trigger-guard lever dropped the breech block, threw out the empty case and brought up a fresh round; raising it closed the breech. The hammer was not cocked by the lever and had to be pulled back by hand before each shot, but a trained soldier could still fire far faster than with any muzzle-loader. The Blakeslee cartridge box, a leather case holding several loaded tubes, let him reload the whole magazine in seconds. The first Army model, the Model 1860, came as a long rifle with a 30-inch barrel and a carbine with a 22-inch barrel, both firing the .56-56 Spencer cartridge. Experience in the field led to the Model 1865. It was built mainly as a carbine, with a 20-inch barrel and the slightly smaller .56-50 cartridge, and many had the Stabler cut-off, which blocked the magazine so the soldier could fire single shots and keep seven rounds in reserve. The Burnside Rifle Company, the maker of the Burnside carbine, built many Model 1865s alongside Spencer's own factory. The long Model 1860 rifle remained the Army's Spencer rifle; the Model 1865 designation belongs mostly to the carbine.

Service

Spencers changed the fighting wherever they appeared in the American Civil War. Colonel John T. Wilder's mounted infantry brigade, which bought its own Spencer rifles, held off a much larger Confederate force at Hoover's Gap in June 1863 and became known as the "Lightning Brigade". At the Battle of Gettysburg, men of Custer's Michigan cavalry brigade used Spencers on East Cavalry Field. By 1864 and 1865 whole Union cavalry divisions carried Spencer carbines, and their firepower helped win the final campaigns. Confederates who captured Spencers could rarely use them for long, because the South could not make the copper cartridges. Most Model 1865 carbines were delivered as the war ended, and they became the standard arm of the postwar cavalry. The Buffalo Soldiers and other regiments carried Spencers in the early Indian Wars, and a scouting party armed with Spencers held off a far larger force at Beecher Island in 1868.

Legacy

The Spencer company went out of business in 1869, and Winchester bought its assets. The Army standardized on the single-shot Springfield "trapdoor" in the 1870s, but the lever-action repeater lived on in the Henry and in Winchester rifles such as the Winchester Model 1866. The Spencer, together with the Sharps Rifle and other breech-loaders, showed that the age of the muzzle-loader was over. Spencer rifles and carbines are highly prized by Civil War collectors, and markings, serial numbers and unit histories can make individual guns especially valuable.