Springfield Model 1842

Origins

For a generation after the War of 1812 the American infantryman carried a flintlock. The Model 1816 and its successors were close copies of the French Charleville Musket, .69 caliber smoothbores fired by flint and steel, and the Ordnance Department was slow to trust the new percussion cap. By the late 1830s the cap had proved itself in civilian guns and in European armies, and in 1841 the United States adopted a percussion rifle for its riflemen. The following year it approved a percussion musket for the line infantry. The Model 1842 was the result, and the national armories at Springfield, Massachusetts, and Harpers Ferry, Virginia, began building it in 1844.

Design & Construction

The Model 1842 kept the proportions of the flintlocks it replaced: a .69 caliber smoothbore barrel 42 inches long, a walnut full stock, three barrel bands and an overall length of about 57.75 inches. It weighed roughly ten pounds. What changed was the lock. Instead of a flint cock and frizzen it had a hammer that fell on a percussion cone screwed into the breech, so the gun fired in any weather and misfired far less often. The lock plate, hammer, barrel and bands were finished bright, and the barrel was proved and stamped at the breech. The musket took a triangular Socket Bayonet of about 18 inches.

The Model 1842 is also a landmark in manufacturing. Harpers Ferry had been working toward interchangeable parts since the 1820s, and by the time the Model 1842 went into production both armories were building it to common gauges. A lock, band or trigger from Springfield fit a Harpers Ferry musket and the other way around, a point the Ordnance Department demonstrated by mixing parts from the two plants. Springfield made about 172,000 and Harpers Ferry about 103,000 before production ended in 1855, and a few contractors added small numbers.

The standard cartridge held a .65 inch round ball, or a "buck and ball" load of one ball and three buckshot. A smoothbore musket was effective to perhaps 100 yards against a single man, and buck and ball made it a deadly close-range weapon. In the 1850s the Army rifled about 14,000 of these muskets and fitted long-range rear sights so that they could fire the hollow-base Minié Ball, which stretched their reach to several hundred yards.

Service

The Model 1842 reached the regulars in time for the war with Mexico in 1846, though most volunteer regiments carried older flintlocks. In 1855 the Army adopted a .58 caliber rifle-musket, and the Model 1842 became a second-line arm. The American Civil War brought it back. In 1861 neither side had enough modern rifles, and tens of thousands of Model 1842s went to Union and Confederate regiments alike. The Confederate States took the muskets stored in southern arsenals and the machinery at Harpers Ferry. Men who carried smoothbores complained about them, yet in the brush of Shiloh and in the close fighting at the Battle of Gettysburg, where several veteran regiments still had them, buck and ball did real damage. As production of the Springfield Model 1861 caught up, the old muskets passed to garrison units, home guards and, in the South, to regiments that had nothing else.

Legacy

The Model 1842 closed the smoothbore era in American service and opened the age of true mass production. The interchangeable-parts methods proved on it became the "American system of manufactures" that let Springfield turn out more than a million rifle-muskets in four years of civil war. Surviving examples are common enough to be collected, and rifled and sighted guns are the scarcer and more valuable form. Many were cut down or sold cheaply after 1865, and a sporting "Zouave" conversion with a shortened barrel was a familiar farm gun on the frontier for decades.