25 Guns Civil War Soldiers Bought With Their Own Money — Because Army Guns Weren't Enough

[00:00:00]In 1861, the man in charge of arming the United States Army was General James Ripley, chief of the Ordinance Department. And Ripley had already made up his mind about repeating rifles. He called them new fangled gym cracks. He refused to test them. He refused to buy them. For 3 years, his offic's answer to every complaint from the field was the same singleshot musket. The soldiers answered him differently. Picture a Union sergeant in the autumn of 1863 counting out $40 in paper currency on a gunsmith's counter. Nearly 3 months of everything the army pays him. Spent on a rifle the army itself refuses to issue.

[00:00:45]He is not alone.

[00:00:47]Two states away, a farm family is doing the same arithmetic at their kitchen table, pooling what they have and shipping a rifle to the front so their son carries more than one shot before an enemy reloads his. At number 12 on this list is the revolver they bought when the ordinance department would not. A metallic cartridge repeater that reloaded in seconds while everyiss issued sidearm still needed loose powder and a percussion cap. At number seven is a privatelyowned target rifle. 30 lb of walnut and steel built to kill an officer at half a mile. At number one is the gun Ripley fought hardest to keep out of the war. The 16shot repeater Confederates came to call that damned Yankee rifle you load on Sunday and shoot all week. Ripley won that fight for 3 years. Then thousands of soldiers spending their own money made it irrelevant. Number 25, the Daringer pocket pistol.

[00:01:47]Henry Daringer worked out of a gun shop on Philadelphia's front street. And by the 1850s, his name had become the industry's most imitated trademark, copied, misspelled, and stamped onto other men's pistols by makers who had never met him. The pistol was a singleshot percussion piece, often under 4 in long. Its boar large enough to be lethal at three feet and useless past 10. It was not built for a battlefield.

[00:02:16]It was built for a pocket. Soldiers bought them anyway, quietly, the way a man buys insurance he hopes never to use. An officer whose saber had snapped.

[00:02:26]A cavalryman whose revolver had run dry.

[00:02:29]A private who wanted one more chance after every other chance was gone. These were the buyers, and none of them bought on the army's dime.

[00:02:38]The ordinance department did not issue hideout guns. It barely issued enough of anything. The same little pistol that rode in a Daringer boot holster in 1862 was 3 years later the pistol John Wilks Booth carried into Ford's theater. One shot, 4 in of steel. It killed a president the same way it was designed to kill anything at close range without warning and without a second chance to miss. By 1865, thousands of these pistols had crossed the war in vest pockets and coat sleeves, carried by men who never fired them, and men who fired them once. Most who bought one never had to use it. Buying it anyway was the entire point.

[00:03:24]Number 24, the Moore's Teat Fire revolver. Daniel Moore built his revolvers in Brooklyn, and he built them around a problem rather than an ambition. Smith and Wesson held the patent on a boardth through cylinder.

[00:03:37]The one design feature that let a metallic cartridge be loaded from the rear. Moore's answer was a strange front-loaded cartridge with a small protruding nipple.

[00:03:48]A teat in the language of the trade that let his little 32 caliber revolver fire a self-contained round without infringing on anyone's patent at all. It was not elegant. It worked for a soldier in 1862. That was the entire argument.

[00:04:08]The ordinance department was still issuing cap and ball revolvers that required loose powder, a ball, and a percussion cap seated by hand. Three separate motions performed under fire.

[00:04:20]Moore's revolver required a cartridge and a chamber. A man could reload it in the time it took another man to fumble for his powder flask. It was cheap, small enough to vanish into a coat pocket, and by every measure that mattered to an enlisted man on $13 a month, worth scraping together the money for, of not because the army wanted him to have it, but because the army had made it plain it would supply nothing like it. Moore sold tens of thousands before the patent dispute caught up with him in 1864.

[00:04:54]By then, the revolver had already done its work in a great many pockets. Number 23, the Allen and Welock pocket revolver in Worcester, Massachusetts. Ethan Allen had been building firearms since before the war was a possibility anyone discussed seriously, and by the time it arrived, his partnership with Thomas Welock was turning out modestly priced percussion revolvers by the thousand.

[00:05:22]These were not the guns the newspapers wrote about. They were not the guns generals carried. They were the guns a private could actually afford. A genuine cult cost more than many enlisted men saw in a season. An Allen and Welock cost a fraction of that. And it fired the same basic principle. Powder, ball, cap, cylinder, well enough to matter in a fight at close range. That difference in price was the entire difference in who carried one.

[00:05:54]Infantry revolvers were not something Washington supplied at all. A private who wanted a sidearm bought his own. And on $13 a month, he bought the one he could afford, not the one he admired.

[00:06:08]Allen and Welock and the dozens of small New England makers like them existed almost entirely to answer that math.

[00:06:16]Thousands of these modest revolvers went to war in the coat pockets of men the ordinance department had never intended to equip with a handgun at all. They were not celebrated. They were not particularly accurate past a few paces, but they were paid for, carried, and [clears throat] trusted by men who had decided that something was better than the singleshot musket standing between them and whatever came next. Number 22, the Colt. 1849 pocket revolver. Samuel Colt's factory in Hartford, Connecticut had built its reputation on the big revolvers, the Navy, the Dragoon. But the 1849 pocket model became something else entirely.

[00:07:01]The bestselling handgun Colt ever produced, a fivesshot 31 caliber revolver, small enough to disappear into a coat and light enough to forget you were carrying it. It was never an army gun and Washington never issued it. It was a personal purchase. Belent was a crystal pushki bought by men who wanted the cult name in a size that fit a pocket rather than a saddle holster. And during the war, it became one of the most common private sidearms on either side of the line.

[00:07:34]An officer bought one for the walk between his tent and the picket line.

[00:07:39]A soldier bought one because his brother had carried one and come home. Nearly every 1849 pocket that saw the war arrived there the same way, purchased outright or sent from home in a package with a letter, a token of a family's own private effort to arm a son the government had equipped with little more than a musket and a blanket roll. It rode in thousands of coat pockets from bullrun to appamatics, fired rarely, carried constantly. Most of its owners never needed it. All of them felt better for having spent the money on it. Number 21, the Colt 1862 police revolver.

[00:08:20]By the time Colt introduced the police model, the company was already watching the cartridge era arrive on the horizon, and this five-shot 36 caliber revolver was among the last percussion designs it would ever build in earnest. It carried a half-length cylinder, a slimmer profile than its predecessors, and a look that suited the men who bought it as much as the function it performed.

[00:08:48]Officers bought it. Not enlisted men scraping together a month's pay, but officers who wanted a sidearm that matched the rest of their uniform.

[00:08:59]Trim, wellfinished, the kind of revolver that looked correct on a dress belt as much as it performed in a fight. Nothing of the sort came from a government contract. An officer's sidearm was his own responsibility and his own expense. and the 1862 police let him spend that expense on refinement rather than raw firepower.

[00:09:24]It represents something larger than itself, an entire category of arms the ordinance department never issued and never intended to issue. Filled instead by men willing to pay for what the government would not provide.

[00:09:39]The singleshot musket, the standard issue rifle. These were the army's guns.

[00:09:47]The revolver on an officer's hip more often than not was his own. Number 20, the Leffue pinfire revolver. Here the story turns foreign. Everything else in this catalog so far was forged in Hartford or Worcester or some grimy shop off a New England river. This one was forged in Paris in the workshop of Eugene Leo, and it did not look like an American gun or work like one.

[00:10:16]Its cartridge carried its own priming compound sealed inside a brass case, and from the side of that case, a small metal pin protruded, waiting for the hammer to strike it down through the wall of the cylinder.

[00:10:31]No powder horn, no percussion cap fumbled between cold fingers under fire.

[00:10:37]Load it, close it, fire it, and reload again in seconds.

[00:10:43]A mechanical fact that seemed almost indecent in an army still measuring reloads in tens of seconds and dropped caps.

[00:10:53]Ships carried them across the Atlantic by the thousand during the war.

[00:10:58]And the United States government itself bought a share for its cavalry, unable to manufacture anything comparable at home.

[00:11:06]But the government's order was the smaller story. The larger one is the soldier who saw a leoshu in a dealer's case, understood exactly what the pin and the sealed cartridge meant, and paid for one out of his own pocket rather than wait for Washington to catch up with Paris. It was not the deadliest gun in this countdown, nor the best made.

[00:11:29]But for a few years of the war, it was one of the most modern handguns any American soldier could carry.

[00:11:36]Self-contained and cartridge-fed years before Hartford could offer the same thing. A man who carried one was, without knowing the word for it, carrying the future. Number 19, the Smith and Wesson. Number one.

[00:11:53]If the Leo was Europe's answer to the cartridge problem, the number one was America's first honest attempt at the same thing. It was tiny, a sevenshot.22 caliber revolver that could disappear inside a closed fist.

[00:12:10]And it was the first revolver built in the United States around a fully self-contained metallic cartridge.

[00:12:18]No powder measured by hand. No cap seated on a nipple with cold, shaking fingers in the dark. A soldier thumbmed a cartridge into the cylinder the way a man today loads a rifle, and that alone made it worth owning. Its weakness was obvious to anyone who fired one. A2 round did not stop a man the way a4 ball did, and no cavalry officer mistook the number one for a weapon of war. But soldiers bought it anyway by the thousand. As a private purchase, the army never contemplated issuing. It rode in coat pockets and boot tops as the gun a man reached for when speed mattered more than power. When the difference between a spent cylinder and a loaded one might be 5 seconds instead of 50.

[00:13:09]The number one did not win battles. It won moments. And in a war measured in single moments as often as in campaigns, that was reason enough to own one.

[00:13:19]Number 18, the Manhattan Navy Revolver.

[00:13:23]Not every soldier who wanted a colt could afford one. That fact alone built an entire industry, and the Manhattan Navy Revolver was its most successful product.

[00:13:35]A near exact copy of the Colt 1851 Navy, made not in Hartford, but in New York and New Jersey, priced low enough that a private on $13 a month could actually own one. Same balance in the hand, same 36 caliber cartridge, same six shots, a different name stamped on the barrel, and a considerably smaller dent in a soldier's pay. Colt's reputation was the product Colt sold hardest, and the Manhattan Arms Company understood that reputation was the one thing it could not copy. So, it undercut everything else instead.

[00:14:17]Tens of thousands of these revolvers went home in soldiers, kits, and trunks.

[00:14:22]Bought not because they were finer than a cult, but because they were close enough. And close enough was what $13 a month could buy. It is not a famous gun today and it was never meant to be one.

[00:14:35]Affordable was the only specification that mattered for men the government would not fully arm.

[00:14:43]Number 17, the star revolver. The Colt was a singleaction gun. [ __ ] the hammer, then pull the trigger. Two separate motions a man's thumb and finger had to remember under fire. The star revolver did not ask for two motions. A single long pull of the trigger both cocked the hammer and released it. And in a war fought as often at 10 ft as a 10 yards, that difference in a44 caliber revolver was not a technicality.

[00:15:16]It was speed a man could feel in his own hand. The army bought some stars outright, but plenty of cavalry men bought their own, paying extra for a mechanism that let them fire faster in the closing seconds of a saber charge than any colt in a comrade's holster. It was heavier than a colt, less elegant, and it never carried the same prestige.

[00:15:41]None of that mattered in the half second a double-action trigger pull could save.

[00:15:46]The star belonged to men who had already decided that a gun's reputation mattered less than what it could do for them in the specific narrow moment when speed was the only variable left to control.

[00:15:59]Number 16, the Whitney Navy Revolver.

[00:16:02]Eli Whitney Jr. built his revolver the way his father had built a reputation on the idea that a single forged piece was stronger than several pieces bolted together. The Colt's frame was open at the top, a design choice that saved weight and cost strength. The Whitney Navy's frame was solid, forged in one piece around the cylinder, a.36 caliber revolver that could take the abuse of a campaign without the top strap working loose the way a tired colts sometimes did. It was not glamorous. It carried no famous name into the history books, no generals endorsement, no engraved presentation case. What it carried was reliability at a reasonable price for soldiers who had learned to value a gun that worked over a gun that impressed.

[00:16:53]Thousands bought their own Whitneys for exactly that reason, judging the revolver on what it would do in month 11 of a campaign rather than how it looked on day one. The design did not disappear with the war.

[00:17:08]The solid frame that made the Whitney Navy sound wouldin become the standard the entire industry copied. Most famously by Remington, whose own revolvers would carry the idea forward long after Whitney's name had faded from the conversation. Number 15, the Ballard rifle. By 1861, the standard infantry musket took the better part of 20 seconds to load. Standing up, longer lying down, longer still with cold fingers in a fouled barrel. The Ballard did none of that. It broke open at the brereech, took a self-contained metallic cartridge, and closed again in a motion that took less time to perform than to describe.

[00:17:53]Accuracy was its reputation, and the reputation was earned.

[00:17:58]Target shooters before the war already knew the name. Soldiers learned it in the field. Kentucky bought some for home guard service, and a few other states followed suit. But the bulk of the ballards that saw the war were purchased the way most things on this list were purchased, by a man who had 30 or $40 saved or borrowed or sent from home, and no faith left in what the quartermaster was handing out. These were not men issued a rifle and told to make do. They were men who had decided individually that the muzzle loader in their hands was an insult to what they were being asked to do with it. The Ballard never became a household name the way the Sharps or the Spencer would. It did not need to. It found the men who cared most about hitting what they aimed at, and it stayed with them. Number 14, the Maynard Carbine. The Maynard tipped open at the brereech the way a shotgun does. Hinged forward, cartridge in, snapped shut.

[00:18:59]What made it unusual was the cartridge itself, a reusable brass shell that could be reloaded with powder and a new primer dozens of times over. An economy that appealed to a government always worried about waste, and to a soldier always worried about resupply. Target shooters loved its accuracy before the war ever started. The war only confirmed what they already suspected. For a man on a horse, the advantage was not abstract.

[00:19:29]A muzzle loading carbine on a moving animal was in practical terms a single shot and then a club. The mayard could be broken open, reloaded, and closed again without the rider ever fully dismounting from the business of controlling his horse. Cavalry men bought their own for exactly that reason, paying out of pocket for a mechanism the Ordinance Bureau was still treating as a novelty. It was simple. It was rugged. It asked almost nothing of the man using it under fire, and that more than any target range score was the quality soldiers were willing to pay for. Number 13, the Merwin and Bray Carbine. The Merwin and Bray Carbine never became a famous name, and it stands here as the reminder that most private purchase weapons of the war didn't. A leveraction breach loader chambered for a rimfire cartridge. It worked the way dozens of competing designs from small northern makers worked in those years. A lever brought the breach open. A cartridge went in.

[00:20:36]The lever closed it again. And the whole operation happened faster than a man could tear a paper cartridge with his teeth.

[00:20:44]Officers bought them. [clears throat] Mounted men bought them. They paid for the same thing every buyer on this list paid for. A self-contained cartridge and a breach that opened in a fraction of the time a muzzle took.

[00:21:00]The Merwin and Bray did not need to outshoot the sharps or outsell the Spencer. It only needed to be better than nothing. And the army, in the estimation of the men who carried it, was still offering something close to nothing. It stands here for a whole category the history books tend to skip past. The flood of small maker carbines, dozens of patents, thousands of units bought one gun at a time by men who had simply stopped waiting for Washington to modernize. Number 12, the Smith and Wesson number two Army. This is the one everyone secretly wanted. A.32 caliber revolver built around a self-contained metallic cartridge at a moment when nearly every issued sidearm in the Union Army still required loose powder poured down a chamber and a percussion cap seated by hand over a nipple. Reloading a Colt took a ram rod, a flask, a box of caps, and patience. Reloading a Smith and Wesson number two took seconds.

[00:22:02]Cartridges in, cylinder closed, done. It was never standard issue. The government never adopted it in any numbers worth mentioning, and it became regardless one of the most sought-after private purchase revolvers of the entire war.

[00:22:19]James Butler Hickok, Wild Bill, as the newspapers and later the myth would call him, carried one. And he was not a man who carried things carelessly.

[00:22:30]Kucky's cavalry bought over 700 of them on state contract, an unusually large institutional order for a gun the federal ordinance department had shown no interest in. But Kucky's contract was the exception. The vast majority of Smith and Wesson number TWs that went to war were bought the same way the Ballard and the Maynard were bought. One man, one revolver, his own money on the counter. What the little cartridge lacked in stopping power. It made up in speed. And in a fight measured in seconds, speed was the one thing the Army's cap and ball revolvers could never give. Number 11, the Frank Wesson two trigger carbine. It looked at a glance like a mistake. Two triggers on a singleshot carbine, the rear one small and set forward of the main trigger guard. It was not a mistake. The rear trigger unlocked the brereech, tipped the barrel down, and let a spent rimfire cartridge come out and a fresh one go in all in a motion quick enough that a man could perform it without thinking about his hands. It was light. It was compact.

[00:23:44]It asked for one cartridge at a time and gave it back to the shooter almost as fast as he could work the mechanism. It became one of the most popular privately purchased carbines of the war. And the men who bought it were disproportionately officers. Men who were by regulation already responsible for arming themselves and who had both the money and the motive to choose something better than what enlisted men were handed. A handy fast loading long arm paid for at their own expense was not a luxury to them. [clears throat] It was a hedge against exactly the moment they expected to face. Compact, quick, and reliable enough to trust in a close fight. The Frank Wesson Carbine belonged to men who had made a simple calculation. They were not going to ride into a fight carrying a single shot that took 20 seconds to reload when 30 or $40 could buy them something faster. Number 10, the Colt 1851 Navy revolver. By the regulations of both armies, an officer was expected to arm himself. The government issued him a sword, sometimes a saddle, and nothing more.

[00:24:58]What went in the holster was his own affair. paid for out of his own pocket.

[00:25:03]And for tens of thousands of officers in blue and in gray, that affair had one answer. A Colt Navy.36 caliber, six shots, walking out of a New England armory at a little over $20 and into the most photographed hip holster of the war. It was not the most powerful revolver a man could buy. It was the best balanced.

[00:25:28]Samuel Colt had built it lean. Seven and a half inches of octagonal barrel, a cylinder engraved with a naval battle scene, a weight that let a man draw, aim, and fire without his wrist fighting the gun the whole way. Officers who could afford it ordered engraving, ivory grips, silver plating, the kind of ornamentation that turned a sidearm into a calling card.

[00:25:55]The men who could not afford ornamentation bought the plane model and carried it just as proudly. It rode from First Manasses to Appamatics Courthouse on hips that never once received a government requisition for it. And that was the arrangement, unspoken, but universal. The army gave a man a rank and a rifle for the men under him. It did not give him a revolver if his life came down to six rounds at close range.

[00:26:21]The government's position was that this was between the officer and his conscience and his bank account. Number nine, the Colt 1860 Army revolver. Where the Navy was an officer's private taste, the Army model was on paper standard issue.44 caliber, six shots, the sidearm the ordinance department actually agreed to buy for Union cavalry by the 100,000.

[00:26:48]And yet officers who could have simply drawn one from the quarterm's crate went out and bought their own anyway at 13 to $20 a piece for a reason that had nothing to do with caliber and everything to do with trust.

[00:27:04]A government contract revolver was built to a tolerance, not to a standard.

[00:27:09]Wartime production at Colts Hartford Works ran around the clock. Inspectors passed what they had to pass, and the cylinder to barrel fit on a rack gun could be loose enough to waste a fraction of every charge as escaping gas. A man who bought his own army model bought the right to handle it first to feel the action. To choose the one whose lock work was tight and whose trigger broke clean, it was the heaviest hitting revolver most cavalrymen would ever fire, capable of dropping a horse at close range. And it stayed in holsters long after the surrender, carried west by veterans who had already decided at their own expense which one they trusted. The government had supplied the pattern. The men supplied the confidence. Number eight, the Remington 1858 New Army. Consider the flaw. The Remington was built to fix. Colt's revolvers were open topped. The barrel and cylinder held together by a single pin below. Nothing above but air. And under hard field use, that frame could flex, batter, and eventually fail.

[00:28:19]Remington's new model army closed the top. A solid strap of steel ran the length of the frame from hammer to barrel, and the whole revolver,44 caliber, six shots, was measurably stronger for it. It offered something the cult could not. A soldier who bought a spare cylinder already loaded with powder ball and cap could swap it into the frame in about 15 seconds and be back to six live rounds without touching a powder flask. Few quarter masters were issuing spare cylinders. Soldiers who wanted the advantage bought their own.

[00:28:56]Around $12 for the revolver and a few dollars more for the spare. William Cody, not yet Buffalo Bill, carried one through his own years of army scouting.

[00:29:07]And by the war's final year, the new model army had become the private purchase revolver of soldiers who had heard correctly that Samuel Colt's patent had expired, and Remington had built the better machine for it. Quarter masters kept requisitioning Colts anyway, out of habit and existing contracts. Men who had a say in the matter chose otherwise. Number seven, the Berdon sharpshooters target rifle.

[00:29:34]Here is the surprise. In the summer of 1861, Hyram Berdon began recruiting the deadliest marksmen the Union could find and told them at first to bring their own rifles.

[00:29:48]Not the standard infantry musket, not anything. The ordinance department had ever approved. Berdan wanted men who could put 10 shots into a 5-in circle at 200 yards. And the only guns capable of that kind of precision in 1861 were not military weapons at all. They were target rifles built for the civilian shooting matches that had become a minor sporting craze in the decade before the war. The men who answered Berdon's call arrived at Camp of Instruction carrying guns that had never seen a battlefield and were never designed to. Some weighed 30 lb or more, too heavy to march with, built instead to be fired from a rest or lying prone. The barrel octagonal and impossibly long. The stock checkered walnut fitted by a target gun maker back home. Bolted to the top of many of them ran a telescopic sight, brass tubed, a technology so far outside the army's imagination that most quarter masters had never seen one. A man with one of these rifles, steadied and sighted, could hit a man at half a mile. Not a musk ball fired in the general direction of a mass of men. A single aimed chosen shot at a single chosen man. These were not weapons of an army. They were the private instruments of hunters and competition shooters carried to war because the war for the first time offered a target worth that kind of patience. A colonel on a distant ridge, a general conferring with his staff, could be killed by a man he never saw from a rifle the government had not bought and did not understand before the sound of the shot ever reached him.

[00:31:30]Number six, the Sharps rifle. The word sharpshooter existed in English before Christian Sharps ever built a gun, but by 1862, the two had become nearly synonymous, and that was the rifle's own doing. It was a singleshot breach loader. The block dropped. A linen cartridge slid into an open chamber. The block closed and a man could fire it lying flat on his stomach. Something no muzzle loader would ever allow. Where a soldier standing to reload a musket made himself a target. A soldier working a sharps stayed low, invisible, and got three aimed shots to the muzzle loaders.

[00:32:10]One. Berdan's own regiments were eventually issued sharps rifles by the army, breach loading, and accurate enough to answer most of the complaints the men had brought from their private target guns. But issue never satisfied everyone. Officers and marksmen who wanted the finest example, chambered a touch more precisely, cited a touch more finely, bought civilian target versions out of their own pay.

[00:32:37]$30 to $45.

[00:32:40]close to a private's full month's wages for a rifle that would earn it back the first time it mattered.

[00:32:47]It was not the heaviest gun in this countdown.

[00:32:51]It was not the strangest. It was not even the most expensive. It was simply the rifle that made the word [clears throat] mean something.

[00:33:00]Carried by men who had learned that in this war, the soldier who reloaded lying down outlived the soldier who had to stand up. Number five, the Witworth rifle. Here is the impossible one. The Witworth was British, designed by the engineer Joseph Witworth for a target range, not a battlefield. And it did something no muzzle loader in North America could do. Its barrel was not round. It was hexagonal, a twisting six-sided bore that gripped a hexagonal bullet and spun it with a precision no smooth boore or standard rifle could match. At 800 yards, it was accurate. At 1,000 yards, a range at which most infantry weapons of the war could not reliably hit a barn. A trained man with a witworth could hit another man. The Confederate government could not supply enough of them, so its officers and its sharpshooter units did what soldiers on both sides had already learned to do.

[00:33:59]They bought their own.

[00:34:01]A Witworth run through the Union blockade cost over $1,000 in gold, a sum that would have taken a Confederate private the better part of a decade to earn in a currency few still trusted by then. The men who carried one were not issued marksmen. They were investors in their own. In May of 1864 at Spennsylvania, Union General John Sedwick stood at an exposed stretch of the line and told his nervous staff that the Confederates could not hit an elephant at this distance. A Witworth marksman positioned far beyond what Sedwick believed possible proved him wrong within moments. The rifle that killed him was never recovered. The man who fired it was never identified. Both remain a century and a half later exactly where a private purchase left them. Anonymous and devastatingly accurate. Number four, the Lamat revolver. If a soldier wanted two guns in the space of one, this was the answer. Jean Alexandre Lami, a French-born physician turned inventor working out of New Orleans, built a Nshot 42 caliber revolver with an ordinary cylinder and then running through the center of that cylinder, a second barrel loaded with a single blast of buckshot, nine pistol rounds, one shotgun shell. A flip of the hammer's nose selected which one fired. No other sidearm carried into the war offered that particular combination of reach and last resort violence in a single frame.

[00:35:34]The Confederacy could not manufacture anything like it. So the Limat came out of Paris and Leazge smuggled through the blockade at roughly $35 a piece. And the men who carried it were almost without exception the ones who could afford to buy their own future. General JB Stewart carried one. General PGT Bogard carried one. Both men had reputations to protect and both had concluded that the revolvers issued to Confederate cavalry were not worth trusting with either.

[00:36:07]Every Lamat in the war was a private purchase. There was no other kind.

[00:36:12]Richmond never had the industrial base to produce one and never seriously tried, which meant the most advanced, most expensive revolver a Confederate officer could own, arrived the same way the Witworth did.

[00:36:25]On a ship built to slip past the Union Navy in the dark, carrying among its more ordinary cargo the personal sidearms of men who intended to outspend the war rather than survive it on issue equipment. Number three, the Colt model 1855 revolving rifle.

[00:36:45]Samuel Colt had built his fortune on the revolver. The 1855 was his attempt to put that same revolving cylinder into a long gun. And for a few strange years in the middle of the century, it was one of the only repeating rifles a soldier could buy at any price. The mechanism gave an infantryman five or six shots before he had to reload. At a moment when the man standing across the field from him was still measuring powder for his first. Some state militias and a handful of Union regiments were issued the 1855 outright.

[00:37:20]But plenty of officers and enlisted men who wanted more than one shot simply bought their own. And they bought it knowing exactly what they were risking.

[00:37:29]The revolving rifle had a flaw. The revolving pistol did not. Loose powder sitting in the front chambers of the cylinder could catch a spark from the chamber firing beside it. And when that happened, every chamber went off at once, not toward the enemy, but out sideways into the supporting hand of the man holding the rifle. Soldiers who carried one learned to keep that hand well clear of the cylinder gap, a habit that became quietly a permanent part of how the gun was used. It was dangerous.

[00:38:02]It was expensive and for a stretch of years before the Spencer and the Henry arrived, it was the only way a foot soldier could put more than one shot into a fight without reloading. And men paid for that privilege anyway, chain fire and all. Number two, the Spencer repeating rifle. The Spencer did what the Witworth and the Colt revolving rifle could only gesture toward. It was a sevenshot lever action rifle firing a self-contained metallic cartridge, meaning a soldier worked a lever, chambered a new round, and fired again seven times while the man in front of him was still tearing open a paper cartridge for his first shot. President Lincoln himself test fired one on the White House grounds. The ordinance department was not delighted. General Ripley resisted the Spencer the way he resisted every repeater that crossed his desk. Too expensive, too wasteful of ammunition. Too great a burden on the army supply wagons. Colonel John Wilder did not wait for Ripley to change his mind. His mounted infantry brigade wanted Spencer's badly enough that when the army dragged its feet, the men arranged their own financing, borrowing against their own pay to buy the rifles at roughly $35 each, close to 3 months of a private's wages, from a bank willing to extend the credit. At Hoover's Gap, Tennessee in June of 1863, Wilders's brigade met a Confederate force that outnumbered it and broke it in an engagement that lasted a fraction of the time a musket fight of that scale should have taken. The math was simple enough for anyone standing on that field to understand without being told. Seven shots against one repeated down an entire firing line was not an incremental advantage. It was a different war bought on credit by men whose own government had refused to arm them for it. Number one, the Henry rifle. This is the one they warned you about at the beginning. The rifle Confederates learned to call that damned Yankee rifle you load on Sunday and shoot all week. Benjamin Tyler. Henry's 16shot lever action repeater fired a 044 rimfire cartridge from a tubular magazine beneath the barrel. And it needed no percussion caps, no paper cartridges, none of the 20 seconds of fumbling a standard issue muzzle loader demanded of every man who carried one. A soldier worked the lever. The rifle fired. He worked it again 16 times before he had to stop and feed the tube from the muzzle end. [clears throat] General Ripley fought this rifle harder than almost any other repeater that crossed his desk. It was too expensive to manufacture at the scale the army required, too wasteful of ammunition for men he assumed would burn through it carelessly, and too great a burden on a supply system already straining to keep muzzle loaders fed. The ordinance department never issued it. Not in 1862.

[00:41:21]Not in 1863, not for the rest of the war. So the men who wanted one bought it. At $40 to $50, a Henry cost nearly 4 months of a private pay, more than almost any other private purchase in this entire countdown. And soldiers found the money anyway.

[00:41:41]Some spent their reinlistment bounties the day they were paid. Some had wives, fathers, and younger brothers back home pull what cash the household had, wrap it, and mail a Henry rifle to the front the way another family might mail a coat or a Bible. The arithmetic was not subtle. A single soldier with a Henry could put out the sustained firepower of 16 men armed with musketss, and entire Confederate units learned to dread a Union line where even a handful of men were carrying one. The rifle Ripley called too expensive and too wasteful became within a few years of Appamatics the direct ancestor of the Winchester that would arm the American West.

[00:42:29]The government had refused to pay for it. The men who carried it paid for it themselves, and it outlived the war, the ordinance department, and General Ripley's objections by more than a century. The math never changed. A singleshot muzzle loader was cheap to make and cheap to feed. And cheap was the deciding factor for an ordinance department fighting a war on a budget it never stopped worrying about. Repeaters cost more to build, ate more ammunition, and asked more of an already overwhelmed supply system. Rip's arithmetic was not irrational.

[00:43:09]It was simply indifferent to what happened to the man standing in an open field with 20 seconds between shots. So, the men who wanted to come home bought their way around it. They bought a revolver that reloaded with a metallic cartridge while the man beside them still poured powder by hand. They bought a target rifle heavy enough to need a rest, built to kill at half a mile before the enemy could see who was shooting.

[00:43:37]They bought at nearly 4 months pay the 16shot rifle their own government called wasteful and their enemies called damned.

[00:43:46]Most of the guns in this countdown have long since gone quiet, sold, melted, lost to a century and a half of attics and estate sales and museum storooms.

[00:43:57]But somewhere behind glass in a collector's cabinet or under lamp light on a gunsmith's counter, a Henry rifle still sits with its brass frame worn smooth at the lever by a hand that paid for it himself. The tube beneath the barrel still capable after all this time of taking 16 rounds.