During the Civil War, the Springfield Armory manufactured only one style of weapon – a strong, durable muzzle-loading percussion rifle. Private contractors developed and manufactured pistols, including revolvers, as well as all sorts of muzzle-loading and breech-loading shoulder arms. Yet the “Springfield” rifle musket, though slower to fire than the newer breech-loading designs, formed the mainstay of the Union armies – its accurate projectile delivered more than twice the energy of any breech-loading weapon then in existence. It could shoot farther and hit harder than most shoulder arms then in use.

Ironically, it was the talented and skilled U.S. Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, and the Superintendent of Harper’s Ferry Armory, James Burton, who from 1852 to 1857 were most responsible for the successful development of the US Model 1855 Rifle Musket. Davis, later President of the Confederate States, provided the leadership and organizational skills necessary to develop and adopt this weapon while Burton, later the Confederacy’s Superintendent of Richmond Armory, adapted the critical new bullet design from European patterns. Both came to face the bitter fruit of their genius when the cause they committed themselves to, the Confederate States of America, lay crushed beneath the tread of “Springfield”-armed Federal soldiers in 1865.

A typical “Springfield” US Model 1861 Rifle Musket weighed less than ten pounds and mounted a 40 inch muzzle-loading steel barrel in an iron-mounted Black Walnut wooden stock. The .58” caliber rifled barrel threw a 510-grain [about an ounce] conical lead bullet spinning accurately enough to hit a single enemy soldier sighted at 500 yards and less accurately at double that range. A paper tube containing both the bullet and measured charge of 60 grains of old-style gun powder [called black powder] was opened by the soldier and rammed down the barrel from the open muzzle, after first pouring in the powder, using an iron ramrod. When the spring-loaded pivoting hammer at the rear of the barrel was released from its full-cock position at the moment the soldier pulled the trigger, the hammer’s face struck a small copper cap containing a small amount of a pressure-sensitive compound, exploding it and sending a hot jet of flame into the steel tube on which it was mounted. That tube directed this priming fire into the main charge of black powder rammed deep within the rear [breech end] of the barrel. High pressure from the ignited main charge immediately forced the hollow base of the lead bullet into the spiral grooves cut along the length of the inside of the rifle barrel as the bullet was driven forward at nearly 1,000 feet per second. Handled by a well-trained soldier, the “Springfield” rifle musket could be loaded and fired at close to three shots a minute.

Preserving the Union