American Rifle - Alexander Rose [59]
The decision to proceed with the muzzle-loading Model 1855 rifle-musket was a momentous one. But by following the path beaten by Europe’s armories, Ordnance ignored the trail blazed by America’s private gun-makers.
The most influential of these privately made arms in the pre–Civil War years was the Sharps, named after Christian Sharps, born in 1811 in New Jersey. A mechanic and machinist formerly employed at Hall’s Rifle Works, Sharps improved on his boss’s breech-loader by adding, among other things, a percussion-cap dispenser (for fast loading) and a platinum ring to reduce gas leakage at the breech.29 He also developed a cartridge containing powder and ball made out of linen, a definite advance over the easily damageable paper cartridges that troops had long used. These linen cartridges were self-consuming in that (unlike their paper predecessors, which were torn open and emptied down the muzzle) they were loaded in one piece at the opened breech and had their rears sheared off by closing the breechblock, thereby exposing the propellant and bullet to the flames unleashed by the hammer hitting the percussion cap. The linen would quickly burn—especially if it was soaked in nitrates—and little residue would be left in the chamber to foul the piece. It was completely different, conceptually, from the minié bullet.
During the early and mid-1850s the Sharps was enormously popular, but only among civilians, owing to the military’s fascination with muzzle-loading European rifle-muskets. A March 1850 article in Scientific American had captured many people’s attention. According to the writer, the Sharps was so simply constructed and so easy to use that a man with no previous weapons experience could fire it up to nine times a minute and place every bullet within a six-inch circle forty yards away.30 Practice made only more perfect: Sharps himself, it was said, could fire his invention eighteen times a minute.31 Even a total neophyte, however, could pick up a Sharps and stand a pretty good chance of hitting a malevolently inclined individual at least twice before he got too close for comfort.
Understandably, the Sharps became the weapon of choice for inexperienced settlers, jumpy officials, and nervous prospectors headed out to the faraway West. Helpfully, the coach lines used to give travelers coming from the East a lengthy itemized list of useful things to bring: occupying first place was “one Sharp’s [sic] rifle and a hundred cartridges.” (“Three or four towels” was figured the least important.)32
Professionals also relied on them. The half-dozen grizzled guards for the U.S. Mail coaches bumping over the hazardous trail between Santa Fe, El Paso, and San Antonio all carried Sharps rifles. They agreed with their boss, Henry Skillman, who had been a “frontier man for fourteen years,” that there “was no arm that in all its attributes begins to compare with the Sharps’ arm.”33
The Sharps mechanism made the gun so easy to use, anyone could fire it and stand a fairly good chance of hitting something—or someone. It became the preferred rifle of those heading, nervously, out West.
The Sharps received its biggest boost from the “Bleeding Kansas” clashes following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, when Senator Stephen Douglas declared that the inhabitants of the new territories ought to be allowed to determine for themselves whether to permit slavery. Soon afterward abolitionist (Free-Stater) and pro-slavery (Border Ruffian) guerrillas arrived to try to swing the vote either way.
The abolitionists were armed by the Emigrant Aid Society, and up to twelve hundred Sharps rifles were illicitly sent to Kansas. They were popularly known as “Beecher’s Bibles,” since the preacher Henry Ward Beecher (brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin) had reportedly told his congregants that while it was as pointless to read the Bible to slavers as it was to buffalo, the former nonetheless