American Civil War When the Spencer rifle was made available for adoption right after the
American Civil War broke out, the view by the
Department of War Ordnance Department was that soldiers would waste ammunition by firing too rapidly with repeating rifles, and thus denied a government contract for all such weapons. (They did, however, encourage the use of breech-loading
carbine, which is also single-shot like most firearms of the day but faster to reload than
cap and ball muskets, but is shorter than standard rifles and thus more suited to mounted warfare) More fundamentally, they feared that the Army's logistics train would be unable to provide enough ammunition for the soldiers in the field, as they already had grave difficulty bringing up enough ammunition to sustain armies of tens of thousands of men over distances of hundreds of miles. A weapon able to fire several times as fast would require a vastly expanded logistics train and place great strain on the already overburdened railroads and tens of thousands of more mules, wagons, and wagon train guard detachments. Its unit cost (several times that of a
Springfield Model 1861 rifled musket) also stood in the way. However, shortly after the July 1863
Battle of Gettysburg, Spencer was able to gain an audience with President
Abraham Lincoln, who invited him to a shooting match and demonstration of the weapon on the lawn of the
White House. Lincoln was deeply impressed with the weapon, and ordered Gen.
James Wolfe Ripley to adopt it for production. Ripley disobeyed the order and continued to use the old single-shooters, causing him to be replaced as head of the Ordnance Department later that year. The
Confederates occasionally captured some of these guns and their ammunition, but, as they were unable to manufacture the cartridges because of their dire copper shortage, their utilization of the weapons was limited. Notable early instances of use included the
Battle of Hoover's Gap (where
Colonel John T. Wilder's "Lightning Brigade" of mounted infantry effectively demonstrated the firepower of repeaters), and the
Gettysburg campaign, where two
regiments of the
Michigan Brigade (under
Brigadier General George Armstrong Custer) carried them at the
Battle of Hanover and at
East Cavalry Field. As the war progressed, Spencers were carried by a number of Union cavalry and mounted infantry regiments and provided the Union army with a firepower advantage over their Confederate opponents. At the
Battle of Nashville, 9,000 mounted infantrymen armed with the Spencer, under the command of Maj. Gen.
James H. Wilson, chief of cavalry for the Military Division of the Mississippi, rode around Gen.
John Bell Hood's left flank and attacked from the rear. President Lincoln's assassin
John Wilkes Booth was armed with a Spencer carbine at the time he was captured and killed. The Spencer showed itself to be very reliable under combat conditions, with a sustainable rate-of-fire in excess of 20 rounds per minute. Compared to standard muzzle-loaders, with a rate of fire of 2–3 rounds per minute, this represented a significant tactical advantage. However, effective tactics had yet to be developed to take advantage of the higher rate of fire. Similarly, the supply chain was not well prepared enough to transport the extra ammunition. Detractors also complained that the amount of smoke produced was such that it was hard to see the enemy, which was not surprising since even the smoke produced by muzzleloaders would quickly blind whole regiments, and even divisions as if they were standing in thick fog, especially on still days. One of the advantages of the Spencer was that its ammunition was waterproof and hardy, and could stand the constant jostling of long storage on the march, such as
Wilson's Raid. The story goes that every round of paper and linen
Sharps ammunition carried in the supply wagons was found useless after long storage in supply wagons. Spencer ammunition had no such problem owing to the new technology of metallic cartridges. In the late 1860s, the Spencer company was sold to the Fogerty Rifle Company and ultimately to
Winchester. Many Spencer carbines were later sold as surplus to France where they were used during the
Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Even though the Spencer company went out of business in 1869, ammunition was manufactured in the United States into the 1920s. Later, many rifles and carbines were converted to
centerfire, which could fire cartridges made from the centerfire
.50-70 brass. The original archetype of rimfire ammunition can still be obtained on the specialty market.
Use by cavalry Argentina purchased 500 carbines between 1865 and 1869. They were issued to the Argentine cavalry (Specially the President's Escort Squadron) and a few to the Navy; and were used against natives. In 1867 Brigadier General James F. Rusling of the Quartermaster's Department recommended cavalry exclusively use the carbine against mounted Indian raiders, after completing a one-year tour of the new western territories. In September 1868 Major Frederick A. Forsyth led a small force of veterans, an "elite mounted attack-and-pursuit force", and came into heavy contact with a superior number of Cheyenne warriors led by Roman Nose. The battle is known as the
Battle of Beecher Island. Forsyth's band was armed with Spencer repeating carbines and 150 rounds of .56-50 Spencer cartridges per weapon. Forsyth and his men were able to hold off and turn away a vastly larger force. It is claimed that this was largely due to the "rapid firepower of the seven-shot Spencer carbines." In the summer of 1870–1871 Chilean cavalry adopted the rifles, a change that substantially increased military disparity with the indigenous
Mapuche who were
at war with Chile. An example of this was
Quilapán's warriors' attack on Chilean cavalry on January 25, 1871, when mounted Mapuche warriors were armed with
spears and
bolas. The Mapuches panicked as they did not expect a second round of shots, and casualties among them were high. These are found to be chambered in .56-50 Centerfire, but it is unknown if they were produced like this or converted in Brazil. ==See also==