Civil War Replica Rifles by Jastro Historic Armory

Civil War Replica Rifles:
P 1853 British 'Enfield' Rifled Musket
M 1855 U. S. Revolving Rifle
M 1860 Henry Repeating Rifle

   The first army muskets - old smoothbores, went west with Lewis and Clark. For over half a century there was a little change in this arm. The first modern weapon used by Union troops was the 1855 rifle musket designed to take a Minie ball of the type invented in France to make loading rifled weapons easier. The rifle also used the Maynard percussion system, which was much efficient. The Springfield rifle musket, developed from the 1855 musket, which was expensive to produce, is the weapon most closely associated with American infantrymen of Union forces in the Civil War. The Springfield Armoury in Massachusetts began turning out massive quantities of these rifles in 1861. However, when the Civil War broke out, neither the North nor the South was prepared to engage in a major war. Decades of relative peace had left limited stockpiles of small arms--the rifles and handguns carried by individual soldiers. As tens of thousands of men volunteered to fight alongside their friends and neighbors, those arms stockpiles were quickly exhausted. Both Union and the Confederacy dispatched agents to Europe to produce arms to supplement domestically produced weapons. Many rifles were imported from Germany and France but the most serviceable and popular imported rifles were British Enfield rifle muskets. By the middle of the Civil War it was estimated that half of the Union troops were armed with Enfield rifles. What made this weapon popular was that its caliber was almost identical to the domestically produced Springfield rifle musket. The same ammunition could be used for both weapons.                                

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