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n the middle 1860s as William Winchester walked to his office at the shirt factory each morning,he presumed his father’s investments in the arms industry were purely the whim of a wealthy man. About eight years earlier, Oliver Winchester had invested cash accrued from the Winchester & Davies Shirt Manufactory in a promising but weak Volcanic Repeating Arms Company, which produced a repeating revolver with “volcanic” firing power that was primarily designed by two of the company’s principals, Horace Smith and Daniel Wesson.The company was mismanaged, and when it went bankrupt , Oliver Winchester, as a board member, was in a position to purchase the firm’s machinery,backlog,and patents.The shrewdWinchester struck a good bargain,and his investment of $40,000 for assets valued at $57,000 paid off Volcanic’s debts.As Smith and Wesson went on to form their own successful enterprise, Oliver Winchester established the New Haven Arms Company. Winchester hired a mechanic from his shirt factory, Benjamin T. Henry,1 who proved a remarkable gunsmith. Henry translated the concept of the volcanic revolver to a rifle and succeeded in designing the first repeating rifle. Its single barrel held multiple rounds of ammunition from a magazine that loaded from the bottom. It could fire off fifteen shots in just over ten seconds.2 Dubbed the“Henry,”it was the first of its kind and was patented in 1860. Advertisements offered “Henry’s Repeating Rifles” for $42, along with the traditional carbines, muskets, and shotguns.3 Oliver Winchester was elated and began calculating how to increase production. With the nation teetering on the brink of civil war, Winchester was aggressively peddling Henry’s repeating rifle to military ordnance officials , who were then furnishing soldiers with single-shot carbines. Winchester believed the repeaters would give an edge to the Union Chapter 3 “The Gun That Won the West” p 39 I 40 / captive of the labyrinth Army,and he was certain that government contracts would pay off handsomely .Winchester pestered Union military officers to purchase repeating rifles for infantry troops,proposing an initial delivery of 40,000 rifles. One brigadier general was strictly opposed to purchasing anything but standardized weaponry,arguing,“A great evil now especially prevalent in regard to arms for the military service is the vast variety of new inventions , each having, of course, its advocates, insisting on the superiority of his favorite arm over all others and urging its adoption by the Government. . . . we must adhere to the rule of uniformity of arms for all troops.”The general advocated “arms for all troops of the same kind.” Many officials believed the repeater was experimental and unreliable. And in fact, early models did have serious drawbacks: exposure to mud and rain caused their magazines to rust and their cartridges to jam. Mechanics at the New Haven Arms Company worked feverishly to solve the problems by redesigning the loading system. But officers decided against Henry’s repeaters, instead purchasing an estimated 1.5 million muzzle-loading muskets, mostly the single-shot Springfields or Sharps. This line of thinking confounded Winchester, who wondered in a company memo, “Where is the military genius that is to grasp this whole subject?”4 The single-shot muskets had their own drawback in that they required a high level of manual dexterity, which was seriously lacking in many new recruits. The muskets also required time, precious seconds and minutes that could cost a man his life. Sarah Winchester’s brother-in-law Homer Sprague wrote an account of the performance of Sharps rifles in an 1863 battle at Irish Bend, Louisiana: Nothing . . . is more difficult than to load and fire advancing without breaking into hopeless confusion. Here the rigid drilling we had received, and the perfect confidence we had in our success, sustained us, notwithstanding the shower of missiles that drove in our faces. . . . Our five hundred men were in the midst of three thousand rebels.All seemed lost. Suddenly, however, from the gleaming rifles of our advancing line, there poured a steady stream of lead, every man loading and firing three times a minute,and the twenty or thirty shots per second making with the answering fire of the rebel line a prolonged and tremendous roar.5 Interestingly, Sprague’s detailed journal of more than three years of war service never mentioned a repeater, and he was related by marriage to the repeating-rifle company’s owner. Sprague may have agreed with the general who wished to maintain...

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