Spencer repeating rifle

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The Spencer repeating rifle was a manually operated falling block, repeating rifle fed from a tube magazine with cartridges. The Spencer replaced the Springfield rifle as the standard service rifle of the United States military. ^{[citation needed]}

1 Overview
2 History
3 See also
4 Notes
5 Sources
6 External links

[edit] Overview

The design was completed by Christopher Spencer in 1860 and was for a magazine-fed, lever-operated rifle chambered for the .56-56 rimfire cartridge. There was also a .56-50 version. These rimfire cartridges were made obsolete by the centerfire rounds coming into vogue^{[citation needed]}. Rimfire cartridge cases were not practical to reload, and reloading of ammunition was important to cost-conscious frontiersmen^{[citation needed]}. The Spencer cartridges were good for self defence or short range deer hunting, but too underpowered for really big game and too expensive for small game^{[citation needed]}. The Spencer carbine, a shorter and lighter version, was also developed. Like the Dreyse breech-loader, the firing system had to be independently primed: in this case, a lever had to be worked to extract the used shell and feed a new cartridge from the tube. The hammer then had to be manually cocked in a separate action. The weapon used brass rimfire cartridges stored in a seven-round tube magazine, enabling the rounds to be fired one after another. When empty the tube could be rapidly loaded either by dropping in fresh cartridges or from a device called the Blakeslee Cartridge Box, which contained up to ten tubes with seven cartridges each, which could be emptied in the magazine tube in the buttstock.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] History

The Spencer repeating rifle was adopted by the United States Army and used during the American Civil War. The South occasionally captured some of these weapons and ammunition, but, as they were unable to manufacture the cartridges, their ability to take advantage of the weapons was limited. Notable early instances of use included the Gettysburg Campaign, where two regiments of the Michigan Brigade (under Brig. Gen. George Armstrong Custer) carried them at the Battle of Hanover and at East Cavalry Field.^[1] As the war progressed, Spencers were carried by a number of cavalry and mounted infantry regiments and provided the Union army with additional firepower versus their Confederate counterparts.

In the late 1860s, the Spencer company was sold to the Fogerty Rifle Company and ultimately to Winchester. With almost 200,000 rifles and carbines made, it marked the first adoption of a removable magazine-fed infantry rifle by any country. Many Spencer rifles and carbines were later sold as surplus to France where they were used in the war against Germany in 1870.

Despite the fact that the rifle was no longer made since about 1867^{[citation needed]}, ammunition was sold in the United States up to about the 1920s. Cabela's recently sold some of the 56-50 ammunition so a few of the old rifles are still in use an incredible 136 or so years after the last new Spencers were sold^{[citation needed]}.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

^ Rummel III, George, Cavalry of the Roads to Gettysburg: Kilpatrick at Hanover and Hunterstown, White Mane Publishing Company, 2000, ISBN 1-57249-174-4.