The Man
Ambrose Burnside was a man of impressive hirsuteness who managed to stand out among his peers, facial-hair-wise, in a time when grotesque facial hair was in fashion. He was also a general in the United States Army, although his record there was rather less than stellar. But what a lot of people don’t know about the man from whom we derive the term “sideburns” is that he was a gun designer.
Ambrose Burnside was born in 1824 in Liberty, Indiana, to Edghill and Pamela Burnside. Interestingly, young Ambrose attended Liberty Seminary but left after his mother's death, instead apprenticing with a tailor. In 1843, he won an appointment to West Point, graduating 18th of 47 in 1847 with a brevet as a second lieutenant in the artillery.
Burnside resigned from the Army in 1853 and got right into the gun-designing business. To that end, he founded what would become the Burnside Rifle Company to build his novel breech-loading carbine. That carbine, which would prove to be a middling success, was, by our modern standards, a bit odd.
The Design
The Burnside carbine, made in the infancy of self-contained brass cartridges, was an odd duck even for the day: A single-shot breechloader that loaded from the front, and a self-contained cartridge that wasn’t, as it lacked a primer and had to be ignited by a percussion cap. General Burnside deliberately shied away from primed cases, deeming them unsafe; history has shown us that he was surely in the minority in that opinion.
But Burnside’s new carbine did have a few advantages over the more common front-stuffing rifle-muskets the Army was using in the 1850s, as well as some other early breechloaders. The brass cartridge did something that the paper or linen cartridges then in use in breechloaders like the Sharps didn’t, and that was to form a tight gas seal between breechblock and barrel. The cartridge was tapered, down from the bullet, and had a ring around the case a tad back from the mouth. This, when the breechblock was closed, prevented the escape of hot gases; getting a faceful of hot gas from a leaky black-powder breechloader can be off-putting.
The gun had two trigger guards. Pressing both levers allowed the user to rotate them downward, which in turn rotated the breechblock upward to access the chamber from the front. The shooter could then insert a cartridge, close the breech, place a standard percussion cap on the nipple, and be ready to proceed with operations.
The cartridge was .54 caliber, a bit smaller than the .58 caliber bore size in use with the Army’s standard-issue 1861 Springfield muzzle-loading rifled musket. Reliable information on ballistics doesn’t seem to be available.
It was an interesting piece at an interesting time for gun development, a time when a lot of old designs were giving way to new ones.
See Also: Sunday Gun Day Vol. II Ep. XLIV - A 'High Capacity' First, the Evans Rifle
The Guns
Ambrose Burnside went to the Army with his carbine. In a competition at West Point in 1857, the Burnside was one of 18 carbine designs tested. At first, the Army wasn’t overly impressed, but then 1861 rolled around. The Army ordered 55,000 Burnside carbines for use by the cavalry, alongside the Sharps and Spencer carbines. There were five models made:
The First Model, which was basically a run of prototypes; only 50 were made.
The Second Model, using the .54-caliber brass cartridge. This model finalized the action and the locking system, which was based on an 1860 patent by one George P. Foster. This version was made in 1861 and 1862, being the first version to see wartime service.
The Third Model involved only minor cosmetic changes. All Third Model guns were made in 1862; the number of those guns is not clear.
The Fourth Model improved, again, the action and locking mechanism. About 7,000 of these were made in 1863 and 1864.
Finally, the Fifth Model was different than the Fourth Model only in having a guide screw that improved the operation of the breech during cycling of the action. This was the final design, and between 1863 and 1865, the Burnside Rifle Company built 43,000 of these. Each Burnside rifle was hand-fitted at the factory, and the guns had a good reputation for smooth operation; it was, however, that odd cartridge that did them in.
What Happened Then?
Post-Civil War developments in cartridges rendered the Burnside carbine moot. Its front-loading design precluded the self-contained cartridges that became standard, those being a primed cartridge designed to be loaded into a chamber from the rear. Guns like the powerful brass-cartridge Sharps, along with the repeating Spencer, Henry, and Winchester designs, shoved the Burnside design aside. In fact, the Burnside carbine wasn’t even manufactured until the end of the Civil War, as the Burnside Rifle Company was instead given a contract to build repeating Spencer rifles.
See Also: Sunday Gun Day Vol. II Ep. X - the Spencer Repeating Rifle
The mid-19th century was a fun time to be a shooter. The advent of the self-contained brass cartridge made for an explosion of gun designs, some of which, like the 1866 Winchester, went on to represent the first of a type that would sell in the millions. Others, like the stock-loaded Spencer repeater and the oddball Burnside carbine, would turn out to be a flash in the pan. The Burnside, in particular, you can, today, find replicas of the Spencer today. I have one. But nobody has made a replica of the Burnside, and with that oddball cartridge, it’s doubtful anyone ever will.
As for General Burnside, the carbine was his only foray into designing guns – that we know of, at any rate. After the war, he held the presidency of several railroads and manufacturing plants, including the Cairo and Vincennes Railroad and the Rhode Island Locomotive Works. He was evidently better and making locomotives than at designing guns and proved adept enough at running a railroad to get himself elected to three terms as Governor of Rhode Island. He also went to Europe in 1870 and tried to mediate an end to the Franco-Prussian War, which he followed up by being appointed as a United States Senator from Rhode Island, a post he held until he died in 1881.
Thus came the end of the man whose grotesque facial hair gave us the term “sideburns,” and whose one gun design was better than generally accepted, but too divergent from what became the norm to be successful. But there are a few of his pieces still around, even if ammo for them isn't available, and were old Ambrose around today, he may well prefer to be remembered for that than for the attempt to take Marye's Heights.
