Early “Assault Rifles”: Revolutionary War-era Breechloaders and Repeaters
We’re accustomed to thinking of semi-automatic rifles with 30-round magazines as a recent development, as still being the new, modern thing. A lot of people still think of them in such a way, even though semi-automatic rifles date back to the late 19th century, and high-capacity magazines are even older than that.
There were practical issues with those earlier guns. To function properly, a semi-auto has to have reasonably tight manufacturing tolerances, which was difficult to achieve on scale until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But more than that, the problem lay in propellants and priming; black powder is messy, and while a single-shot front-stuffer can keep running for quite a few shots and even a breechloader can keep working as long as the action can be pried open, the first few attempts at autoloaders had to deal with that problem of fouling. Also, until about 1840, guns depended on the flintlock mechanism for ignition, which usually had a priming powder pan that required recharging for each shot.
Gun trivia: I never tried it, but when I was a teenager and just getting into black powder shooting, an old man who lived in our neck of the woods told me how to deal with a buildup of black powder fouling in a rifle barrel. “Just pee down the barrel,” he told me, “and then run a few clean cloth patches through it.”
I never had the nerve to try it.
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Of these early attempts, though, two stand out: One single-shot breechloader and one semi-automatic weapon. The first, the breechloader, was around at the time of the American Revolution; that would be the Ferguson rifle.
This was a reasonable affair for the time. Designed by Major Patrick Ferguson of the British Army in 1770, the gun was a single-shot breechloader that used a threaded breech plug. To open the breech, one used the trigger guard, which doubled as a crank. One complete rotation of the trigger guard dropped the breech plug to expose the breech, into which the shooter then dropped one standard .615” carbine ball, followed by a charge of powder. Then, one primed the pan as in a muzzle-loader, and then the shooter was ready to commence operations.Needless to say, this resulted in a rate of fire quite a bit higher than a standard Brown Bess muzzle-loader, and with a rifled barrel to boot. During testing for the British Army, Major Ferguson fired six shots a minute while standing, and four shots per minute while advancing at the walk. For the time, that was an incredible rate of fire, and the Ferguson had an effective range of 400 yards on a man-sized target, to boot.
The British Army flirted with the Ferguson. About a hundred were made by four different arsenals, but in the end, the Army didn’t adopt it for general use.
That’s probably fortunate for the United States, as the outcome of the Revolution may have been different if the general run of British troops had been armed with Ferguson breechloaders.
But the Ferguson was complicated by the standards of the day, difficult to mass-produce, and they proved to be fragile in practical use. Also, the gun fouled rapidly, and unlike the good old Brown Bess, cleaning the Ferguson meant disassembling the gun.
But before the Ferguson, there was an even more remarkable rifle: The Kalthoff, designed around 1630, and it was a flintlock repeater with a capacity of up to 30 rounds.
Yes, really.
The Kalthoff family is credited with the design; it’s not clear which member of the family put quill to parchment to figure out the design, but at least 19 gunsmiths and small armories produced variants of the Kalthoff repeaters.How they worked is interesting, and would seem broadly familiar to modern American shooters. The guns typically used a sliding rectangular breech block with two or three chambers. A tubular magazine under the barrel held round lead balls, while the powder magazine was in the stock. To operate the piece, one held the gun muzzle-up and rotated the trigger guard to the right. This deposited the ball and powder into the breech and cocked the gun. When the trigger guard was returned, the breechblock would bring the breechblock back into battery. Some guns had a dingus that charged the priming pan as well.
This was, for its time, a remarkable piece of equipment when it worked. But it was expensive, complex, requiring a lot of careful hand-fitting in the manufacture and a lot of tender loving care in the field. What’s more, just as with the Ferguson, it was susceptible to gumming up with black powder fouling.
Why Did Armies Not Use Them?
As noted, these, even the single-shot Ferguson, were, for the time, complex, expensive, and fragile. Like another flintlock repeater, the Collier revolver, they weren’t practical for heavy use in the field, although a Collier revolver on the British brig Corvo may well have inspired a young man named Samuel Colt in the design of his first sidearm.
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Still, the technology of the time limited these pieces to being a fancy, rich man’s toy. In our revolution, there’s no evidence that either arm was used by either side, other than one possible trigger guard that may have been from a Ferguson breech loader, found in the remains of a British encampment.
What Happened?
These were guns that were well ahead of their time. Their complexity and delicacy – again, for the time – rendered them impractical for martial use. But they remain as fascinating examples of the gunmaker’s art, and it’s not unlikely that the Ferguson in particular may have provided some inspiration for later single-shot falling-block breechloaders like the Sharps, or even repeaters like the Spencer.
But imagine a British Army, in the field in 1777, armed with a functional breechloading carbine with a rifled barrel – or better, imagine the Continental army so armed. It would have yielded whichever side had them a considerable advantage, and that’s for sure and for certain. And today, with modern steels and manufacturing techniques, it would certainly be possible to make a more reliable and more robust replica of one of these guns. That, right there, is something that might make me reach for my toy fund cash, just to see what shooting one of these would be like.
