Load the Hopper and Turn the Crank: Rapid-Fire Guns of the Civil War
By Joseph G. Bilby

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Doctor Richard Gatling ecstatically received the reports that were being sent from the Petersburg, Virginia, front regarding his eponymous weapon, a rapid-firing six-barreled beast. The “Gatling Gun” had become a favorite weapon of Major General Benjamin Butler, and Gatling enthusiastically wrote that “Ben Butler took the guns… to the Battle of Petersburg and fired them himself upon the rebels. They created great consternation and slaughter, and the news of them went all over the world….”

Gatling was engaging in a bit of exaggeration, of course, but his weapon and others similar to it did lay the gory groundwork for “great consternation and slaughter” on future battlefields. For hundreds of years before the Civil War, the typical infantryman carried a cumbersome musket that he could load and fire two to three times a minute under the best of circumstances. Inventors had tried to produce weapons that could be loaded from the breech and fired rapidly, but fragile paper cartridges and glitchy matchlock and flintlock ignition systems hampered the development of such guns.

By the mid-19th century, however, the introduction of percussion ignition and metallic cartridges increased the potential of such weapons. Such developments, coupled with the outbreak of the Civil War, invigorated American inventors’ interest in multiple-round weapons. The rapid-fire rifled caliber arms introduced during the Civil War were not true machine guns, since they did not use recoil or gas from the firing of one cartridge to load and fire another round like the automatic guns in service a half-century later, but the weapons did represent a large leap forward in firearms technology.

Doctor Josephus Requa, a Rochester, N.Y., dentist once apprenticed to the prominent gun maker William Billinghurst, was one of the first tinkerers to design a multibarrel breechloading gun after the Civil War began. He had Billinghurst make the prototype.

Billinghurst and Requa’s gun featured 25 horizontal barrels mounted on a light artillery carriage. The barrels were loaded at the breech with a “piano hinge” magazine holding a row of 25 .52-caliber brass cartridges with no integral priming, but with a hole in the base of each round. A hammer triggered by pulling a lanyard fired a percussion cap on a single centrally located nipple that detonated one round, causing the flash to pass from one cartridge to the next until all had been fired. When the chain reaction process worked properly, the barrels fired almost simultaneously.

If an operator had several loaded magazines at his disposal, he could ensure a fairly rapid rate of fire. A lever under the gun’s carriage controlled the spacing of the barrels, which could be spread apart or moved together like the fingers of a hand and raised or lowered to control fire dispersion and range.

A three-man crew at an 1861 demonstration of the “Requa Battery” in New York City fired the weapons at the rate of seven volleys, or 175 shots, per minute. In one Army test the gun’s rate of fire reached 225 shots in one minute and 15 seconds. Billinghurst and Requa claimed an “effective range of 1,200 yards,” and Army and Navy records appear to have verified that claim.

Captain Albert G. Mack, a Rochester associate of Requa who encouraged the development of the Requa Battery, wanted to be the first to deploy one in combat. In the summer of 1862, Mack raised the 18th Independent Battery, New York Light Artillery. Captain Mack intended that his “Rochester Rifle Battery” be equipped with Requa guns, a “Rochester invention.” Another Rochester unit, Captain J. Warren Barnes’ 26th Independent Battery, used Requa guns as a recruiting enticement. Both batteries were sent to the Department of the Gulf, but the Requas were sparingly used at best. The 18th’s guns were shipped south without ammunition or spare magazines, and Mack’s gunners ended up servicing 20-pounder Parrott rifled cannons.

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