Brigadier General William F. Barry, a hard-to-please Regular Artillery officer, tested the Requa in January 1863 and found it “extremely serviceable.” Requa guns were also used by Brig. Gen. Quincy Gillmore in Charleston, S.C. He obtained five for field testing, and they were manned by crews from the 3rd New Hampshire, 39th Illinois and 9th Maine Infantry regiments. During the siege of Battery Wagner on Morris Island, the guns were used to suppress enemy sharpshooters, cover advancing trench lines and, on at least one occasion, in support of an infantry attack by the 24th Massachusetts. A Confederate defender maintained that the Requa guns gave “very little trouble,” but a Federal officer reported that they were “used against the enemy’s sharpshooters and working parties, apparently with good effect.”

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Ben Butler was an enthusiastic proponent of new military technology, and in July 1864 he ordered two Requa guns for his Army of the James, then engaged in the siege of Petersburg and Richmond. The guns were assigned to the 16th New York Heavy Artillery and were still in use in October, when an after-action report noted the “Requa gun section” lost three horses killed and three wounded.

Although the Requa proved the most combat-effective Civil War machine gun, further development of internal primers for brass cartridges quickly made the Requa Battery obsolete in the postwar years, and Dr. Requa returned to dentistry.

In contrast to the Requa, the “Union Repeating Gun” used a revolving breech to achieve rapid fire. A feeding hopper sat atop the gun’s firing mechanism, and when a handcrank was turned, internal gears forced cartridges from the hopper into grooves atop a revolving drum. The crank action then cammed the cartridge chambers against the gun’s barrel; this tripped a firing hammer and then ejected the empty cartridges activating a fan like device to blow away firing debris and cool the barrel. Users claimed the gun was capable of firing up to 120 shots a minute.

The barrel was mounted on a light artillery carriage like the Requa and could be elevated and traversed. A spare barrel, which could be quickly changed in case the original overheated, was included with each gun. The Union gun’s steel cartridge chambers could also be reloaded by hand with conventional .58-caliber paper rifle-musket cartridges when fitted with a nipple primed with a percussion cap.

Several men—Wilson Ager, Edward Nugent and William Palmer—battled over taking credit for the Union Gun’s development and patent rights. But it was actually a salesman, J.D. Mills, who displayed a prototype to President Abraham Lincoln in June 1861. After a look at the gun’s hopper feeding device, Lincoln reputedly dubbed the weapon the “Coffee Mill” gun, a nickname that stuck.

Arsenal tests of the Coffee Mill before the president, generals and other dignitaries were impressive, and Brig. Gen. Joseph Mansfield requested the guns for the defensive works around Washington. There were some early indications of potential problems with the weapon—for example, the mainspring of a Coffee Mill gun independently purchased by the technologically adventurous General Butler broke in testing. Despite those problems, the Ordnance Department ordered 50 of the guns in December 1861.

In January 1862, two of them were issued to Colonel John W. Geary’s 28th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry, which allegedly used them on Rebel cavalry in March near Middleburg, Va. The only evidence of what apparently was the first use of a machine gun in combat, however, is a casual remark by one of the regiment’s captains citing their effectiveness. In seeming contradiction, Colonel Geary returned his Coffee Mill guns in April, describing them as “inefficient, and unsafe to use.”

Despite Geary’s opinion, Maj. Gen. John C. Frémont, campaigning in the Shenandoah Valley in the spring of that year, requested 16 Coffee Mill guns, but they did not arrive before his June resignation. Rebel General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson appears to have captured the lot at Harpers Ferry in September 1862, but what happened to them after that is unknown. They were apparently not considered a vital asset by their captors.

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