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

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A number of Coffee Mill guns went to the Virginia Peninsula with the Army of the Potomac in the spring of 1862. One report cites the 56th New York Volunteers as fielding “a large sized rifle with a hopper and machinery at the breach, which loads and fires by turning a crank….” When the 56th advanced up the Peninsula following the fall of Yorktown, however, the regiment left its Coffee Mill behind. Governor Andrew Curtin of Pennsylvania made sure that many of his state’s infantry regiments approached Richmond armed with machine guns. A private in the 83rd Pennsylvania wrote that “all the Pennsylvania regiments have them.” The 49th Pennsylvania employed a Coffee Mill at a skirmish at Golding’s Farm on June 28, 1862.

Federal Lieutenant Edward Burd Grubb recalled that at the June 27, 1862, Battle of Gaines’ Mill, “lying between the Fourth and Third [New Jersey Volunteer Infantry] regiments…was a battery of seven machine guns…called the Union Coffee Mill Guns.” Lieutenant Grubb went on to say that the guns deployed with the 1st New Jersey Brigade were loaded with combustible Johnson and Dow paper cartridges that were made with paper saturated with a chemical that would cause them to burn, and the cartridges had also been issued to the brigade’s infantrymen at Gaines’ Mill. Using the Johnson and Dow rounds with the Coffee Mill made sense, since loading with conventional musket cartridges would take longer and might result in misfires if the paper was not completely removed.

The fate of the New Jersey Brigade’s Coffee Mill guns at Gaines’ Mill remains murky. It is unclear whether they were successfully withdrawn from the battlefield or captured by the Rebels as the brigade retreated. Other than Lieutenant Grubb’s recollection, information is scant.

Reports on the effectiveness of the guns on the Peninsula are ambivalent as well. A soldier in the 49th Pennsylvania characterized his regiment’s Coffee Mill as doing “good work,” but Colonel E.C. Pratt of the 31st New York opined that the gun issued to his regiment was “very defective in several particulars.” Colonel Charles Kingsbury, Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan’s chief ordnance officer, reported that the field performance of the coffee mill was “not equal to the results obtained at the Washington Arsenal” tests.

The main difficulties of the Coffee Mill gun appear to have been barrel overheating, failures to feed ammunition and gas escaping from the breech during firing, which reduced the weapon’s velocity. These problems were, as Kingsbury noted, not initially evident but appeared during use in the field, providing an instructive case study in apparently innovative ordnance. Initial prototype weapon tests could not predict results in combat, a fact that is often disregarded by modern writers criticizing the conservatism of the Union Ordnance Department— which, in at least some cases, indicated good sense.

Although the Coffee Mill guns were seldom used after the Peninsula campaign, J.D. Mills continued to push his product, staging demonstrations for state officials and foreign governments. Venezuela reportedly ordered one gun, and the U.S. Navy gave the Coffee Mill a limited and apparently unsuccessful trial on western riverboats. In March 1863, Scientific American reported that Coffee Mill guns had “proved of no practical value” and noted that surviving specimens were in storage in Washington.

Despite the bad reviews, Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans, a commander attuned to tactical innovation, ordered 10 of the guns that summer, but they did not arrive before his September 1863 Chickamauga disaster. In February 1864, General Butler, still seeking a secret weapon for his Army of the James, requested 10 for use on river patrol boats.

The third machine gun to see active service, and the only one to survive the war as a viable weapons system, was the Gatling gun, the invention of Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling, a North Carolinia dentist who had moved north before the war. Gatling’s invention, patented in November 1862, shared a hopper feed, crank-action revolving breech and steel cartridge chambers with the Coffee Mill. He claimed, however, that his gun was not “the inferior arm known as the ‘coffee mill gun.’” His significant design departure was replacing the earlier weapon’s single barrel with six barrels revolving around a central axis, reducing barrel heating and raising the rate of fire. Like most firearms ideas, however, the concept of revolving barrels was not a new one. A similar concept had been patented in 1861 by Ezra Ripley, who never followed through on his idea.

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