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

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Gatling contracted with a Cincinnati firm to manufacture six guns, which were destroyed in a factory fire in 1862. In 1863 he had 13 more weapons produced at another foundry and shipped to Baltimore, where his agent failed to interest the military. By that time, government officials were wary of buying or even testing any new wonder weapons.

Enter again General Butler, who happened to be in Baltimore at the time. The general took some of the guns to Petersburg, and Butler actually fired the Gatling personally. While it worked well, it did not quite generate “consternation and slaughter” among the Rebels as Gatling exuberantly had claimed. It did seem to make them angry, though. On May 30, 1864, Lieutenant J.B. Morris of the 4th New Jersey Battery wrote his friend James S. Yard that, “Gen. Butler brought one his favorite Gatling guns, which throws 200 balls per minute, in this Battery on Friday, and pointing it through one of the embrasures, began to ‘turn the crank.’ This drew the fire of the Rebs on us, and one captain and a private were severely wounded.”

Although a late arrival on the scene, the Gatling survived the war and prospered, due to the appearance of the self-contained metallic cartridge for which the gun was chambered in 1865. Synchronization of the Gatling’s barrels with the cartridge chambers was a tricky business, and the necessarily loose tolerances apparently led to some gas loss at the gun’s breech. As in the case of repeating rifles, cartridges containing primer, powder and projectile inside copper or brass cases created an instant breech gas seal on firing and assured smooth feeding through the action of a repeating rifle or machine gun.

Verifiable deployment of machine guns in the field during the Civil War was primarily limited to Union forces. Captain R.S. Williams invented a rapid-fire repeater for use in the Confederate army, but although it was an ingenious design and fairly successful, the Williams gun was not a true machine gun. It was a manually operated, single-shot, breechloading, small-bore cannon served by a three-man crew. The loader controlled the rate of fire by inserting a paper cartridge in the breech and placing a percussion cap on a nipple when a lever was pulled back. Pushing the lever forward closed the breech and fired the gun.

Other Confederate rapid-fire designs like Josiah Gorgas’ revolving turret cannon and the Vandenburg volley gun were limited to prototype models with no recorded use in combat. One source asserts that Confederates used a large-bore version of the Requa at the siege of Charleston, however, and a list of captured ordnance following the January 15, 1865, capture of Fort Fisher has an intriguing reference to one “volley gun” described as “disabled,” which was either a captured Requa or Rebel version of that arm.

The tactical use of machine guns was never committed to the doctrine of either army, but, as with repeating rifles, officers developed local ad hoc methods of employment, most notably with the Requa gun, based on experience.

For the most part, although Requa and Coffee Mill guns were issued to infantry units, as were later machine guns, they were employed as artillery pieces, usually in roles better served by actual artillery. In the end, however, imperfect ammunition combined with a lack of tactical ingenuity assured that the machine gun would fulfill no more than a novelty role in the Civil War.

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