Upon reaching France at last, Le Mat eventually made an arrangement with arms manufacturers Charles Frederic Girard and Son, of 9 Passage Joinville, Paris, to produce his revolver. Their first crop of grapeshot revolvers, however, were so abysmally made that Girard and Le Mat were forced to relocate their operations to a more suitable manufacturer: the Birmingham Small Arms Company in England. Those pistols met with Le Mat’s and Girard’s satisfaction. Shipments of the guns were handed over to Confederate officials in Britain and France, who then had them slipped through the Union naval blockade that barricaded the Confederate coasts.

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Originally, all Le Mat revolvers came in one model –.40 caliber above 18 gauge. That changed when purchasers for the Confederate Navy, intrigued by the Le Mat pistols manufactured for the Rebel Army, negotiated a contract with the French arms dealers for a lighter .35-caliber pistol equipped with a 28-gauge (.50 caliber) shotgun barrel. Only a few of the latter variety were manufactured, however, before the Navy canceled the contract. The Army version was used until the end of the war.

Although the Le Mat design was sturdy and reliable, it nevertheless had its flaws. The pistol was ungainly and not particularly elegant to look at; and its very unorthodoxy made it a difficult firearm to manufacture, as its abominable execution by the original French manufacturer vividly illustrated. More damning was the fact that the Amy version could not accept the regulation .44-caliber percussion (and later centerfire) cartridge that was the standard for Confederate handguns. That limited its utility a great deal, although many had been converted to the proper caliber by 1865. All told, nearly 3,000 of Le Mat’s grapeshot revolvers reached the Confederacy; its users included General Beauregard, Maj. Gens. Richard H. Anderson and J.E.B. Stuart, and Colonel George S. Patton. The great majority of the Le Mat pistols were of the percussion variety, though by the end of the war a very few centerfire Le Mats had reached the battlefield.

Le Mat’s profitable partnerships with Girard and Son and Beauregard dissolved with the Confederacy, but the good doctor elected to continue manufacturing his weapons. He produced a number of grapeshot-revolver combination guns, including a cumbersome carbine with a revolving cylinder, which was eventually used in the U.S. Army. Postwar Le Mats were equipped to take the new self-contained pinfire or centerfire metallic cartridges that had become standard toward the end of the Civil War. Manufactured primarily in Belgium and Britain, they were widely used in French penal colonies.

Le Mat’s guns continued to be popular until the late 1870s, when they suddenly and unexpectedly went out of fashion. Le Mat died shortly afterward, in 1883.

Even though they were largely supplanted after the Civil War by plainer and less ponderous pistols, Le Mat firearms were brought west in those postwar years and played a small part in the taming of the Western frontier. Ultimately, however, when revolver manufacture standardized along the lines of the simpler six-shooter as pioneered by Samuel Colt and others, the Le Mat design was put aside for posterity to wonder at, along with the pepperbox, blunderbuss and hand cannon. Time had passed it by.

This article was written by Floyd Largen and originally published in the October 1996 Military History magazine. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Military History magazine today!

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