1. 1865 Spencer Carbine Serial Numbers
2. Spencer Repeating Carbine Serial Numbers
3. 1865 Spencer Carbine Serial Numbers
4. Spencer Carbine Serial Number 16501
5. Spencer 1865 Carbine Serial Numbers

Spencer Model 1860 Repeating Rifle This Spencer rifle bears serial number 4452 and was manufactured in 1863. The Spencer rifle, with its lever action, seven shot tubular magazine and internally-primed metallic-cased cartridge, was a popular wartime breechloader. Spencer Model 1860 Saddle Ring Carbine, Civil War serial number range 42,XXX,.52 Spencer, 7 shot magazine fed with correct 22” round barrel with blade front sight & military ladder rear sig.Click for more info.

The Spencer Repeating Rifles and Carbines were early American lever action firearms invented by Christopher Spencer. The Spencer was the world's first military metallic cartridge repeating rifle, and over 200,000 examples were manufactured in the United States by the Spencer Repeating Rifle Co. and Burnside Rifle Co. between 1860 and 1869. The Spencer repeating rifle was adopted by the Union Army, especially by the cavalry, during the American Civil War but did not replace the standard issue muzzle-loadingrifled muskets in use at the time. Among the early users was George Armstrong Custer. The Spencer carbine was a shorter and lighter version designed for the cavalry.

Overview[edit]

Serial number blocks were assigned by the Ordnance Department on an as needed basis, generally in response to the awarding of a contract to a given manufacturer. The serial number was placed on the carbine receiver during the manufacturing process of the receiver, not when the carbine was finally assembled. Model 1865's contracted and made by the Burnside Rifle Company are serial numbered from 1 to approximately 25,000. Model 1867 Spencers are numbered from approx. For whatever reason Spencer skipped numbers 62,000-90,000. So your rifle should not have a serial number in the 73,000 range. Carbines have a sling ring bar with a ring on the left side and a rear sling swivel. 50,000 of these were made between 1863 and 1865 with serial numbers from 11,000 to 61,000. Offered is serial number 41756, which fits the civil war period range and was manufactured by Spencer. In fact, it was so easy to spot I decided there was no reason to remember the serial. Last rifle inspection I ever stood, officer inspecting asks me for my rifle number and I had to fess up I didn't know. Oct 31, 2013  Topic: 1860 Spencer Carbine serial number (Read 8187 times) metcatant. Those numbers should be rifles if they are M1860s. In fact they are very close to my rifle. If it is a prototype, it would have probably been made with a Sharps sling.

1865 Spencer Carbine Serial Numbers

The design for a magazine-fed, lever-operated rifle chambered for the .56-56 Spencerrimfire cartridge was completed by Christopher Spencer in 1860. Called the Spencer Repeating Rifle, it was fired by cocking a lever to extract a used case and feed a new cartridge from a tube in the buttstock. Like most firearms of the time, the hammer had to be manually cocked after each round in a separate action before the weapon could be fired. The weapon used copper rimfire cartridges, based on the 1854 Smith & Wesson patent, stored in a seven-round tube magazine. A spring in the tube enabled the rounds to be fired one after another. When empty, the spring had to be released and removed before dropping in fresh cartridges, then replaced before resuming firing. Rounds could be loaded individually or from a device called the Blakeslee Cartridge Box, which contained up to thirteen (also six and ten) tubes with seven cartridges each, which could be emptied into the magazine tube in the buttstock.^[8]

Unlike later cartridge designations, the .56-56 Spencer's first number referred to the diameter of the case just ahead of the rim, the second number the case diameter at the mouth; the actual bullet diameter was .52 inches. Cartridges were loaded with 45 grains (2.9 g) of black powder, and were also available as .56-52, .56-50, and a wildcat .56-46, a necked down version of the original .56-56. Cartridge length was limited by the action size to about 1.75 inches; later calibers used a smaller diameter, lighter bullet and larger powder charge to increase power and range over the original .56-56 cartridge, which was almost as powerful as the .58 caliber rifled musket of the time but under-powered by the standards of other early cartridges such as the .50–70 and .45-70.

History[edit]

At first, the view by the Department of War Ordnance Department was that soldiers would waste ammunition by firing too rapidly with repeating rifles, and thus denied a government contract for all such weapons. (They did, however, encourage the use of carbine breech loaders that loaded one shot at a time. Such carbines were shorter than a rifle and well suited for cavalry.)^[9] More accurately, they feared that the Army's logistics train would be unable to provide enough ammunition for the soldiers in the field, as they already had grave difficulty bringing up enough ammunition to sustain armies of tens of thousands of men over distances of hundreds of miles. A weapon able to fire several times as fast would require a vastly expanded logistics train and place great strain on the already overburdened railroads and tens of thousands of more mules, wagons, and wagon train guard detachments. The fact that several Springfield rifle-muskets could be purchased for the cost of a single Spencer carbine also influenced thinking.^[10] However, just after the Battle of Gettysburg, Spencer was able to gain an audience with President Abraham Lincoln, who invited him to a shooting match and demonstration of the weapon on the lawn of the White House. Lincoln was impressed with the weapon, and ordered Gen. James Wolfe Ripley to adopt it for production, after which Ripley disobeyed him and stuck with the single-shot rifles.^[1]

The Spencer repeating rifle was first adopted by the United States Navy, and later by the United States Army, and it was used during the American Civil War, where it was a popular weapon.^[11] The Confederates occasionally captured some of these weapons and ammunition, but, as they were unable to manufacture the cartridges because of shortages of copper, their ability to take advantage of the weapons was limited.

Gettysburg was the first major battle of the war where Spencer rifles were used, as they had recently been issued to the 13th Pennsylvania Reserves. They were used at the Chickamauga and had become fairly widespread in the Western armies by 1864. Repeater rifles for comparison were rare in the Army of the Potomac.

Notable early instances of use included the Battle of Hoover's Gap (where Col.John T. Wilder's 'Lightning Brigade' of mounted infantry effectively demonstrated the firepower of repeaters), and the Gettysburg Campaign, where two regiments of the Michigan Brigade (under Brig. Gen.George Armstrong Custer) carried them at the Battle of Hanover and at East Cavalry Field.^[12] As the war progressed, Spencers were carried by a number of Union cavalry and mounted infantry regiments and provided the Union army with a firepower advantage over their Confederate adversaries. At the Battle of Nashville, 9,000 mounted infantrymen armed with the Spencer, under the command of Maj. Gen. James H. Wilson, chief of cavalry for the Military Division of the Mississippi, rode around Gen. Hood's left flank and attacked from the rear. President Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth was armed with a Spencer carbine at the time he was captured and killed.^[13]

The Spencer showed itself to be very reliable under combat conditions, with a sustainable rate-of-fire in excess of 20 rounds per minute. Compared to standard muzzle-loaders, with a rate of fire of 2–3 rounds per minute, this represented a significant tactical advantage.^[14] However, effective tactics had yet to be developed to take advantage of the higher rate of fire. Similarly, the supply chain was not equipped to carry the extra ammunition. Detractors also complained that the amount of smoke produced was such that it was hard to see the enemy, which was not surprising since even the smoke produced by muzzleloaders would quickly blind whole regiments, and even divisions as if they were standing in thick fog, especially on still days.^[15]

Spencer Repeating Carbine Serial Numbers

One of the advantages of the Spencer was that its ammunition was waterproof and hardy, and could stand the constant jostling of long storage on the march, such as Wilson's Raid. The story goes that every round of paper and linen Sharps ammunition carried in the supply wagons was found useless after long storage in supply wagons. Spencer ammunition had no such problem.^[16]

In the late 1860s, the Spencer company was sold to the Fogerty Rifle Company and ultimately to Winchester.^[17] Many Spencer carbines were later sold as surplus to France where they were used during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.^[18]

Even though the Spencer company went out of business in 1869, ammunition was manufactured in the United States into the 1920s. Later, many rifles and carbines were converted to centerfire, which could fire cartridges made from the centerfire .50-70 brass. Production ammunition can still be obtained on the specialty market.^[19]

See also[edit]

Notes[edit]

1. ^ ^abWalter, John (2006). The Rifle Story. Greenhill Books. p. 69. ISBN978-1-85367-690-1.
2. ^Purchase of arms, House Documents, 1861, P. 168-170.
3. ^'www.romanorifle.com'. www.romanorifle.com. Archived from the original on 7 September 2012. Retrieved 17 April 2018.Cite uses deprecated parameter |deadurl= (help)
4. ^The M-1863 version
5. ^The M-1865 version
6. ^Walter, John (2006). The Rifle Story. Greenhill Books. pp. 256, 70–71. ISBN978-1-85367-690-1. The fire-rate of the Spencer was usually reckoned as fourteen shots per minute. The Spencer rifle with a Blakeslee quickloader could easily fire twenty aimed shots a minute
7. ^'The Spencer Repeater and other breechloading rifles of the Civil War'. Retrieved 2011-02-23.
8. ^'Blakeslee Cartridge Box'. National Museum of American History. Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved 2008-06-12.
9. ^Philip Leigh 'Lee's Lost Dispatch and Other Civil War Controversies' (Yardley, Penna.: Westholme Publishing, 2015), 25-36
10. ^Davis, Burke (1982). The civil war: strange & fascinating facts (1st ed.). New York, NY: Fairfax Press. p. 135. ISBN0517371510.
11. ^'Spencer Carbine'. CivilWar@Smithsonian. Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved 9 September 2010.
12. ^Rummel III, George, Cavalry of the Roads to Gettysburg: Kilpatrick at Hanover and Hunterstown, White Mane Publishing Company, 2000, ISBN1-57249-174-4.
13. ^Steers, Edward (12 September 2010). The Trial: The Assassination of President Lincoln and the Trial of the Conspirators. University Press of Kentucky. p. 93. ISBN0-8131-2724-6.
14. ^'The Spencer Repeater'. aotc.net Army of the Cumberland. Retrieved 9 September 2010.
15. ^'More on Spencer's Seven Shot Repeater'. Hackman-Adams. Archived from the original on 17 April 2010. Retrieved 9 September 2010.Cite uses deprecated parameter |deadurl= (help)
16. ^Pritchard, Russ A. (1 August 2003). Civil War Weapons and Equipment. Globe Pequot Press. pp. 49–41. ISBN978-1-58574-493-0.
17. ^Houze, Herb (28 February 2011). Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Iola, Wisconsin: Gun Digest Books. pp. 69–70. ISBN1-4402-2725-X.
18. ^Tucker, Spencer (21 November 2012). Almanac of American Military History. ABC-CLIO. p. 1028. ISBN978-1-59884-530-3.
19. ^Flatnes, Oyvind (30 November 2013). From Musket to Metallic Cartridge: A Practical History of Black Powder Firearms. Crowood Press, Limited. p. 410. ISBN978-1-84797-594-2.

Further reading[edit]

1865 Spencer Carbine Serial Numbers

• Chris Kyle and William Doyle, 'American Gun: A History of the U.S. in Ten Firearms'.
• Earl J. Coates and Dean S. Thomas, An Introduction to Civil War Small Arms.
• Ian V. Hogg, Weapons of the Civil War.
• Barnes, Cartridges of the World.
• Philip Leigh Lee's Lost Dispatch and Other Civil War Controversies, (Yardley, Penna.:, Westholme Publishing, 2015), 214
• Marcot, Roy A. Spencer Repeating Firearms 1995.
• Sherman, William T. Memoirs Volume 2 - contains an account of the success of the Spencer on combat (pp. 187–8) and reflections on the role of the repeating rifle in warfare (pp. 394–5).

Spencer Carbine Serial Number 16501

External links[edit]

Spencer 1865 Carbine Serial Numbers

• The patent drawing for the Spencer action
• Description and photos of Spencer rifle, serial number 3981