While multiple-shot rifles during the Civil War were seen almost exclusively at an experimental level, repeating handguns had been relied on since the 1830’s, when Samuel Colt patented the first revolver. Early in the war, as with rifles, all types of handguns were used by soldiers, even old flint-lock single shots. But the revolver quickly became the mainstream handgun of the war. Most of these revolvers were Colts, over 150,000 of these models saw service. The Colt’s came in a range from .36 to .44 caliber, depending on the model. The Colt worked on a fairly simple design principle, in a system known as "single action", a hammer was pulled back, which rotated a cylinder to the next chamber, pulling the trigger then fired the gun. A few "double action" models were released, although they were not very popular. In the "double action" system, pulling hard on the trigger both moved the cylinder and fired the weapon. Most Colts were six-shooters, although a limited number of five-shooters were produced. The gun could be fired as quickly as the hammer could be cocked and the trigger pulled.
One major problem with the Colt revolvers was reloading the cylinder once all the cartridges were spent. The black powder used made the reloading process both time consuming and messy, and often the powder residue made the gun jam. Many soldiers got around this by carrying a number of pre-loaded cartridges with them, and simply switched cartridges. This process was fairly quick and easy, usually taking only about thirty seconds.
While the Colt produced the vast majority, some other manufacturers did fairly well, too. The Remington firm offered Colt stiff competition for Union government contracts. The Remington gun was actually slightly more sturdy than the Colt, due to the fact that it’s barrel was permanently fixed to the gun. Many Southern manufactures made limited numbers of copies of both the Colt and Remington models, usually in small numbers, due to the limited resources available. Several other American manufacturers, such as Smith and Wesson and Starr made handguns too, some of fairly exotic designs. Foreign handguns also saw some action in the war, with many British models being popular. One French model that saw limited use due to it’s weight and expense, but was nonetheless quite revolutionary, was the LeMat. This gun was an attempt to provide maximum firepower in a handgun. It’s cylinder carried up to nine .40 caliber shots, which packed quite a wallop by itself. But in addition to the normal cylinder, this gun had an additional barrel mounted under it’s primary one, made for a .18 caliber shotgun load. The idea behind this was that once the revolver chambers were spent, the shooter could simply cock the hammer again and fire a deadly scatter load. While this weapon was quite effective, it’s high cost and odd caliber made for limited use.
The Civil War was a time of great innovation and popularization for the hand held gun, in the years after the war, the revolver would go on to become famous in the wild west.
