TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog

Category: Arms & Armament

  • Pegler on Sharpshooting, Capandball on Lorenz and Needle Gun

    Martin Pegler, prolific author and former Senior Curator of Firearms at the Royal Armouries Museum, Leeds, has published a series of articles in American Rifleman on sniping and sharpshooting. The first starts with the introduction of the rifle and goes into the early 19th Century. The next one covers the period starting roughly with the […]

  • Sir Joseph Whitworth and His Deadly Rifles

    My article about Joseph Whitworth and his rifles is up on the Shock Troops web site. It originally appeared in the December 2010 issue of Civil War Times. In 1854, at the request of the British Board of Ordnance, Whitworth turned his attention to firearms, specifically the Enfield P53 .577 caliber service rifle, which he […]

  • Lincoln at Fort Stevens—Could A Rifle Have Hit Him?

    British shooter Michael Yardley participated in a Discovery Channel special for their Unsolved History series, “The Plots to Kill Lincoln.” One of these plots was the shot taken at him by a Confederate sharpshooter at Fort Stevens on July 11 or 12, 1864 during Jubal Early’s raid. The question was if it was realistic to […]

  • The Turner Rifle

    I was recently fortunate to acquire a Turner rifle. Thomas Turner (1834-1890) was a 19th Century gunsmith who lived and worked in Birmingham, then the center of the gun trade. He was “a prolific manufacturer of Volunteer rifles in the 1859-1862 period. His small-bore (.451) rifles were very popular into the mid 1860s, rivaled only […]

  • A Look at the Whitworth rifle

    The Whitworth rifle, used by Confederate sharpshooters during the Late Unpleasantness, has acquired an almost mythic status and a matching price tag. American Rifleman takes a look at current specimen in private hands. Whitworths were prized sharpshooter arms during the Civil War, some numbers of them being run through the blockade by the rebels and […]

  • Review: Lee’s Lost Dispatch and Other Civil War Controversies by Philip Leigh

    Lee’s Lost Dispatch and Other Civil War Controversies By Phillip Leigh Illustrated, photos, maps, notes, bibliography, index, 224 pp. softcover $18.95 Westholme Publishing 2015 www.westholmepublishing.com Phillip Leigh, whose last book, Trading With the Enemy, I reviewed a while back, has produced another volume for the Civil War reader. This one is a series of essays […]

  • A Look at Some Period Guns

    Just a quick look at some period firearms. Cap and Ball, whom we have met before, shoots an original .58 cal. Springfield rifle-musket. He shows it can shoot quite accurately at a distance, but OTOH he’s an experienced shot and has fiddled with it a bit. Then, a look at the Needham postwar conversion to […]