| The Le Mat Revolver
Part revolver, part shotgun, the Le Mat was a favorite of several
noteworthy Confederate officers during the Civil War.
by Floyd Largent
The outbreak of the American Civil War provided a rare
opportunity for all manner of weapons inventors and arms manufacturers
to profit by offering their products to the war departments of either the
Union or the Confederacy, as both scrambled to arm their troops. Some designs
were unusual, but few were as bizarre as the one contributed to the Confederate
cause by Jean Alexandre François Le Mat, a Paris-born aristocrat
who designed firearms in his spare time.
A Creole physician (perhaps self-proclaimed), Dr. Le Mat
served for a time on the staff of the governor of Louisiana. While in government
service, he was awarded the military rank of Colonel, a title that he was
to use to his advantage in later life. On October 21, 1856, at the age
of 32, he was granted United States Patent No. 15,925 for a unique percussion-pistol
design in which the arbor pin of the revolver (the axis upon which the
cylinder revolves) came in the form of a large smoothbore barrel, which
fired a charge of grapeshot. British patents for the same design were issued
in 1859. That design represented one of the first multi-shot percussion
revolvers in a world where many people were still using flintlocks and
single-shot percussion guns.
In partnership with fellow Louisianan Pierre Gustave Toutant
Beauregard, a Colonel in the U.S. Army, Le Mat tried to interest the Army
in his revolutionary design several times in the late 1850s. While the
officers who tested the prototypes were impressed, the Ordnance Department
failed to express any interest.
Basically, Le Mat's novel method involved mounting the
ball-firing percussion cylinder upon a large gauge, smoothbore shotgun
barrel. The nine-chambered cylinder accepted .40- to .42-caliber percussion
cartridges. The grapeshot barrel was .60 to .63 caliber, or approximately
18 gauge, and received a charge of 11 buckshot. A quick flick of a small
lever mounted on the hammer nose allowed the user to select the desired
barrel. As the design stood, Le Mat intended to use a sliding rammer for
loading the cylinder and a jointed one for loading the grapeshot barrel;
when the guns were actually produced, however, a jointed rammer was employed
for both duties. In addition, a removable ramrod for use in charging the
shot barrel was inserted in the rammer's lever.
The revolver was constructed of blued steel, with grips
of polished walnut, and was a total of 13.25 inches long. The upper, rifled
barrel was 6.75 inches long; most were octagonal in cross section, though
some were round. The lower barrel was 5 inches long, and an extension could
be attached to it to form a true shotgun. It was designed as a single-action
weapon, equipped with a mainspring mount and hammer linkage. Shell casings
were removed with a slide rod ejector.
Very few of these grapeshot pistols were manufactured
prior to the outbreak of hostilities between North and South, and those
produced were little more than experimental prototypes. The Le Mat pistol
did not come into its own until early 1861, when Dr. Le Mat, a longtime
Southern sympathizer, offered his invention to the newly formed Confederate
government. At General P.G.T. Beauregard's recommendation, the Confederate
Ordnance Department offered Le Mat a contract to purchase 5,000 of his
pistols.
After dropping the "Doctor" from his title and adopting
the more militaristic title of Colonel, he first undertook a lengthy search
within the Confederacy for a manufacturer with adequate facilities to produce
his revolvers. Unfortunately, he was hard-pressed to locate anyone in the
South who could meet his exacting standards. Negotiations with Cook and
Bros. of New Orleans--his one acceptable choice--fell through. Disheartened
by that failure, he traveled to France, the country of his birth, in hopes
of having the weapon manufactured there.
An unfortunate choice of transportation nearly spelled
the end of Colonel Le Mat's career as an arms manufacturer. Expecting to
reach France via London, he booked passage on the British mail packet Trent
in the company of Confederate officials James Murray Mason and John Slidell,
who were traveling to Europe in an attempt to garner aid and recognition
for the fledgling Confederacy. Shortly after the beginning of the voyage,
on November 8, 1861, Trent was stopped and boarded by the Federal warship
San Jacinto. Both Mason and Slidell were taken into custody and interned
at Fort Warren in Boston, where they remained until New Year's Day of the
following year. Despite his Confederate ties, Le Mat was not detained.
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.
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 Army 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, Major Generals
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.
|
| M1865 to M1868 US Springfield:
by Keith W. Doyon
GENERALLY: After
the American Civil war, over a million and a half percussion muzzle-loaders
were available and in service, but were also demonstrably obsolete.
Yet, financial constraints imposed by the great cost of the war required
that if there was going to be a more modern arm introduced, it would have
to take into consideration this vast number of arms "available" for use
in some appropriate, but economical, fashion. The outcome was clearly
not the best possible modern breachloader, but the best compromise to be
had, given money available and the desire to obtain more service out of
the existing stockpile of arms. This balancing resulted in the adoption
of a breachloading mechanism to be fitted onto the Springfield muzzle loading
rifle M1863. Nominally "designed" by Springfield Armory Master Armorer
E.S. Allin, the pattern resulted in pattent infringement suits by both
W. Mont Storm and Col. Hirum Berdan, designer of the Spanish and Russian
Berdan systems and a successful Civil War commander of note.
The first conversions made in 1865 utilized the original .58 cal barrel
but quickly proved unsatisfactory, both due to calibre and
an exceedingly complex extractor mechanism. The next batch in 1866
were immediately successful. These incorporated a simplified extractor
mechanism and a sleeved barrel reducing the rifle's caliber to .50.
These proved servicable enough that the M1868 was produced utilizing completely
new (shorter) barrels, with Allin actions built on M1863 percussion rifles.
PHOTO: The rifle shown is
a US M1866 Springfield infantry Rifle converted from the M1863 Springfield
muzzle loading rifle.
DISTINGUISHING CHARECTERISTICS:
The M1866 is distinguished from the M1865 by it's simplified extractor
and sleeved .50 caliber barrel. It is distringushed from the M1868
by it's 40" barrel. The M1868 is fitted with a new made, unsleeved
30 1/2" barrel. The M1865 are usually marked "1865" on the lockplate
tail, the M1866's were mostly converted from M1864 percussion muzzle loaders
and are marked "1864." The M1868's are marked "1863" or "1864" and
are serial numbered on the left side of the receiver.
MISC NOTES: Note
to potential collectors, that the same serial number as was on the receiver
was also stamped on the barrel, as well as the receiver, just forward of
the juncture between the barrel and the receiver. So these two serial
numbers are side by side, and if different from each other indicate that
the barrel is a replacement, and not as originally manufactured at the
National Armory.
More articles by Keith Doyon can be found at
MILITARY
RIFLES IN THE AGE OF TRANSITION
(Non-U.S.) Black Powder, Metallic Cartridge, Military
Rifles from about 1865 to about 1888.
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