[ Tallassee Carbine ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Morphy's
taking a look at one of the rarest Confederate
small arms out there from the Civil War.
This is a Tallassee carbine, it is the new pattern
of carbine that was supposed to become standard,
that was adopted in the latter years of the US Civil War.
So in the summer of 1863 the Confederate military decided that it wanted
a new cavalry carbine, and it wanted it to be a muzzleloader specifically.
There were ... at least a few breechloading designs
that had been developed and produced in small numbers in the Confederacy.
But the conclusion of Confederate Ordnance was that these guns were both
too unreliable and too complex and expensive to manufacture.
And they didn't make sense for trying to create a standardised arm
that could actually be produced in quantity in the Confederacy.
Frankly, even the Union came to this same conclusion,
despite having significantly more industrial infrastructure to work with.
They looked at the possibility of using a breechloader as a standard infantry arm,
and said "Nah, nah, we're going to stick with tried and true,
what we know, and what we're able to produce quickly and easily."
So no surprise that the Confederates would come to the same conclusion.
Now the initial development of the gun was really pretty quick and easy.
The Richmond ... Arsenal came up with a prototype layout.
It's a percussion-fired muzzleloading carbine, all you really have to do is figure out
the details of where you want the slings, the bands, the sights, the barrel length.
They put it together pretty quickly in August of 1863.
A number of them were field tested by the Army of Northern Virginia.
They made a few recommendations, I think it was mostly to like sling placement.
Those recommendations were adopted, the gun was tweaked a little bit,
and ... the design was pretty much ready by the late summer/early fall of 1863.
The problem now became manufacture, so tooling started up at Richmond.
But by early 1864 the Richmond Arsenal was not a secure location.
It was too close to the borders of the Confederacy,
it was vulnerable to Union military action.
And Confederate Ordnance really wanted to move things out of Richmond
into more stable areas that were ... located deeper inside the Confederacy.
And they found two particular locations that would work well.
One was Macon, Georgia, where they set up the Macon Arsenal.
And the other was Tallassee, Alabama.
Now the Tallassee site ... was on a river, it was about 6 miles from a major railroad junction,
which is good for moving goods in and out, raw materials in and completed guns out.
And it was the site of an existing significant cotton mill facility.
And the Confederacy was able to go in and actually acquire
the use of one of the original cotton mill buildings to turn into its armoury.
This was ... a factory complex that was already doing military work for the Confederacy.
And so in 1864 they essentially take over one of the old mill buildings
and start moving machinery and tools in to set up production of carbines.
There would be a whole series of logistical issues ... trying to get production started.
Part of this was of course refurbing and converting the buildings
to be suitable for firearms manufacture,
moving in heavy machinery and tooling, and then getting the raw materials.
This is now 1864 in the Confederacy, it's getting hard to get the raw materials.
So they managed to get stocks from the Macon armoury that had been set up.
Macon had basically reject rifle stocks
that would work well for carbines, they brought in a couple of hundred of those.
They had a lot of trouble in particular getting good quality steel for springs.
There's some ... telegrams back and forth complaining about how
like the reject rate on some of the early steel batches for main springs was 80%.
They'd make them, temper them, test them, 80% of them broke.
They needed better quality steel to make those springs.
Well, eventually by April of 1865 now, they have production actually under way.
It's not known exactly how many of these guns were actually manufactured.
There's a reference out there that's regularly cited of 500,
but that's actually kind of a dubious number, it's certainly the high end maximum.
There's no way they made more than 500, there's a pretty good chance they made less than 500.
But before we talk about what happened to them,
let's take a closer look at what the gun actually is.
So what do we have here? We have a simple muzzleloading percussion carbine.
It uses an Enfield-style lock that has some great markings on it.
By the way, this is just a percussion nipple protector.
I'm honestly not sure of its vintage or authenticity. It certainly looks pretty old.
But ... that's outside my area of expertise, so I'm not going to speak to it.
The side plate is pretty clearly marked "C.S." Confederate States, Tallassee, Alabama.
And on the back of the lock plate we have a date of 1864.
Complete carbines weren't ready until 1865, but that date is correct for the lock plates.
Now as for the rest of the gun, we have a three choice rear sight here
you can flip up, this is pretty typical of carbines at the time.
I believe that would probably be 100, 300 and 600 yard notches there.
We have two barrel bands on a 25 inch barrel.
The barrel bands are both brass, in fact all of the hardware is brass. The nose cap here is brass.
The barrel is 25 inches, got a fixed front sight. It is .58 calibre and it is muzzleloading.
And this paraphernalia here is essentially just to secure the ramrod so that you can't lose it.
Remember this is a cavalry carbine, so guys are going to be
trying to reload these things potentially on horseback.
If you drop the ramrod while you're standing on the ground, no big deal.
If you drop your ramrod while you're on a moving horse, that's a big problem.
Remember, without a ramrod the gun is completely useless.
This is the equivalent of like having no ammo.
... Losing a ramrod would be worse than, say,
losing every loaded magazine you have for a modern semi-auto rifle.
Like, a modern rifle you can single load one cartridge at a time.
With a muzzleloader like this if you don't have a ramrod
you can't fire anything, you can't load a single round.
So the idea here is we can pull the ramrod out.
And then this pivots forward, positions the ramrod over the bore.
I can drop that down, we've got a big pad out here that you can use against your hand.
And then once you're done ramming the projectile and powder down,
flip this back in place, put the ramrod back into its slot in the stock.
And you are ready to fire.
The sling here is a reproduction Confederate-style
canvas and leather (there's some leather on there) sling.
I didn't point this out earlier, but we have a brass butt plate on here as well,
as well as a brass trigger guard.
So ... virtually all the furniture is brass, the only iron pieces
are the lock plate itself and the front sling swivel.
The band is brass, the sling swivel is iron.
On the left side you've got the two screws that hold the lock plate in.
And that's pretty much it, it's a pretty simple gun.
Not a whole lot that goes into a muzzleloading single-shot percussion carbine.
As an interesting aside, it's been noted that the Tallassee carbines
are actually really pretty similar to the carbines being made in
Athens, Georgia, by Cook & Brother for the Confederacy.
And there's a question of, "Well, why would they need to set up their own new arsenal,
why not just pay Cook and buy more carbines
from Cook who's already got a good setup for making them?"
And it appears that the answer is, by the time they decided to start making Tallassee carbines
the Confederate government was in debt to Cook, something like a quarter of a million dollars.
And so Cook had stopped making guns, he wasn't getting paid,
he couldn't buy new materials, and he wasn't sending anything more to the Confederacy.
And so it appears that possibly through bureaucracy and
miscommunication or possibly deliberately, they decided to just
stand up their own operation instead of making good and dealing more with Cook.
By April of 1865, Tallassee is also now at risk to its physical security.
There are Union troops close enough to raid and ... hit the factory.
And so they start getting directions to pack up all the tooling and move it to Macon.
And this never really manages to take place.
It is largely through luck and circumstance
that the Tallassee Arsenal was never actually destroyed by Union troops during the war.
They tried to, they had orders to, they ... basically had a bad map.
Apparently what happened, they had a map that showed the town on one side of the river.
And they found a local enslaved dude and they're like, "Take us to Tallassee."
And he's like, "OK, we have to go to this river crossing."
And they're like, "Well, our map says it's on our side of the river, so you're clearly lying," and they shot him.
And then they never ended up actually finding the arsenal.
So it was occupied post-war, but ... was never actually destroyed.
Which I believe makes it the only Confederate arsenal
to not be burned to the ground during the Civil War.
At any rate, there remains this big question of what happened to the guns that they produced.
Because they definitely produced a couple of hundred.
There was a telegram ordering them to take 500 to Macon.
There are no surviving production records from Tallassee.
But as I said earlier, 500 is really the top end limit on what they could have produced,
largely because of ... supply chain issues.
The guns that did survive, there are a couple of different rumours about what happened to them.
Well like I said, Federal troops occupied the arsenal,
they destroyed the equipment after the war, they destroyed the guns.
There's rumour that the barrels were actually used as reinforcing material
in the rebuilding of one of the mill buildings in Tallassee.
Who knows if that's actually true?
There are only 10 or 12 surviving examples of these carbines,
almost all of them in museum collections.
So this one is ... one of two that I'm aware of in private hands.
It was previously bought at the Julia Auction House in 2012.
It's ... the same gun as that, it's back here at Morphy's now.
It is a really cool example of the official late-war Confederate carbine.
Not one of the experimental, small contract, private production ones.
But this was the actual new Confederate arsenal in Tallassee
that was supposed to put together carbines to supply the main ... body of Confederate cavalry.
Never actually quite happened. So.
Anyway, despite its condition, it's a fantastic example because so few of these remain.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching.