[ Model 1795 Springfield Musket ]
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 an early example
of the first US standardised military long arm.
This is a Springfield Model of 1795 musket.
Except it wasn't actually called that at the time,
that's a collector designation we've added after the fact.
When these were actually being manufactured they were simply
referred to as the "US musket, Charleville pattern".
At this point in history, the late 1700s, the primary weapon in US military stores
was the 1766 French Charleville pattern musket.
A smoothbore, flintlock, muzzle-loading musket, very much like this one.
And it was reliable, it was effective, it was a high quality design.
And so it made perfect sense that when the US went to make
some more of its own guns, that would be the pattern to copy.
So this was manufactured at Springfield,
which was only opened as a manufacturing facility in 1795,
hence the model designation given to it.
This is the first weapon that was produced at Springfield.
Springfield had previous to that been a weapons depot location
for storage and probably some repair as well.
But it wasn't until 1795 that it was formally made a manufacturing site.
By the way, there would be a second formal US national armoury set up for manufacture,
and that would be Harpers Ferry in Virginia, which went on-line in 1800.
Now even before this, the US military was going to need some more guns,
the militia needed guns, the Army needed guns.
And so there were contracts put out as early as 1794
for private construction of muskets like this.
In 1794 Congress specifically requested 7,000 of them.
In 1798 they would request another just over 40,000.
And there were a lot of contractors that potentially responded,
but as far as we can tell, the US government had trouble actually getting guns.
It had trouble actually making good on these contracts, for a couple of reasons.
One of them being there was a lot of private demand for arms as well.
Recall that this is during a time when the US is issuing letters of marque.
There are privateers who need arms for very profitable civilian-military enterprises.
Those probably will take precedent over government contracts with manufacturers
because the privateers are probably more willing to hand over a bit higher price,
and quicker, and probably easier to work with than the government was.
And so, faced with this issue of,
"How do we actually get guns for our national defence?"
Congress authorised some money to set up two national manufacturing sites.
And that would be Springfield and Harpers Ferry.
Now before we delve into this in detail,
I want to point out that there's a lot of variation in these guns.
In fact, prior to 1799 it's basically impossible
to identify a Springfield manufactured musket like this.
Because it was only in 1799 that they actually bought the eagle stamps
that we recognised today as a mark of government manufacture.
Before that, a Springfield musket would look just like a private contract musket.
And there were at least a dozen different private manufacturers,
and all of them had substantial variation in all the little details of the gun.
This was not modern assembly-line work,
... these were all hand-built guns, largely in somewhat primitive conditions.
So this is ... not even 1800 yet, this is 1795 we're talking about.
By the time this one was made it was 1799, and well, that's not a whole lot more modern.
So, with that in mind, let me show you the details of this,
and how we can identify what it is.
Holy moly, these guys are long.
These were manufactured with 44.5 inch barrels
(give or take a little bit between individual guns).
Smoothbore of course, .69 calibre.
So a little bit smaller than, say, the British pattern at the time
of .75 calibre, but still quite effective.
Flintlock of course. We've got our priming pan,
we've got our frizzen, we've got the flint right there.
A couple of the definitive aspects of this,
which is the first variation of Springfield musket.
You'll see that the lock plate and the spring here,
the spring in particular here ends with this little nub
on the end of the bottom of the spring.
And we have sort of a bevelled shape to the pan here.
On the second pattern this would change to rounded.
By the third pattern this pan was a removable piece, and this little nub disappears.
All of the variations have that same sort of little nub on the end of the lock plate here.
This is identifiable as a Springfield because it is helpfully stamped "Springfield".
Note that this did not start until [1799].
It was in that year that these identifying stamps were all added.
Before that the lock plates were blank, and it would be very difficult to identify a Springfield
as opposed to a private contract musket.
And it appears that the reason for adding some of these markings,
and simultaneously requiring them to be added to private contract guns built for the government,
was to be able to identify the manufacturer in case of later quality control issues.
If you have a gun that gets issued out into the field,
and then someone's at musket practice and the barrel bursts,
you want to know who made it so you can go back and see if there's a trend of
manufacturer X making crappy condition barrels that blow up.
So Springfield in 1799 acquired this eagle stamp,
and they started marking them "US" and the eagle, and marking them with the word "Springfield."
They ended up with a couple of different stamps, so there is variation to the exact style of the eagle.
This one's kind of worn, I mean give it a break, it's what ... almost 250 years old.
So there is variation to that and that's fine, that doesn't impact authenticity or collector value.
Now, after a few years they would start marking the dates on the lock plate.
But on the early ones like this,
the date is actually stamped on the top of the butt plate here, so this is 1799.
And I can't flip it around because the other end of this table does not have
five feet of space so that I can swing the muzzle end of this thing out.
So there's your date stamp, 1799, first year that they were dated.
Which makes this a pretty cool example.
If we look at some of the other features here.
We have really quite wide barrel bands,
that gives good support to the barrel and stock.
They are held in place by these springs,
very much a French style of thing copied from the Charleville patterns.
There are three total barrel bands, so here's the middle one which includes the sling swivel.
There's another sling swivel at the front of the trigger guard that you already saw.
And then flipping this around again because it is so dang long,
we have the front barrel band here with its retention spring right there.
Note that it actually has a front sight,
which is not necessarily a universal feature on early muskets like this.
It does not actually have a rear sight, just a front sight,
but the front sight's the more important of the two.
We have a bayonet lug on the top of the barrel.
The bayonet itself was not mounted on the top, but the locking lug was.
The ... bayonet would have been out to the side.
Interestingly, of the roughly 25,000 of this first variation of musket made by Springfield,
about 15,000 of them actually had the bayonets
originally brazed onto the gun, so permanently affixed.
Most of those would be cut down by 1815.
But that's a story for another day when I come across
one that has the bayonet on, or has been cut down.
At the back here we have a relatively thick stock with a pretty sharply contoured comb there.
And then the breech end of the barrel, and the plate opposite of the lock.
Not a whole lot of fanciness on these.
No real decoration, a few little artistic elements to the elements of the lock plate.
But pretty much a standard heavy-duty military-style pattern of flintlock musket.
These would see service in pretty much every US military action up to the Civil War.
Of course the War of 1812 they were used in, the war against Mexico in 1848.
The Lewis and Clark Expedition included some of these.
By the time of the Civil War most of them had been converted to percussion lock.
And so that also makes the originals
in their original flintlock configuration rather more scarce.
Obviously when percussion guns became the standard pattern
it was very cost effective to convert ... flintlocks into cap-lock percussion guns.
Ultimately by 1816 the US arsenals were making a somewhat
simplified pattern of musket with a little less detailing on the lock plate,
a little simplified version of the stock.
And then that transition would continue through further patterns of musket.
There have been attempts to identify and like segregate
specific models of US musket Charleville pattern.
And they've resulted in designations like the 1808 pattern,
and the 1795 pattern, and the 1795-1808 transitionals.
And those designations are numbers
that have been forced onto an existing set of guns.
They don't actually indicate definitive changes in practice.
What happened was a gradual evolution of features in the guns.
And ... of particular interest, you'll see if you look at a lot of these that
Springfield had its model guns and started manufacturing,
and started making changes as it saw fit to the guns.
Harpers Ferry did the same thing, and you kind of get two distinct evolutionary trees
of US martial flintlock musket from the two different manufacturers.
When you add in the private contract guns,
which are generally built off of sample guns provided by one of the arsenals,
you'll see that the private contract guns kind of follow those
two evolutionary tracks from the government manufactured ones.
Because the models that they were given to copy are of varying types.
So ultimately a grand total of 80,000 to 85,000 of this type of musket would be made
of what ... can basically be broken down into four major patterns.
This of course being the first pattern because it is the earliest dated example.
Before 1799 there was no dating, and so there are earlier guns out there,
but there are not any earlier guns out there that can actually be definitively identified as such.
So, hopefully you guys enjoyed this video.
I think it's pretty cool to take a look at the weapon that started the entire
story of Springfield, and in many ways, the story of the formal US military.
Thanks for watching.