Do you know what's hard? Making guns in an agrarian state that's under blockade
and has minimal natural resources and industrial base of its own. That's what's hard.
Thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and I am here today at Rock Island
taking a look at a US Civil War Confederate
muzzleloading percussion carbine.
This is a Bilharz, Hall & Company .58 calibre percussion carbine.
It doesn't have any particular designation beyond that,
because, well, there are only two versions of gun
that this company actually made.
They were located in Virginia, and their first gun, interestingly, was actually a pretty cool breech-loading design.
It had an operating lever, and when you pulled the lever down it would lift the breech up,
and you could load it, and then drop the whole thing back into place.
Kind of on the idea of a Hall rifle, but not really.
At any rate, they made 100 of those for 45 dollars apiece for the Confederacy early in the war.
And the problem was it didn't go all that well,
and clearly ... it was going to be too expensive over time to keep making those.
So when that contract was up the company looked into doing a much simpler gun.
This one. This is basically patterned on a US Model of 1855 cavalry carbine.
And the hypothesis is that most of those 1855 carbines that were in US military service with the cavalry
were turned in in the late 1850s and replaced with Sharps rifles.
And they were turned in to US bases in Texas, where they remained until Texas joined the Confederacy.
And those guns then ended up with the Confederate arsenals.
One of them, somehow or another, wandering its way out to Virginia, where it was the basis for this copy.
So, there are a few small details that differ, but in general this is a US 1855 pattern carbine.
Now Bilharz & Hall, the founder by the way was one Candidus Bilharz,
who was an emigrant from the state of Baden, Germany,
(well it wasn't Germany at the time, but it would become Germany), became a naturalised US citizen in 1859.
He worked ... at various times he was listed as a harness maker, a distiller, and a mechanic.
And 'mechanic' in those days meant what we would think of as a machinist today.
Which set him up nicely for being the basis behind a gun manufacturing company.
Obviously there was a lot of demand for small arms in the Confederacy
during the Civil War, and so that's what he started doing.
Now let's take a closer look at exactly what they put together here,
because this isn't the world's greatest gun.
Like I said, building guns without materials is hard.
So we have a basic percussion lock gun here.
Note that there is a single fixed rear sight notch.
The 1855 American Union guns had a ... flip up sight with three range settings on it.
That was simplified here.
We have a captive ramrod here. So you can pull this out of the stock
(it's a little sticky, there we go)
and then what this allows you to do (if you can get it around your camera tripod)
is use the ramrod here to load a round.
But the ramrod is fixed to the gun, so if you're on a horse trying to do this
you are not in danger of dropping the ramrod,
"Oops," and then all of a sudden basically having a useless gun that you can't load.
So, this is a feature that was also on the US 1855 guns.
One of the complaints made about the initial prototypes of these guns
was that they didn't have a nose cap, we'll get to that in a moment.
So the production ones do, and about half of them have brass nose caps like this one.
These are generally understood to be the early production.
And the late production ones have pewter nose caps,
probably because they simply ran out of available brass.
This is the only brass part on the gun, most of the rest of the components here are simple iron.
Now there was originally a CSA stamp right about here.
Unfortunately the surface finish of this gun is worn enough that
that ... marking is lost, it was relatively shallow to begin with.
We do have this "P" mark on the barrel,
which is ... found on all of the Bilharz & Hall guns. And it probably comes from their barrel supplier.
It's found on a couple of other patterns of rifle and carbine that were manufactured
in the same basic geographical area, and probably all got their barrels from the same source.
There is a sling swivel on the back of the trigger guard, but that is the only sling swivel.
So it would probably be hooked up to a single point cavalry sling.
Now the lock plate here is unmarked,
but there are a couple of markings on the inside of the gun, which we'll get to in just a moment.
But first, courtesy of one John Murphy, M.D.,
we have some really good information about this, based on original research
that he did for this, the 2002 edition of his book on Confederate small arms.
And I want to read a brief bit.
"In March of 1863, the Richmond Armory was being run by a Major William S. Downer,
who ... inspected the first prototype carbine of this pattern from Bilharz & Hall.
And he had a number of conclusions about it.
He said, 'I find that the tumbler is made of iron which is not case hardened,
rendering the lock very rough, and liable to get out of order very soon.
The barrel is not finished smoothly, either inside or out. The inside should be improved in boring.
The muzzle end of the stock is too short, it should pass at least 4 inches above the band and be tipped ...'
(he's got a bunch of complaints about the way the wood stock is done as well)
'And then the general finish of the arm is rough, but with the exception of the tumbler,
I see nothing to prevent the usefulness of it in the field.
If the improvements and alterations mentioned are made
I should think, and I am informed that the firm is paying 10 dollars apiece for rough barrels,
that 45 dollars would be a reasonable price for the arm."
Now, as you can see out here they did make the changes that he requested.
They lengthened the forend, they gave it a metal cap,
and they made a number of changes to the stock,
and to the ramrod attachment as well to meet his requests.
And they would go ahead and put these into production.
But this gives you again some idea of the straights that the Confederacy was in,
where they're looking at this prototype gun and they're basically saying,
"Well, this is pretty much crap, but we need anything we can get.
And as long as you harden the lock tumbler so that it'll keep working for a while,
well, it's better than nothing, so we'll go ahead and take them."
Now, let's go ahead and pull the barrel and the lock off
and let me show you the secret hidden numbers inside the Bilharz & Hall carbine.
Looking inside the carbine there are a couple of numbers
that we would normally expect to see, and some of them are on here.
Generally, one expects to find a number stamped on the back of the barrel right here.
... We're not really sure if that's a serial number pertaining to production of the guns,
or if it's like a serial number referring to the number of barrels produced.
A serial number that can't be visible from the outside of the gun loses a lot of its value.
So it's a little unclear exactly what that number is.
Unfortunately on this one the number is either missing,
or simply not visible anymore because of age and corrosion on there.
However, there is an additional set of numbers on these Bilharz & Hall guns,
and those are ... what appear to be assembly numbers in the long tradition of military small arms.
And so we see that here on the bottom of the barrel, this one is E58.
And we also see that here on the inside of the lock plate.
The idea of assembly numbers, of course, is that you're hand fitting the guns together,
and you do that before the guns have been heat treated or finished.
So it's important to be able to keep track of which parts went into which gun
during the assembly process in those final stages. And that's what the assembly numbers are for.
These Bilharz guns have been noted with a number of letter/number combinations on the inside of parts like this,
A through E, and typically only two digit numbers.
So there is a hypothesis that these represent that they did, say, 99 of each letter,
and these represent sort of a secondary serial number.
Or at least they help tally a total quantity of guns made.
In that numbers above "E" don't appear to have been recorded,
and that would suggest something about 500 of the guns.
Maybe 600, depending on whether there was a series that had no letter at all.
The first deliveries of these carbines were made in 1863 to the Richmond Armory.
It is interesting that these were also purchased for 45 dollars apiece,
the same price that the substantially more complicated breech-loading Bilharz guns had been priced at
at the very beginning of the war. And this is an indication of the inflation,
the devaluation of the currency that was rapidly occurring in the Confederacy.
At any rate, it looked like the company was actually going to shut down at the end of 1863.
And ... the guys in charge started talking to the Richmond Armoury,
about like maybe selling them some of their machine tools
and transferring some of their best employees to the Armory.
A couple of the best guys did in fact move to the Armory,
but then operations continued at Bilharz, Hall & Company.
Apparently they found some more material, or something, to keep working with.
And they would continue producing these guns until late in 1864, when they finally did shut down.
Now based on the pseudo-serial numbers that have been recorded,
it's estimated that between 750 and 800 of these guns were produced.
Which is not very many, but that's kind of the story of arms manufacture in the Confederacy,
nobody was able to do a really high quality gun in large numbers.
They just didn't have the industrial base and the raw materials with which to make something like that happen.
So, ... well, there aren't very many of these around.
This one's not in the greatest shape, but really ... this is kind of what you get with Civil War firearms from the Confederacy.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.