Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I am Ian McCollum, and I'm here today at RIA
taking a look at an 1841 Mississippi rifle
made at the Harpers Ferry Armoury in Virginia,
that was then converted to a Merrill pattern breech loader.
So there's lots of cool history going on with this rifle.
In the very beginning, the 1841 was really more of kind of a Jäger rifle ...
than the typical full length infantry rifles at the time.
It became known as the "Mississippi rifle" because its first prominent use was with the Mississippi Rifles,
who were a unit in the 1840s, commanded by one Jefferson Davis.
He would of course go on to be president of the Confederate States of America for a brief time.
People don't normally think about anything except that with regard to him,
but he was a West Point-trained US military officer in the Mexican-American War.
And he thought that this rifle would be great for his troops,
well, not exactly this one, this rifle without the conversion, as a muzzle-loading percussion rifle.
He thought it was handy. The calibre was .54 calibre, originally.
And the Chief of Staff of the Army at the time didn't think that the rifles
were well enough tested, didn't want to let him use them.
This argument ended up going all the way to President Polk, who agreed with Davis,
gave his troops permission to use these things. And anyway, the rifles became associated
with that nomenclature, the Mississippi Rifles, as a result.
Now, they turned out to be really quite nice, they're handy, they're effective, they're reliable.
And Harpers Ferry Armoury, or Arsenal, in Virginia would start producing these in 1845,
and they would do so for about 10 years, and in total about 100,000 of these were manufactured.
Pretty darn good rifles.
By the 1850s the US had adopted a .58 calibre Minié ball,
and a lot of the 1841 pattern rifles were rebored to .58 calibre from .54 calibre.
And this has been done, so we'll take a look at the rear sight in a moment.
Then in 1860 the Harpers Ferry Arsenal also conducted experiments on breech-loading conversions.
And they used 1841 Mississippi rifles, as well as a couple of other patterns,
as the basis for some of these experiments. And that is what this is.
So, let me go ahead and show you that up close.
So this rifle was originally manufactured by Harpers Ferry, which was the second of the United States government arsenals,
small arms manufacturing centres. You can see that this has the US crest on it.
People may think of Harpers Ferry as being a Southern or a Confederate thing,
and that's because, well, it was in Confederate territory, but
there was no Confederate territory prior to 1860, before that it was all just the United States.
And this arsenal was set up in Virginia as a source of small arms.
They manufactured about 100,000 of these rifles, as well as Hall rifles and a bunch of other interesting things.
So, just to start off with, it's cool to find an original Harpers Ferry production rifle.
On the top of the breech lever here, we have a very small little patent marking from Merrill,
slightly abbreviated, that is James H. Merrill, Baltimore, patented July 1858.
Now when the US adopted the .58 calibre Minié ball, a lot of these rifles would end up being converted.
Basically just bored out to .58 calibre from .54 calibre.
This change required a new rear sight,
and they went through a number of different types of rear sight
before they finally settled on this one in 1855. This is the fourth pattern.
And it is ... a very simple three leaf sight. You have a 100 yard rear notch here,
a 300 yard, and a 500 yard, and you just kind of lift up the one that you want.
Very simple.
Now, getting to what makes this particular rifle special,
that would of course be the breech-loading conversion system.
So Harpers Ferry actually experimented with several different types of breech-loading conversion.
They had Merrill guns like this, they also made some Lindner conversions,
and what are called "Mont Storm" conversions.
Each of those being based on a particular person's patent system.
Some of the Lindners are still around, these are still around in very limited numbers, because
... well, we'll get to numbers in a moment.
The Mont Storm guns appear to have all been destroyed in the fire that destroyed
the Harpers Ferry facility in 1861. So none of those are around anymore.
As best I can tell, Harpers Ferry did 300 Merrill conversions.
They did 100 each on 1841 Mississippi rifles like this one,
and then also 1842 muskets and 1847 musketoons.
So experimenting with a couple of different styles and patterns of overall gun,
in addition to the breech-loading system itself.
So the way this works is we have a little spring-loaded catch here,
you pull that back and lift up,
and it gives you access to the back of the barrel.
You would insert a ball, a .58 calibre Minié ball, and a powder charge behind it,
probably wrapped in paper just to make it easy to get in there, although you could dump powder in.
You have this ramming lever which, when you close the whole thing, is going to lock up
against this lug in the top part of the lever.
So we'll put that down in there.
As you close this, it's going to ram the powder and ball up into the chamber so it's properly seated,
and then you are going to get a nice solid lock up here.
You've got a knee joint as well going in there, so that pressure pushing backwards
when it fires isn't going to cause this to pop open.
And, of course, as ... an additional measure,
you've got this spring-loaded catch that's going to hold the whole thing closed.
So this is going to allow you to, first off, reload the gun a lot faster than from the muzzle.
It also allows you to do things like reload it from a prone position, where you are not exposed to enemy fire.
Now, you have to load the ball and powder, you then also have to cock the ... hammer
put on a percussion cap, fully cock the hammer, and then you can fire.
Kaboom.
This would be an early example of a caseless cartridge,
because if you had a paper ... container for your powder, that would all get blown downrange when you fire.
And there's nothing to extract, so there is no sort of extractor mechanism on this.
It's just there to ram powder and ball.
We have brass hardware on here, good corrosion resistant stuff.
There is a patch box at the back, this is just a standard component of the 1841 Mississippi rifle.
So we've got a spare percussion cap nipple there, and a cleaning patch.
And then looking up front, this a single barrel band rifle, again brass hardware there.
A brass nose cap up here.
These were not originally intended to use bayonets,
some of them have been modified to use various types of bayonet, but not this particular one.
Even if this rifle wasn't extremely rare, which it is,
I think it would still be a really cool piece of interesting history because of the number of conversions that it went through.
It's interesting to consider: if the Harpers Ferry Arsenal hadn't been in Confederate territory,
if it hadn't been burned down to prevent the Confederates from getting access to its manufacturing capabilities,
perhaps the Union government would have used those facilities to convert
a large number of muzzle loaders into breech-loading rifles like this one,
or like the other patterns that were tested.
Obviously it's all hypothetical because the armoury was burned down,
but that leaves us with some tantalising, interesting pieces like this one.
Hopefully you guys enjoyed the video.
Thanks for watching.
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