Christopher Spencer patented his lever-action rifle in 1860, the first military metallic cartridge repeater, built around a falling breech block and a tubular magazine hidden in the buttstock. This episode explains how it worked, why early nine-round magazines were cut to seven after dropped rifles risked setting off the stacked cartridges, and how Erastus Blakeslee’s case of preloaded tubes let a soldier reload in seconds. The copper .56-56 rimfire cartridge was waterproof and crush-proof, but General James Wolfe Ripley of the Ordnance Department refused the weapon, fearing soldiers would burn through ammunition and noting it cost about $40 against $13 for a Springfield.

In July 1863 Spencer bypassed Ripley and met Abraham Lincoln, who test fired the rifle at a target on the White House grounds and ordered it adopted; Ripley resisted and was replaced later that year. Spencers armed John T. Wilder’s Lightning Brigade at Hoover’s Gap, George Armstrong Custer’s troopers at Gettysburg and James H. Wilson’s 9,000 mounted infantry at Nashville, though rapid fire blinded troops in black powder smoke and the Confederacy could not make the copper ammunition. After the war the rifle went west and abroad, while the Spencer Repeating Rifle Company was out of business by 1869 and its assets ended up with Oliver Winchester.

• When John Wilkes Booth was killed in a Virginia tobacco barn, he was carrying a Spencer carbine.
• Captured Spencers were of little use to Confederate forces, who lacked the industry to draw and stamp copper cartridges.
• At Beecher Island in 1868, about 50 scouts under Frederick Forsyth held off a far larger Cheyenne and Arapaho force with Spencer carbines and over 150 rounds each.
• Brazil formed special sharpshooter units armed with Spencers during the Paraguayan War, and France bought thousands in 1870.
• In an 1871 fight, Chilean cavalry with Spencers fired repeated volleys at Mapuche warriors who had timed their charges to the reload window of single-shot guns.