MUSKETGATE

In October 1861 Casper D. Schubarth made his way from his home in Providence, Rhode Island, to the nation’s capital. The 32-year-old Norwegian immigrant brought with him a rifle, ammunition, and a letter of introduction to U.S. Senator James F. Simmons, one of his home-state lawmakers. Those three items, he hoped, would help him make a fortune.

The Civil War had begun just four months earlier, and the Department of War was hastily trying to equip the 500,000-man army that President Abraham Lincoln had persuaded Congress to authorize that summer. The war effort was already straining the industrial capacity of the Northern states. Just finding enough fabric to sew uniforms for Union soldiers was a challenge. And then there was the matter of weapons. The Union’s arsenal—filled largely with antiquated, obsolete weapons—had just 50,000 up-to-date rifles. What’s more, the government’s single armory, in Springfield, Massachusetts, could produce only about 10,000 rifles a year. If the Confederacy was to be defeated, the Union needed a lot of guns, and it needed them in a hurry.

Schubarth was eager to supply some of them. He had arrived in the United States 11 years before and settled in Providence, where in the late 1850s he opened a two-room gun shop in a neighborhood near the banks of the Providence River. His trade was strictly small time, such as making and fixing guns for local hunters.

The Union needed a lot of guns, and Schubarth was eager to supply them.

But Schubarth had big dreams. In his spare time, he had invented what his July 1861 patent application described as “a new and useful improvement in breechloading fire-arms.” A lever on the underside of the stock retracted a key, which allowed the stock to fall away from the barrel. A cartridge could then be inserted and the weapon snapped back together. Schubarth believed his mechanism, which had no sliding or rubbing joint to wear out and was designed to avoid malfunctions that plagued muzzle-loading muskets, represented a significant advance. “The above arm is effective and sure, and not liable to explode by accident, and capable of very rapid firing,” he wrote. “Its construction is simple and economical, and it is durable and not liable to repair.” He had also developed an unusual, bulb-shaped pinfire .58 cartridge for his rifle, which his patent application noted was designed to be waterproof.

Already, Schubarth’s innovations had impressed “Among all the breech-loading guns that we have examined, we have seen none that impressed us more favorably than Schubarth’s,” its reviewer wrote in August 1861, noting that his rifle could propel a bullet “through 15 one-inch boards