The Henry rifle, designed in 1860, is a North American breech-loading, manually repeating long gun:the shooter operates a trigger guard and the gun is ready to fire again. Reserve metal cartridges are contained in a tubular magazine placed under the barrel.
A notable advance over contemporary rifled muskets (single-shot, rifled, muzzle-loading, percussion-fired rifles) the Henry rifle was not officially adopted by the United States government but was widely used during the Civil War and the Indian Wars like its competitor, the Spencer Rifle.
Technical
The trigger guard allows manual repetition of fire at the rate of one shot every two seconds in trained hands, compared to 2 to 3 shots per minute for muzzle-loading muskets. In addition, the tubular magazine holds 16 rounds, making the Henry a weapon whose firepower and rapidity of fire far exceed those of contemporary muzzle-loading rifles.
The cartridge is rimfire, and includes a copper (later brass) case, containing 25 grains (1.6 g) of black powder, which propels a lead bullet of nominal caliber .44 (11mm17), weighing 216 grains (14g).
Operation:Pulling the trigger guard down opens the bolt, raises the feeder with a fresh cartridge, withdraws and ejects the empty case from the chamber and cocks the hammer. Raising the trigger lever closes the breech, this pushes the cartridge housed in the feeder into the chamber, the spring housed in the magazine then pushes a cartridge into the fallen feeder. the weapon is ready to fire.
Despite all its advantages, the Henry rifle posed a security problem:the hammer was either in the "cocked" position (rifle ready to fire) - or in the "rest" position, the tip of the firing pin resting on the edge of the cartridge . An accidental impact on the dog could then start the shot...
History
The designer of the Henry rifle was Benjamin Tyler Henry:around 1850 he improved the "Volcanic Repeating Rifle", a manual repeating rifle, whose mechanism was similar to that of the Henry, but which used caseless ammunition (powder and primer located in the base of the bullet), with insufficient ballistic properties.
In the fall of 1862 the firm "New Haven Arms Company" had manufactured 900 of these new rifles. In 1864, it produced 290 a month. When production of the Henry rifle ceased in 1866, approximately 14,000 units had been produced.
During the Civil War, the Henry rifle (which was not officially adopted by the Unionist government) acquired a reputation as a very effective but expensive weapon, which provided overwhelming firepower, but whose ammunition was not available. not easily. We saw the Henry rifle rather in the hands of soldiers called to fight in isolation:scouts (scouts), raiders, skirmishers, flank-guards - rather than in large units.
For Confederates armed with muzzle-loading rifles and facing the new "sixteen-shooter" ("sixteen-shooters"), the Henry rifle was "that damned Yankee rifle, which they load on Sunday, and with which they shoot all week".
The Confederates used the Henry rifle very little, because when they managed to capture it, they quickly ran out of ammunition:they could not manufacture this specific case in a continuous way because they lacked copper. The Henry was, however, used sporadically by various Southern cavalry units in Louisiana, Texas, and Virginia, as well as by President Jefferson Davis's bodyguards.
The Henry was not used on a large scale, but proved to be very useful when intense and rapid fire, and at close range, made it possible to win the decision.
Thus during the American Civil War, at the battle of Franklin (Tennessee), on November 30, 1864, 2 Unionist regiments armed with Henrys broke the frontal assault en masse of the 20,000 men of John Bell Hood, and the Confederates experienced a of their worst defeats, which preceded that of Nashville.
During the Indian Wars, the rolling fire of small United States Army detachments armed with Henry rifles was decisive against masses of Native American warriors, particularly during Red Cloud's War (Battle of Hayfield on the 1st August 1867, and Battle of Wagon Box the following day, near Fort Phil Kearney, Wyoming).
The overwhelming success of the Sioux and Cheyenne at the Battle of the Little Big Horn (June 25, 1876) has been attributed to the fact that they were armed with a few Henry (and also Spencer and Winchester) rapid-fire rifles, while the soldiers of the 7th Cavalry had only Springfield Model 1873 "Trap-door" single-shot carbines (more defective, it was said) and revolvers...