M1841 Mississippi rifle
type of rifled musket
The M1841 Mississippi rifle is a muzzle-loading percussion rifle used in the Mexican–American War and the American Civil War.
Development
When Eli Whitney III took over management of the Whitney Armory in 1842, he set about tooling up under his new contract from the U.S. government for making the model 1841 percussion rifle. Machinery and fixtures for making the 1822 contract flintlock musket had to be retooled or replaced in order to produce the lock and barrel of the new model. Whitney hired armourer Thomas Warner as foreman, who, as master armourer at Springfield Armory, had been implementing similar changes there.
Warner spearheaded the drive to equip the Springfield Armory with a set of new, more precise machines, and a system of gauging that made it possible to achieve interchangeability of parts in military small arms. Under Warner's tutelage, Whitney equipped the Whitney Armory to do likewise.
Design and features
The Mississippi rifle was the first standard U.S. military rifle to use a percussion lock system. Percussion lock systems were much more reliable and weatherproof than the flintlock systems that they replaced, and were such an improvement that many earlier flintlock rifles and muskets were later converted to percussion lock systems.
The Mississippi rifle was originally produced in .54 caliber, using 1:66 rifling and no provision for fixing a bayonet.
In 1855, the Mississippi rifle was changed to .58 caliber, so that it could use the .58 caliber Minie Ball that had recently become standard.
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This entry incorporates text from “M1841 Mississippi rifle” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.