Weapons seized from US Arsenal in Little Rock

[borderruffian72]

I have surfed the net but have not been able to find a list or description of the weapons seized from the Little Rock Arsenal in 1861. Does anyone have a list or link?

Thanks

[Archie R. Lib]

Hey Evan -

Little Rock was a "Class 3" armory - storing mainly older military weapons meant to arm the state militia if mobilization were called for. According to the Confederate inventory (http://www.geocities.com/capitalguards/arsenal.html) after the seizure these records indicate:

5,625 M1816/22 Springfield muskets, flintlock
2,864 "Hall's" rifles, flintlock
52 M1816/22 Percussion conversion muskets
357 M1842 Springfield muskets
900 M1855 Springfield rifled muskets
54 M1841 "Mississippi" rifles

As well as assorted 1817 "Common" muskets, a few Hall's carbines and two M1847 Musketoons. There were also over 250,000 cartriges, caps, 4 bronze artillery pieces from General Bragg's old battery. Apparently only about 9,600 stand were serviceable longarms.

It looks as if the source is listed as John Harrell's "Confederate Military History", Volume 10, Part 2. I'll have to look that one up...

Hope that helps!

Keep your powder dry,
Rich

[Victor Sarna]

Rich,
Thank you for posting this most informative report! As I started reenacting with Co A, 6th Arkansas Vol Inf, the "Capitol Guards" back in May of 1973, we were affiliated with the Little Rock Arsenal that had become a local museum. I have often wondered what was kept there in 186,1 as for many years we did a re-enactment of the Arsenal's surrender by Captain Totten to Arkansas Governor Rector. Keep up your fine research work!

[wavey1us]

Hey Evan -

Little Rock was a "Class 3" armory - storing mainly older military weapons meant to arm the state militia if mobilization were called for. According to the Confederate inventory (http://www.geocities.com/capitalguards/arsenal.html) after the seizure these records indicate:

5,625 M1816/22 Springfield muskets, flintlock
2,864 "Hall's" rifles, flintlock
52 M1816/22 Percussion conversion muskets
357 M1842 Springfield muskets
900 M1855 Springfield rifled muskets
54 M1841 "Mississippi" rifles

As well as assorted 1817 "Common" muskets, a few Hall's carbines and two M1847 Musketoons. There were also over 250,000 cartriges, caps, 4 bronze artillery pieces from General Bragg's old battery. Apparently only about 9,600 stand were serviceable longarms.

It looks as if the source is listed as John Harrell's "Confederate Military History", Volume 10, Part 2. I'll have to look that one up...

Hope that helps!

Keep your powder dry,
Rich

Rich,
Good info. It would be neat to determine out of the 8400 flintlock weapons, how many were converted to percussion and how long it took to do so. Also, there is no mention of flints for the above muskets.

[Archie R. Lib]

Hey Bill.

Honestly I think the truth with the flintlock conversions is closer to "not very many", if any at all, at least on the Confederate side, and especially in Arkansas. The Confederates, like the Federals, needed to arm thousands and do it fast, so they did it with what they had on hand until they could get other sources (i.e. Europe) up and running. And it seems like sometimes the musket flints show up on the ordnance returns and sometimes they don't.....Mainly they just show up if they are being issued to a unit with the muskets I guess. The ordance & quartermasters were much more anal retentive about it than the arsenal staff it appears!

Though primary resource material is scarce, it seems as though most Arkansas troops (as in many of the more rural southern states) were armed with whatever was available at the beginning of the war - and that meant whatever could be immediately sent to them from the seized arsenals or even what was brought from home. And that meant obsolete weapons, for the vast majority. I don't think there was any quick way to get them re-tooled before issuing. Even a major industrialized and well-funded Federal contractor like Hewes and Phillips in New Jersey took forever to convert the flints - many of them not getting done until very late in 1862, though granted their contract called for some rifling of the smoothbores. The Federal govt finally got so fed up with waiting that they just demanded them without rifling to get them out to the massing volunteers, while they frantically grabbed whatever they could from across the pond and spun up production of the '61 Springfields with a bunch of outsourced contracts. If that was going on in the Union, I'm sure it was much worse in the fledgling Confederacy, and especially so in industrial backwaters like Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi and even Tennessee.

I saw a very cool thing at Shiloh this past April on this same subject. If you look at the details of the new Tennessee monument there you'll see it is very accurate.... The standing soldier is armed with an 1816/22 cone-in-barrel conversion, and the fallen soldier is carrying an 1816/22 flintlock. Pretty awesome research went into that monument. And records and sources, especially first person accounts, all seem to indicate this was prevalent in the west. And that was in the spring of 1862, a year after the war started and 8 months after Manassas.

Unfortunately the flintlocks of that period are totally underrepresented in our hobby for a ton of (mostly litigious) reasons. I've always thought that the most accurate, historically correct unit for early war Confederacy (especially western) would be a company armed completely with 16/22 flintlocks.... That would be something to see.

Keep your powder dry.

Rich