Ferguson Rifle - Details

Details

The breech of the weapon is closed by 11 starting threads on a tapered screw, and the trigger guard serves as the crank to rotate it. One complete turn dropped the screw low enough to drop a round ball into the exposed breech followed by a slight overcharge of powder which was then sheared to the proper charge by the screw as it closed the breech. Since the weapon was loaded from the breech, rather than from the muzzle, it had an amazingly high rate of fire for its day, and in capable hands fired six to ten rounds per minute.

The action was adapted from the earlier 1720 Isaac de la Chaumette design by Major Patrick Ferguson (1744-1780), who redesigned it around 1770. He received an English patent in December of 1776 (number 1139) on details of the design.

Roughly one hundred of the Ordnance rifles were manufactured by four British gun firms, Durs Egg being the most notable, and issued to Ferguson's unit when its members were drawn from numerous light infantry units in General Howe's army. The largest battle in which the rifles were used was the Battle of Brandywine, in which Ferguson was wounded. While he recuperated, his Experimental Rifle Corps was subsequently disbanded. This was in no way due to "excessive losses" or any political machinations. The unit was an experiment; the men were always slated to return to their original units. If the unit was a failure as reported by some historians, why was Ferguson successful in getting General Clinton to agree to double the size of his experimental corps? Sadly, once Ferguson took a musket ball in the right elbow his chances of surviving, let alone returning to the field, did not look good, and the experiment of the charismatic young officer was ended.

Ferguson's men went back to the light infantry units they had originally come from, and his rifles were eventually replaced with the standard Short Land Pattern musket. Some historians report the surviving rifles were apparently put in storage in New York. But as most surviving Ferguson Ordnance Rifles known to exist in the U.S. today were war booty taken North during the American Civil War, questions remain as to any possible deployment of Ferguson Rifles in the Southern Campaigns of the American Revolution.To support this a number of ferguson rifles were brought north by the North Carolina Militia during the War of 1812. At least two actions are displayed at the Fort Meigs museum near Perrysburg Ohio. They were said to be booty from Kings Mountain.

The two main reasons that Ferguson rifles were not used by the rest of the army:

• The gun was difficult and expensive to produce using the small, decentralized gunsmith and subcontractor system in use to supply the Ordnance in early-Industrial Revolution Britain.

• The guns broke down easily in combat, especially in the wood of the stock around the lock mortise. The lock mechanism and breech were larger than the stock could withstand with rough use. All surviving military Fergusons feature a horseshoe-shaped iron repair under the lock to hold the stock together where it repeatedly broke around the weak, over-drilled out mortise.

However, despite an unsubstantiated claim that one of the actions was found at the battle site of Kings Mountain, North Carolina, where Ferguson was killed in action, the only piece of a Ferguson ever found in America from a gun used in action is a trigger guard found in excavations of a British army camp in New York City. The only association the Ferguson rifle has with the Battle of King's Mountain is that Patrick Ferguson was there.

Experience with early modern replicas, made before the proper screw and thread pitch of the breechblock were rediscovered, seemed to indicate that while reloading was rapid, it seemed to be necessary to first lubricate the breech screw (originally with a mixture of beeswax and tallow) or else the (replica) rifle would foul so much that it needed cleaning after three or four shots. However, through the research efforts of DeWitt Bailey and others, the properly made reproduction Ferguson rifle, made according to Patrick Ferguson's specifications of the 1770s, can fire beyond sixty shots.