Curious Relics #142: Load It On Sunday? – The 1860 Henry Rifle Part I

Before the Henry Came the Volcanic

To get to the Henry you have to start with a pile of failures. Walter Hunt of New York (yep, the safety pin guy) patented his Volition Repeater in 1848. It fed his “Rocket Ball” from a tube under the barrel, and the Rocket Ball was nothing more than a hollow lead bullet with powder stuffed in the base and no case whatsoever. It was way too complicated to build and from what I have read the only known example sits in the Cody Firearms Museum out in Wyoming.

Lewis Jennings simplified Hunt’s design, and Robbins & Lawrence in Vermont built a run of Jennings rifles that nobody wanted. Working in or around that same shop were Horace Smith, Daniel Wesson, and a shop foreman by the name of Benjamin Tyler Henry. Smith kept tinkering and he and Wesson partnered up, but the first thing they actually got into production around 1854 was a lever-action pistol, not a rifle.

Lot 1001: Smith-Jennings Rifle 54 percussion. (n.d.-c). Rock Island Auction Company. photograph. Retrieved February 19, 2024, from https://www.rockislandauction.com/detail/63/1001/smithjennings-rifle-54-percussion.

By 1855, the whole operation had been reorganized as the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company and carbines joined the pistols in the lineup. One of the investors was a New Haven shirt maker named Oliver Winchester. The Volcanic already had the toggle-link action, the lever, and the front-loading tube magazine that the Henry would carry over, but it was stuck with Rocket Ball ammunition. A few grains of powder in the back of a bullet does not make for much power or reliability, and by the end of 1856 the company was insolvent after selling fewer than 3,400 guns, according to American Rifleman.

Lot 2: Volcanic Repeating Arms Company Lever Action Navy Pistol [Photograph found in Premier Firearms Auction #82, Rock Island Auction Company]. (n.d.). Retrieved April 9, 2021, from https://www.rockislandauction.com/detail/82/2/volcanic-repeating-arms-company-lever-action-navy-pistol

Winchester bought up the pieces and moved everything to New Haven, where it became the New Haven Arms Company in 1857, with Henry running the plant. Smith and Wesson had already left to go make revolvers, and I think we all know how that went for them.

History Abridged: The 1860 Henry Rifle

Henry figured out pretty quickly that the action was fine and it was the ammunition holding everything back. Smith & Wesson was having good luck with their little .22 rimfire revolver cartridge, so Henry took the idea and scaled it way up into a copper-cased .44 rimfire. Sources vary, but roughly, the early load was a pointed 216-grain bullet on top of about 25 grains of black powder, and later it settled into a flat-nosed bullet somewhere in the 200 to 210 grain range with 25 to 28 grains of powder. That is not a lot of gun next to a Springfield rifle musket throwing a bullet over twice as heavy. What it had going for it was that it was self-contained and it fed through a tube reliably, which the Rocket Ball never managed.

Patent No. 30,446 was granted on October 16, 1860 and I pulled up the original to take a look for myself. It describes a sporting rifle with a 24 inch barrel “carrying fifteen charges,” a firing pin with two prongs that strikes the rim in two spots, and a carrier that kicks the empty case out of the frame. The part that caught my eye was at the very top of the page, though. Under Henry’s name, the patent is assigned to Oliver F. Winchester. I will come back to that in a bit.

Thanks to production and distribution problems, it took until 1862 for Henrys to get out the door in any real number, and a few hundred of the earliest ones had iron frames before brass took over (Part II will cover that). As for price, I have seen anything from about $37 to $47 for a plain rifle in those first years depending on the source. For reference a Union private was making about $13 a month.

Winchester went after the government first, and he was smart about it. Engraved presentation Henrys went to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (serial number 1), President Lincoln (serial number 6, now at the Smithsonian), and Navy Secretary Gideon Welles (serial number 9). That last one sits at the Autry Museum along with the Frank James Remington from our last series, small world. Army trials in late 1861 went well and the Chief of Ordnance, Brigadier General James Ripley… still said no.

Ripley is the bad guy in just about every Henry story out there and he did earn some of that. He was 66 when he took the job in 1861, and early on he wrote that the flood of new inventions was an evil that could only be stopped by flat out refusing anything new and untried. In December of that year he decided the Henry and the Spencer were too heavy when loaded and no better than the single-shot breechloaders the Army already had. When the 1st D.C. Cavalry got approval to buy 240 Henrys in 1863 Ripley personally cut the order down to 120 before it got put back.

All that being said, I do not think he was the cartoon villain he gets made out to be. Ripley was trying to arm an army that grew from around sixteen thousand men to over a million while inventors with friends in Washington lined up out his door. On top of that, the Henry shot a proprietary cartridge only a couple of companies were making. Somebody even wrote a whole book defending him (General James Wolfe Ripley, Chief of Ordnance: Answers to His Critics). What usually gets left out is that New Haven Arms could not have filled a big order anyway. They were making something like eight to ten rifles a day with a lot of help from small subcontractors and could not even fill the D.C. Cavalry’s small order out of stock. When Colonel John Wilder wrote asking to buy Henrys for his brigade he was told to get on the waiting list, so he bought Spencers instead. Even after Ripley was pushed out in September 1863 the Army’s own ordnance history says his replacement kept things running pretty much the same way for another year.

So the Henry mostly went to war one private purchase at a time. Soldiers paid with their own wages or their reenlistment bounties, sometimes with money sent from home. Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, and Indiana were the big early markets and the Illinois boys seem to have bought more than anybody. The 66th Illinois (Birge’s Western Sharpshooters) picked up something like 250 of them, and one of their men, Lorenzo Barker, wrote in his diary in January 1864 that the “seventeen shooters” (sixteen or seventeen depending on who was counting) had come in for the fellas who signed up for them.

The government did eventually buy some. The 1,731 figure you see everywhere holds up since it comes from the Ordnance Department’s own postwar record of purchases, but where they went is the more interesting part. Roughly 1,100 went to the 1st District of Columbia Cavalry, a regiment raised in 1863 mostly to go after John Mosby and his rangers (remember that for later). They did not take great care of them either. In August 1864 the Chief of Ordnance complained that the regiment had lost 276 Henrys in four months without the casualties to explain it, and that September over 200 more were captured and passed out to the 7th, 11th, and 35th Virginia Cavalry, so a couple hundred Henrys in Confederate hands were paid for by the Union Army.

Most of the rest were 627 brand new rifles that went to the 3rd U.S. Veteran Volunteer Infantry in April and May of 1865, after Lee had already surrendered. Those men never fired them in anger and one company of them spent the next winter at Fort Snelling right here in Minnesota. They got to keep their rifles at discharge. Anybody else who wanted to buy their issued Henry when they mustered out paid $15, the highest price the Ordnance Department put on any Civil War arm.

“Outstanding Civil War Production Henry Lever Action Rifle.” Rock Island Auction, www.rockislandauction.com/detail/79/21/outstanding-civil-war-production-henry-lever-action-rifle. Accessed 28 Sept. 2026.

Allatoona Pass in Georgia on October 5, 1864 is the fight everyone brings up. A small Union garrison held a supply depot with around 2.7 million rations in it against a bigger Confederate division, and the 7th Illinois was there with a good number of privately bought Henrys. (The 4th Minnesota was there too and yours truly would be a bad Minnesotan not to mention it.) The quote on the historical marker comes from Major William Ludlow who was in the fort that day, and the way it usually gets printed you would think the Henrys saved the place all on their own. In the paper he read to fellow veterans in 1891 what he actually wrote was that the Henrys saved them “among forty other things.” He mentions one reserve company from an Illinois regiment armed with them, and when he writes “16-shooters” he is talking about the rifles, which is easy to misread as a headcount.

Load It On Sunday?

Now for the quote. You guys and gals know the one. “That damned Yankee rifle that can be loaded on Sunday and fired all week.” It is on gun company websites and historical markers, it is in the Smithsonian’s catalog entry for Lincoln’s rifle, and I quit counting the magazine articles. It gets pinned on an unnamed Confederate soldier or an unnamed officer, and lately it gets pinned on Colonel John Mosby.

I could not find it sourced to anybody. I went looking for a letter or a diary or anything else from the 1860s with it in there and came up empty. The Mosby version goes back through a Wikipedia footnote to Herbert Houze’s history of Winchester, which was written well over a hundred years after the war, and I could find no helpful information tying it to anything Mosby himself said or wrote. The closest thing I found to an origin is a note from Rock Island Auction that a Union commander wrote to Oliver Winchester and passed along what a captured Confederate had told him. If that is where it came from then the most famous line about the Henry started out as a customer testimonial sent to the company selling it. I only found that in one place so take it with a grain of salt.

This is speculation but the Mosby version may have stuck around because the 1st D.C. Cavalry, the one regiment in Virginia carrying government Henrys, was raised to hunt him down. His men would have had more reason than most to cuss at a Henry, but that is my guess and not a source.

How Many Were Made?

The other number everyone repeats is “about 14,000,” and I have repeated it myself over the years. It is really based on the highest serial numbers. George Madis surveyed Henry serials back in 1961 and came up with 14,094. Wiley Sword put it at about 12,850 in his 2002 book. Then in 2016 Vincent Rausch published an article through the American Society of Arms Collectors using Steve Stevens’ database of about 2,200 known Henry serial numbers. It argues New Haven Arms skipped whole blocks of numbers to make sales look better than they were, and by that math only about 4,550 Henrys were made through serial number 12,999.

That is a massive difference, and I cannot settle it. Plenty of collectors disagree and figure New Haven built a rifle for every number, and there are no factory records left to check against. Somewhere between 4,500 and 14,000 is as honest as I can get. We will dig into it more in Part III with dating.

Henry Versus Winchester

Back to that patent assignment. Henry designed the rifle and the cartridge and his name was on both, but the patent belonged to Winchester from day one. Henry felt he was being underpaid. Every source agrees on that much but I could find no helpful information on what his deal actually said or what he thought he was owed.

What he did next is better documented, even if the dates move around depending on who you read. While Winchester was over in Europe drumming up foreign sales, Henry (who was still a stockholder) and company secretary Charles Nott petitioned the Connecticut legislature to rename New Haven Arms the Henry Repeating Rifle Company, which would have put Henry in charge. Most sources say 1865, a few say 1864 or 1866. Winchester got home in June 1865 and rather than fight it he started a new company, filing the paperwork in Bridgeport that July. That company became the Winchester Repeating Arms Company and Henry’s company did not last long.

Henry never came back. Winchester’s new superintendent Nelson King patented a loading gate on the side of the receiver and put a wooden forearm over the magazine tube, and that rifle went out as the “Improved Henry” in 1866 before everyone started calling it the Winchester Model 1866. Henry worked as an independent gunsmith in New Haven for the rest of his life and died there in 1898. His name stuck around on the cartridge and on thousands of rifles, and since 1996 it has been on a company that has zero connection to him or to New Haven Arms.

After the war the surviving Henrys went west with their owners, and you will read that Lakota and Cheyenne warriors carried them at the Little Bighorn. Archaeologists did find plenty of .44 Henry brass on that battlefield. The catch is the Winchester 1866 fired the same cartridge, so you cannot tell from the brass which rifle it came out of.

A Henry With an Asterisk

Which brings me to the rifle I actually have on hand. The Uberti 1860 Henry on my bench is brass framed with a 24.5 inch octagon barrel and it looks the part. It is not a .44 Henry though. Nothing new is, since commercial .44 Henry ammunition died off back in the 1930s. Uberti makes this rifle in .44-40 and .45 Colt and mine is the .45 Colt.

That is a bigger gap than we had with the Frank. The .45 Colt came out in 1873 with the Single Action Army, years after the last Henry was made, and no Henry was chambered for it back then. It is offered today because Cowboy Action shooters want their rifle and revolver shooting the same ammo (Frank James would approve). If you want something closer to period correct the .44-40 is the way to go, since it is Winchester’s centerfire .44 from that same year. The Uberti also holds 13 in the tube plus one in the chamber compared to the fifteen the patent describes. So when we get to range time in Part IV, keep in mind all of it is about a Uberti in .45 Colt and not a New Haven Arms rifle. And if you own an original please treat it like the piece of history it is and leave it off the range.

End of Part I: The 1860 Henry Rifle

That was a lot of Henry for one article, folks, and a good bit of it was me poking holes in things most of us have read our whole lives. I still love this rifle. It started out as a failed gun with lousy ammunition and some shirt money behind it, and it ended up the grandfather of every tube fed lever gun that came after. Next time we are getting into the variations like iron versus brass frames, early and late features, the barrel address change, buttplate styles, and the inspector marks that set government rifles apart. Part III covers specs, dating (with more of that serial number argument), and parts, then Part IV is range time with the Uberti. Hope to see you then!

This installment is part of the Curious Relics series – an ongoing archive of historical firearms documentation. Browse the full series here.

A big thank you to the folks at Uberti for sending out the 1860 Henry for this series. Actually getting to work the action and load that magazine the old way makes it a whole lot easier to explain a rifle this odd, and I really appreciate it.

In closing, I hope our Curious Relics segment informed as well as entertained. This all was written in hopes of continued firearm appreciation and preservation. We did not just realize how guns were supposed to look and function. It was a long and tedious process that has shaped the world we live in. If you have a question or you are sitting on information that could sharpen up an article like this one, you can find me through my Linktree. Until next time!