The Gatling gun was an early machine gun that was first used during the Civil War and would later be deployed against strikers and rioters throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Public DomainBritish soldiers used Gatling guns during the Second Anglo-Afghan War between 1878 and 1881.
In modern warfare, advanced weapons can fire thousands of rounds per minute with the single pull of a trigger. But before firearms were fully automatic, there was the Gatling gun.
Invented in 1861 by Richard J. Gatling, the weapon was one of the earliest rapid-firing guns. It had multiple barrels and was operated with a hand crank. With a crew of four men, it could fire up to 400 rounds per minute.
The Gatling gun was first used in combat during the Civil War, and over the following decades, it saw action in conflicts across the globe. It was also deployed against strikers and rioters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Gatling himself stated that he created the gun to reduce the size of armies and thus the death toll of warfare — but instead, his invention served as the blueprint for today’s even deadlier fully-automatic weapons.
The Creation Of The Gatling Gun
The Gatling gun’s inventor and namesake, Richard Jordan Gatling, was born in North Carolina in 1818. His father was a wealthy plantation owner and enslaver who invented farm machinery, and young Gatling began creating his own inventions at an early age. In 1844, he received his first patent for a seed sower.
Library of CongressRichard Jordan Gatling, the inventor of the Gatling gun.
His designs helped revolutionize the agriculture industry in the United States, but he would ultimately be remembered for something much different: the Gatling gun.
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Gatling started working on various designs for a gun that was a far cry from the muskets and bayonets of the time — one that would ideally reduce the number of soldiers needed in battle.
According to Julia Keller’s book Mr. Gatling’s Terrible Marvel, Gatling wrote in 1877, “It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine — a gun — which could, by rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a great extent, supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease be greatly diminished.”
U.S. National ArchivesPart of the patent document for Richard J. Gatling’s rapid-fire weapon.
He combined ideas from his previous farming machines, imagining a weapon that dropped cartridges into a barrel much like his other inventions dropped seeds into the ground. The result was the Gatling gun.
The first iteration of the weapon had six barrels that were rotated with a hand crank. At the top of the rotation, a single cartridge dropped into a barrel by the force of gravity from a magazine mounted above. That barrel then fired as it reached the bottom of the cycle and cooled as it circled back to the top to be reloaded.
By late 1862, the Gatling gun was ready for combat — but it wouldn’t quite make the impact that Richard Gatling had hoped.
The Gatling Gun In Battle
Despite its innovative design, the Gatling gun wasn’t widely used during the Civil War. Union commanders purchased a few of the weapons, and at least one was deployed during the siege of Petersburg in 1864, but not everyone was impressed by it. Union General James Wolfe Ripley reportedly once said, “You can kill a man just as dead with a cap-n-ball.”
Other countries saw the potential in the new firearm, however. The Imperial Russian Army had hundreds of Gatling guns in its arsenal by the 1870s, and British colonizers frequently used the weapon against Zulu and Bedouin warriors in Africa.
National Army MuseumBritish soldiers stand with a pair of Gatlin guns during the Zulu War in South Africa. 1879.
Richard Gatling improved his original design over the decades, and by the 1880s, a full crew of four operators could fire more than 400 rounds per minute. It proved even more effective once brass cartridges replaced paper cartridges in the years following the Civil War.
During the Spanish-American War in 1898, U.S. troops used Gatling guns during the Battle of San Juan Hill. Over the course of nine minutes, four of the weapons fired 18,000 rounds, resulting in a high number of casualties. The following year, the U.S. Army deployed several Gatling guns during the Philippine-American War, but the rough terrain of the islands made it difficult to transport the bulky weapons.
Library of CongressSoldiers man a Gatling gun in the Philippines during the Philippine-American War. 1899.
The U.S. military found other uses for the Gatling gun, though — particularly when it came to breaking up strikes and riots.
The Legacy Of The Early Machine Gun
The Gatling gun saw use beyond warfare throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. When riots broke out in New York City in July 1863 as residents protested against new draft laws, authorities tried to quell the chaos with Gatling guns. There’s even a rumor that The New York Times owner Henry Jarvis Raymond personally defended the newspaper’s office with one of the weapons.
In 1877, railroad workers in Pittsburgh destroyed locomotives and train depots as part of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. President Rutherford B. Hayes sent federal troops armed with Gatling guns to quash the violence.
By 1911, the U.S. military had declared the Gatling gun obsolete, but coal companies in West Virginia still kept several of the weapons in storage to use against striking miners. During the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921 — the largest labor uprising in U.S. history — miners stole one of these Gatling guns and deployed it against strikebreakers.
Public DomainMembers of the Colorado State Militia used Gatling guns during a 1904 miners’ strike.
But despite these violent incidents, perhaps the bloodiest aspect of the Gatling gun’s legacy is the future weapons that it inspired. The first fully-automatic machine gun was invented in 1884, and firearms only became deadlier from there.
Even today, weapons like the M134 Minigun and the M61 Vulcan are based on the Gatling gun — though they don’t need to be cranked by hand and can fire up to 6,000 rounds per minute rather than 400.
This may not have been Richard Gatling’s intention when he first began sketching out ideas for a rapid-fire weapon in 1861, but his invention certainly changed the history of warfare, for better or for worse.
After learning the history of the Gatling gun, read about the Paris Gun, the German superweapon of World War I. Then, discover how the Tommy gun became an icon of the Prohibition era.
