Remington Model 1858 New Army

About the Remington Model 1858 New Army

The Remington Model 1858 New Army is a six-shot single-action percussion revolver designed by Fordyce Beals for E. Remington & Sons and adopted by the U.S. Army during the American Civil War. Chambered primarily in .44 caliber round ball (with a .36 caliber Navy variant), it served as the principal rival to Colt's contemporaneous 1860 Army revolver and was carried in massive numbers by Union cavalrymen and officers. The revolver's defining feature is its solid one-piece frame with an integral top strap above the cylinder - a design that made it significantly stronger and more rigid than Colt's open-top competitors, allowing the Remington to absorb heavier powder charges and withstand harder service. Operation is strictly single-action: the hammer is manually cocked for each shot, which rotates the 6-shot cylinder and indexes a fresh chamber. Each chamber is loaded from the front using the hinged loading lever to seat a powder charge and round ball, with a percussion cap placed on a nipple at the rear of each chamber. A clever set of safety notches cut between the chambers at the rear of the cylinder allows the hammer to rest safely between loaded chambers, permitting all six to be carried charged - a practice unsafe on many competing designs. Perhaps the revolver's most tactically significant feature is the ease with which the cylinder could be removed and replaced: by lowering the loading lever and withdrawing the base pin, a shooter could swap a spent cylinder for a pre-loaded one in roughly ten seconds, effectively giving the Remington a field "reload" capability that the Colt 1860's integrated frame could not match. Constructed with a blued steel frame and octagonal barrel, a brass trigger guard, and smooth walnut one-piece grips, the 1858 was produced in Ilion, New York, with approximately 132,000 delivered on Civil War contracts and over 200,000 manufactured in total before production ended in 1875. After the Civil War many Remingtons were factory-converted for metallic cartridges in .46 Rimfire and .44 Colt, extending their service life well into the cartridge era and carrying the design through the frontier and Wild West periods.

Its solid top-strap frame made the 1858 dramatically stronger than the open-top Colt 1860 Army, and a trained cavalryman could swap a spent cylinder for a pre-loaded spare in about ten seconds - the closest thing to a magazine change that the percussion era ever produced. Clint Eastwood carried a cap-and-ball Remington as the Preacher in Pale Rider, and the same pattern of revolver was favored on the outlaw trail by Frank James and Cole Younger of the James-Younger Gang.

Remington Model 1858 New Army specifications

Often retroactively called the "Remington Model 1858," though Remington themselves marketed it and its successors as the "New Model Army" (1863 onward). The pre-1863 variants are properly called the Beals Army (1860-1862) and Model 1861 Army ("Old Model Army"); the New Model Army introduced refinements including redesigned loading lever, safety notches, and improved cylinder pin. Effective combat range is short - roughly 25 to 50 meters - though the heavy .44 ball retained lethality well beyond that.