Tallassee Carbine: The Confederacy's Last-Ditch Effort

With an 80% failure rate, Ea-Nasir must have been reincarnated as a spring steel supplier for the Confederacy.

Being Floridian my brain read "Tallahassee" so when Ian said "Tallasee" I was extremely confused for a few seconds.

How cool, I grew up in Tallassee and the old armory structure is there. It's a ruin now but until about 20 years ago it was a standing roofed structure still.

6:40 That's actually a pretty ingenious device for retaining the ramrod while simultaneously allowing its use. I'm impressed.

Wait, WHAT, there is something firearm related outside Ian's expertise!!! Percussion Cap protectors. How long till Ian has a video going into detailed history of such protectors and shows us all 6 types that ever existed?

I live about 20 minutes from Tallassee. The old brick cotton and armory buildings were still standing until a few years ago. As kids, we walked through them once or twice after brunch at the Hotel Tallassee.

When you mentioned confederate rifle barrels used as reinforcement in a foundation it reminded me of a very long fence and gate system at a place called Grant's Farm. The fence is built primarily of Civil War rifle barrels, thousands of them(alot but not sure of the exact count). This is in St. Louis County, Missouri. Those are surely forgotten weapons and hundreds of people drive past them every day not realizing they are there.

The cannon that sits out on the corner of the ME engineering building is from Tallassee. Also, I have been diving in the river by the old armory looking for cannons that were allegedly dumped when the armory was packing up.

Ian, I know you must hear this all the time but PLEASE consider doing either the occasional history video or a history channel altogether. My favorite parts of your videos are always the historical background and you tell it so well. Great video as always!

In '89 or '90 my dad and I went to Giest music shop in Helena Arkansas and dad purchased one from Mr. Giest. Mr. Giest (about 70 at that time) said he can remember as a small boy, his granddad put that carbine, along with the saber I purchased in that corner and no one paid any more attention to them. The carbine dad purchased did not have a sling. It did have the rings for a sling. I had a brass bar and ring on the side of the wood opposite the lock. It also had a serial# 590 on the trigger guard and on the wood under the butt plate. The wood and brass was complete as well. My eldest brother now owns the carbine, as dad passed in the early 2010's I went hunting with it the same year dad bought it. We used black powder, with a slug and sabot from a 20ga. It did not kick as hard as my 20ga. It put a HUGE hole in the beaver I shot. To the best of my knowledge, no one has fired or even loaded it since I cleaned it.

When I First read the subject title, I thought it was about Tallassee, TN which is a small unincorporated town on the Chillhowee Lake/River, near the Smoky Mountains. What a small world of township names.

In the last couple of years, the Tallassee armory was disassembled. Tallassee is pretty cool. There's a car grave yard of models from early 1900's to the 70's just in a ravine by the river, and it's illegal to harvest anything off the cars. Great little downtown. Cool to see this and I've seen the Tallassee Armory before it got torn down.

The map story was horrible and hilarious at the same time.

This bears a striking resemblance to the 1856 Enfield carbine. I have a 1972 Indian manufactured replica that is chambered in 12 gauge. It's a wonderful shooter, launching 1oz round balls downrange.

The handling and "handiness" of a carbine-length riflesd from ML to SA has always impressed me. It is fascinating that it took so long for the M4 carbine to become the standard barrel length. Now pretty much every new military rifle on the market is carbine length.

Macon arsenal wasn't burned down. It fell in due to neglect. Source: Historical marker in Macon. Also, the Cook & Bros building is an admin building for the University of Georgia as it was never burned down either.

From what I've read - partly in Peterson's classic The Book Of The Gun - the reluctance of the Union's ordnance department to adopt a breechloading rifle was only partly due to concerns about complexity and dubious reliability. A great deal was due to being so adverse to any kind of innovation that I suspect they'd have insisted on issuing percussion-primed rifled muskets if they'd had a wormhole feeding them 1903 Springfields and whole pallets of .30-06 ammo. More than a generation later their successors eagerly followed in their footsteps by trying to unload outdated single-shot Allin Conversion Springfields in .45-70 onto some crackpot who wanted to equip a volunteer cavalry force to go fight the Spanish in Cuba. After all, it's a proven design, easy to operate, hits hard, and half-trained "Volunteer Cavalry" won't waste ammo they way they would with newer designs. And they use black powder...you can hide behind the smoke. Fortunately, the crackpot in question was far too downey a bird to be taken in by that, and after adjusting his spectacles and giving the gentlemen at Ordnance an earful, Colonel Roosevelt left with a full issue of Krag bolt-action carbines.

My great grandparents and grandparents worked in the cotton mill that was the Arsenal before they built the other cotton mill across the river. My grandmother still lives half a mile from the old Mill.

The American Civil War took place during a very interesting time in firearms development. I live in Richmond, and one of the reasons it was chosen as the capital of the CSA was the fact that Richmond had more industrial capacity and is located at the intersection of several railroads and of course the James River - direct water transport to the Hampton Roads area, the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic. So “important transportation hub” is putting it lightly. Of course the industrial capacity is very important. Otherwise…Richmond is almost exactly 100 miles due south of Washington, D.C.. hence why a huge number of Civil War battles took place in Virginia.

That “union troops murdered a slave because they didn’t believe him” story was pretty casually horrific.