People carrying small firearms for personal protection is not a new concept, and in the middle of the 19th century, many pocket pistols were designed with self-defense in mind. One such gun, the Brown Manufacturing Southern Derringer, was among the earliest cartridge-firing self-defense guns. Watch our “American Rifleman Television: I Have This Old Gun” segment above to see the details of this diminutive derringer.
“Derringers really reached the height of their popularity in the 1860s,” American Rifleman Executive Editor Evan Brune said. “There is, of course, the infamous Philadelphia Derringer, which is the style of gun used by John Wilkes Booth to assassinate President Abraham Lincoln in 1865. But this style of gun really had become popularized up to that point and was a pocket-style single-shot gun in .41 caliber, and as the self-contained metallic cartridge era really starts to take hold, again at the tail end of the Civil War, There are some companies and some designers that are marrying these two concepts together.”
Initially designed and patented by Daniel Moore during the Civil War, the concept of a side-swinging, single-shot derringer chambered for the .41 rimfire cartridge was picked up by several companies, notably the Merrimac Arms & Manufacturing Co. based in Newburyport, Mass. The Massachusetts-based company took advantage of the turmoil following the end of the Civil War and the chaos caused by Reconstruction to market a self-defense revolver to those living in the former Confederacy, calling its single-shot design the “Southern.”
“It was a, you know, very, very interesting little pistol,” American Rifleman Field Editor Garry James said. “Well-made. It had a side-swinging barrel. It was released by a button underneath the frame. You just put it in a cartridge, swivel the barrel back, cocked it and boom. Fired it.”
The single-action Southern Derringer fired a self-contained, .41-caliber rimfire cartridge containing a 130-grain bullet with a muzzle velocity of only 425 fps, producing a scant muzzle energy of only 53 foot-pounds. Merrimac Arms produced the guns until 1869, when it was reorganized into the Brown Manufacturing Company, which continued to produce the design into the mid-1870s. At that point, a familiar name in firearm history entered onto the scene.
“Now what’s interesting about the Brown-manufactured guns is anyone who’s a Colt collector or has an interest in early Colt arms will look at the Southern Derringer, and they will say, ‘Hey, that looks a lot like the Colt Third Model Derringer that started being manufactured in 1875,’ and they’re absolutely right,” Brune said. “Brown Manufacturing went out of business in 1873, and two years later, this Colt-designed, allegedly, single-shot derringer emerges, and Colt ends up selling tens of thousands of its Third Model derringer and makes them until 1912.”
To watch complete segments of past episodes of American Rifleman TV, go to americanrifleman.org/videos/artv. For all-new episodes of ARTV, tune in Wednesday nights to Outdoor Channel 8:30 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. EST.
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