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John Brown’s Sharps sporting rifle


This Sharps sporting rifle, a .44 caliber percussion piece, was made especially for John Brown, and bears no maker’s mark or number. Brown carried this weapon on his Kansas campaign in 1856 and later presented it to Charles Blair of Collinsville, Connecticut. Blair was the forgemaster with whom Brown had contracted in 1857 to make pikes for the clandestine slave insurrection he was planning for Virginia.


Division of the History of Technology, Armed Forces History
National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
Behring Center

 

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