Recent years saw the saga of military-handgun testing and evaluation enter news headlines across the country, as the U.S. military embarked on its Modular Handgun System program to replace the aging Beretta M9, in service since 1985. However, sidearm selection, while infrequent in American history, is not new, having a storied history dating back to numerous private-contract guns from the late 18th century to the Model 1805 Harpers Ferry pistol, the country’s first sidearm produced by a national armory.
Though the Harpers Ferry Model 1805 is often considered the first U.S. martial pistol, the journey from the dawning days of the American Revolution to the requisition of the country’s first armory-produced sidearm was a long one. Martial-pistol development in the U.S. military rose from a hodge-podge of hastily assembled arms during the mid-1770s to a number of private-enterprise contracts before settling on U.S.-designed arms made in a U.S.-government facility.
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