At the outbreak of the American Civil War thousands of outdated government flintlock shoulder arms were in storage in state and Federal armories throughout the South. The number of such arms, altered to percussion and pressed into service by the Confederacy, did not go unnoticed by many a Yankee certain that the new president of the Confederacy, once U. S. Senator, Jefferson Davis had exercised his pre- secession power as chairman of the U. S. Senate, Military Affairs Committee, then as U. S. Secretary of War to move the large cash of federal weapons south. Also suspect were the motives of Virginian, John B. Floyd, U.S. Secretary of War under President James Buchanan and soon to become a Confederate general, who had arms sent south out of northern U.S. armories. Among those arms were the U. S. Model 1817 muzzle loading flintlock ‘Common Rifle’ and the Hall’s Patent Model 1819 flintlock, breech loading rifle. Hard use and common discarding in the field in favor of battlefield captured Union arms, cut the survival rate of examples of such early Civil War conversions to nill save the rare attic found war trophy that somehow made it through.