Henry rifle

The Henry rifle is a lever-action rifle that appears in both The History Channel: Civil War – A Nation Divided and History Civil War: Secret Missions. It is one of the two lever action that appeared in the game, the other is the Spencer rifle.

Features
As one of the first lever action rifle the gun can fire 8 times more than a single-shot muzzle loader in the Civil War. This is because of its revolutionary design in which a 15-round (12-rounds in the first game) tube magazine is installed beneath the barrel and a lever that chambers the round, ejects spent casings and cocks the hammer in one motion.

It has the highest rate of fire in all the small arms in the games (only beaten by the gatling gun since its a machine gun). While it has the fastest rate of fire, it also has the smallest sights in all the rifles. It is reloaded through the tube near the end of the barrel. Besides magazine account, another difference between the games is that in A Nation Divided the Henry has a ladder sight while a typical iron sigh is used in Secret Missions. It usually takes only 1 to 2 shots to kill an enemy.

Real life
In real life though, the gun never became a standard issue in the battlefield due to its complex design that makes manufacturing it expensive and unreliable for the Union government, although a soldier can save his wages to buy one himself. A soldier that can buy this rifle and all of its ammunition had a source of pride among his unit. It was mostly used by the Union in skirmishes, raids and other irregular warfare where there is no need for battle lines and formations.

In the South, the rifle was known as "that damned yankee rifle that they load on Sunday and shoot all week" (supposedly attributed to John Mosby). Securing the gun was even more expensive for the Southern government. Even though a Confederate soldier can loot a Henry rifle in the battlefield, it was still expensive to buy its ammunition, and creating your own ammunition is troublesome since metals like brass for casings is hard to come by. Nonetheless, the Henry rifle did got into the hands of some Confederate units such as civilian partisans (where they can just buy ammunition in their local stores) and Pres. Jonathan Davis' bodyguards.