I always heard that the US Army did not issue repeating rifles to their men because the generals/war department thought that they would waste too much ammunition if they had them. Also, lots of the army enlisted men back then were immigrants(lots of germans) who were not familiar with guns like most native born americans were.
On the other hand, I have read the accuracy/stopping power argument in several books (none of which I have at home, so I will need time to cite them). In addition, the site to which you link also supports the notion.
In addition, note that the Army
The U.S. Army was committed to the idea of the “less wasteful” single shot weapon throughout the end of the 19th century.
In addition, the weapons used by the 7th Cavalry were not the re-fitted Civil War weapons, but newer weapons manufactured to the purpose (although based on the conversion design).
I suspect that the truth of situation is a blending of the points made in your link and in Spavined Gelding’s post. The positions of the Army in supporting a rugged, long-ranged weapon and avoiding wasteful expenditure of ammunition are not incompatible. However, rather than bureaucratic inertia, I would hold a failure among the Army brass to understand changing technology to be the culprit at the time of the Spanish American War, (to which your link relates), while I’m not sure that they were guilty of that at the time of The Little Bighorn, 22 years ealier.
The Army commands who actually got hold of the lever action guns were notoriously inaccurate with them. The fifty men on Beecher’s Island, firing against massed cavalry attacks of up to 600 warriors by the Lakota and Arapahoe were able to kill only 35 attackers (the indians claimed only six died–even if one of the attackers was Roman Nose).
Well, not exactly, Quercus. A line is vulnerable from three sides: both flanks and the rear. A rifled musket can only point in one direction at a time, and when splayed out in a line infantry are particularly susceptible to being rolled up by a shock attack which oozes around the flank and into the rear of the line.
This was partially mitigated by the accuracy of the rifle, but the slow rate of fire was often not enough to interrupt the charge before it hit the line. If the charge did reach a flank, chaos almost always ensued. Custer was particularly arrogant about the line of rifles, wearing that red scarf and sometimes charging across the front of Confederate units to reach an unsecured side.
The only infantry formation which offered complete protection against a cavalry charge was the infantry square. Neither side used this formation in the Civil War because it was inherently impracticable: three out of four soldiers in a square are facing away from the enemy’s front. Usually the flanks of an army were protected by cavalry, but by the 1864 Valley Campaign Confederate cavalry was so markedly inferior and outnumbered that they could no longer reliably perform that duty (they did a pretty good job, considering).
Nevertheless, it did happen on one occasion in the Shennandoah Valley in 1864. Custer’s troops hit Early’s flank at… Cedar Creek, perhaps? with a sabre charge and completely threw it into disarray, but one small regiment had apparently been practicing the square formation on the parade ground. It squared up and successfully withdrew in good order. That was, as best I can tell, the last time in American military history that the infantry square was used in combat.
There is a wonderful out-of-print book on Sheridan’s Valley Campaign which discusses these incidents in detail, but unfortunately the name escapes me. If I can find it, I’ll post it here.