Rodney, do you have any idea, when and if that action was patented?  I have pics of a patented european gun that works identically to that, but has an internal stricker and is made out of steel. The one I have seen was chambered for the .455/.577 round

Mqabbi asks a very interesting question.  The Confederate States of America did have a patent office.  It issued 266 patents, and likely some more during the early months of 1865.  Unfortunately, the office and its records were destroyed by fire when Richmond itself largely burned, April 1-3, 1865.  Approximately 10 original patent documents issued by the CPO are known to survive, none of which to my knowledge pertain to the Morse rifle/carbine/action.

Bill Lawrence

Morse had several patents on both cartridges and rifles.  The two main US rifle patents that were used were 15995 issued on Oct 28, 1856 and 20,503 issued on June 8, 1858.  He actually started by making a few examples of the new version at the Springfield armory in 1859 and 1860.   
Bruce

The rifle I referred to yesterday is the Benson-Poppenburg Breechloader which was submitted to the British Army Trials of 1866-67. There is an excellent article about this rifle on Historical Firearms : (You need to Login or Register to view media files and links)

The British Army Trials of 1866 were at least as interesting as the American one was. Bnelson, forwarded me a copy of the report on the American trials, which was pretty straight forward.

The British one is anything but! The pettiness in some of the evaluations makes one wonder if 5 year old kids were doing the testing. I have a  fully documented Albini-Breandlin that was one of the rifles on trial there. It is in the standard, for that time, .577 and made up from P53 parts as requested in the specs of the trial. The Albini-Breandlins were rejected because they were one inch shorter in the barrel than wanted, DESPITE the fact that they outshot ALL the competition!!!

I had to buy both books. To much information not to be in the library .