The days of successful frontal assaults by infantry and cavalry were over; defenders armed with the new rifle-musket could fire from a safe place and knock down attacker after attacker before they got close enough to do damage.The problem with the rifle of the time was that loading it was a difficult and slow process.
)On the Confederate side, the Enfield rifle-musket was perhaps the most common of a wide assortment of firearms. Soldiers were better off firing three or four shots a minute in the general direction of an approaching enemy unit than firing once a minute with pinpoint accuracy at individual targets.Increased musketry range caused a revolution in warfare: no longer could an attacker advance to charge range, suffer a volley or two from the defenders, and then attack with bayonets. In 1855, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis adopted the rifle musket and Burton’s improved Minié ball, or bullet, for the United States Army.Statistics appear to bear out this theory. This, and the traditional success of bayonet charges that still influenced many commanders, forced troops to continue to fight in closely packed formations that presented opponents armed with rifled muskets large targets.The combination of the rifle-musket and minié bullet also made the bayonet nearly obsolete. Since troops armed with rifled muskets could stand off and fire from a greater distance, this smoothbore advantage only occurred during close-quarters fighting.“Fritz over thar tho’ght he was going to have a cinch with us raw Americans. )Delvigne’s developments inspired Minié, who had served with the French Chasseurs in several African campaigns, to do further work toward making an efficient, effective bullet. Ninety percent of the soldiers killed on the fields of battle owed their fate to a deceptively simple hand-held gun and its companion projectile: the rifle-musket and the minié bullet.Pfc.
Even 13 years later, at the beginning of the Civil War, Union and Confederate authorities issued smoothbore flintlock muskets to thousands of unlucky soldiers.The British War Ministry was sufficiently impressed with the design to pay Minie´ a royalty of 20,000 pounds in 1852 to use it for British weapons. And if the ragged, tumbling bullet had enough force to cleave completely through the body, which it often did, it tore out an exit wound several times the size of the entrance wound. They were notably less successful, however, in convincing the public of this fact, as cries of “Butchery!” continued to dog the medical corps throughout and after the war.
His memoir of the Civil War – “Rebel Private: Front and Rear” – was said by author Margaret Mitchell to be “her single most valuable research tool when writing ‘Gone With the Wind.'”Over all, Civil War surgeons did a respectable and generally successful job of trying to save lives, given the unrelenting slaughter with which they had to cope. As Colonel George Hanger, a British officer who fought in the American Revolution, wrote in 1814:The design of Norton and Greener was taken a step further by two French army captains, Claude-E´tienne Minie´ and Henri-Gustave Delvigne, who in 1849 created the conical, soft-lead bullet with four rings (similar to the three-ring version shown in the illustration above), and a rifle with a grooved barrel to go with it.
Popularized during the Crimean War, it was perfected in early 1850s America. Of all the wounds treated by Union Army doctors throughout the war, nearly 95 percent were caused by small-arms fire, less than 1 percent were attributable to bayonets and swords, and all but a handful of the remainder resulted from artillery shells and shrapnel.As for Pvt. Finally, he stuffed the empty cartridge paper down the barrel to serve as a plug, a stopper strong enough to keep the ball from rolling out by the force of gravity, but weak enough not to obstruct the travel of a fired ball.The cavalry was similarly ousted from its former role by the rifle-musket and minié ball. The ignition system featured a hammer–called a cock–that held a small piece of flint. But in many ways the Civil War rifle-musket was a brand new weapon that boasted the best features of its predecessors. When fired, the expanding gas deformed the bullet and engaged the barrel’s rifling, providing spin for better accuracy and longer range.Norton’s bullet with Greener’s refinement eventually came before the British army for approval for use in the field, but the army’s old-school officers rejected it. (Rodney Bryant and Daniel Woolfolk/Military Times)...The percussion ignition system made infantry weapons fire more reliably, but there remained the challenge of coupling easy loading with long range and accuracy.