[ Civil War Firearms Tech ]
Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another "Ask Ian" Q&A on Forgotten Weapons.
I'm Ian McCollum, and our question today comes from Jan on Patreon who says,
"What often baffles me is the transition period of various stages of development
of gun technology - in particular around the Civil War.
What were the types of guns used during the Civil War
and why weren't more modern mechanisms used, if they were available?
Was it similar in wars that took place about the same time, but in other areas of the world?"
There are really two elements that come to mind for this question.
The first is regarding the adoption of new firearms developments by national militaries.
And the second is the procurement of arms in the American Civil War specifically.
So ... well, let's start with talking about the adoption of new mechanisms.
This always happens a little bit slowly, even to this day.
We have fancy, cool stuff out there right now that you look at and you say,
"Well ... the basic, let's call it the line infantry of the American Army
is still armed with M4 carbines, and yet we've got so much cool fancy stuff.
If you go look at what Special Forces units are armed with, well,
why doesn't the army in general have all of that cool stuff?"
And it comes down to a variety of factors, some of it is cost, some of it is training.
How often are you going to replace all the guns in the army?
Is it worth updating the army's standard issue rifle every five years?
That costs really a lot of money, and well, if you don't end up going to war with it,
then did you just waste all that money?
Could you just have stuck with the existing carbines that they have
and put the extra money into some other projects?
Like even really blasé, boring stuff like maintaining base infrastructure.
Making sure that the barracks have proper heating and air conditioning systems.
That sort of problem isn't unique to today, that was happening back during the Civil War as well.
The army budget was limited, and they can't go and just adopt
every new thing on a mass scale for the whole army.
Even if it is something that would turn out to be really good.
Now when it comes to the US Civil War in particular, the other issue that is very relevant
is that this was a civil war, not a more sort of traditional expeditionary war.
Which is to say that everybody ended up fighting in it.
The country was turned against itself, and the requirements for small arms
were massively increased over what you would expect for a traditional war.
Normally in a good old-fashioned traditional European war, the country has an army.
And they send their army to go capture something,
and the other guys send their army to defend against the first guy's army.
And there is a big battle, and usually it's only a couple of battles,
and one army is pretty much rendered combat ineffective or retreats
and is unable to retake important territory, and the war kind of ends.
Maybe ... one country decides to try and raise more soldiers,
and that gets to the critical element of getting not just people, but getting arms for them.
In the US Civil War when the war started the American army was not particularly large,
but it was armed with a pretty good modern weapon, it was a Model of 1855.
The standard arm was a rifle musket, which is to say it actually had rifling,
relatively large bore .58 calibre.
It was equipped with a Maynard primer system, so you had a ... continuous tape of primers.
And you actually had a primer magazine in the gun,
so you didn't have to fumble with individual primer caps.
It used what we call today typically the Minié system, or minie ball.
Derived from the French, the version that the Americans were using
was actually a modification of the system by an American officer named Burton.
But the idea is, it is a conical bullet that is smaller in diameter than the rifling
so that it is very quick and easy to load.
And then it has a big hollow cavity in the base of the bullet.
And so when you fire it, the pressure expands the base of the bullet to seal against the rifling.
And you get then the accuracy benefits of a rifled barrel
with the speed benefits akin to loading a smoothbore.
Now the army was equipped with these.
The problem was when the Civil War breaks out the army gets a whole lot bigger,
you have a tremendous number of volunteers.
And of course now you're also looking at equipping two armies,
one in the North and one in the South as well.
And so the supply of modern, rifled, good standard firearms was immediately used up.
And the arms that were in reserve in the United States,
as is pretty typical of just about everywhere all the time,
the guns in reserve were much older stuff. Mostly smoothbores.
There were a lot of old smoothbores, of flintlocks converted to percussion.
That was the stuff that was still sitting in US armouries as backup reserve weaponry.
And so that stuff all got sent out to newly raised army units.
The North was much better off in this area than the South was.
In the South at the beginning of the war there was like an estimated
12-15,000 rifled military firearms total, period.
A lot of Southern units were actually using double-barrelled shotguns,
as well as personally provided smoothbore guns for at least several years.
I've seen references to flintlocks being used in combat service,
albeit in the West, out to like 1864 by the South.
So there was a huge problem of acquiring new arms.
Now in the North the US Ordnance Department is led by General Ripley,
who ... often gets a lot of bad press for being very anti-modern new weapon technology.
In reality, what Ripley was doing was trying to manage manufacturing capacity.
He recognised that the army was being deluged by inventors
with fancy high-tech modern breech-loading systems.
And a few of them were probably going to be pretty good, the vast majority of them
were probably not going to be up to military durability and reliability requirements.
And a lot of them were also probably going to be paper companies essentially,
that had no manufacturing capability anyway, and were trying to get a contract
to get money in hand and then like try and figure out how to make stuff.
And pursuing that technology would ... be a huge risk of the money and the time
that was available to the Ordnance Department to actually provide weapons to the army.
And Ripley's first concern is, "We've got our best units equipped with rifles,
but we've got a whole lot of guys who are still equipped with smoothbores or worse.
We need to bring the standard of the army equipment up to rifle musket for everybody first."
And he was in retrospect, quite correct in that plan. That is the best move for the army.
If he had tried to equip the entire army with 1860 Henrys in 1861
there would not have been very many of them that actually got into the field.
... Hundreds of thousands of soldiers would have been left with smoothbore muskets still.
And the outcome would have been worse than if he did what he actually did,
which was essentially push off guns like the Henry,
and focus on manufacturing and importing and purchasing rifle muskets.
So if we look at other countries around this same time period,
there was absolutely experimentation going on with new technology.
One of the most obvious ones is the needle-fire systems
with self-contained cartridges that were breech loading,
and much more rapid fire than even a Minié ball style of rifle musket.
But ... again we can actually kind of see a parallel here if we look at the Franco-Prussian War.
This is admittedly 10 years after the start of the American Civil War.
But you have two standard national armies, [mostly the] Prussians
and the French equipped both with needle-fire guns.
And so let's look at the French, they've got needle-fire Chassepots, and they're good guns,
and the whole army is basically equipped with them. And they're defeated in the field.
And then we turn to the Siege of Paris, and what happens in the Siege of Paris?
Well, everyone kind of gets involved in fighting and now we need a whole lot more guns,
and manufacturing capacity is dramatically restricted because it's only
what you can build with what you got in Paris, basically.
And that's where you see a whole raft of smoothbores, and conversions,
and older guns, and stuff thrown together on a sort of ad hoc individualised basis.
... I think actually fairly similar to what you would see going on
in the Confederacy to supply arms during the US Civil War.
So, that hopefully is a decent answer to your questions, Jan.
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