The Importance of the Rifle-Musket
The rifle-musket and the Minie Ball revolutionized war. The smoothbore muskets were not very accurate at ranges beyond 60 yards while the rifle-musket was accurate up to 400 yards and still deadly at half a mile. The new weapons and ammunition, the size of the armies in battle, and the battlefield tactics that were slow to change were a deadly combination. Shelby Foote describes how the Minie Ball and tactics in battle were a major factor in the brutality of the war:
It was brutal stuff, and the reason for the high causalities is quite simple: the weapons were way ahead of the tactics.
Take the rifle itself. It threw a .58 caliber soft lead
bullet at a low muzzle velocity and when it hit, the reason
there were so many amputations was that if you got hit in
the upper arm . . . it didn’t just clip the bone the way the
modern steel-jacketed bullet does. You didn’t have any
bone left up there. They had no choice but to take the arm
off. And you’ll see in pictures of the dead on the battlefield
with their clothes in disarray, as if someone had been
rifling their bodies. That was the men themselves tearing
their clothes up to see where the wound was, and they
knew perfectly well if they were gut shot they’d die. Yet for
so much of the war they still believed that to take a
position you massed your men and moved up and gave
them the bayonet. In fact, there were practically no
bayonet wounds in the Civil War. They never came in that
kind of contact. But they still thought that to mass their
fire they had to mass their men. So they lined up and
marched up to an entrenched line and got blown away (18).
The soldiers who fought during the war left vivid descriptions of what it was like during battle. Many soldiers recalled the terrifying conditions when bullets were flying. Lt. H.W. Jackson of the 4th New Jersey, hearing the bullets during battle stated how they were “never to be forgotten, and made a ping as they flew over” (19). During the Battle of Spotsylvania, G. Norton Gallaway of the 95th Pennsylvania claims to have fired over 400 cartridges and described how his “lips were incrusted with powder from biting cartridges” (20). Lt. Richard Tuthill described how “the smell of battle was everywhere. The smoke from the guns was so dense that though a July sun was shining there was the appearance of a dense fog” (21). One soldier recalled how “several large oak trees, which grew just to the rear of the woods were completely gnawed off by converging fire” (22). Captain John Gillespie of the 78th Ohio at Kennesaw Mountain described how a “furious barrage of bullets cutting limbs and leaves from the bushes so that they looked as naked as though a furious hailstorm had passed over them. I never heard balls come thicker or faster” (23). Private Val Giles remembered in powerful terms how “dirt, leaves, limbs, and bark were falling and flying all around, making the position a veritable hell on earth” (24).
Many soldiers were greatly impacted at the destructive sights after a battle. After the Atlanta campaign, John Green of the 9th Kentucky “walked over the ground in front of the position we defended and there was not a twig which had not been cut down by bullets and there were trees as big as my leg which were actually whittled down by Minie balls. It seemed a miracle that any living soul could have survived that hailstorm of lead” (25).
Soldiers were also greatly impacted at the number of bullets that struck in concentrated areas. W. H. Swallow counted 836 holes in a wooden fence plank which measured 16 feet long after the battle of Gettysburg (26). Robert Stiles remarked after Cold Harbor, “I remember counting ninety odd holes through a dog tent” (27).
Soldiers also described the toll that such violent combat had on them. One soldier described “A member of our regiment stood loading and firing as rapidly as his teeth could tear the cartridge and his hands could ram them home. His face was cold and pallid and bloodless, but not from fear. Blackened with powder stain, through which the perspiration trickled in streams, his eyes flashed defiance with every flash from his gun, as he stood there a perfect demon of war, with no thoughts save to kill” (28).
The destructive power of the Minie Ball left others stunned at what it could do to the human body. Lt. Davidson of the 35th Ohio described in great detail the experience of being struck by a Minie Ball: “A wound by a Minie Ball in full force through the bowels feels like a red hot wire run through instantly and does not become painful immediately. A ball in full force, hitting a bone or bones in any part of the body, causes a numbness as though you had been hit by a heavy bar of iron and caused pain sooner and more severe than a flesh wound” (29).
The use and impact of small arms during the Civil War were a critical part of making the Civil War the most deadly war in U.S History.