At a time when the term "military-style assault weapon" has become seared into the American lexicon, it is sometimes hard to imagine the deadliest weapon used in the Civil War was not a cannon or some other innovative explosive device of mass destruction. It was the rather primitive looking Springfield rifle musket that was first produced in 1855.
Before the Civil War, battling armies used smoothbore muskets that fired a lead ball that was almost harmless unless the opposing troops were within shouting distance of one another. One British officer who had served in the Revolutionary War observed in 1814 that "a good musket will kill a man at 80 feet, perhaps even a hundred; but a soldier must be a very unlucky person to be hit by a musket directed at him from a distance of 400 feet, even if his enemy aims correctly; as for firing on a man at 600 feet with an ordinary musket, you could as well shoot at the moon with the same hope of hitting your target."
During the Civil War, the combination of new technology in arms that produced the rifled musket and the lead bullet called a "Minie ball" — a conical round that amplified the effectiveness of the new rifled musket — caused deadly results on the battlefield. Of the three million Union and Confederate soldiers who fought in the war, historians estimate that about 500,000 were wounded and more than 200,000 killed. Most were felled not by artillery shells or bayonets, but by rifles and revolvers.
The .58 caliber rifled musket appeared when tensions between the states were reaching the boiling point in the 1850s. At the same time that the musket was being perfected, experiments conducted in Europe and in the United States were producing a bullet that would prove far deadlier than anything previously used by the military.
The convergence of technologies turned battlefields into killing fields. The new Springfield rifle could be loaded quickly and easily by trained soldiers. During the Civil War, a soldier was expected to be able to load and fire up to four rounds per minute. The grooved barrel of the rifle made it far more effective at longer ranges than the old smoothbores.
The government official who ushered in the era of the rifled musket was U.S. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, who, in 1855, made the decision to adopt the new rifled weapon for military service. Just five years later, Davis would serve as the president of the Confederacy and as the commander in chief of an army that was compelled to use weapons ranging from old flintlock muskets to pre-war smoothbores.
When Davis approved the rifled musket, he also approved the use of the Minie ball that had been modified from European designs by the U.S. Armory at Harpers Ferry in Virginia, now West Virginia. Together, the rifled musket and the new bullet design enhanced not only the accuracy of the weapon but also the gravity of the wounds that were produced. Whereas the solid lead musket balls used in the Revolution could pass through a body intact, the new bullets were made of soft lead with a hollow base that expanded when it struck its target, leaving a ghastly wound.
The new bullet did not lodge into muscle or tissue or simply snap bones when it hit. It tore through flesh with expansive wounds that shattered bones and produced devastating damage to organs as it exited the body. While it might be easy today to decry the Civil War surgeons' lack of knowledge, even a modern surgeon would face a challenge in dealing with the massive wounds caused by the bullets used in the Civil War.
Amputation of a wounded limb was often necessary because the destructive nature of the wounds inflicted by the Minie ball left no other option. Even if doctors had been inclined to pursue a more moderate course of treating wounds during the war, the sheer numbers of battlefield wounded required expeditious work that often required amputation.
The rifled musket not only took the lives of more soldiers, it also changed the way in which opposing armies engaged each other on the battlefield. In the eras of Napoleon and Washington, armies marched steadily toward each other in straight lines and at a steady pace, using the firepower of the mass to overcome the inaccuracy of their weapons. Battles were fought at close quarters (sometimes just 50 to 100 yards apart). In the old style of warfare, armies could advance upon each other and not suffer significant casualties until within close proximity. The rifled musket changed that.
In the Civil War, the rifled musket made linear assaults very costly. Soldiers who were in protected defensive positions could fire upon attacking armies with greater accuracy and deadly effect than ever before. Whereas the smoothbore musket might have been effective at 50 yards, the musket used in the Civil War was accurate at 250 to 300 yards and still deadly at 500 yards. At battles such as Fredericksburg and Gettysburg, attacking armies suffered huge numbers of casualties as their officers tried to use the old Napoleonic tactics against a defending foe.
The result was a costly education in the changing nature of tactics for the soldiers of the attacking army. Sadly, it took the officers longer to learn such lessons. As late as June 1864, Gen. Ulysses S. Grant still ordered repeated and futile attacks against strongly entrenched Confederates that he regretted for the rest of his life.
William F. Howard lives in Delmar. He recently published "The Civil War Memoir of William T. Levey."