Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

that made the loading process substantially easier. Due to the deadly slow spin imparted by the grooves (the rifling, which gave the weapon its name), a rifle musket firing one of Minié’s conical, soft-lead slugs (hilariously misnamed the “minnie ball” after its designer) could hit an eleven-inch bull’s-eye at 350 yards and could penetrate six inches of pine board at 500 yards.

The rifle musket received its first practical tests in North Africa in 1846, the Crimean War (1854–56), and the North Italian War of 1859, and in short order the British Army reequipped its soldiers with a British-made version of the Minié-system rifle, the .577 caliber Enfield, followed by the Austrians (who developed the .54 caliber Lorenz rifle in 1854), the Russians, and the United States, with then secretary of war Jefferson Davis presiding over the development of the .58-caliber Springfield. Federal arsenals manufactured almost 700,000 of the 1861 Model Springfields for use during the war, while twenty private Northern arms manufacturers supplied 450,000 more. Approximately 400,000 Enfields were run through the blockade to equip the Confederate armies, who had no access to the Springfield rifle beyond what could be scavenged from battlefields, along with an assortment of Austrian Lorenz rifles, Belgian-made Minié rifles, and smoothbore conversions.38

The rifle, however, remained slow to load, requiring a sequence of nine separate steps (known as “load in nine times”). Each Minié ball, packed into a cigar-shaped paper tube along with sixty grains of black powder, had to be removed from the soldier’s cartridge box, torn open with the teeth, emptied into the barrel through the muzzle (which required standing the weapon upright on its stock), and rammed home with a long thin steel ramrod. Then the infantryman would have to raise the musket, fit a percussion cap onto the nipple of the lock plate above the trigger, and pull the trigger, exploding the percussion cap and igniting the powder charge in the barrel. Although the optimal firing rate was three rounds per minute, the practical reality under battlefield conditions was closer to one round every four to five minutes.

The Sharps Rifle, a .52 caliber rifle that could be loaded from the rifle’s breech rather than by the muzzle, was invented by Christian Sharps in 1844, and was favored as a sharpshooter’s rifle. But even the Sharps rifle was still a single-shot, one-by-one affair. It remained for Christopher Miner Spencer, a Connecticut inventor, to develop a seven-shot repeating rifle, firing manufactured brass cartridges from a magazine in the stock of the rifle, which streamlined the tedious and dangerously exposed process of loading and reloading. Alongside Spencer’s rifle, the Colt Patent Firearms company introduced a repeating rifle with a peculiar five-chambered revolving cylinder, while the New Haven Arms Company’s Henry repeating rifle could carry fifteen rounds in its magazine, and could reload a new cartridge and eject a spent one with a single lever motion.39

Oddly, the repeating rifles failed to get the approval of the army’s chief of ordnance, James Wolfe Ripley. Part of this distrust may have been simple obstinacy on the part of the sixty-seven-year-old Ripley. Ripley had at least some justification in fearing that the move to rapid-fire repeating rifles would put too much stress on the federal arsenals’ ability to supply the repeaters’ ammunition in sufficient quantities to the Union armies. Breech-loading repeating rifles encouraged soldiers to blaze away without regard for supply, and Ripley had enough trouble supplying soldiers with sufficient ammunition for their muzzle-loaders without having to think of the quantities of expensive, brass-encased repeating cartridges he would have to supply for an army full of repeaters (Spencer cartridges cost more than two dollars apiece). As it was, an early government contract for 10,000 Spencer repeaters was nearly lost by Spencer when his small factory was unable to keep up a supply of the weapons or their ammunition. Whatever else was wrong with the Springfield, it was a simple and durable weapon and cost little more than half the price of a Henry repeater or a Spencer, while the Enfield and Springfield both accepted the same standardized Minié ball.

These arguments were perfectly plausible to an army bureaucrat; they meant a good deal less to the soldier in the field. In 1861, Colonel Hiram Berdan went over Ripley’s head to the president to get authorization to arm his two regiments of United States Sharpshooters with the Sharps breech-loading rifle; and in 1863 Colonel John T. Wilder offered to buy Spencer repeating rifles for his brigade out of the contributions of the men themselves. (Ripley relented on this occasion and refunded the cost of purchase to Wilder’s men.) Wilder’s men got the first test of their repeaters in June 1863, when they easily outshot both Confederate cavalry and infantry at Hoover’s Gap, Tennessee. In August Spencer got an opportunity to display his repeating rifle before Abraham Lincoln, and on September 15 Ripley was officially retired. By January 1865, the Ordnance Bureau was no longer even considering new models of muzzle-loaders. By contrast with Union hesitancy, the Confederates were much more willing to experiment with new weapons and were happy to capture as many Spencers as they could. But the South lacked the technology to manufacture its own copy of the Spencer, and it had no way at all to manufacture the special metal cartridges for use in captured repeaters.40

The most common tactical formation that the volunteer infantryman fell into was the “line of battle”: a regiment drawn up in two long ranks, one behind the other, with a thin curtain of skirmishers in front to clear the advance and another thin curtain of sergeants and lieutenants in the rear to give orders and restrain cowards and shirkers. Attack in line of battle had been the formula for the British army’s successful assault against the Russians at the Alma River in 1854, and the received wisdom was that “the formation in line—that is to say, the extended volley, followed by the charge—is the most effective” at winning victories.41

As the line moved forward,