CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“At the distance of a few hundred yards, a man might fire at you all day without your finding it out.”1
That’s Ulysses S. Grant, making fun of the old .69-caliber, muzzle-loading, smoothbore musket the US Army used in the Mexican-American War. He was only slightly exaggerating. Though the weapon threw a frighteningly large projectile and could be fired quickly—up to four times a minute—using one was like shooting a marble from a shotgun. It was famously inaccurate at any range above a hundred yards, and often not much good beyond eighty yards. It was the standard infantry weapon of the 1840s and early 1850s, but had changed little since the invention of the muzzle-loading flintlock in France in 1610.2 (The main change was a new detonator—a percussion cap instead of a flint.3) The smoothbore, which fired a round ball, or buck and ball, had defined warfare during Napoléon’s military career (1793–1815). Lots of men stacked in close-order formations, concentrating their firepower on similarly stacked enemy troops, were necessary if anybody was going to hit anything. Battles took place, of necessity, at very close range.
But in the years following the Mexican-American War something happened to the old smoothbore that would change warfare forever and have horrific and far-reaching consequences in the American Civil War. This revolution came in the form of something very small: a conical lead bullet developed in 1849 by a French army officer named Claude-Étienne Minié. The minié ball, as it was known, permitted combat muskets to employ rifling—spiral grooves inside a gun barrel—which made them accurate up to four hundred yards and able to kill a man at a thousand yards. This in turn produced the deadliest small-arms fire in human history. Rifles were used by French and British troops in the Crimean War (1853–1856) to devastating effect, and were employed on a massive scale by both sides in the American Civil War. Though the correct pronunciation of the inventor’s name was “Min-YAY,” Americans insisted on pronouncing it without the acute accent—“Minnie”—which made this brutally destructive invention sound like a child’s toy.
Minié had solved a very old problem. Gunsmiths had known for several centuries that rifling greatly improved both the range and accuracy of firearms. A bullet that fit the grooves tightly would prevent gases from escaping, thus improving the gun’s range, and the rifling gave it spin that greatly improved accuracy. The highly accurate Kentucky long rifle, developed in the 1700s, was a good example of this technology. But such a weapon could be fired only a few times before the gunpowder fouled its grooves, requiring cleaning. A tight-fitting bullet was also harder to ram down the barrel, often jamming on the way. This meant that such rifles were impractical as infantry weapons. Though the smoothbore—which was loaded by ramming a loose-fitting round ball down an unrifled barrel—had far shorter range, it fouled far less frequently, was easy to load, and thus had the advantages of speed and rapidity of fire.
Minié’s solution was elegant: a self-cleaning, cylindrical bullet with a hollow base that would expand when fired, thus fitting snugly into the barrel’s rifling, and in the process clear the residue of the previous shot from the grooves. It could be loaded quickly—the bullet was in its unexpanded state—and many rounds could be fired before the barrel had to be cleaned. By the mid-1850s, rifled muskets using minié balls that had been simplified by Harpers Ferry armorer James Burton were being mass-produced in America, and in 1855 Secretary of War Jefferson Davis converted the entire US Army to the .58-caliber Springfield rifled musket. That, along with the British-made .577-caliber Enfield, which used the same bullets, would become the main infantry arms of the Civil War. That sort of ruinous power had never before been put into the hands of the common soldier.
What made the rifled musket even more lethal was that the battlefield tactics of the Civil War remained largely frozen in the Napoleonic era. A rifle that was reasonably accurate at three hundred yards should have dictated infantry formations that were spread out, more like skirmish lines. Instead, Civil War commanders stuck to the old close-order formations that Napoleon had used half a century before.4 The typical battle line still consisted of men packed shoulder to shoulder—literally touching elbows—and stacked two deep. There were several reasons for this. First, while spreading soldiers out made them less vulnerable, it also took away their main tactical advantage: their ability to concentrate their firepower. A single individual with a musket was irrelevant; battles were won by hurling more lead, more accurately, at the enemy than the enemy hurled at you. Second, close tactical formations were the only way that officers could control and move men around a battlefield. In the noise and confusion of battle, a regiment of three hundred to six hundred men had to be able to hear the orders of its colonel and subordinate officers; those who could not actually hear had to be able to follow the movements of those who did.5
Imagine, then, a 2,500-man brigade, packed into tight battle lines, moving at “quick time,” which meant they would cover eighty-five yards a minute, toward the enemy’s defensive position. This was the orthodox Civil War “charge.” Against smoothbores, the men had a very good chance of getting close to the enemy’s position. Against rifled muskets fired from cover, the effect approximated pure slaughter. The war is full of examples of generals—one thinks of Ambrose Burnside at Fredericksburg, Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg, and Ulysses S. Grant at Cold Harbor—who continued to throw large bodies of men against entrenched defenders wielding rifled muskets, with catastrophic results. But even without massed frontal assaults, much of the war was fought at one hundred to two hundred yards, as it was at Kernstown—absolutely murderous range for the new weapons. This explains why the casualty rate was so much higher for the American Civil War than for preceding wars. Such accuracy makes it even harder to imagine a soldier standing erect in a field in a battle line, unprotected, biting off the paper end of a cartridge, pouring powder down the barrel, ramming a bullet down the barrel with his ramrod, inserting a percussion cap in the breech, then cocking the hammer—a process that took up to thirty seconds—while hundreds or thousands of men on the other side lined him and others like him up in the sights of their rifles. Ninety-four percent of all men killed and wounded in the war were hit by bullets. Jackson’s love of the bayonet was an anachronism: less than half of 1 percent of wounds were inflicted by saber or bayonet.
That is not to say that the new muskets and their strangely whistling minié balls did not affect military strategy. They rendered cavalry, for example, nearly useless as an attacking body. Men on horses presented fat targets. Civil War commanders quickly learned how easy it was to empty saddles at long range. (They also learned how easy it was to kill mounted officers, and especially generals: 18 percent of Confederate generals were killed or mortally wounded, mostly by minié balls.) Cavalry, so important as an attacking unit in Napoléon’s time, was thus consigned to support work: scouting and screening, raiding supply lines, or creating diversions—much as Ashby had done in the days preceding the Battle of Kernstown. The role of artillery changed, too. Napoléon had begun battles by moving his artillery up front, then firing canister to blow holes in enemy lines. Infantry charges would follow. Such tactics were used as late as in the Mexican-American War. They worked because the effective range of canister—250 yards or more—was greater than the 100-yard range of the smoothbores. But now the muskets outranged the cannons. Any general who opened a battle by moving artillery forward would soon see his artillerists and battery horses shot to pieces. (To some extent, this is what happened to McDowell in the early afternoon at Manassas.) Artillery thus moved back, and while canister was still used, much of the work of the guns was done against the other side’s guns—known as “counterbattery work.”6
The minié ball had other effects, too, most notably on the human anatomy and thus on the medical corps, surgeons, and generals who had to deal with it. The balls fired by smoothbores could, and often did, pass through the body intact, creating an exit wound about the same size as the entrance wound. They were also relatively easy to extract. But the soft, conical, hollow-bottomed minié balls flattened out, deformed, and often fragmented on impact. As these jagged pieces of lead tumbled through the body they caused extraordinary damage. If they managed to exit, they caused horrific, gaping wounds far larger than the entrance wound. The bullet’s shattering, splintering, sometimes even powdering effects on bones were usually irreparable, and were the main reasons why surgeons often had no choice but to amputate, and why stacks of human arms and legs were a common sight outside field hospitals. And the soft, tumbling pieces of lead simply shredded whatever internal organs they encountered.7 Because the injuries they caused were so often crippling or disfiguring, minié balls had a far more profound impact than round balls on the fighting ability of armies. An army reporting nine hundred wounded in battle, in a typical example, would lose seventy of those men to death, while the minié’s effects meant that four hundred would be too crippled ever to fight again. The army thus suffered a permanent loss of nearly five hundred men.8 Round balls were not nearly as destructive.
This great revolution, however, arrived unevenly on the battlefields of the American Civil War, a fact that had a large—but largely uncredited—impact on the early war campaigns of Stonewall Jackson. When the war began in 1861, a high percentage of the weapons in both armies were the old .69-caliber smoothbores. The Union quickly remedied that problem. In 1862 most Federal soldiers were equipped with either Springfield or Enfield rifled muskets. But the Confederacy lagged far behind. Jackson’s valley army fought at Manassas and in the valley campaign with smoothbores, a condition that did not begin to change until he later captured so many Union arms that he was able to partially reoutfit his army.9 According to a number of descriptions by ordinary soldiers, their equipment at the beginning of the war was badly outdated. John Worsham, an infantryman who served under Jackson, recalled an abundance of smoothbores, including old modified flintlocks, Mississippi rifles, pistols, and double-barreled shotguns. “Not a half dozen men in the company were armed alike,” he wrote.10 Unlike the Federals, the Confederate army as a whole was still using smoothbores well into mid-1863. “My recollection is that Gettysburg was our first battle in which we were at last entirely rid of smoothbore muskets,” wrote Edward Porter Alexander.11
All of this suggests a rather extreme mismatch in firepower in the early part of the war. This inequality was apparent to soldiers on both sides. In one of Jackson’s valley fights a Georgia regiment, equipped with .69-caliber smoothbores, stood fire for two and a half hours from Springfield-carrying Federals without being able to respond.12 In many instances the Union troops, upon learning that their opponents were shooting outmoded muskets, exposed themselves and taunted their opponents. Many of them felt perfectly safe at a hundred yards.13 It is true that, at close range, rifles lose some of their advantages over smoothbore muskets. But not all. Rifles are superior weapons, in accuracy and in the sheer destructiveness of their mushrooming, somersaulting bullets. Jackson was forced to deal with this disparity in firepower throughout his Civil War career.14 In the early going, he had to deal defensively with the effects of this revolution in warfare. His opponents largely did not.