Causualties were high because of close order battle formation. Your are right that tactics didn’t keep up with technology. The Civil War was the first technological war. It was the first with air recon, submarines, steam engines, photography, bullets, gatling guns, etc. All wars aforetime had been fought the same since the West used gunpowder. Albeit, the Confederates defended with pikes.
The Confederates had the submarine.
Another fun fact - the Revolutionary War is often credited with the British re-evaluating their treatment of colonies and being more lax and willing to allow local governments (at least for white people). In fact it was the opposite effect - they cracked down, producing the rebellions in Upper and Lower Canada in 1837 which finally made them realize they had to grant some self-government to their colonies.
During the 1837 rebellion the rebels assembled at a tavern north of York/Toronto. (hey, it’s beer, after all…) After suitable preparation they marched south to confront the local troops. They had rudimentary training in firing in alternate lines, front and back. So when they encountered the authorities, the front line fired first then dropped down to reload so the back line could fire over their heads. The back line heard all the gunshots and saw the entire front line drop, thought they’d all just been shot, and turned and ran…
Training.
A Treasury of Southern Folklore, compiled by forklorist B.A. Botkin in 1948, contains an account of the Rebel Yell from a Confederate veteran. He did say that men from different states had different tones, and noted that the pitch went up when they attacked black troops. He also noted that veterans’ attempts to recreate it at reunions weren’t especially accurate, lacking as they did the impetuses of youth, excitement, and pants-shitting terror.
This is certainly true. It wasn’t even really cost that held the firearms back but the complete inability of the manufacturers to produce adequate numbers of them. By 1864 some of the production challenges had been worked out and a few specialty units did get equipped with the new firearms (mostly cavalry). The thing was that cavalry units were probably the best-suited to using them, as the repeating rifles all had some quirks that made them a little less suited to infantry use anyway. Of course, within a couple years of the war’s end this was no longer the case, but c’est la vie.
Weren’t cartridges originally copper? Studies at Little Big Horn found spent cartridges that had to be pried out of rifles because the copper expanded.
No, that was the second step in cartridge design. First paper, then copper, then brass.
Another inhibiting factor was the conservatism of the military procurement office. They refused to authorize large purchases of Gatling ‘machine’ guns because “that would lead to excessive wasting of bullets”!
[Which is true, but rather beside the point. Modern military units use an incredible amount of ordinance per soldier, but that is mostly irrelevant – you can pay for an awful lot of bullets cheaper than patching up one injured soldier. And your citizens willingly pay for those bullets, if it means Johnny comes home safely.]
I am not sure I agree with that. The armament was patented in 1862, but I don’t believe even a prototype was completed until 1863. By late 1864 the army had a few in the field, but they were bulky and not suited to all situations; there’s an argument that they were simply introduced too late to matter anyway. Plus the early models were cranky in the technical sense, as well as extremely heavy and not well suited to field battles. My understanding is that reloading them was an tedious and lengthy affair and couldn’t realistically be done under fire.
I was always under the impression that until smokeless powder was invented you generally couldn’t get that many rounds out of a Gatling gun until it was already all fouled up from residue.
Let me rephrase that, and ask another. Weren’t the first metallic cartridges copper? When was the change from copper to brass?
I can completely believe the idea that someone in the Army of that era would balk because of the idea that a Gatling gun would waste bullets.
Even as late as the 1903 Springfield rifle, the Army had it designed with a magazine cutoff to force loading the rifle via single rounds, as they were concerned with soldiers wasting ammunition if they let them go after it from the magazines/stripper clips.
Keep in mind that the Gatling Gun was pretty new, and essentially untried- you can see based on the carriages, that they were thought of as some kind of artillery piece, not an infantry weapon, and likely didn’t see their utility as a general infantry weapon.
You can go a lot later than that 1903 to find examples of military reducing fire rates to conserve bullets. The 1982 update of the M-16 changed from full auto fire (like a machine gun) to three rounds at a time, to keep troops from wasting too many bullets.
Yes: (wiki) *Malfunction of the Springfield carbine extractor mechanism
The question as to whether the reported malfunction of the Model 1873 Springfield carbine issued to the 7th Cavalry contributed to their defeat has been debated for years.[194]
That the weapon experienced jamming of the extractor is not contested, but its contribution to Custer’s defeat is considered negligible. This conclusion is supported by evidence from archaeological studies performed at the battlefield, where the recovery of Springfield cartridge casing, bearing tell-tale scratch marks indicating manual extraction, were rare. The flaw in the ejector mechanism was known to the Army Ordnance Board at the time of the selection of the Model 1873 rifle and carbine, and was not considered a significant shortcoming in the overall worthiness of the shoulder arm.[195] With the ejector failure in US Army tests as low as 1:300, the Springfield carbine was vastly more reliable than the muzzle-loading Springfields used in the Civil War.[196][197]
Gallear addresses the post-battle testimony concerning the copper .45-55 cartridges supplied to the troops in which an officer is said to have cleared the chambers of spent cartridges for a number of Springfield carbines.[198] This testimony of widespread fusing of the casings offered to the Chief of Ordnance at the Reno Court of Inquiry in 1879 conflicts with the archaeological evidence collected at the battlefield. Field data showed that possible extractor failures occurred at a rate of approximately 1:30 firings at the Custer Battlefield and at a rate of 1:37 at the Reno-Benteen Battlefield.[199][200][201]
Historian Thom Hatch observes that the Model 1873 Springfield, despite the known ejector flaw, remained the standard issue shoulder arm for US troops until the early 1890s.[202] when the copper-cased, inside-primed cartridges were replaced with brass.*
I’m began reading David Poyer’s Civil War at Sea series and have been enjoying “Fire on the Water” so far. Came across a incident in the book where a colored man struck a petty officer and the resultant Captains mast saw him awarded the punishment of being hung. A new officer on board asks the second in command about the harshness of the judgement but it turns out that the fella isn’t being hung till he dies but rather hung for a minute to teach him a lesson. It’s explained that since flogging was abolished(in 1850), Captains often came up with alternate forms of punishment. He explains that some even resorted to branding offenders. I looked into this a bit but didn’t really come across anything that verify’s the historical accuracy of this “hung for a minute” form of punishment. Not questioning Poyer’s research as I’m sure it’s based on factual information but it doesn’t seem to be something well known. The description of what the offender had to endure for that minute was a bit appalling but on the other hand probably much less compared to traditional floggings. Just curious if anybody here is aware of such policies that were up to each individual captain during this time?
Hmmm, this came up just recently. Not just the exposure times, which could be as short as a few seconds in decent light, but the cumbersome process involved. Mathew Brady and other photographers of the era used the wet plate collodion process:
The photographer basically had to cart their darkroom around with them. The plate had to be prepared, shot, and developed within a very short interval (15 minutes according to that wiki article - other sources give different figures, but certainly no more of a window than half an hour). Photography became dramatically less cumbersome as well as having shorter exposure times about 20 years later with the development of the gelatin dry plate, baking them for faster emulsions, and Eastman then coming up with practical roll film.
I would think that the guys who could not extract spent cartridges were killed, and had no more spent cartridges to extract.
But by the 1870’s every criminal gang in the West had one, if we are to believe Hollywood movies.
Event: One of the Mexican civil wars, circa 1911.
Place: Naco Sonora/Arizona.
Action: Rebel vs Federal troops skirmishing just south of the US/MX border.
Viewers: Gringos from Tucson and closer sitting in railcars and bleachers on the US side, watching the battle a few yards away. With boozy picnics.
Priority: Warfare’s first recorded motorized (not balloon) aerial bombardment.
Fun: A US pilot was hired by one side to bomb the other. He carefully circled his biplane and tossed a grenade overboard. Which landed on the US side. In a warehouse. Where the federal general’s Rolls limousine was safely stored. Boom. Bye-bye, car. And bye-bye pilot, who wisely amscrayed ASAP.
Watching wars from a safe distance is fun - unless TV coverage ruins everything.
Well, all the Calvary at the Little Big Horn died, so, yeah, pretty much.