Slight nitpick: during the American Civil War, artillery hadn’t quite had a chance to catch up with the advances made to infantry firearms. AFAIK, all the field pieces in use were still smoothbore, firing round shot or cannister. As a result, the new rifled muskets had the range to pick off gunners and especially the draft horses used to move artillery while they were too far away to support an attack. Where artillery was most murderously effective was on the defense, where attacking troops faced withering fire not only from the enemys’ rifles but from cannon loaded with cannister and grapeshot.
Actually, the Indians often got good weapons – good enough, at least, to make many of them lose the skills to both make and use bows and arrows. They, particularly those in the northern parts of what is now the US, benefited from the competition between the French and the English (and the Dutch before them), who coveted pelts as much as the Indians wanted guns, and so the Indians had some bargaining power. (I recall one author making the point that the Indians thought the Whites stupid to trade perfectly good guns and shot for parts of dead animals; as I thought about it, I had to agree.) Apart from creating Indian dependence on Anglo-American trade, this points to a couple of conclusions relevant to the topic at hand: (1) even the Indians saw the advantage of gunpowder over arrows, and (2) by the time of the Revolution making and using quality bows and arrows was a vanishing, if not quite lost, art.
Generally concur.
For clarity, I will be a bit more explicit about one thing you’ve alluded to above: one of the main strategies of combined-arms warfare was to use the threat of nearby cavalry to force infantry to stand in tight formations. Infantrymen not immediately needed were often instructed to lie down to minimize casualties from cannonballs, but they would be too vulnerable to being overrun by cavalry. Nearby cavalry would force them to stand and form a tight line or square which would very effectively repel cavalry – but was highly vulnerable to artillery. You would then bombard them until casualties opened enough gaps in the line (less common) and/or morale caused them to falter (more likely) , and then send in the cavalry, hoping to put them to flight.
But only infantry could hold ground, so you needed all three arms. Infantry holds ground, advances against other infantry, and storms fortified positions; cavalry scouts, breaks already-faltering infantry, and pursues the routing survivors; artillery either stiffens defending infantry (attacking infantry is standing at close range much like infantry forced into formation by cavalry, and is similarly vulnerable to cannonballs) or breaks up infantry which has been forced to stand by cavalry, but is dramatically less effective against dug-in infantry or infantry lying on a reverse slope. Sort of a deadly version of “rock-paper-scissors.”
So how well would a modern bow or crossbow fare against modern troops and the armor they wear? I think a nice pointy arrow would do very well in taking down a soldier in a bullet proof vest, but what about the heavy armor they wear (I think they have inserted plates of metal or ceramic)?
My WAG is that an arrow or bolt will go through basic Kevlar or modern woven fiber armor, since said armor is designed to disperse the energy of a bullet (but really it’s more for protection against shrapnel and such). It wouldn’t go through the steel or ceramic plates that are added in the front and back though.
-XT
Bored soldier activity #443:
I’ve personally witnessed field tipped arrows fired from a modern compound bow (the kind with the pulleys) by a regular bow hunter at around 10-15 meters bounce off of old IBAs with no SAPI plates.
The backing was a Bob striking dummy sans head.
(Saw no need to ruin everyone’s fun.)
OTOH, I’ve seen pictures of broadhead arrows punching through equivalent kevlar on the internets.
My guess is that it’s all about the arrowhead and the draw weight.
Outside of combat between massed forces, a gun has to be more useful. A gun can be cocked and ready to fire in an instant, but how long can you hold a bow drawn and ready to release? How many people can be controlled at arrow-point?
On the other hand, during the American Revolution, powder could get wet (see Battle of the Clouds).
I’d guess the reason guns won out is because guns are cool.
Question for the militarists: Long bow assaults are depicted in the movies as a mass of arrows shot high in the air, coming down from above on the enemy (the arch in archery). In Braveheart, the Scots could see the arrows, and hold up their shields to block most of the arrows. Did that really work? That would be an advantage for guns, you don’t see the bullet coming.
Not really. A bodkin pointed or pile pointed arrow could pierce through chain mail (and even early plate, depending on the range). Holding up a shield made of wood and leather might help a bit, but most likely (again, depending on the range) the arrow would go through and injure or even kill the guy hiding behind it. And an arrow storm could be fired off over and over again, unlike in the movie (or in the 300)…you could have 3 or even 4 arrows in the air before the first ones hit. Even if the cover worked you’d be pinned down while the enemy moved up other forces to finish you off while you were cowering under your shields.
Just as an anecdote, I saw a demonstration of an English longbow once. They set up a target of a whole cow carcass about 100 yards distant. Then this guy with a monster long bow put a shaft through it…and I mean through it. The arrow went in one side of the carcass and clean out the other, using a bodkin head. It was unreal. I also saw a steel breast plate punched through about about 50 yards (the arrow probably went into the the chest beneath about 3-5 inches…plenty enough to wound or kill the poor sod wearing the thing).
I’ve seen a guy string a bow in about 10 seconds, and arming one is simply a matter of grabbing an arrow, nocking it, drawing it and shooting. With pre-cartridge guns you really didn’t keep the gun loaded and ready to fire unless you were going into battle. If you did the priming could get wet or damp and then it wouldn’t fire.
I think they won out because of all the reasons folks in this thread have mentioned. To summarize: They were more useful. It was easier to train someone to use one effectively.
Different type of war. You couldn’t see the bullet coming, but given the limitations of muskets you knew when it was coming because the guy shooting it was about 10-20 yards away and presenting his weapon with a bunch of other guys and pointing it right at you. Also, while it’s true that you could see an arrow storm coming from a few hundred yards out, from close range you’d only see a blur, if anything. I think an arrow (from memory here) goes at something like 200-300 feet per second, so it’s going pretty fast.
-XT
In the early centuries, of course, you couldn’t keep a firearm ready at all, what with the match smoking, glowing, and occasionally throwing off sparks. The wheellock solved that, but it was expensive and fragile, so was chiefly used for pistols and display pieces. Only the perfection of the true flintlock made it possible to keep an inexpensive weapon ready for instant use – at least until the primer got damp. The modern sealed brass cartridge didn’t turn up until the 1850s.
The Romans and several other ancient armies and on up through the Middle Ages had professional sling soldiers as well. Some companies had custom made lead projectiles with a mark or the number of the company on it for confirmed kills (pic). I would guess the sling would be easier to learn and use than the bow and arrow and certainly bullet sized rocks would be easier to come by than making arrows, so I’m surprised they went out of fashion.
One of the drawbacks I’ve heard cited for slings as a war-weapon is that each slinger needed more room around him. Massed formations of slingers didn’t work as well as massed formations of bows - and bows could be fired through arrow slits in fortifications. So density of fire could be an issue.
Also, though I’ve never used a sling, apparently it was pretty skilled. Certain places were famous in antiquity for producing good slingers, like the Baleric Islands.
The benefits of slings were cheap ammo (sorta offset by the fact that the best slingers used lead bullets, and lead wasn’t all that cheap), longer range, and more impervious to weather - rain or wind would not affect 'em to the degree they would affect bows (much less, early firearms!).
I’m guessing that the skill required to use the weapon was the primary reason it fell out of favour. Again and again, people have traded in relatively cheap and effective military technology (such as slings and bows) for relatively expensive (such as early firearms - gunpowder being a huge expense), mostly because the latter wasn’t as hard to learn to use. A weapon which allowed your half-trained levies to blow away the other side’s skilled military specialists was apparently worth the money. 
I recently read Bernard Cornwell’s “Azincourt”, which is an ok story BUT the reason I bring it up here was the author’s extensive history of the English longbow. His historical notes are most interesting.
" ... A good archer could shoot fifteen accurate arrows in a minute (I've
seen it done with a bow that had a draw weight of 110 pounds, some
twenty to thirty pounds lighter than the bows carried at Agincourt but
far heavier than any modern competition bow)."
Right after the historical section is a bit on the English longbow itself. How it was made, what made it so ‘springy’, how the arrows were made, the stringing of the bow, the different arrowheads, the absence of quivers to hold the arrows, and the years of training it took to make a decent archer. Cornwell also tells us how the bones of archers
tell modern archaeologists what the men’s profession was.
The book was published in 2008 and the paperback version the following year. I really do recommend anyone interested in (medieval) archery to give the book a read. Or at least, the afterword portions!
15 arrows a minute… for how many minutes? I don’t care how strong you are, drawing a 100+ pound bow every 4 seconds takes a toll.
Powers &8^]
At Agincourt, Crecy, Poitiers etc. the archers could not keep up the arrow-storm for long - not necessarily because they got tired, but more basically because they ran out of arrows.
And this is why, after hundreds of years of work improving the rate of fire for gunpowder weapons, we’ve basically stopped trying. Because your infantry can only hump so much ammo to the battlefield, and when the ammo is gone they’re screwed. Even with crew-served weapons you’ve only got so many crates of ammo.
In a way, Agincourt “worked” for the English because the archers ran out of arrows - they, in effect, acted as their own combined-arms attack.
The arrow storm forced the French to button-down in armour and walk across a muddy field towards the English in a tight formation (an earlier cavalry attack was of course disasterous, as the horses could not be as fully armoured); the archers then threw down their useless bows, picked up their mallets, and beat the shit out of the tired, encumbered and vision-impaired French from the flanks.
Two anecdotal-ish examples, the second one being somewhat tongue in cheek:
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Oda Nobunaga (using rifles) versus Takeda Katsuyori (using cavalry charges) in the Battle of Nagashino (Battle of Nagashino - Wikipedia) - the rifles won handily, but not without a bit of help from some very clever redirecting via blockades. And apparently it rained later in the day, rendering the rifles useless. (But by then it was too late.)
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The Sniper in Team Fortress 2 has an alternate load-out for his primary weapon: instead of a rifle, he can wield a bow-and-arrow (Huntsman - Official TF2 Wiki | Official Team Fortress Wiki). The Huntsman gives a Sniper a wider field of vision, a slightly larger hitbox, and eliminates the aiming dot that gives him away to his enemies, but the arrow flies in an arc (thus making it more difficult to aim and shortens the range), he can’t hold a 100% charge indefinitely, and an airblast-wielding Pyro can reflect the arrow. According to NameBright - Coming Soon, the basic Rifle is preferred almost 75% of the time (though of course some part of that is from people who think Team Fortress 2 was perfect from the moment that it shipped and refused to use all these newfangled fancy things).
http://www.coldsiberia.org/monbow.htm
Nothing to say Franklin was suggesting these in particular(and likely was not), but the result would have been interesting. Dragoons could have defiantly benefited.
Matchlock smootbores. Not rifles.