When in the heat of the battle I can assure you that it would not unusual at all for a musket to be fired with a ball part way down the barrel, I have even done this myself, ignorant of the dangers that we today know to be very a very unsafe action.
Picture yourself struggling to load as the enemy is shooting at you and many more charging with drawn sabers.
Given the conditions those troops fought in, where they would have to sleep with their musket under them to keep it dry so it would fire the next day. Those were some tough infantrymen.
I have a hard time even reading some of the books about the war. If you can read right through the biography of Gen Ambrose Burnside, you are stronger than me. The horrific depictions of conditions are unbelievable! Even Andersonville was easier to read.
As for purposely overloading a musket to render it unusable is a stretch, when one could be destroyed much easier by just stomping on one. just my very H O.
Now, I can certainly understand double-loading a musket.
First, these guys were drilled to load and fire quickly, to the point that it should have been nearly one motion for them. Now, imagine you’re on a battlefield, with people shooting at you (and your buddies dying around you) If you’ve got a gun, you’re either going to be loading and shooting back as fast as your adrenaline-enhanced body can, or you’re running away. Add the clouds of smoke, and the guns going off all around you, and it would be pretty easy to not notice a misfire (plus the adrenaline rush is going to make it more likely that there’s a loading mistake that causes a misfire).
But
I’m afraid I’m not going to believe these actual numbers until I see at least a reference to an original source. It’s all over the web, but the only place I could find where anyone paid any attention to whether it’s, you know, true, or not was at the Snopes BB: http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=48;t=000511;p=1 (go down a few posts)
They couldn’t find any real source either, and lay out pretty well why it’s hard to believe these are real statistics.
Double-loaded I can see. But 10 times? 23 times? Not bloody likely. 23 loads in a standard 1853 model rifled musket is 2/3 of the barrel length.
The earliest cite I can find says that the quote comes from the “master armorer at the Washington Arsenal” (unfortunately that’s all we get to identify who said it and when). It is printed in the “World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, Ill., 1893” By United States. World’s Columbian Commission. Committee on Awards. Here’s the exact quote from the book. Make of it what you will.
For those who aren’t aware, the “cartridge” referred to is nothing like a modern rifle cartridge. It was a paper tube with a pre-measured amount of powder in it, and the paper tube also contained a pre-greased minie ball. Minie balls had grooves in the skirt that needed to be greased, partly to allow the minie ball to be shoved down into the barrel more easily and partly so that it made a better seal with the barrel. Rather than measuring out powder, the “cartridge” was designed to speed things up. All you needed to do was tear open the cartridge (usually with your teeth), pour in the powder, drop in the minie ball, then drop the paper and ram down the minie ball with the ramrod. You wouldn’t normally shove the entire cartridge into the barrel “without being torn or broken” as the quote says.
This leads me to another movie annoyance. In movies they always ram down the musket ball or minie ball like it has to be pounded into place. You shove it down relatively gently until it reaches the end of the barrel (the breech). You don’t wham on it once you get it seated.
I still see a ball rammed home today. The need to make sure the ball is seated firmly on the powder today leads to this practice.
This practice might originate from the french pre-Minie ball that was seated into the cone breach.
What I find intriguing is the amount of tedious work in pulling all the guns apart to count the loads.
And as for the 23 loads in one gun, well that would have been someone in a catatonic state, as I am sure there were many thaT DID THINGS OUT OF MENTAL DELUSION.
Had a few more thoughts after hitting submit.
I wish they would have given a specific model number. The “Springfield rifle musket” could have been anything from an 1842 Springfield, which was basically just the older .69 caliber smooth bore musket that had its barrel rifled, or it could have been the 1855 Springfield which had its dreadful Maynard Primer system instead of a percussion lock, or it could have been the Model 1861 Springfield which, with all of its minor variants like the 1863 version, was the most popular musket used in the civil war. If it was an 1842 the soldier may have been intentionally getting rid of it so he could use the more standard .58 caliber round used in the later Springfields. If it was the 1855 he could have been tossing the weapon so he didn’t have to deal with its primer mechanism (which was horrible - all of the 1855s had been retired by 1860 but were dragged out of the closet due to arms shortages). The 1861 Springfield was the state of the art, top of the line weapon at the time, though. It wouldn’t have made much sense to intentionally foul that one.
The “percussion, smooth-bore musket” mentioned at the end of the quote would have been considered an inaccurate and obsolete weapon at the time. These had also all been retired by the 1860s, but were dragged out of the closet due to arms shortages. I can picture someone intentionally fouling it so that he could pick up one of the newer, rifled muskets like the 1861 Springfield or 1853 Enfield.
I think in both cases the guy was probably intentionally mucking up the weapon so that he had an excuse to pick up one of the better weapons from the battlefield.
The double loads would have come from accidentally dropping the ball in before the powder, which happened occasionally in the heat of battle. The guy goes to load the second round and realizes the first is still in there. At that point he realizes the only way to get the round out is to attach a ball puller to the end of his ramrod, so he probably just tossed the weapon and picked up a working one from one of his fallen comrades.
I know exactly what was going through the mind of the guy who owned the 23’r.
“Stercus, stercus, stercus, moriturus sum!”
Given that there were probably 150,000 infantry soldiers actually engaged at one time or an other during the three days of Gettysburg, that of the 27000 rifles and muskets salvaged from the field some 18000 were misloaded ought to be no great surprise. In the noise and confusion of a stand up fight with double ranked brigades hammering at each other at relatively close range, the second rank firing over the shoulders of the first rank, men being hit and falling all along the line, the screaming and shouting and facing incoming fire it would be easy enough to screw up the loading and firing sequence. The soldier would have little reason to recognize that his weapon had misfired until he loaded the next round at which point it was too late to do much about it. It would have been far better to scrounge up an abandon rifle-musket than to go through the time consuming process of extracting the misfired round. When you realize that your weapon is not firing, throw it down and pick up one that has been dropped by a casualty and hope it was not discarded because it was misloaded.
While the percussion cap .58 cal. rifle-musket had a theoretical effective range of 400 yards or more, Civil War infantry was not trained in musketry beyond the loading and firing drill. As a consequence much of the improved long range accuracy of the rifle was thrown away because troops did not know how to estimate distance, calculate windage and drop or how to adjust fire. Most commanders wanted to reserve musket fire until the target was within 200 yards and the real execution was done at ranges of 100 yards and less. Because of the dramaticly curved trajectory of the rifle ball the constant reminder was to aim low, otherwise the shooter was likely to fire right over the target.
In addition there were a fair number of units at Gettysburg who were armed with .69 cal. smooth bores that fired a round ball and several buckshot. These people could do serious execution at close range but were pretty much harmless at longer ranges, see for example, the face off between Hayes’ division of the Union Second Corps and Pettigrew’s Confederate division along the Emmettsburg Road during Pickett’s Charge.
Some historian has a book out on the rifled musket in the American Civil War that argues that in the hands of inadequately trained infantry the rifled musket was not much more lethal than the smooth bore weapons of 100 years before.
You’re not the first person I’ve heard say this, but I shoot one of these muskets all the time and I personally think the “dramatically curved” trajectory is very much exaggerated.
Smooth bore muskets didn’t have sights. They weren’t accurate enough to need them. Rifled muskets had sights. The two most popular muskets in the civil war were the 1861 Springfield (produced by the Springfield armory in the north) and the British 1853 Enfield, which was imported by both the north and the south. The sights on these are different, but they both have the similar characteristic in that they are sighted for 100 yards by default. At 50 yards, my Enfield shoots about 6 inches too high (the Springfield has the same problem).
If you are fairly poor at estimating distances, you’ll be off by a few inches, but you aren’t going to be winging the shot over the guy’s head. Soldiers were taught to aim for the other guy’s belt buckle to compensate for the fact that these weapons shoot high when you are under 100 yards, and a lot of fighting took place in the 50 to 100 yard range. You’re not going to be winging the shot over the guy’s head unless you accidentally left your sight set for 300 yards from earlier in the battle.
As for poorly trained troops being ineffective with rifled muskets, you can ask General Sedgwick about how accurately rifled muskets were used at a distance. 
“They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist…”
But those weren’t “poorly trained troops.” Those were Confederate sharpshooters.
I just want to put in a word on Sedgwick’s behalf. Everybody finds that quote irresistible for good reasons, but Uncle John was a good man, reliable, brave, and loved by his troops.
Americans did use some riflemen to snipe British Officers, Non-coms, Standard-bearers and other dudes who lead or stuck out. It was fairly effective, and the British used the same tactic with the Baker rifle in the Peninsular campaign.
When ever some important person got nailed there was an impulse to attribute the event to some unnamed sharpshooter rather than to just stray rounds flying about – a more likely but less heroic explanation. Of course, we got Bishop Polk with a cannon – now that’s shooting.
I too have fired Civil War period rifle-muskets and it is my impression that at close ranges the sights are set to send the bullet well above the point of aim. At 50 yards using iron sights set for 200 yards the shooter need to aim at his opponent’s knees in order to hit him in the torso. The tendency to shoot high is exacerbated when the shooter is uphill from the target and the field is obscured by gun smoke. I have personally managed to do the same thing with an M-14 on a trainfire range. Dead on at 250 meters but a full foot above the target at 25.
Remember that the .58 cal. Springfield had a muzzle velocity of about 1000 feet/second or less. That means a drop of 15 or 16 feet 300 yards or so down range. Aim low, boys, aim low.
I can agree with these thoughts except for the intentional mucking up of the musket. I just cannot see the need. If I needed to muck one up just to pick up a superior musket I would again break it in some fashion instead of loading it to fail or just simply pick it up.
When it came to assessing these recovered muskets, how many were missing flints, or the flint was simply broken badly, or how many frizzens were worn through the hard facing. There are many reasons a musket might fail after proper loading, let alone improper loading.
With all the different bore sizes on the battlefield it must have been a struggle to get the right size balls through normal channels much less picking up on the battle ground. Many must have been discarded simple because of bullet size.
As for the Maynard tape primer system, General Burnside knew how unreliable that system was even before the war and was tasked with retrofitting his carbine with that system before he could enter into contract with the war department even after proving his rifle far superior. The Bristol Arms Co. did make the tape primer in the 1st model but also made it much better and also made it to where a standard musket cap could also be used in place of the tape system. And by doing so didn’t have to pay Maynard any royalties.
I agree, why not just toss yours aside and grab one from that dead guy?
But few had flints, most were percussion of one sort or another.
This is an excellent response, I’m really chuffed.
Anyway and again from the film.
The British(Cornwallis) complains to Gibson that his men are targetting officers and goes on to say that this just isn’t on.
So I’m wondering if the rebels were the first to adopt this tactic of naffing off the officers which effectively meant that the rank and file were pretty much clueless as to how to go about matters having no officers to guide/lead them
No I think it was the Yankee’s, as in the American Revolution Yankee’s.
I think north and south would pick off an officer when the opportunity presented itself.
Obviously when I said rebels I meant the colonists, you thought I meant the N-v-S caper
I do apologize, We kind of got offtrack of your original post about the,
Still upset with us Yankee Doodles, hey!
Quite glad to be shut of you actually old chappie.