Here is a scene from Glory showing the process during training, including under stress. The piece is a smoothbore musket because the private is using the empty paper cartridge as wadding between the powder and the ball. I’m guessing it would be a flintlock converted to percussion but I’m not good enough to spot the precise model.
It’s a British pattern 1853 Enfield rifle-musket. It’s not a smooth bore and it’s not a percussion cap conversion. It doesn’t look to me like he’s actually loading a Minie ball into the weapon in that scene. To me it looks like he shoves the entire paper cartridge into the barrel (except for the bit he tore off with his teeth), basically creating a blank round, which is what I would expect on a movie set.
There are cuts between him loading the barrel and firing the musket. He might not have even put powder into the barrel during the loading portion of the scene for all we know.
The pistol looks like a Colt model 1851 Navy Revolver, which is a cap and ball type.
I can’t identify every Civil War weapon in any movie scene, but I happen to own one of each of these.
Both weapons are correct for the period. Modern replicas are available for each.
The pistol would have belonged to the officer, and he would have paid for it himself. It wasn’t issued by the army. I’m guessing Shaw managed to score a crate or two of Enfields fresh off the boat from England for his men. I don’t know historically what weapons were actually issued to his units though.
Great scene btw. Thanks for posting it. It really shows what a difference stress makes.
A bunch of ramrods got fired out of muskets at Gettysburg. What they think happened was that one nervous Confederate soldier accidentally forgot to remove the ramrod in the heat of battle. The Union soldiers thought it made a funny sound so they started picking up ramrods from fallen muskets and firing them back at the Confederates.
There were also muskets found after the battle at Gettysburg that had multiple charges loaded in them. Apparently nervous soldiers just kept on loading even when the musket didn’t fire. Some had the barrels completely stuffed with charges. Those might have been intentional so that the enemy couldn’t pick them up and use them. The barrel would be likely to explode if you tried to fire a musket in that state.
During the re-enactment, cartridges are kept in a period appropriate cartridge box. Sure, powder and cleaning supplies are transported in non-period containers. But I imagine it would be quite rare for a re-enactor to just “forget” and mix up inappropriate ammo w/ his/her re-enacting gear. So it wouldn’t even get brought to the event. Then, you’d need this rare clueless person to be clueless again as to what he/she brought out on the field.
The organizations I am familiar with take safety (and liability) VERY seriously.
Thank you for that. I was basing my guess on how, as a black regiment, the 54th would not be getting top of the shelf equipment and the conversions were not popular with the troops. The movie depicts them armed with pikes while in training and Shaw having to bully a quartermaster into issuing shoes, as examples.
Of course, it’s Hollywood, not a documentary.
Yeah, I would have expected them to be issued old smooth bore flintlocks and smooth bores that had been converted to caplocks, too.
I went poking around on google and it looks like the Enfield as used in the movie was actually correct. The Wikipedia article on Robert Gould Shaw states that they were issued 950 Enfield muskets, and an article by the National Park Service also mentions that they were issued Enfield muskets but doesn’t give the number.
Kudos to the movie producers for getting the weapons right. Most viewers wouldn’t recognize the difference between an American Springfield musket and a British Enfield or an Austrian Lorenz rifle.