PS: edited today for the new thread.

Sparked by MM's dish related to the American Civil War

MM, thank you very much for your two interesting stories about event related dishes.

I prepared yesterday not so much related to the American Civil War dish from General Lee and General Grant's ginger bread cake, but more to the new fire power of the American Civil War. 

Here it is an aside, but visiting a museum at Charleston South Carolina I saw a history of weapons , among others of the American Civil War. 
https://www.charlestonmuseum.org/exhibits/permanent/2/the-armory

I had there the impression from texts that in that war, new technologies in gun building were used and that that was a reason to win the war by the Union. And yes I learned there about the new  Henry rifle
https://www.wildwestoriginals.com/winchester/henry-rifle/



And I later read also about machineguns

As the Gatling machine gun
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatling_gun
And the odd thing it was invented by Gatling to save lives (from the wiki):
"The Gatling gun was designed by the American inventor Dr. Richard J. Gatling in 1861 and patented on November 4, 1862.^[5][6] Gatling wrote that he created it to reduce the size of armies and so reduce the number of deaths by combat and disease, and to show how futile war is.^[7]"
And an example of a test of 15 man with I guess the smooth barrel musket? and not a kind of rifle with riffled barrel? against the Gatling machine gun
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDeOlVe9O8s

But the day before yesterday I learned that it was quite another story
https://www.historynet.com/civil-war-firepower-denied.htm

Kind regards, Paul.

Paul - I moved your post to this new thread. It's too much of a derailment from "dish of the day" and disrupts the theme of MM's excellent thread.

Thank you nordmann, now I can develop immediatly further from here.

Kind regards, Paul.

The Minie Ball, invented in the 1840s. The bullet could be given spin fired through a rifled barrel, greatly increasing range and accuracy.

The rifle itself was still a muzzleloader.

Loading and firing drill for ACW infantry.

The Minié ball and Minié rifle were of course named after their inventor, the French Army captain, Claude-Étienne Minié, and first saw battlefield use, albeit in limited numbers, with the French Army during the Crimean War. The Pattern 1851 Minié rifle was also used by the British Army from 1851 to 1855, and as you say similar rifles, such as the US 1861 Springfield rifle and the Austrian Lorenz rifle, which both used Minié bullets, were the dominant infantry weapons in the American Civil War. Minié rifles had great penetrating power and the large-caliber, easily deformed conical lead bullets, combined with the high-speed spin from the rifling, created terrible wounds.

While the bulk of the soldiers in the ACW were armed with rifled muskets, there were some specialist units equipped with other weapons.

One of these was the 1st US Sharpshooters Regiment, part of the Federal Army of the Potamac. This regiment was armed with the breech loading Sharps Rifle and were uniformed in green.

Thank you very much, Trike and MM, for adding these two examples, one of the Minié ball and the one about the drill of I guess still a smooth barrel and as you see muzzle loading musket.
And yes the hollow bullet which expands in the barrel during the shot by the gaspressure and tightens the gap between the barrel and the bullet for greater effectiveness...

It all adds to my discussion of why the new types of both rifles, cartridges and new repeating rifles were not used in full during the Civil War.

And after all my pre-thoughts I learned for the first time in my life, about that question from this site:
https://www.historynet.com/civil-war-firepower-denied.htm
and about James W. Ripley
https://goordnance.army.mil/history/chiefs/ripley.html
And in the meantime I learned a lot about muskets, rifles, breech loaders and muzzle loaders, smooth and rifled barrels...
https://www.britannica.com/technology/rifle

In the meantime I learned during more in depth research (on the internet!)
that there are many controversies about that ordnance general, as defending as criticizing him.
In fact I learned today that the introduction of the new technology was not so evident, for instance in the ACW and that there are strange similarities with European armies as the British and for instance Austrian and Russian armies of that time.

I learned especially from this thesis:
http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/19501/1/cwoodfinalthesis.pdf

If some of you have time, read once Chapter 1. New advances and new norms. The adaptation of new developments. and Chapter 7. Conclusion.
I will try to make tomorrow also a synopsis of this thesis and its conclusion.

A first excerpt of the conclusion:
"The development of the firearm in the nineteenth century was not determined simply by new ideas in a constant wave of progress. Its story is far more complicated. It can be seen that the development of the firearm is instead linked to its development as a product which is efficient in mechanical, practical and economic terms. As each new development reaches acceptance it does so because the development itself has reached the point where it's mass adoption has become a practical proposal. Until this point new developments face obstacles in the form of mechanical complexity in production and economic costs in manufacture. Only when these are overcome can the new development hope to reach acceptance, and even when these are overcome, there is often a inertia to overcome in terms of resistance to change, as can be seen with the adoption of repeating arms only coming after several costly military disasters."

And I learned today that the first proof of the advantage of the new arms was seen at Little Big Horn...will tomorrow seek more details.

Kind regards to both, Paul.

PaulRyckier wrote:

and the one about the drill of I guess still a smooth barrel

Paul, the drill was for rifle barrelled muskets. The Minie was developed to produce ammunition that could be rapidly loaded into a muzzle loading musket.

wiki:

The precursor to the Minié ball was created in 1848 by the French Army captains Montgomery and Henri-Gustave Delvigne. Their design was made to allow rapid muzzle loading of rifles, an innovation that brought about the widespread use of the rifle rather than the smoothbore musket as a mass battlefield weapon. Delvigne had invented a ball that could expand upon ramming to fit the grooves of a rifle in 1826. The design of the ball had been proposed in 1832 as the cylindro-conoidal bullet by Captain John Norton, but had not been adopted.


and for the ammunition used in the ACW:
Captain James H. Burton, an armorer at the Harpers Ferry Armory, developed an improvement on Minié's design when he added a deep cavity at the base of the ball, which filled up with gas and expanded the bullet's rim upon firing. The result was not only better range, but also a cheaper bullet, which was used in the Crimean War[citation needed] and then the American Civil War. Burton's version of the ball weighed 1.14 ounces.

The Spencer repeating rifle was the first repeater to go into widespread use. The weapon had been developed just before the outbreak of the War, but did not gain immediate support.

wiki;
When Spencer signed his new rifle up for adoption right after the Civil War broke out, the view by the Department of War Ordnance Department was that soldiers would waste ammunition by firing too rapidly with repeating rifles, and thus denied a government contract for all such weapons. (They did, however, encourage the use of breech-loading carbine, which is also single-shot like most firearms of the day, but is shorter than standard rifles and thus more suited to mounted warfare) More accurately, they feared that the Army's logistics train would be unable to provide enough ammunition for the soldiers in the field, as they already had grave difficulty bringing up enough ammunition to sustain armies of tens of thousands of men over distances of hundreds of miles. A weapon able to fire several times as fast would require a vastly expanded logistics train and place great strain on the already overburdened railroads and tens of thousands of more mules, wagons, and wagon train guard detachments.  

Also, at $40 each the Spencer cost twice as much as the standard Springfield 1861

Similar to the way the American Springfield Model 1866 was a development to convert muzzle-loading Springfield rifles to breech-loeaders, the Tabatière rifle was a way to convert the French Army's Minié rifles into breech-loading ones. The name, Tabatière, meaning "snuff box" comes from the mechanism's supposed resemblance to a snuff box. Only about 25% of the French Army's muzzle-loading Minié rifles were ever converted, as by the time of the Franco-Prussian War they had been superseded by the Chassepot rifle as the main service rifle of the French Army. Accordingly the Tabatière conversions were only ever used in earnest by reserve troops and in defensive roles.


Tabatière breech mechanism of a converted Minié muzzle-loading rifle, 1867.

But returning - both geographically and temporally - to the OP: another breech-loader which was in widespread use during the ACW was the Burnside carbine, designed and patented by US General, Ambrose Burnside, who resigned his commission to devote himself full-time to working on the weapon. They were produced in large numbers for the Union army and so many were in service that many were captured and used by Confederates too.

From wiki:
The carbine used a special brass cartridge which was also invented by Burnside. This cartridge contained a bullet and powder, but no primer. Pressing the weapon's two trigger guards opened the breech block and allowed the user to insert a cartridge. When the trigger was pulled, the hammer struck a separate percussion cap and caused a spark; a hole in the base of the cartridge exposed the black powder to this spark. The unique, conical cartridge sealed the joint between the barrel and the breech. Most other breech-loading weapons of the day tended to leak hot gas when fired, but Burnside's design eliminated this problem.

Trike, thanks for the specifications about the youtube of the drill, the Minié ball and the ammunition of the ACW.

I read also about the Spencer repeating rifle, and that too is in defence of 
Brevet Brigadier General James W. Ripley. Ordnance during the ACW.

https://goordnance.army.mil/history/chiefs/ripley.html
From the link:
"Called to Washington to supersede Colonel Henry K. Craig as Chief of Ordnance on 23 April 1861, the 66 year old Ripley quickly determined that it was more essential to get sufficient numbers of standard weapons to troops in the field than it was to test and develop the host of new weapons presented to his department for consideration. This policy subjected Ripley to considerable criticism from his contemporaries, and some historians have been sharply critical of what they consider Ripley's too conservative approach to his task. What is often overlooked is that a good deal of the Union's production capacity and of its existing stocks of weapons were lost to the Confederacy at the onset of the Civil War."

Kind regards, Paul.

Meles meles wrote:

But returning - both geographically and temporally - to the OP: another breech-loader which was in widespread use during the ACW was the Burnside carbine, designed and patented by US General, Ambrose Burnside, who resigned his commission to devote himself full-time to working on the weapon. They were produced in large numbers for the Union army and so many were in service that many were captured and used by Confederates too.
From wiki:
The carbine used a special brass cartridge which was also invented by Burnside. This cartridge contained a bullet and powder, but no primer. Pressing the weapon's two trigger guards opened the breech block and allowed the user to insert a cartridge. When the trigger was pulled, the hammer struck a separate percussion cap and caused a spark; a hole in the base of the cartridge exposed the black powder to this spark. The unique, conical cartridge sealed the joint between the barrel and the breech. Most other breech-loading weapons of the day tended to leak hot gas when fired, but Burnside's design eliminated this problem.

 
MM, thanks for documenting another breech-loader of the ACW.

"Most other breech-loading weapons of the day tended to leak hot gas when fired, but Burnside's design eliminated this problem."

Yes up to then it had always been a problem as in the smooth or rifled barrel to tighten the gap between the bullet and the barrel so that one had no loss of gas pressure.
And some as in the British Imperial Army, had a solution for that in the Enfield Pattern 1853 rifled musket




by greasing the bullet before introducing it in the barrel. It was even a method that caused  the Sepoy Mutiny  in India in 1857 because of the grease.
www.guns.com/news/2013/01/19/how-gun-lube-brought-down-the-british-empire
 
Kind regards, Paul.

And as mentioned the debate about Little Big Horn, strictly no part of the ACW, concerning the question if the battle was won by the more modern Indian weaponry

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Little_Bighorn

And the debate: (I think it is only one version of the controversies)
https://www.historynet.com/battle-of-little-bighorn-were-the-weapons-the-deciding-factor.htm
From the article:

"George Armstrong Custer may have done almost everything as prescribed. But it was not enough to overcome the combination of particular circumstances, some of his own making, arrayed against him that day. Inadequate training in marksmanship and poor fire discipline resulting from a breakdown in command control were major factors in the battle results. Neither Custer’s weapons nor those the Indians used against him were the cause of his defeat."
 
Kind regards, Paul.

Re the Little Big Horn, an archaeological survey after a major grass fire back in the 1980s, successfully identified 69 individual Springfield carbines of the 210 that were carried by Custer's troopers, approx 1/3rd.
Similar finds of non cavalry weapons identified 7 Winchester 1873 models and 62 Henrys, which in a similar proportion to the identified cavalry weapons would indicate a figure of 21 Winchesters and 186 Henrys, a total of around 207 repeating rifles.
One position, some 400 feet from a trooper position on Calhoun Hill, was nicknamed "Henryville" by the archaeologists from the number of expended cartridges found there.


From Archaelology, History and Custer's Last Battle:

"The effect of repeating rifles on soldiers in the Calhoun sectors in particular, and elsewhere on the field as well, lay not only in the killing but also the shock that such weapons can deliver at close range. Marshall, for example, noted that the moral fortitude of fighting  men endures only so long as the chance remains that their weapons will deal greater death, or fear of death, to the enemy. "When that chance dies, morale dies and defeat occurs""

The 19th century also saw the development of the metallic cartridge, self-contained ammunition which greatly speeded up the rate of fire, and made repeaters and automatic weapons a practical proposition.






A modern cartridge consists of the following:
1. bullet, as the projectile;
2. case, which holds all parts together;
3. propellant, for example gunpowder or cordite;
4. rim, which provides the extractor on the firearm a place to grip the casing to remove it from the chamber once fired;
5. primer, which ignites the propellant.

A cartridge or a round is a type of pre-assembled firearm ammunition packaging a projectile (bullet, shot, or slug), a propellant substance (usually either smokeless powder or black powder) and an ignition device (primer) within a metallic, paper or plastic case that is precisely made to fit within the barrel chamber of a breechloading gun, for the practical purpose of convenient transportation and handling during shooting. Although in popular usage the term "bullet" is often used to refer to a complete cartridge, it is correctly used only to refer to the projectile.

Thanks, Trike, for this picture and the comments.

And now I see, what I didn't understood before "primer". In our technical language of the time it was "the first basic coat"...
Yes our Dutch "slaghoedje" (small percussion hood) is the "primer"

In our former house near Ostend Belgian coast I and my sister found (1950) a lot of ammunition (only empty bullet casings) ...Our father (who was a soldier during WWII) said that it were German ones, while the English and Americans hadn't that nod in the casing...

I can still visualize it after some seventy years...
I think it were these, but of course they were black green...


 
But in my imagination they were bigger...but yes if you see 57 MM for the bullet it can easely according to the photo be a 9 mm for the bullet casing and that could fit with my rememberance...

And it seems to be ammution for as well the rifle as the machinegun...



as the machine gun



Kind regards, Paul.

Given all the technological advancements that were rapidly adopted for small arms during the ACW: rifling as standard; breech-loading; percussian caps and then composite cartriage; repeat-loading magazines; ranging sights; and other developments ... I find it slightly odd that ACW artillery lagged so far behind.

The most commonly used (by both sides) piece of field artillery was the smooth-bore, muzzle-loaded, 'Napoleon' cannon, that would not have been out of place on a European battlefied of a century or more earlier. (Although note the name 'Napoleon' for these ACW cannon was because they were copies of the then modern French-designed pieces, named after Napoleon III,  and so nothing to do with Napoleon Bonaparte). Nevertheless for a 'modern' weapon it was already old-fashioned when first introduced in the early 1860s, and was soon to be made completely obsolete by 'more modern', rifled, breech-loaded, steel-barreled, exploding shot, timed-fuse ... artillery pieces.


Firing an ACW 1855 replica 'Napoleon' cannon ... something that would have been completely recognisable a century, or indeed even two centuries, earlier. Note the back-jet from the touch-hole ... indicating that this mid-19th century piece of artillery is still basically little changed from the 'fire tubes' and 'bombards' of the 14th century?

MM, 

Yes the old fashioned and most used "Napoleon"...



but they had already better and as I understand it with explosive shells...
But only used by the Confederates and only once by the Union...
The 12 pounder Whitworth from Great Britain.



And the explosive shell...
http://www.civilwarartillery.com/

DIAMETER:  2.73 inches across flats
GUN:  12-pounder Whitworth rifle, 2.75-inch caliber
LENGTH:  10 7/8 inches
WEIGHT:  12 pounds
CONSTRUCTION:  Shell
SABOT:  None
FUZING:  Confederate copper fuze plug, paper time fuze
otice the excellent British workmanship. Although of British origin, this specimen is fitted with a Confederate copper time fuze plug. Both Federal and Confederate forces used the 12-pounder (2.75-inch caliber) Whitworth projectile, although the majority were fired by the Confederates. The moral of Federal troops, when facing Whitworth cannon, was greatly affected as evidence by the following statement made by Abbot in his book Siege Artillery in the Campaigns Against Richmond, he states on page 105 "These projectiles were largely used by the confederates on the lines of Petersburg, where they inspired dread among our men from their long range and horrid sound." The 12-pounder (2.75-inch caliber) Whitworth rifle firing a solid shot projectile with a propellant charge of 1.75 pounds at 35 degrees elevation had a maximum range of 10,000 yards.  For information about Sir Joseph Whitworth click here


Kind regards, Paul.

One of the "what ifs" of Hampton Roads - if Virginia had had solid shot (as she would have had if they had known they weren't facing wooden ships as on the previous day), or if Monitor hadn't been restricted to half-charges (her Dahlgrens hadn't been proof fired) then .....

First ironclad vs ironclad battle. CSS Virginia also brought back the ram into naval warfare after an absence of about 3 centuries.

The French Army developed the "La Hitte" system, named after General Jean Ernest Ducos de la Hitte,
by which external lugs on an artillery shell could be used to fir the rifled barrel of a muzzle loading cannon. The system was in place in time for the Italian War of 1859.
The opposing Austrians were impressed enough to adopt a similar system and equipped their army with an 8-pounder rifled cannon which performed better at Sadowa than Prussia's breechloaders.
This, however, was due more to the Prussian Army's faulty tactics in deploying their guns, than the weapons themselves. They would not make the same mistake in 1870.

French made shell for muzzle loading rifled cannon:

From "The Franco-Prussian War" by Michael Howard, this pagenote:

Steel guns were unpopular with artillery specialists of the day, since the difficulty in cooling the barrel evenly during the casting process tended to produce flaws which shattered the weapon when it was fired. France and Austria therefore kept to the traditional bronze, while Britain preferred the wrought iron guns, strengthened by exterior coils, developed by Sir Joseph Whitworth

Krupp solved the technical problems involved in steel gun making. Krupp guns were bought by the Belgian Army and French officers who saw them tested in 1867 sent back alarming reports of it's superior range and accuracy, however nothing was done to improve France's artillery (113 million francs had been spent on developing and manufacturing the Chassepot, the additional 13 million requested by the Army to improve its' artillery was refused by the Corps Legislatif.)

Article about Prussian artillery:

In a addition to Whitworth's field gun mentioned above, the Confederacy purchased some Whitworth rifles. These .451 calibre weapons had an hexagonal bored barrel and were extremely accurate, selected Confederate soldiers who acted as scout/snipers were issued with them. Only 250 were ordered by the Confederacy and only about 20 -30 of these made it through the blockade.

The Whitworth rifle caused one of the best known "famous last words", when, during the Battle of Spotsylvania,  Union General John Sedgwick remarked " They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance"

Green George wrote:

One of the "what ifs" of Hampton Roads - if Virginia had had solid shot (as she would have had if they had known they weren't facing wooden ships as on the previous day), or if Monitor hadn't been restricted to half-charges (her Dahlgrens hadn't been proof fired) then .....

Gilgamesh!...

as ever you have pushed me to do all the painstaking    research...
I know that you are in ship related stories an "ace?" and so I always feel humble in your company...

That said I started...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hampton_Roads
and so I came at the "Dahlgrens" on both sides...
and already started to understand something of what you wrote...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahlgren_gun
And that was already a derivative of Paixhans' guns...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri-Joseph_Paixhans
and as an aside that guy's mortar played a role in our 1832 battle of Antwerp...



And now I understand what you say Gil...

http://learningabe.info/Dahlgren_Cannons.html
However, fatefully, one of the "Dahlgrens" exploded on being tested in 1860, causing Navy regulations to require the use of much lower levels of powder until 1864, well into the Civil War.
The commander of USS Monitor felt that, had his gunner packed the cannons with a full charge, he might have been able to destroy CSS Virginia.

And yes if the Virginia had used solid shot...

PS: Gil, you don't believe it , how difficult it is to translate even one simple sentence in English, as we, here in our Flemish dialect, have first to think in Dutch and then translate it in English...
As my simple saying:
"je bent 'n as"
First of all "as" don't exist in Dutch in that connotation, as it is French, meaning in Dutch "aas" and even to find the English translation of "as" it was difficult as they mingled it with the "English "as"...
And at the end, I think the sentence has to be:
"you are an ace" in the same meaning of our "as"
The Dutch say more "you are an "uitblinker" (star), kampioen (champion)...

Kind regards, Paul.

Video about the 1861 Model Springfield and the 1853 Model Enfield:

Thank you, Trike. It is a welcome addition about all what I learned the last week about the muskets/rifles of the ACW.

Kind regards, Paul.