Muskets, carbines and revolvers and advances that allowed soldiers to fire faster and with more accuracy. All right guys, how are you all doing today . Welcome to class. Today, as i talked about a little bit earlier this week, we have a special lecture here. Doctor jeff kinard. You may have a class with him. He is the chair of our history and Political Science program here at Guilford Technical Community college. Which may not know about doctor kinard is that he is a military historian, an expert in military history. He has published at least four books on anything from weaponry, weaponry from the civil war, revolutionary war. He collects a host of artifacts which he has brought and will share with us today. He is a ph. D. And earned his doctorate from Texas Christian University in fort worth texas. What year was that . It was a while ago but he is an expert. So if you get an opportunity to take a class within, take the class. We will continue to discuss the civil war. Thankfully for dr. Kinard, we get to look at the aspect of weaponry and its impact on the war. Without without further ado, i will hand the class over to doctor kinard. The theme for todays lecture is going to be about technology of warfare. A lot of our classes we deal with the politics of warfare and the historical record of warfare. But a lot of it comes down to the individual who is in the field and the weapons they were issued because that is what you need for warfare. But one thing i found fascinating in research was looking at the early 19th century, in other words from say the year 1800 up until the American Civil War. From 1860, 61 to 65. This was also period in the United States of intense invention. Americans were incredibly creative at this time. We were really a world leader in inventing just about everything. Everything from steam ships, to Steam Powered factories, to the telegraph, just layer after layer of inventions and creativity. A kind of strange unfortunate way, we see a lot of these inventors started using their talents inventing weapons. In other words, there was a sort of a technological revolution in weaponry technology during the early 1800s. And this is one of the factors that leads to such high casualties in the American Civil War. You see this throughout history, a repetition, that it takes military leadership very often, if you look through the past, to catch up. Military thinking and strategy, it tends to stay in the past war and Technology Goes ahead. And then military thinking has to catch up with the technology. And what we see is when we enter the American Civil War, that most military thinking was still along the lines of the american revolution. In other words, warfare that had happened decades earlier or even napoleon just a few years earlier. So, that was their hero. A lot of these american generals, their hero was napoleon bonaparte. They thought he was the greatest general and strategist in the world. But the problem was that they had new weapons where they were making their plans based on old weapons. That is one thing i will go through to show the advances in various weaponry that we see with the American Civil War and how that is going to affect how casualties happen. First of all, i brought in the basic weapon of the American Revolutionary war soldier. This is a, its actually an american copy of a french musket that was used at the time. The french called it a charleyville. It is a single shot, flint lock musket. Anyone know anything about these . They are very slow to shoot and just the weapon itself dictated how any battle wouldve happened for really over 250 years. From the American Civil War back. This kind of weapon dictated how a battle would happen. It was just because of the limitations. This weapon cannot really be aimed. It is a smooth bore weapon which means that the barrel, do we have a makeup of one of these . Yes . No . Possibly not. Okay. The basic idea between the flint behind the flint lock musket. Im going to use my artistic genius here. What would be the basic part of this must get . It is the barrel. The most important part. Now you can understand why my freshman art teacher started crying. If you think of a barrel, its really just a long pipe. Its just a metal pipe and it is plugged up at one end. I will plug it up here and it is open at this and. This is the barrel. What we have here is that we drill a small hole in the side. Im making a lefthand musketeer. What happens is, if you are going to load this, the soldier is told to load. That is the word. A military guy, a soldier, would have taken a cartridge. A cartridge was essentially a round ball like this. This is a round lead ball, this is 65 to 75 caliber. About an ounce of lead. About three quarters of an inch. This ball itself wouldve been in a paper cube with gunpowder in it. Soldier unselfish would be told to load. So he would raise the musket like this and this is the lock. So you would have to take this which is called the battery. It is very hard steel. You flip that up, this is the hammer, at that time they called it the caulk because it looked like a roosters head. Thats why you say cocked the weapon. You pull that back to half top, you would bite off the end of the paper cube, poor a tiny bit of powder and what is called the pan. You can see there is a hole right there in the pan. So you put a little bit of powder in this pan, this flips back and holds the powder in place. You then drop the must get like this, you take the rest of the powder and the ball and drop it in. You pull out your ramrod and that is where you have to do that. Could you imagine if someone was shooting at you while you were doing this . It is taking a long time. Imagine someone is shooting at you while you are doing this. And then finish that and you are pretty much ready to go. Your officer or your sergeant says, ready so you pull it to full. They never said aim, they said level. You would just level it at the other side like that and then pull the trigger. You have a piece of flint, this is a pistol of the time. If you do like this, you saw the sparks come out. So it is fluent hitting the steel, that is why it is called flint lock. If you are lucky, what is going to happen next . What happens next is, when the gunfire is, this goes forward, the sparks fall into the pan right here, the sparks go through the whole and hit the powder inside a must get and with luck the powder will explode and the ball will go rolling out of the barrel. And if you are lucky that ball might go how far . 50 yards, 100 yards, it is not going to go very far. And because it is rattling down the barrel, it is not going to be accurate. If i were shooting towards the back of this room, i might be able to hit somebody and i might not. That would be kind of discouraging wouldnt it . And it takes a long time. What is going to happen if it is raining . Will this work . No. Its going to get into the powder. The spark will not spark. If it is raining and really humid, that might make it not work. That is also why you as a soldier are than issued the bayonet which turns your musket into basically a spear. That is why we have that. So you have got maybe two or three shots in a battle and then you are just trained to go at your enemy with the musket like that turned into a spear. That is typical fighting. In other words, if you did not follow a set of rules, the battle would not have worked. Because not only does it take so long to load, i must get like this if it went off would create a huge amount of smoke. Then youre thinking you have several thousand guys firing at the same time, you will have massive amounts of smoke. So that is why we see a kind of, its almost rules of war for a few hundred years. To make a battle work, you are going to have very inaccurate slow firing muskets and you are going to have a lot of smoke. So for this reason, you have to follow certain rules. Soldiers would lineup shoulder to shoulder in line and face another group of soldiers, the enemy soldiers, lined up. In other words shoulder to shoulder. The idea is i might be aiming at you but i might hit him. So if i am shooting at least im going to hit somebody. The same thing happens if you are shooting at me, you might not miss me but you might hit the guy next to me. Thats why they have to be very close just to make it work. It is also why you see the soldiers are color coded. And the american revolution, what color did the british soldiers where . They were known as the red coats. What color did we wear . We wore blue. Do you know why . Very good. Our clothes, we got our weapons from the french. Guess what color the french war . Blue. So if you go to the American Civil War, you see that is why we were wearing blue clothes like this. The hats they wore, the only reason they wore the hats like this is because the french were hats. We copied everything french. This is what people thought like that. You had to have those colors so you could see each other in the distance and know who each other are. We need to be close together to get what you are trying to shoot. Then we have a breakthrough in technology as we go from the 20s into the thirties into the 1840s. One part of this breakthrough is the use of the rifled musket or rifling. You will be able to see this in a minute. The idea someone figured out that if you take this beryl and cut grooves in the barrel and make them twist, in other words the groups twist as they go down the barrel, you will take that bullet and instead of having it rattle down the barrel if you have the bullet a little bit smaller than the bore inside of the barrel, that it will fit tightly into those grooves. So youve got this soft lead bullet, i will just pass these around, here is a round ball and here is a bullet. What we call the many ball. The mini ball is what is shaped this what we think of as a bullet. Im doing a little better now. The many ball, you will see if you look at the base of it, it is kind of hollow. So if you look inside it is shaped like this. It has this hollow in it. The idea is when you fire at the musket, that the power of the charge will make this spread out a little bit. So you will spread out to here and grab the rifling and it will go down the border and be much more accurate. So instead of missing that person at 100 yards, you will hit what you are shooting at. As a matter of fact you can hit someone 300 or 400 yards away. Accuracy jumps way up. And you can fire them quickly because instead of having a loose powder to set it off, they invent what is called a percussion cap. I will pass this one around. This is the percussion cap which, i will switch to the musket i am talking about, this is a model 1855 rifled musket which would have been produced at the arsenal at Harpers Ferry in virginia at the time. This rifle has the percussion cap right here. You can use a percussion cap, it uses the mini ball that i passed around and that means your loading is going to be much faster. So by taking this cartridge and again this is a paper cartridge. This is what you use. You would take a cartridge like this, drop it on the floor. By the way if youre doing archeological work you can see where people are trying to load. You can find old old battle sites and you can tell the soldiers that were really nervous. You see they dropped cartridges all of the time. Theyre being shot at and then you can find many balls like this where they just dropped them. In perfect shape. So you would take the cartridge, put it in the muzzle like that and still use your ramrod but it is fast. A lot of times the guy would just stick it in the dirt like this so it would be faster the next time. You pull this back, you put the percussion cap on here and you can fire. The thing about it is you can hit someone hundreds of yards away and accurately. This is what led to a lot of the casualties in the civil war. Guys got way too close and there was no way to miss. You see tens of thousands of soldiers getting killed in a single battle. This is one of the reasons we see the casualties. Something very accurate and it is also showing a lot of the invention. The one thing about this particular rifle though, and it Shows Technology that was too far ahead of its time. The rifle itself has in invention on it that was made to make the percussion cap even obsolete. Can you see what is going on in their . This is a roll of caps. These caps are like todays toy cap guns. When you cockpit it pulls the cap forward so you do not even need to put on the percussion cap. It is automatically priming itself. What is the problem with this . What happens when you run out . And very often that was a problem, the soldiers could not find the caps and sometimes they also got wet. Another problem is it is a little more complicated than just using the cap. Again, a lot of these soldiers are straight off the farm and have had almost no experience with real machinery. It kind of got them confused. So the soldiers or the ordinance officers figured out maybe this is too complicated. So they could still use the cap on it but you see an attempt to make these more efficient. So it was a pretty decent idea in practicality though it did not work. If you have any questions at all feel free to ask. Going into the idea, going into the ideas that did not work. Does this look different from that last one . This was an attempt to make a soldiers weapon that you did not need to use a ramrod with. It was meant to be what we call a breech loading must get. And the idea is essentially it is equipped with a bolt. So if you do it right, you pull it back like a modern weapon, you take your cartridge and put it in there, you close the bolt and then it still needs the percussion cap. Guess where . It is on the bottom. So this was how this one was made. And again, you take your percussion cap and you put it there. Whats the problem with that . It could fall out. We mentioned that earlier. But its a great idea, it just confused shield soldiers and was not all that practical. Only about 1000 of these were made. It was a great experiment. But it didnt work. Brilliant idea. The technicality, it does not work. Another great idea that does not work. Do you see anything odd about this cup . What is strange about this . Its got to hammers. The idea behind this was, an inventor whose brother had killed out in the west fighting native americans and the battle thought that american explores should have had more shots in their guns. So he creates a two shot must get where you put two cartridges in the barrel and then, with luck, you have both hammers one trigger fires one hammer, shoots the cartridge, the next trigger shoots the back cartridge. Youve got two shots in one barrel. How successful do you think this was . No. But it was a great idea. Sometimes great ideas just get pushed out into the field but not tested. I think the biggest jump in technology that we see in the civil war as far as firearms, it would not be for infantry. If you know about the military, you have at least three branches. You have artillery, infantry, and cavalry. The infantry guys pretty hadnt had these kinds of weapons. They were trying to keep it simple. We do see however, with the cavalry, there was much more innovation with cavalry. These are the soldiers with horses. They want it shorter weapons that could be easier to use while on a horse. They wanted weapons that could be fired rapidly and loaded easily. This is where we see most of the innovation, i would say, or the useful innovation. I brought several cavalry represents here, which were invented by individuals and each one has its own advantage and disadvantages. First when i pick up. Does that look a little bit neater . This is what is known as a burn sidecar been. It was invented by a famous civil war general named burn side. Guess what style we have that comes from burn side . Sideburns. The term side burn. They just switched it around. It comes from gerald burns side who had magnificent sideburns. He was famous for that. But he invents this caribbean. He was a terrible general and a terrible businessman. He got cheated out of his parents but it was a brilliant concept. The carbine, to fire it, instead of using a ram rod, you press this lever so you have the entire inside of this exposed. That is easy. We do not have to ram things to do that. It uses a metallic cartridge. In other words, not made out of paper that you get messed up and the rain. It has a brass or copper holder for the powder, the powder is in the copper, its got the bullet in the front and its loaded to loaded, you place it right here, and then you push this forward. You still have to use the percussion cap, but it is much much faster to use. It works in the rain, and you could fire probably five to ten times more rounds at the same time as it takes to fire two rounds in one of these or one round, really. A big breakthrough. Not to be outdone, another inventor named smith invents his own carbine. Guess what its called . The smith carbine. Brilliant idea. If you want to loan load this, you press a button right here. It pops open. It uses a cartridge like this. It was made out of the lead bullet with a hard rubber cartridge in the back. That fits right in there. You close it and you are ready to go. Oisin it also needs the percussion cap. After, i left people being able to examine these. This is a good example of looking down the barrel and actually seen the rifling in it. You can see the grooved cuts in the barrel. Brilliant idea. If youve ever heard the term sharp shooter, a lot of people think it comes from this particular carbine. It is called the sharps carbine, one of the most popular used in the American Civil War. It is nice, light, handy. To load it you use a cloth cartridge, linen or made out of animal skin. To load it, you pull that down, you put your cartridge right there. The back of the cartridge has to be opened. There is like a razorblade in the back of this. It cuts it off. You are ready to go. Then it also uses percussion cap. This is one of the more popular guns used in the civil war. Again, some of the longer ones were used by sharpshooters for sniping. After the civil war this became one of the most popular types of weapons used for buffalo hunting out in the west. It became a very popular weapon through the entire 1800s. This is the famous sharps carbine. The most revolutionary was this carbine. This was invented by a man named christopher spencer, and spencer came up with several brilliant ideas, one of which was the new cartridge. His cartridge was totally self contained. It looks like a modern cartridge doesnt . It looks like a giant 22. His cartridge was the standard mosque led many ball but the cartridge itself is selfcontained. It has the powder in this copper case and instead of having a percussion cap for priming, the primer isnt that rim around the base. Around the base of the cartri