Transcripts For CSPAN3 Lectures In History Civil War Weaponry 20240712

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 cartridge. You do not need a percussion cap. Is that a big jump . It is a huge jump. If that wasnt a jump enough, to load it, he invents a magazine that goes into the back of the carbine. This magazine holds seven cartridges. If you have a spencer carbine, and if you are in a battle in a fight, soldiers we typically have this thing loaded with a magazine like that. They would have had seven magazines and one pouch or a box attached to their saddle. To fire it, all you had to do was load, it do that, khaki it, fire it. So you could shoot it just dozens of shots within a very brief time. It was it incredibly effective. The army adopted it. Why would the army not adopt it . Its simple. It is very efficient. Super well made. But why would they not adopted yeah . It was not that expensive. But it was expensive to shoot. The guys counting the beans were saying soldiers will ways too much ammunition. It is too easy to shoot. Soldiers will waste the ammunition. We are not going to buy this gun for the army. That makes sense, doesnt it . Spencer did not give up. He takes his carbine and goes directly to the white house. He gets a meeting with Abraham Lincoln in a famous story. Abraham lincoln goes out on the white house grounds and Abraham Lincoln gets to test fire one of these them himself. As soon as he does this, lincoln orders his generals to accept this rifle. It took a president ial order to take one of these. Or for us to adopt this. This is the famous spencer carbine. It works wonderfully. As soon as lincoln was dead, at the end of the civil war, the army took back all these spencer carbines and turn them into single shot carbines. They were still worried about the money. But still, a beautiful idea. Going back to the cavalry, we also see law another jump in technology. Before the civil war, if you had a pistol, this was probably what it looked like. A single shot, either flint lock or percussion pistol. You notice, it is also shaped like a club. It works great with one shot. You can knock somebody with it. Not very accurate. It doesnt go very far. 20, 30 yards maybe. Not an efficient weapon. Famously, an american inventor by the name of samuel colt. He was a sailor at the time. He invents the revolver while he is on the ship sailing around in the pacific. He just like to carve stuff. He comes up with the idea of the revolver. It is a percussion weapon, but he creates the cylinder, and again, this is a rifle by the way. This is a cylinder with six cartridges than it. The cartridge was a little thing like this. It is got the powder and the pieces like skin. With the colt revolver, you take your cartridge, you put it in the front of your cylinder. This is a ram rod. You put your percussion cap. Use these little tiny ones. He put the percussion cap on it. You loaded, put the percussion cap on it back here, and in that effect you have six cartridges in this pistol. Just to fire, all you have to do is clock it, pull the trigger it and with each, the cylinder revolves and youve got six shots. It is a big jaw jump from having us single shot pistol to having a sixth shot pistol. See every time every single time he had to shoot . Each cylinder has to have a percussion cap. This had to have six cartridges and percussion caps. It takes a while to load. That is the disadvantage of the colt. It takes a little while to load it, most of these guys would carry two pistols at a time, so that gives you 12 shots. So you could if you had the spencer car been youve got a massive number of shots from the carbine and with two of these you have 12 shots with the pistol, and again ive seen the Archeological Site outside of greensboro, where you could see that there was a confederate position of local confederate soldiers who had conventional muskets like this and then were facing a much, much Smaller Union or federal cavalry unit, and you can tell that this tiny cavalry unit held off a much larger confederate infantry unit, because the cavalry soldiers had revolvers like this and spencer you can tell what was happening because you can carbines see these cartridges. Left on the ground that were about three inches under the dirt. You can see how effective the massive pop firepower coming from cartridge carbon and cartridge revolver. That reminds me that cold, even though a great inventor, held back invention in america for decades because of his patent rights. He patented this revolver action and no one else could really use it. How much better pistol came out during the same time which was this one. I will illustrate this. This is a riminton revolver, the second most used pistol in the American Civil War. But it is a much better pistol in the cold especially if you like to fire rapidly. It is much heavier made and feels much more solid and it can be loaded much faster than the cold. Just again, it works the same but you pull this back and all you have last to do to load it, you can drop the cylinder out so you can replace the cylinder. Its a little heavy isnt it . You can see you can put those cap caps on the back and put on the front. A lot of cavalry soldiers were carrying a bunch of these in a bag. So they would loaded like a magazine so they would have much more shots than otherwise. Lets see here, i will show one thing i find somewhat interesting in that the ability to manufacture sat modern equipment during the civil war. There is a difference between what was issue to the south and what was issued to the north. When the civil war started, the north already had good resources and they developed their manufacturing skills and factories. It was not like that here in the south. This was agricultural. We did not have the manufacturing skills in the south to the north and you could really see that in some of the weapons that were produced at the time. Also in the thinking. At the beginning of the civil war, there were very few arsenals in the south. There were not that many resources to create weapons. And thinking about behind the times, one of the first weapons produced by southern arsenals and this is excavated. This is called a pike or a spear. So early confederate soldiers out of georgia were issued spears to use against union forces. Not a really good idea was it . They did not last but they were using something as primitive as that and they decided to copy union weapons. Here is the basic cavalry saber of United States soldiers in the civil war. It is beautifully made and from massachusetts. Beautiful leather and beautiful workmanship. It makes a nice rain doesnt it . You can see it is beautifully made and beautifully balanced. You can see it is dated, inspected, manufacturing marks all over it, this went through an intense Inspection Program and it is beautifully made. Is it sharp though . It is sharp enough. But one thing they found out very quickly is it is almost like you had to have a sword because it was part of your ego but you would probably never use it. Because if im going at you with a sword and you are coming at me with one of these, who will win . It got to the point where its almost you needed a sword because you just have to have one but they did not use get used that much. This is a good example of a federal sort of beautiful quality. On the other hand, this sort was made here in North Carolina at about the same time. Do you see any differences so far . If you look, it is very simple and very crude looking. The blade is dark but the blade is not as well balanced and not as well made. It has no markings on it other than a couple of roman numerals. If you look at the scabbard, you can see a seam down it. Whoever made this was not that good at it. So the stuff made in the south is anello not as good. It is not of quality. Another example of that we will have a sort fight in a few minutes. Another example of that is a federally made musket, United States government made musket. You can look at it. Everything about it is beautiful workmanship and it has been inspected multiple times. It is beautifully made. The problem in the south was they just did not have the manufacturing capabilities. They tried to copy federal designs. This is a musket made in richmond virginia. This is a confederate musket which is a copy of the union musket, the federal mascot. You can see it is darker and not as good a shape but you can see the federal musket had this mechanism here and the confederate version did not know how to make that so they left it off. So it is a bit crude or. Another issue that we have is skilled workers in the south. The biggest example locally. There were multiple rifle making shops until four county and one of them was off of 85. One of the exits off of 85, there was a confederate rifle factory there, North Carolina made, they were doing a great job of making muskets but i found the paperwork for this musket factory here in town. Im finding in the paperwork, this is sort of said, they had been working and working and amar now had almost finished a big order of muskets that were ready to go. But muskets need springs. To pull it back, they need a spring. They had something they needed Something Like Three Springs in the musket and they will not work without them. In guilford county, they had one man in 1862 who could actually make good springs. In the whole county, there was one guy who could do this. Its kind of sad isnt it . What was the problem with this one man who made springs for this factory . Did he die . No, he was really good friends with a local moonshine or. He would disappear for weeks at a time so they would have everything ready to go but the was one guy who is not dependable that held up production. You can see that was another one of the issues. Any questions at this point . We are getting close for time. Yes sir . So between the first bull run and appomattox. Was there a change in tactics . Did the union realize they had better weapons and kept close proximity. Sadly no. You would think. You see some changes and cavalry tactics, but for the most part they just dont seem, it does not seem to have registered on them. You still see massive casualties towards the end. These big groups of soldiers marching in and just getting mode down. One volley can drops dozens of times at one time and they were still doing it. It shows after the war, the Ordinance Department turned the spencer carbine back into a single shot. Yes maam . What are the big bullets over there . These are artillery shells. And they also show that jump in technology. This is what you would have seen fired in a cannon during the revolutionary war. This is a cannonball from the battle for the guilford courthouse here in guilford county. It is basically a big iron ball. If it hits you it will make a mess but it has to hit you. That was one of the other changes during the American Civil War. They made the jump to shells inside of this. This is a civil war cannonball from a big battle in North Carolina in 1865. You had explosives inside of this and a very complex fuse. These would explode and you could time it by doing diffuse. You could find this at troops and with up to a five second delay. When it got to where you want it to go, it would explode. It was filled with bullets and was much more deadly. Here is one. This was found at bull run or manassas. These battles during the civil war typically had two names. The south named the battle after the local town and the north named it after the local body of water. So the first battle of the war in the south was called manassas because of the town. In the north it was called bull run because a bull run creek. This is where this was found. This was an artillery shell fired out of a cannon and weighs ten pounds. You can see it is shaped like a bullet. It came out of a rifled artillery piece cannon. And went farther than say a revolutionary war cannon. It has a fuse and would explode and this would go much farther. It was much more accurate and it would explode explode making it much deadlier than anything they wouldve seen in the revolutionary war. Its heavy isnt it . Oh yeah. Anyone else . Questions here . If that is the case, i also have other things if you want to see. Basically articles of clothing, what you would have been wearing in july and manassas if you were in the union artillery. Bull. laughs this is what people were wearing at the time. The soldiers were wearing will pants, will sleep shirts with long sleeves, jackets. You would have been burning apart. Yes maam . I wanted to know, how did you gather all of this stuff . And also, i noticed there are some initials on that gun. Is it your initials or is it is soldier from back in the day . I love that. Actually im old enough. They were issued to me and i just kept them. No, this is kind of my profession and i have been doing this for years and it is true, you will see some of these have been personalized by soldiers. You do not see it as much in union weapons but in the south sometimes, like this was made in the north and captured by southern soldier and just personalized it. A lot of times in the military, you spent a lot of time just board. So you will see things like that, someone with the initials j. E. Had that. You can see a lot of the guys personalized their muskets. And they did other things for example, what else do you do when you get bored here is a bullet that the person carved into a fishing or. It is a wait for a fishing line. He took a bullet, carved it, and you can tie your line here. It is made for fishing. You see things like that, soldiers pergola personalized everything that they had. But yes, that is exactly what they would do. You would see that quite often. Somebody else . Yes sir. With black pedal rifles and general it seemed they kicked pretty hard. What inventions would come around this time later that would make the recoil better . They do kick. They kicked more, the morey fired it. That was another issue that i did not mention. You do not really see something where they get. You could put less powder in it, but they did not want to do that cause it takes away range. It does illustrate the problem with these muskets. Black powder is dirty. If you fire a black powder weapon, it leaves a lot of credit residue and the barrel. It is grainy, black, missy. But every time you fire a black powder must get, it leaves a residue in the rifle which means it gets harder and harder to lift. Each time you load it, you have to really ram the ram down. That was one of the problems. I dont see any issue with later on, they invented a license that helped with the recoil. They do kick. Again, they kicked more when it was harder to load them because you had more buildup in them. Again, if you want to come up afterwards, ive got bullets here that you could actually see where the soldier had to really ram it. You see the impression of the ramrod in these bullets before they got fired because the guy had to really cram it down like that. That was a good question. They still kick. Anyone else . I know you showed us the coats that were in wall that they wore during battle. Where their numbers that showed large casualties not from puncture or wounds or ammunition but more like heatstroke and things like that . From hiking and traveling for war . More people because that was a great question. Thank you. More soldiers died of disease and other problems when you are looking at casualties, you see almost no casualties from say, the bayonet because in the revolutionary war, we were supposed to get close to use it. But you are not going to get close enough to the other guy to use it. If you are civil war soldier, would you use your biden at more than anything else . Stick it to the ground and put a candle on. It makes a lovely candle holder. I mean it. Thats what they would use it for. Of all the casualties you rarely see wounds from a bayonet. You rarely see wounds from a sort. You could not get close enough. You see quite a few wounds, the biggest damage comes from the rifle musket. This is the biggest weapon, but the soldiers are in camp. This is pregerms and things like that. The big killer would have been things like, any kind of disease going through camp. Measles could kill people. You see dysentery being a big killer, typhoid being a big killer. Ive seen issues of heatstroke because i do not see how people could have fought in weather at that time like gettysburg in the middle of the summer. Early july. Look here to me, its phenomenal. This is summer weight, also winter wait. The soldier would have been wearing long johns, flannel long johns, with a linen shirt, and you cannot leave it unbuttoned. It was part of the uniform. It had to be buttoned. So you are wearing that. You would have been wearing women pants, and an almost useless ruling cap. The evidence in the shoes, by the way, leather soles, the shoes would have been hideously uncomfortable. If you notice, the soul is not sold on. They were pegged over with little pegs. If you want to see that. There is evidence that you would have seen these soldiers. I read a lot of letters where they were just dying of thirst. They had a low capacity canteen. You would have seen people dropping from heatstroke. Yuck since this is nationally televised i will ask the Million Dollar question. In your mind, in your research, is gettysburg still considered the major turning point or do you see it as being something else, another set of circumstances . I would say it would be the big turning point. I know some people would disagree, but gettysburg was a desperate move by the confederacy, robert e. Lee, trying to get a major victory of Northern Home soil. His biggest purpose for that would have been to bring in european help to the south. A lot of the people in the south, a lot of the leadership in the south we are really counting on bringing in france and england on the side of the south to go against the United States. What are my Research Topics was a french nobleman who right up until the very end in 1865, was hoping to bring france and on the south end of the confederacy. With these northern sorry, with these european powers were looking for was to see if the south had a chance of winning, or at least coming up with a negotiated truce. So that is what it would have been a great victory on another northern soil. It might have persuaded some foreign powers to at least recognize confederacy as an independent government. But that fell through. It was a little bit delusional, i think. Very delusional. But that was the goal and once he lost that, the war still goes on. There are horrendous battles afterward, but i think that was the turning point. Anybody else . Thank you. If anybody wants to come down and enjoy and take a look. If you have never seen a musket, here is your chance. Let us give a hand to be prepared for a second exam coming up next week. Thank you for being here, come down and look at the weapons. He will let you touch and see. Thank you so much. Because of its versatility. Low production costs and reliability. Up next, a conversation about the history of this tank. Law nicholas