Transcripts For CSPAN3 Lectures In History Civil War Weaponry 20240712

Up next on American History tv a Community College class about civil war weaponry, such as 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 . Welcomes to class. Today as i talked about earlier this week, we have a special lecturer here. Dr. 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. What you may not know about dr. Kinard is that he is a military historian. Hes 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. He earned his doctorate from Texas Christian University in fort worth, texas. What year was that . It was a while ago. But hes an expert. So if you get an opportunity to take a class with him, take a class. So were going to 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. So without further ado, i will hand the class over to dr. Kinard. Well, thank you, dr. Bartee. 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 just the historical record of warfare but a lot comes down to the individual who is in the field and the weapons that they were issued because that is what you need for warfare. But one thing that i found fascinating in research was looking at the early 19th century, in other words from the year 1800 up until the American Civil War from 1860, 61 to 65. This is also a 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. Things from steam ships to steam power factories to the telegraph, just layer after layer of invention. Creativity. And in a kind of a strange, unfortunate way, though, we see that a lot of inventors started using their talents in inventing weapons. In other words there was a certain 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. That you see this throughout history, a repetition that it takes military leadership very often, if you look through the past, to catch up to 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 technology. And what we see is that 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 the american generals, their hero was Napoleon Bonaparte and a strategist. But the problem is they had new weapons where they were planning based on old weapons. So that is one thing im going to go through is the advances in various weaponry that we see, because in the American Civil War and how that will affect how casualties happen. First of all, i brought in the basic weapon of an American Revolutionary war soldier. This is a it is an american copy of a french musket that was used at the time. The french call it a charlieville but it is a single shot flint lock musket. Anybody ever know anything about these . They are she slow to shoot. And just the weapon itself dictated how any battle would have happened for really over 250 years. From the revolution well American Civil War back. This kind of weapon dictated how a battle would happen. And it is just because of the limitations. This weapon cant really be aimed. It is a smooth bore weapon, which means that the barrel, do we know do we have the makeup of one of these . Possibly not. Possibly not. The basic idea behind the flint lock musket, im going to use my artistic genius here. What would be the basic part of the musket . The most important part is the barrel. Now you could understand why my freshman art teacher started crying. But if you think of a barrel, its really just a long metal pipe. And it is plugged up at one end, ill plug it up here and it is open at this end. See, this is the barrel. And what we have here is that we drill a small hole or a small hole on this side, im making a lefthand musket here. And what happens is if youre going to load this, the soldier is told to load. That is the order. They dont 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, these could be 69 to 75 caliber, in other words three quarters of an inch, about an ounce of lead. This ball itself would have been in a paper cube with gunpowder in it, black powder. The soldier himself would be told to load. He would raise the musket like this and then this is the lock. So you would have to take this, which is called the frizzen or the battery. It is very hard steel. You flip that. This is the hammer. At that time they called it the cock because it looked like a roosters head and that is why you say cock the weapon and pull that back to half cock and bite off the end of the cartridge, the paper tube, pour a tiny bit of power right here in what is called the pan. If you could see through there, there is a hole there. So you put a little powder in this pan and this flips back and holds the powder in place. You then drop the musket like this, you take the rest of your powder and ball and drop it in. You pull out your ram rod, and that is where you get it seated like that. You have to do that. Could you imagine if somebody was shooting at you while youre doing this . It is a long time. It is a long time. Imagine somebody shooting at you while youre doing this. You then finish that. Youre now pretty much ready to go. Youre officer or your sergeant says ready. You pull it to full cock. And they never said aim. They said level. You cant aim these things. You would level it at the other side like that and then pull the trigger, you have a piece of flint, this illustrates much better, this is a pistol from the same time. And this is a piece of flint. This is the steel. And if you do like this, you saw the sparks come out. So it is flint hitting the steel. That is why it is called flint lock. If youre lucky, whats going to happen next . Well what happens next is when the gun fires, this goes forward, the sparks fall into the pan right here, the sparks go through the hole, hit the powder inside the musket, and with luck the ball this powder will explode and the ball will go rolling out the barrel. And if youre lucky that ball might go how far . 50 yards, 100 yards. It is not going to go very far. Because its rattling down the barrel its not going to be accurate. If i were shooting towards the back of this room i might be able to hit somebody, i might not. That would be discouraging, wouldnt it . It takes a long time. Whats going to happen if its raining, would this work . Its going to get on the powder, the spark wont spark. If its raining, if its really humid, that might make it not work. You as a soldier are then issued the bayonette, which turns your musket into basically a spear. That is why we have that. So youve got maybe two or three shots out of 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 didnt follow a set of rules, the battle wouldnt have worked. Because not only does it take so long to load, a musket like this, if it went off, would create a huge amount of smoke. If youre thinking you have several thousand guys firing at the same time you have massive amounts of smoke. So thats why we kind of see almost a rules of war for a couple hundred years. To make a battle work, youre going to have very inaccurate, slowfiring muskets and a lot of smoke. For this reason, you have to follow certain rules. Soldiers would line up, 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. If im shooting, at least im going to hit somebody. The same thing that happens, if youre shooting at me, you might miss me, but you might hit the guy next to me. That is why they have to be very close, just to make it work. Its also why you see the soldiers are color coated. In the american revolution, which color did the british soldiers wear . They were known as the red coats . What color did we wear . We wore blue. Do you know why . [ inaudible ]. Very good. We got our clothes, our weapons from the french. Guess what color the french wore, blue . So if you go to the American Civil War, you see thats why we were wearing blue clothes like this in the American Civil War. The federal United States troops were wearing blue. The hats they wore, the only reason they wore the hats like this, the french wore hats, we copied everything french. This is called a capi, like french for cap. This is why people thought like that. So you have to have those colors so you can see each other in the distance to know who each other, you have to be close together to hit what youre going to shoot. Then we have a breakthrough in technology as we go from the 20s into the 30s into the 1840s. One part of this breakthrough is the use of the rifled musket or rifling. And yall will be able to see this in a minute. The idea, somebody figured out if you take this barrel and cut grooves in the barrel and make them twist, in other words the grooves twist as they go down the barrel, youll take that bullet, and instead of having it rattle down the bullet, if you have the bullet a little bit smaller than the bore, the inside of the barrel, it will fit tightly into those grooves. Youve got this soft lead bullet, and ill just pass these around. Heres a round ball and theres a bullet. What we call the mini ball. Minie. The minie ball is whats shaped like a bullet. Im doing a little better. The minie ball youll see if you look at the base its kind of hollow, isnt it . If you look inside its shaped like this. Its got this hollow in it. The idea is when you fire the musket, that the power of the charge will make this spread out a little bit. So it will spread out to here, it will grab the rifling and it will go down that bore and it will be much, much more accurate. So instead of missing that person at a hundred yards, youre going to hit what youre shooting at. As a matter of fact, you could hit somebody 300, 400 yards away. So accuracy jumps way up. You have super accuracy with these things. And you can fire them quickly, because, instead of having the loose powder to set it off, they invent whats called a percussion cap. And this is the percussion cap which ill switch to the musket im talking about. This is a model 1855 rifled musket, which would have been produced at harpers ferry, virginia, at that time. This rifle has the percussion cap right here. It can use a percussion cap. It uses the minie ball that i passed around and that means your loading is going to be much faster. So taking this cartridge, and again, this is a paper cartridge, this is what you use. You will take a cartridge like this, drop it on the floor, by the way, doing archaeological work, you can see where people are trying to load, you can find old battle sites and you can tell the soldiers that were really nervous, because you find a battle line, you see that they dropped cartridges all the time. They were just being shot at, they were afraid, and you can find minie balls like this where they had just dropped them and theyre in perfect shape. But the soldier himself would grab this cartridge, he would put it in the muzzle like that, and you still use your ramrod, but its fast. A lot of times the guys would just stick it in the dirt like this, so that they wouldnt it would be faster the next time. You pull this back, you put that percussion cap on here, and you can fire. The thing about it is, you can hit somebody 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. There was no way to miss. You see tens of thousands of soldiers getting killed in a single battle. So this is, you know, one of the reasons why we see the casualties. Something very accurate and its 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 an invention on it that was made to make the percussion cap even obsolete. Can you see whats going on in there . This is a roll of caps. And these caps are like, today, you could get theyre toy cap guns. When you cock it, it pulls the cap forward, and so that way you dont even have to put on the percussion cap. So its automatically priming itself. Whats the problem with this . What happens when you run out . What happens when you run out, and very often, that was a problem. Often soldiers couldnt find the caps and often they got wet sometimes. And its a little bit more complicated than using just the cap. A lot of these soldiers are straight off the farm and had almost no experience with real machinery. It kind of got them confused. The soldiers or the ordinance officers figured out maybe this is too complicated, so you see an attempt to make these more, you know, more efficient. So it was a pretty decent idea. In practicality, it didnt work. If you have any questions at all, feel free to ask. Go into the idea of ideas that didnt work. This is does this look different from the last one . This was an attempt to make a soldiers weapon that you did not have to use a ramrod with. It was meant to be what we call a breech loading musket. The idea is they actually equipped it with a bolt. If you do it right you pull it back, kind of like a modern weapon, you take your cartridge, you put it in there, you close the bolt, and then it still needs the percussion cap. Guess where . Its on the bottom. So this was how this one was made. Again, you take your percussion cap and you put it there. Whats the problem with that . It could fall out. Weve noticed that earlier. Its a great idea. It just confused soldiers and was to the all that practical. Only about a thousand of these were made. It was great experiment but didnt work. Brilliant idea. In practicality it doesnt work. Another great idea that doesnt work. Do you see anything odd about this . What is strange about this . Its got two hammers. The idea behind this was, an inventor whose brother had been killed in the west fighting native americans in the battle thought that american explorers should have had more shots in their guns. He creates a twoshot musket. Where you put two cartridges in the barrel and then with luck you have your both hammers caught with luck, one trigger fires one hammer, shoots the front cartridge, the next trigger shoots the back cartridge, and youve got two shots in one barrel. How successful do you think this was . But it was a great idea. Sometimes great ideas just get pushed out into the field and not tested. I think the biggest jump in technology we see in the civil war as far as firearms, we go against it would not be for infantry. If you know about the military, you have three fields of or at least three branches. You have artillery, you have infantry, you have cavalry. The infantry guys pretty much had these kind 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 that are on horses. They wanted shorter weapons that could be easy to use while on a horse. And you also wanted weapons that could be fired fairly rapidly and loaded easily. So this is where we see most of the innovation, i would say, or the useful innovation. So i brought several cavalry weapons here, which were invented by individuals and each one has its own advantages and disadvantages. First one i pick up, does that look a little bit neater . This is whats known as a burnside carbine. It was invented by that famous civil war general by the name of ambrose burnside. Guess what style we have that comes from ambrose burnside. Guess sideburns. The terms sideburns comes they just switched it around. The term sideburns comes from general ambrose burnside, who had magnificent sideburns. But he invents this carbine. The guy was a great inventor. He was a terrible general and a terrible businessman. He didnt make a penny out of this, really. He got cheated out of his patents, but it was a brilliant concept. The burnside carbine has the rifled barrel, its short and easy to carry on your horse. Its got a ring so you can put it on a strap so you dont lose it. And to fire it, instead of using a ramrod, you press this little lever and this drops open. So you have the entire inside of this exposed. So thats easy. You dont have to ram things. You do that and it uses a metallic cartridge. In other words, not made out of paper that could get methods up in the rain. Its got a brass or copper holder for the powder. So the powder is in that copper back. Its got the bullet in the front, and to load it, you just place it right here and then push this forward. You still have to use the percussion cap, but its much, much faster to use. It works in the rain and you can fire probably five to ten times more rounds in the same time it takes to fire two rounds in one of these, or one round, really. So a big breakthrough. Not to be outdone, another inventor named smith invents his own carbine. This is guess what its called . The smith carbine. Brilliant idea. If you want to 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 rubber, hard rubber cartridge in the back. That fits right in there and you close it. And youre ready to go. It also, though, needs percussion. Percussion cap. After the talk, if yall want to come up i love people being able to examine these. This is a good example of looking down the barrel and actually seeing the rifling in it. So you can actually see those grooved cuts in the barrel that makes that bullet spin. Brilliant idea. If youve ever heard the term sharpshooter, a lot of people think it comes from this particular carbine. This is called the sharps carbine. One of the most popular carbines used in the American Civil War. Its nice, its light, its handy, to load it, you use a cloth cartridge. Either cloth, linen, or made out of animal skin. And to load it, you pull that down, you put your cartridge right there. The back of the cartridge has to be opened. Theres like a razor blade in the back of this, and it cuts it off, youre ready to go like a scar trimmer. And then it also uses the percussion cap. This is one of the more popular guns used in the civil war. Again, some of the longer ones were used by Sharp Shooters for sniping. After the civil war, this became one of the most popular types of weapons used for buffalo hunting out in the west. So it became a very popular weapon through the entire 1800s, really. So this is the famous sharps carbine. The most revolutionary carbine 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 selfcontained. It looks like, pretty much like a modern cartridge, doesnt it . It looks like a giant. 22. His cartridge was the standard lead minie ball, but the cartridge itself was totally selfcontained. It has the powder in this copper case, and instead of having a percussion cap for priming, the primer is in that rim around the base of it. So it has the rim going around the base of the cartridge. So you dont need a percussion cap. Is that a big jump . It is a huge jump. And if that wasnt a jump enough, to load it, he invents a magazine that goes in the back of the carbine. So this magazine holds seven cartridges. So if you have a spinster carbine and youre in a battle, a fight, the soldiers would typically have the thing loaded with this magazine like that. They would have had seven magazines in a pouch or in a box attached to their saddle. And so to fire it, all you had to do was load it, do that, caulk it, fire it. So you can shoot it just dozens of shots within a very brief time. It was incredibly effective. Does the army adopt it . Why would the army not adopt it . Its simple, very efficient, super well made, but why would they not adopt it . Expensive . It wasnt that expensive, but it was expensive to shoot. The army the guys counting the beans were looking at it and going, soldiers will waste too much ammunition. They say, its too easy to shoot, soldiers will waste ammunition. Were not going to buy this gun for the army. That makes sense, doesnt it . Spinster was one of those guys who doesnt give up. In a famous story, he takes one of those carbines, is frustrated with dealing with the army, goes directly to the white house, gets a meeting with Abraham Lincoln, and in a famous story, he and Abraham Lincoln go out on the white house grounds and Abraham Lincoln gets to test fire one of these himself. As soon as he does this, he orders, generals, youre accepting this rifle. So it takes really a president ial order to take one of these, or for us to adopt this. So this is the famous spinster carbine. It works wonderfully. As soon as lincoln was dead, at the end of the civil war, the army took it back, put a device on it to turn them into single carbines. Still worried about the money. Still a beautiful idea. But still a beautiful idea. Going back to the cavalry, we also see 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 locke or percussion pistol. You notice this is also kind of shaped like a club. It works great with one shot and then you can bonk 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, who was a sailor at the time. He invents what we call the revolver while he is in a ship, sailing around in the pacific. Sitting around, he just liked to carve stuff. And he comes up with the idea of the revolver. Its a percussion weapon, but you have he creates the cylinder, and again, this is rifled, by the way. Its a cylinder with six cartridges in it. The cartridge was a little thing like this. Its got the powder in a piece of skin or paper. And with a colt revolver, you take your cartridge, you put it in the front of your cylinder. This is a ramrod, so you ram each one in, you take your percussion cap on it, so you load it, put your percussion cap on it back here. In that effect, you have six cartridges in this pistol. So just to fire it, all you have to do is cock it, pull the trigger and the cylinder revolves and you have six shots. A big jump from a single shot pistol to a six shot pistol. Yes, maam . Did you have to use several percussion caps every single time you wanted to shoot . Its each cylinder has to have a percussion cap. So this would have six percussion caps. And six cartridges in it. So it takes a while to load. Thats the disadvantage of the colt. It takes a while to load it. You load it in advance. Most of those guys would carry two pistols at a time. That would give you 12 shots. So if you had the spinster carbine, you would have a massive number of shots from the carbine, then with two of these, you have 12 shots from the pistol, and again, ive seen an archaeological. Site outside of greensboro where you can see there was a confederate position of local soldiers who had confederate musket likes this facing a Smaller Union or federal cavalry unit and you could tell that this tiny cavalry unit held off a much larger confederate infantry. Because the cavalry soldiers had revolvers like this and spinster carbines. And you can tell what was happening because you can see these cartridges left on the ground three inches under the dirt. You could see how effective the massive fire power coming from cartridge carbine and cartridge resolver. The problem, that just reminds me that colt even though a great inventor, held back invention in america for decades because of his patent rights. He patented this revolver action. And nobody else could really use it unless they bought a patent or infringed on the patent. So he held it back. A much better pistol came out during the same time. Which was this one. This is a remington revolver, the second most used pistol in the American Civil War, but its a much better pistol than the colt if you like to fire rapidly. Its much heavier made. It feels much more solid. And it can be loaded much faster than the colt. To load this thing, again, it works the same but you cock this and all you have to do to load it drop the cylinder out and replace the cylinder. Heres the cylinder. And its a little bit heavy, isnt it . But you can see on the back you put the caps on the back, load it from the front and some of these cavalry soldiers would carry a bunch of those in a bag. If you have it would be like loading it like a magazine. They would have more shots than otherwise. So lets see here. I think so we can have a little bit of questions. I will show one thing that i find somewhat interesting in that the ability to manufacture modern equipment during the civil war, theres a difference between what was issued to the south and what was issued to the north. When the civil war started the north already had good resources and they had developed their manufacturing skills and their factories. It was not lake that here in the south. This was agricultural. We did not have the manufacturing skills in the south to match the north. You can really see that in some of the weapons produced at the time. The thinking at the beginning of the civil war, there were very few arsenals in the south, not that many to create weapons. 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 really a good idea, was it . But they were using they didnt last, but they were using something as primitive as that. They decided to copy union weapons. Heres the basic cavalry saber of federal soldiers or United States soldiers in the civil war. Beautifully made, it was made in massachusetts. Beautiful leather, beautiful workmanship. Makes a nice ring, doesnt it . But you can see, its beautifully made, beautifully balanced. You can see, its dated, inspected, manufacturing marks are all over it. This went through an intense inspection program, beautifully made. But is it that sharp, though . Its sharp enough, but one thing that they found out, very quickly, its almost like you had to have a sword, because it was part of your ego. But you probably never would use it. Because if im going at you with a sword and youre coming at me with one of this, one of these, whos going to win . It got to the point where people, you know, its almost like you had to have a sword, well, because, you just have to have one, but they didnt get used that much. This is a good example of a federal sword, beautiful quality. On the other hand, this sword was made here in North Carolina down in keenansville near wilmington about the same time. Do you see any differences so far . If you look, very simple, very crude looking. The blade is dark, but the blade is not as well balanced, its not as well made. It has no markings on it other than a couple of roman numerals, but if you look at the scabbard, you can see a seam down it. Its like, whoever made this was not that good at it. So the stuff made in the south is not as good, its cruder made, and not of quality. Another example of that, well have a sword fight in a few minutes. Another example of that, as i showed earlier, there is a federally made, United States government made musket. Beautiful i mean, you can look at it. Beautiful workmanship. Everything about it inspected, multiple times. 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 a couple this was made in richmond, virginia. This is a confederate musket, which is a copy of the union musket, the federal musket. And you can see, its okay, its darker, its not in as good of shape. But you can see, the federal musket had this mechanism here. In the confederate version, they didnt know how to make that, so they just left it off. So its a little bit cruder. Another issue we have, skilled workers in the south. Biggest example locally, there were multiple riflemaking shops here in Guilford County, multiple. And one of them was out off of 85 on lets say, rock creek dairy road. If you know that. One of the exits off of 85. There was a confederate rifle factory there, North Carolina made. They were doing great job of making muskets but i found the paperwork for this musket factory here in town or in Guilford County. Im finding in the paperwork that, this is sort of sad, they had been working and working and they had almost finished all of these muskets, had a big order ready to go, but muskets need springs. If you notice to make it cock back you need a big spring. They have Something Like Three Springs that need to be in the musket, two to three. It wont work without them. Here in Guilford County we had one man in 1862 who could make good springs. In the whole county, one guy who could do this. Thats kind of sad, isnt it . And 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 moonshiner. I mean he would disappear for weeks at a time. So they would have everything ready to go, but because of only one guy who was not dependable, that held up production. So we see, that was another one of the issues. Any questions at this point . Were getting kind of close to time, but, yes, sir . Can i ask a question . So between the first bull run and the sort of change in weapons, is the a shift in battle tactics . Do we see or have you found that there were the proximity was further away for the soldiers or was did the federal or union realize we have better weapons lets keep the close proximity and well come out of sort of better for it or sadly, no, not really. You would think. You would see some changes in cavalry tactics, but for the most part, they just dont seem to have it doesnt seem to have registered on them. That you still see massive casualties towards the end. These big groups of soldiers marching in and just getting mowed down. One volley can just drop dozens of guys at one time. They were still doing it and that shows after the war, they had them turn the spinster carbine back into a single shot. Yes, maam. I wanted to know, what are those big bullets over there . The big bullets, 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 guilford courthouse here in Guilford County. Basically its just a big iron ball. If it hits you, its going to 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 cannon ball found at bentonville, which was a big battle here in North Carolina in 1864. The big jump, you had explosives inside of this and a very complex fuse, and these would explode. You could time it by doing the fuse. You could fire this at troops, and up to five seconds delay, when it got to where you wanted it to go, it would explode, chunks would break off. It was filled with bullets that would go out and hit. And this was much more deadly. Heres one. This was found at bull run or manassas. Thats one that throws people off. These battles during the civil war typically had two names. The south named the battle after the local town. The north named it after the local body of water so the first battle of the war, the battle of the first battle, in the south it was called manassas because of the town. In the north, it was called bull run because of bull run creek. But thats where this was found and this was an artillery shell fired out of a cannon, weigs 10 pounds, but its shaped like a bullet. This came out of a rifled artillery piece cannon. It has a fuse and it would explode and it would go much farther much more accurately, and again, it would explode in making it much deadlier than anything else you would have seen in the revolutionary war. Oh, geez its heavy, isnt it . Yeah. Anyone else . If thats the case, i have other things if you want to see basically articles of clothing. Again, what you would have been wearing in july at manassas if you were in the union artillery, wool. So this was what people wore at the time. These soldiers are wearing wool clothes, wool pants, long sleeves, shirt, jacket, vest, and thats it would have not only being unpleasant being fired at, you would have been burning up hot. Yes, maam . I wanted to know like, how did you gather all of this stuff . And then, also, i notice theres like some initials on that gun. Is that your initials or is that like a soldier from back in the days initials . I love that actually, im old enough and these were issued to me and i just kept them. No, its ive been this is part of my profession, ive been doing this for years. And it is true, youll see, some of these have been personalized by soldiers. And you dont see it as much in union weapons, but in the south, sometimes, like, this was made in the north, this was captured by a southern soldier. And he was just personalizing it. A lot of times in the military, you spent a lot of times just bored so you will see things like that. Somebody with the initials j. E. Had that. This one right i think over here, you can see very carefully, a lot of the guys personalized their muskets. And they did other things, for example, yeah, what else do you do when you get bored . Here is a bullet that the person carved into a fishing lure. Its a fishing its a weight for a fishing line. So he took a bullet, he carved it, and you can tie your line here. This was made for fishing. You see things like that. Soldiers personalized just about everything they had. Yeah, thats exactly what, you know, they will do. You see that quite often. Somebody else . Yes, sir . With black powder rifles in general it seems like they kick pretty hard. What inventions would come around this time or even later that would make the recoil a little better . I like that. They do kick. And they kicked the more you fired it. That was another issue that i didnt mention that you dont really see something that will lower the kick. You can put less powder in it, thats going to do that, but they wouldnt want to do that, that takes away range. But it does illustrate one of the problems with these muskets. If you black powder is dirty. If you fire a black powder weapon, it leaves a lot of crud, residue in the barrel. And its kind of grainy and its black and its messy. But every time you fire a black powder musket, it leaves this residue in the rifle, which means that it gets harder and harder to load. So each time you load it, you have to really ram that ramrod down. That was one of the problems. I dont see any issue with the later on, they invent devices that help with the recoil, but these things, they do kick. And again, they kicked more when it was harder to load them, because you had more buildup in them. And again, if you want to come up afterwards, ive got bullets here that you can actually see where the soldier had to really ram it and you see the impression of the end of the ramrod in these bullets before they got fired because the guy had to just really cram it down like that. That was a good question. But they still kick. Anyone else . I know you showed us the wool coats that they wore during battle. Were there numbers that were shown that showed large casualties not from puncture wounds from ammunition and things like that, as in heatstroke and things like that, from hiking and traveling for war . More people more people during the that was a great question. Thank you. More soldiers died of disease and other problems than really bullets. When youre looking at casualties, you see almost no casualties from, say, the bayonet. Because during the revolutionary war, you were supposed to get close to use it. It was great. But youre not going to get close enough to the other guy. What do you use a bayonet . It makes a lovely candle holder. Ive looked at all sorts of casualties. You rarely see wounds from a bayon net or a sword, because you cooperate get close enough. You see quite a few wupds from the biggest wounds, damage comes from the rifle muss ket. This is the biggest weapon. The soerm the soldiers are in camp. The big killer would have been things like, well, any kind of disease going through camp. Like measles could kill people, but you see disinterry being a big killer, typhoid. Ive seen issues of heat stroke because i just do not see how people could have fought in weather at thattime like gettysburg is in the middle of the summer. Its in early july and to me, its just you can this is summer weight. Its also winter weight but a social would have been wearing really long johns, flannel long johns with a linen shirt and that coat and you couldnt leave it unbuttoned. It was part of the uniform. So youre wearing that. You would have been wearing woollen pants, and almost useless woollen cap, so yeah, the evidence. And the shoes, by the way, leather soles and the shoes would have been hideously uncomfortable. Youll notice that they were not the sole was not sewn on. They were there were little pegs. Theres evidence that you would have seen these soldiers that ive read a lot of letters where they were dying of thirst. They have a low capacity canteen. You would have seen people dropping from heat stroke. You said this is nationally televised im going to ask you the Million Dollars 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 . Yes. I would say it would be the big turning point. I know some people disagree, but gettysburg was a desperate move by the cop fed ra si, robert e. Lee trying to get a major victory on Northern Home soil, and his biggest purpose for that would have been to bring in europe help to the south. A lot of people in the south, a lot of the leadership in the south were really counting on bringing in france and england on the side of the south to go against the United States. And you know, one of my Research Topics was a french nobleman who right up to the very end in 1865 was hoping to bring france in on the side of the confederacy. What these nowhere im sorry. What these european powers were looking for was to see if the south had a chance of winning, or at least coming up with the negotiated truce. So thats what was it would have been a great victory on northern soil. It might have persuaded some foreign powers to at least recognize the cop fed ra si as its own independent government. It was a little delusional, i think, or very delusional. That was the big goal. Once he lost that, the war goes on. There were horrendous battles after, but i think that was the turning point. Any other questions . If you want to come down and if youve never held a musket, heres your chance. Lets give a hand. [ applause ] be prepared for your second exam coming up next week. Thank you for being here. If youd like to cull down and look at the weapons. Come down and hell let you touch and see what he brought. Thank you so much. A look at why june is lgbtq pride month. After a raid on a Greenwich Village gay club proved to be a turning point in the gay rightsing movement. A documentary of history joined us to mark the 50th anniversary of the upriegz. Watch american tv on cspan3 tonight. American history tv on cspan 3, exploring the people and events that tell the american story every weekend coming up this weekend saturday at 6 00 p. M. Eastern on the civil war. The 1863 richmond bread riots where women protest inflation and the scarcity of food. Sunday at 4 00 p. M. Eastern, four films profiling the auto darely and Airline Industries affected by the coronavirus today. The restoration of indian lands. Watch American History tv this weekend on cspan3. Youre watching American History tv on cspan3. Up next, the hitch with the u. S. Air force on the history of the National Rifle association. This is from the american historical Associations Annual meeting. Patrick charles is a former marine and now Senior Historian for the summertime air force and author of the book armed in america. Thanks for being with us on cspan3s American History tv. Thank you steve. Flood to be here. Lets again with the origins of the National Rifle association. How did the Association Come about and why . Well, it came about after the civil war where there was poor marksman