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. Earned his doctorate from Texas Christian University in fort worth texas, what year was that . It was a while ago. He is an expert so if you get an opportunity to take a class with him take a class so we are going to continue to discuss the civil war thankfully for doctor kine or we get to look at the aspect of weaponry and its impact on the war so without further ado i will hand the close over to doctor kin or a center. Thank you. 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 in a lot of it comes down to the individual whos 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, 1800 up till the American Civil War from 1860, 61 to 65. This was 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. Everything from steam ships to steam power in factories to the telegraph. Layer after layer of invention, creativity. In a kind of a strange unfortunate way though, we see that a lot of these inventions started using their talents in inventing weapons. In other words there was a certain technological revolution in referee 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, military thinking and strategy its 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. That was their hero, a lot of these american generals, their hero was napoleon bonaparte, they thought was the greatest general in the world and strategist. But the problem was they had new weapons where they were planning, making their planning based on old weapons. And so that is one thing im going to get to is show this the advances in various weaponry that we see because of the American Civil War and how that is going to affect casualties. First of all, when i brought in the basic weapon of an American Revolutionary war soldier. This is a, its actually an american copy of a french musket that was used at the time. This is the french call it a charlottesville but it is a single shot flint lock musket. Anybody ever know anything about these . They are very slow to shoot, just the weapon itself dictated how any battle would have happened for really over 250 years. From the American Civil War back for this kind of weapon dictated how that battle would happen, it is just because of the limitations. This weapon cant really be aimed. It is a smooth board weapon, which means that the barrel, 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 this musket the most important part is the barrel. Now you can understand why my freshman are teacher started crying. But if you think of a barrel its really just a long pipe. It is a metal pipe. It is plugged about when and. I will plug it up here. It is open at the scent. This is the barrel what we have here, is that we drill a small hole on the side. I look like a left hand must get here. What happens is, if youre going to load this, the soldier is told to load. A soldier would have taken a cartridge. A cartridge was essentially around ball like this. This is around red ball. These can be 69 to 75 caliber. Three quarters of an inch, about an ounce of lead. This ball itself would have been in a paper tube with gunpowder in it black powder. Soldier himself wouldve been told to load. He would raise the must get like this, and this is the rock. You would have to take this which is called the prism or the battery. He flipped that up. This is the hammer. At that time they called it the caulk, because it looked like a roosters head. You would pull that back to have caulk. You would bite off the end of the cartridge, the paper cube, poor a tiny bit of powder in what is called the pan. Theres a whole right there. The whole that i just. You put a bit of powder in the span, flipped back, it holds the power in place powder. You then drop the musket like this. You take the rest of your powder and the ball, you drop it in. You pull out your ram rod, and that is where you have to do that. Imagine if somebody was shooting at you while youre doing this . It is taking a long time. Imagine somebody shooting at you while you are doing this. Then your finish that. You are now pretty much ready to go. Your officer or sergeant says, ready. You put it to full clock and then, they never said a. They said level. You cannot aim these things. You would level it at the other side like that and then pull the trigger. You have a piece of flint says this illustrates much better. This is a pistol from the same time. This is a piece of flint, and if you do like this, you see the sparks come up. So its flint hitting the steele, that is why its called flint lock if you are lucky, what is going to happen next . What happens next is when the gunfire, as this goes forward, the sparks fall into the pan right here. The sparks go through the whole, hit the powder inside the mosque it, and with luck, the ball will go rolling out the barrel. If you are lucky that ball might go how far . 50 yards . 100 yards . It will not get very far. It is just kind of rattling down the barrel. It will not 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 kind of discouraging, wouldnt it . And it takes a long time. What is going to happen if it is raining with this work . It wont spark. Thats right, a spark wont spark. If it is raining, its humid, that could not work. Thats why you, as a soldier are issued a buy in it, which turns your must get into a spear. So that is why we have that. So you have got maybe two or three shots in the battle, then you just are trained to go a year enemy with a musket like that with a spear. That is typical fighting. In other words, if you did not follow a set of rules, the battle would not have worked. Not only does it take so long to load, im a skit like this, if it went off, would create a huge amount of smoke, and if you are thinking youve got several thousand guys firing at the same time, you will have massive amounts of smoke. That is why we see a kind of its almost rules of war for a couple of hundred years. To make a battle work, you have to have very inaccurate slow firing 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 shoulders, the enemy soldiers. They would lineups shoulder to shoulder. The idea is, i might be aiming at you, but i might hit him. So if im shooting at least a will hit somebody. The same thing happens. If you are shooting at me, you might miss me but you might hit the guy next to me. That is why they had to be very close, just to make it work. Thats why you see the soldiers are color coded. The american revolution, what color did the british soldiers where . They were known as the red coats. What color did we wear . We were blue. You know why . We got it from the french. Very good. We got it from the french. So if you went to the civil war, that is why we were wearing blue coats in the American Civil War. Federally United States troops were wearing blue. The hats they wore, the only reason they were hats like this, the french war hats. We copied everything french. This is called a kathy. French for cap. This is why people fought like that. You actually have those colors so you can see each other at a distance. It had to be close to each other to be able to hit what you are going to shoot. Then we have a breakthrough in technology as we go from the twenties into the thirties to the 18 forties. One part of this breakthrough is the use of the rifled musket or rifling. Well ill be able to see this in a minute. Somebody figured out that if you take this peril and cut grooves into the barrel and make them twist. In other words, the grooves twist as they go down the barrel, it will take that bullet, and instead of having it rattled down the barrel, if you have the bullet just a little bit smaller, then the bore inside the barrel, it will fit tightly into those grooves. So you have the soft lead bullet. I will just pass these around. Here is around ball. And then theres a bullet, what we call the mini ball. The mini ball is shaped like what we call a bullet. I am doing a little bit better now. The mini ball, youll see, if you look at the base of it, it is kind of hollow, isnt it . If you look inside, it is shaped like this. It has a hollow in it. The idea is, that when you fire the musket, that the power of the charge will make this spread out a little bit. It will spread out, grab the rifling and go down the bore and it will be much more accurate. So instead of missing that person at 100 yards, you are going to hit what your shooting at. As a matter of fact you can hit someone 300, 400 yards away. So accuracy jumps way. 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 what we call a percussion cap. I will pass this around. This is the percussion cap which, ill switch to the musket im talking about. This is a model 1855 rifle musket which would have been produced at Harpers Ferry virginia at that time. This rifle has the percussion cap right here. You can use a percussion cap. It uses the mini ball which i passed around. 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 would take a cartridge like this, drop it on the floor. laughs by the way, if youre doing archeological work, you can see where people are trying to load an old battle sites, you can tell the soldiers that were really nervous, because you will see that they used to drop cartridges all the time. They had been shot at, they were afraid. You can find many balls like this where they had just drop them in their perfect shape. But the soldier himself would grab this cartridge, put it in the muzzle, and you still use your ramrod, but its fast. A lot of times the guys we just stick it in the dirt like this so that they would not it would be faster the next time. You pull this back, put that percussion cap in there and fire. The thing about it is, you can hit somebody hundreds of years away 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, and you see tens of thousands of soldiers getting killed in one single battle. This is one of the reasons why 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. It Shows Technology was too far ahead of its time. The rifle itself has an invention on it that was it had made the percussion cap obsolete. You see whats going on in there. This is a rule of caps. In these caps, today you can get 20 cap guns. When you clock it, it pulls the cap forward and so that way you dont even have to put on the percussion cap. It is automatically priming itself. What is the problem with . This what happens when you run out . Very often, that was the problem. The soldiers cannot find the caps. They would get wet sometimes. Another problem was, it is a little more complicated than using just the cap. Some soldiers, theyre straight off the farm. Theyve had almost no experience with real machinery. Theyre confused. So the soldiers, for the ordinance officers figured out, maybe this is too complicated, so they could still use the cap, that you see an attempt to make these more efficient. It was a pretty decent idea and practicality and did it work. If you got any questions at all, feel free to ask. Go into the idea of ideas that did not work. Does this look different from that last one . This was an attempt to make a soldiers weapon that you do not have to use a ram rod with. We called it a breach floating musket. The idea is, equipped it with a bolt. If you do it right, you pull it back, feels like a more modern weapon. You take your cartridge, you put it in their, you close the bolt and then it still needs to percussion cap, guess where . It is on the bottom. So this was how this one was made. Then again, you take your percussion cap and you put it there. What is the problem with that . It could fall out. But it is a great idea. It just confused soldiers and was not all that practical. Only about 1000 of these were made. It was great experiment. It did work. Great idea, but in practicality it does not work. Another great idea that does not work. Do you see anything odd about this . What a strange about this . It has got to hammers. Behind the the idea behind this was, an inventor whose brother had been killed out in the west fighting native americans and battle thought that american explore ships had more shot in their guns. So they created a two shot musket. You put two cartridges in the barrel and with luck, you have both hammers cocked with luck. It shoots the front cartridge and then the back cartridge and you have two shots in one barrel. How successful do you think that 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 that we see in the civil war as far as firearms, it would not be for infantry. If you know about the military we have three fields of at least three branches. Artillery, infantry and cavalry. The infantry guys pretty much 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 that are on horses. They wanted shorter weapons that could be easy to use while on a horse. You also wanted weapons that could be fired fairly rapidly and loaded easily. This is where we see most of the innovation, i would say, or the useful innovation. I brought several cavalry weapons here which were invented by individuals and each one has its own advantages and disadvantages. The first when i picked up, doesnt it look a little bit neater . This is what is known as a burn side car been. It was invented by a famous civil war general by the name of ambrose burn side. Guess what star we have that comes from burnt side . Sideburns. The term site burns, they just switched it around. The term site burn comes from general birds burn sites. He was famous for that. You convinced this. He was a great inventor. He was a terrible chant general and businessman. He got cheated out of his patents, but it is a brilliant concept. The burn side carbon has the rifle barreled. It is short, easy to carry on your horse. Its got a ring so you could put it on the strap so you dont lose it. To fire it, instead of using a ram rod, you press the lever and this drops out. You have the entire inside of this exposed. That is easy. You do not have to ramp. Things you do that, and it uses a metallic cartridge. In other words not made out of paper that can get messed up in the rain. It has a brass or copper holder for the powder. The powder is in the copper. It has got the bullet in the front. To load it, you just place it right here, and then 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 can fire probably five to ten times more rounds in 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 car being. Guess what it is . Called the smiths car been. 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 lid bullet with a rubber, hard rubber cartridge in the back that fits right in there, and you close it, and you are ready to go. It also needs a percussion cap. Carabine. I love people being able to examine these. This is a good example of looking down the barrel and seeing the grooved cuts in the barrel that makes that bullet spin. Brilliant idea. If you have overheard the term sharp shooter. A lot of people think it comes from this particular carbine it is called the sharps car been. It is one of the most popular car been used in the civil war. It is nice, light, handy. To load it you use a cloth cartridge, linen or 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. There is like a razorblade in the back of this and it cuts it off. You are ready to go. Then it also uses percussion cap. This was one of the more popular guns used and civil war. Some of the longer ones were used by sharpshooters for sniping. After the civil war this became the most popular type of weapon used for buffalo hunting out in the west. It became a very popular weapon. This is a famous sharps carbine. The most revolutionary carbine, was this carbine. This was invented by a man named christopher spits her. Spencer came up with several brilliant ideas. One of which was a new cartridge. His cartridge was totally self contained. It looks like a modern cartridge, doesnt it . It looks like a giant 22. His cartridge was the standard lead mini 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 of. It so you have the rim going around the base of the cartridge. You do not need to percussion cap. Is that a big jump . It is a huge jump . If that wasnt a chump, enough to load it, he invents a magazine that goes in the back of the carbine. This magazine holds seven cartridges. If you have a spencer carbine and you are in a battle, the soldiers would typically have what they loaded with this magazine, like that. They would have had seven magazines in a pouch or a box attached to their saddle. To fire, it all you had to do is, loaded, do that, pocket, fire it. So you could shoot it. Dozens of shots within a brief time. Incredibly effective. The army adopted it. Why would the army not adopted . It is simple, it is very efficient. Super well made. But why would they not adopt . It was not that expensive, but it was expensive to shoot. The army the guys counting the beans were