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Bullets: The Minnie vs the Musket
By the time the smoke had cleared and the veterans headed back to their homes, the
American Civil War had exacted a terrible human cost. In four long years of bloody fighting,
half a million of the three million men and boys in blue and gray had been wounded in
combat. Two hundred thousand others had been killed.
These staggering figures may be less surprising after considering all the ingenious killing
machines taken onto Civil War battlefields–rifled cannon, multi-shot arms, crude machine
guns, and repeaters, to name a few. But it was not these spectacular weapons that drew the
most blood during the Civil War. Ninety percent of the soldiers killed on the fields of battle
owed their fate to a deceptively simple hand-held gun and its companion projectile: the riflemusket and the minié bullet.
The rifle-musket and minié bullet together changed the face of warfare forever. For the
first time in history, infantrymen could aim their weapons at a target a fair distance away and
actually have a chance of hitting it. The days of successful frontal assaults by infantry and
cavalry were over; defenders armed with the new rifle-musket could fire from a safe place
and knock down attacker after attacker before they got close enough to do damage.
All this is quite a bit of notoriety for a humble-looking firearm with few visible
characteristics to distinguish it clearly from its 1850s predecessor. But in many ways the
Civil War rifle-musket was a brand new weapon that boasted the best features of its
predecessors. It also had a more reliable ignition system and, more important, it fired a
greatly improved projectile, the minié bullet.
The lineage of the Civil War rifle-musket reaches back to early-17th-century France.
About 1610, the muzzleloading, smoothbore flintlock musket was invented as an
improvement on the matchlock musket, a similar firearm that depended on a lit match for
ignition. As the name muzzleloading, smoothbore flintlock musket suggests, the gun was
loaded (with loose gunpowder and a round ball) at the mouth of its barrel. The bore, or inside
of the barrel, was smooth; unlike the later rifle-muskets, it contained no spiral rifling grooves
to force the projectile to spin evenly and thus travel rapidly in a straight line like a spiraling
football. The ignition system featured a hammer–called a cock–that held a small piece of
flint. When the shooter pulled the trigger, the cock fell and scraped the flint against a rough
piece of metal known as the frizzen pan cover. This showered sparks onto loose gunpowder
in the frizzen pan, which then ignited the main powder charge inside the barrel, behind the
projectile. The British army beat the French army to the punch and officially adopted the
weapon in 1682. It eventually became the standard infantry firearm of Europe and America
and remained so until the muzzleloading rifle-musket replaced it in the 1850s.
What made the smoothbore flintlock musket so dominant an infantry weapon for so long
was that it was easy to load; an experienced soldier could load and fire up to four times a
minute, a rapid rate of fire for the time. Since the gun’s barrel was not rifled–it had no
grooves that a bullet needed to fit snugly against–the projectile could be cast slightly smaller
than the bore diameter. That allowed the ball to fall to the bottom of the upturned barrel with
little resistance. To load the weapon, a soldier pulled a paper cartridge containing both
powder and ball from his cartridge box and tore off the powder end with his teeth. He primed
the flintlock by pouring some of the loose gunpowder from the cartridge into the frizzen pan
and closed the pan cover to keep the priming charge in place and dry. Next, he poured the
remaining powder down the barrel and rammed the ball down on top of the powder with a
metal ramrod. Finally, he stuffed the empty cartridge paper down the barrel to serve as a
plug, a stopper strong enough to keep the ball from rolling out by the force of gravity, but
weak enough not to obstruct the travel of a fired ball.
The ease of loading the smoothbore musket allowed soldiers to fire quickly, but the shots
were not likely to hit their targets. Accuracy and range were not the weapon’s strengths. In
fact, firing one of these guns would be similar to shooting a marble from a modern shotgun.
The weapon did not even have a rear sight for precise aiming because aiming was a fruitless
effort. The statistics boil down to this: at 40 yards, the flintlock smoothbore could usually hit
a target measuring 1 square foot, but at 300 yards, only 1 shot in 20 would hit a target of 18
square feet. As Colonel George Hanger, a British officer who fought in the American
Revolution, wrote in 1814:
A soldier’s musket if not exceedingly ill-bored (as many are), will strike the figure of a man
at 80 yards, perhaps even at 100; but a soldier must be very unfortunate indeed who shall be
wounded by a common musket at 150 yards, providing his antagonist aims at him; and as for
firing at a man at 200 yards with a common musket, you might just as well fire at the moon
and have the same hope of hitting your object. I do maintain and will prove, whenever called
on, that no man was ever killed at 200 yards by a common soldier’s musket by the person
who aimed at him.
The chance of firing a smoothbore musket and hitting something beyond rock-throwing
range was slim, but there was an alternative weapon: the rifle. The venerable Kentucky
flintlock rifle, for example, the weapon favored by frontiersmen and by sharpshooters in the
American Revolution, was extremely accurate at long ranges. Common practice targets were
the head of a tack at 20 yards, the head of a turkey at 100 yards, and the body of a turkey at
200 yards–challenging targets even for today’s sharpshooters with modern rifles and
telescopic sights. At 400 yards, an American soldier with a Kentucky rifle could easily hit a
target as large as a horse, a fact that made British cavalrymen very uneasy.
The problem with the rifle of the time was that loading it was a difficult and slow process.
Because the ammunition had to fit inside the barrel tightly in order to fit in the spiral rifling
grooves, soldiers had a tough job forcing it down from the muzzle, especially under combat
conditions, when repeated firing quickly filled the grooves with the residue of burnt powder.
Before long, the rifleman literally had to pound the tight-fitting bullet down the barrel. As a
result, the rifle’s rate of fire was only one-third of the smoothbore’s, making the gun
impractical for general military use. Soldiers were better off firing three or four shots a
minute in the general direction of an approaching enemy unit than firing once a minute with
pinpoint accuracy at individual targets.
What the infantryman needed was a firearm that combined the best of the smoothbore
flintlock musket with that of the rifle–a gun that was easy to load and could hit a small target
at 200 yards. That gun was the muzzleloading rifle-musket, and with it came the improved
bullet that made it possible. Known to common soldiers as the minié ball (which they
pronounced ‘minnie ball), the conical bullet could be loaded quickly and easily down a rifle’s
muzzle and still fit the barrel’s rifling grooves tightly when fired. But before all this came to
bear, inventors and sportsmen were working to perfect a new ignition system.
The rifle-musket and minié bullet revolutionized warfare by drastically altering the
tactical balance between an attacking army and a defending one. Frontal assaults by infantry
on a waiting enemy suddenly became suicidal. During the Napoleonic era, attacking infantry
could safely approach to within 100 yards of an enemy line with little danger of being shot
down. During the Civil War, however, because of the rifle-musket’s accuracy at long ranges,
stationary defenders could load and fire quickly and hit their attackers. Since advancing
infantrymen could not easily stop to take aim in return, their losses were much heavier than
the defenders’.
The combination of the rifle-musket and minié bullet also made the bayonet nearly
obsolete. In earlier years, the bayonet was often the most decisive infantry assault weapon,
because the smoothbore flintlock musket’s short range allowed attackers to approach close
enough for hand-to-hand fighting. In the Civil War, however, firepower almost always
decided an assault’s outcome before charging troops came within stabbing distance. In fact,
very few Civil War surgeons reported bayonet wounds. During Lieutenant General Ulysses
S. Grant’s bloody campaign against Confederate General Robert E. Lee in the summer of
1864, for example, Union medical directors recorded only 37 bayonet wounds. Of the several
hundred thousand wounded men treated in Union hospitals over the course of the war,
surgeons noted only 922 bayonet wounds!
As they had done to the bayonet, the rifle-musket and minié bullet also reduced the
effectiveness of field artillery. In the early 1800s, Napoleon often placed the artillery forward
in his battle lines, even during advances, to provide direct fire in support of the infantry.
During the Civil War, however, it was too easy to shoot down an exposed cannon crew
operating in the front lines. The artillery was forced to seek protection in the rear, a position
from which it was more difficult to hit enemy targets without endangering friendly troops in
the front.
Unfortunately, it took most Civil War generals too long to realize that some critical tactics
they had learned at West Point or from military manuals were obsolete, particularly the
frontal assault. Generals on both sides continued to send their men on these suicidal attacks.
In Pickett’s Charge alone, almost 6,000 Rebels were killed or wounded as they advanced
uphill over a mile of open ground toward entrenched Union positions at Gettysburg. The
equations and formulas of warfare had been changed completely, mostly by a simple firearm
and bullet: the rifle-musket and minié ball.
Essay (15 sentence minimum): You are the officer in charge of buying weapons for the
Union army. Your assignment is to write a weapons report to give to Abraham Lincoln
regarding what type of gun and bullets the Union should purchase for their soldiers to use.
Lincoln will make his decision based solely on your report.
Your report should include:
 A description comparing and contrasting smooth-bore muskets and rifled-muskets.
 A description comparing round musket-balls and conical Minnie balls.
 A personal recommendation as to which type of bullet and gun Lincoln should
purchase for the Union army. This recommendation should include advantages and
disadvantages of each gun and bullet as well as a prediction as to how the chosen
weapons could effect the war and the battlefield tactics used to fight the war. (Be sure
to back up your recommendation with facts!).
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