>Due to widespread shortages of arms at the start of the Civil War, numerous stopgap solutions were tried including importing secondhand weapons from Europe. The arms-strapped Confederacy was in greater need of them but the War Department also purchased many just to keep them out of enemy hands. One of the more commonly used infantry arms on both sides was the Austrian M1854 "Lorenz" rifle, .54 caliber. The Austrian army had introduced the weapon in 1854 to replace smoothbore muskets and it saw extensive use in the 1859 war with France. By the time of the Civil War, it was being replaced by the improved M1862 Lorenz (the standard Austrian service rifle during the disastrous Seven Weeks War), so M1854s were being auctioned off and disposed of.>As with most European imports, the Lorenz had problems partially due to lack of spare parts in the United States, or the correct ammo type. Soldiers were issued .54 cartridges designed for the M1841 "Mississippi" Rifle which were not an exact replacement for the original cartridges. They also didn't know how to use the sights on the weapons or maintain them properly, as the original drill and maintenance guides were in German and not available nor readable by Americans--the Austrian army had a couple variations of the Lorenz for different shooting ranges including long-distance sniping, but these did not figure into Civil War battlefield tactics.>Nonetheless, thousands of them saw use in both Union and Confederate armies; most preferred .58 rifles if available but a few soldiers thought the Lorenz was better due to its lighter weight. Construction quality of the weapons also varied widely from excellent to atrocious.
>>18247721>.54>.58jesus that's terrifying. i would never want to be a soldier in the age of black powder warfare. fuck that.
>>18247750Common misconception: The smoothbore .69 musket was inaccurate. Not so, it could be effective up to 500 yards. In some regards it was a nastier weapon than the Minie ball because the round ball has more kinetic energy. If you were shot in the torso by a smoothbore ball at <100 yards, you were basically dead while a Minie ball injury could be survivable if it didn't hit a vital organ or artery and you didn't get an infection.
>>18247756where the Minie ball was worse was if it hit bone since it would almost certainly shatter the bone and require amputation of a limb while smoothbore balls usually didn't cause major damage to bones.
>>18247756>The smoothbore .69 musket was inaccuratethat was true for flintlock muskets because the soldier couldn't see to aim. you had to turn your head away when firing or be blinded by the powder flash. percussion muskets eliminated that problem.
>>18247721>>18247756the sights wouldn't have really been a concern before the mass adoption of rifled barrels. Like they do have crude sights that often double as bayonet lugs on earlier smooth bores and the bongs did aim, even though people erroneously claim they didn't because the order is >levelnot >aimbut at the ranges the smooth bores were usually used at and the fact you were shooting into a line of men and not an individual sighting wasn't a super big deal if the sights weren't spot on. I'd have to think that depending on the range of engagement the sights on the rifles wouldn't matter but they were probably engaging from farther ranges due to the rifles and the fact the south didn't really have the man power to bayonet charge so they'd prefer to fire for as long as possible instead of charging>>18247750>>18247756The reason they used those huge fucking chunks of lead was to kill horses since Cavs were a big deal. You can kill a person with a smaller round ball. The minute men during concord and lexington had smaller round balls because they were using their hunting smooth bores and not something they needed to kill horses with
What that means is a round ball will cause cavitation and basically demolish the surrounding tissue while a conical shot does not affect anything outside the bullet track itself.
>>18247721A good source of info as to what arms ACW armies were carrying is medical directors' reports post-battle which describe the most common wounds encountered. They give us the obvious picture that smoothbore muskets were much more common early war and largely disappeared by 1863.
>>18247800there is an order form from the Army of Tennessee's chief of ordinance requesting 1.5 million (!) .69 cal ball and buck-and ball cartridges ASAP. in truth vast amounts of .69 and .54 rounds were being ordered throughout the war lest you think soldiers were mainly toting Enfield and Springfield rifles.
>>18247823At Lee's surrender at Appomattox probably 95% of the ANV soldiers had .58 rifle muskets. The Army of Tennessee had more smoothbores still in use late war.
>>18247823AoC had 40% smoothbore muskets at Stones River, AoT 60%. By spring 1863 both armies had mostly gotten rid of them.
>>18247843The Confederates didn't win many battles in the West, in fact they lost fuckloads of weapons at Donelson/Shiloh/Iuka/Corinth/Stones River/Vicksburg. Only time they acquired any captured arms were from Forrest raids and at Chickamauga. The Army of Tennessee had lots of Lorenz rifles with a smaller amount of Enfields. Still by 1864 they were decently equipped with modern weapons. The AoT also had the most Lorenz rifles of any army in the war.It was a gamble how well equipped a regiment was. At Chickamauga one of Longstreet's regiments went to sleep at night and stacked their Enfield rifles only to wake up the next morning and find that some AoT regiment had taken them and left them their percussion conversion M1816 muskets.
>>18247869i heard that the AOT actually preferred the Lorenz to the Enfield
>>18247889tbqh the M1853 Enfield was a pretty good long arm for the day but still far from perfect. one problem is that ACW armies had the export version made by licensed contractors of variable quality while the British kept the domestic version manufactured in state armories with top-tier production equipment for their own military use.
Robbins & Lawrence of Windsor, Vermont made Type 2 Enfields for the British army on contract during the Crimean War. They delivered 16,000 out of 25,000 guns ordered. Many later saw use in the Civil War. Surviving examples are pretty rare. The British didn't care for them due to the use of American walnut for the stocks and being ardent patriots who disliked using American-made guns out of principle.
>>18247915as i said, Enfields used in the Civil War were made by private gunsmiths for export because the British government could not supply weaponry to either the US or CSA as it was considered an act of war. they didn't mind private manufacturers selling guns to whoever, but the government did not and would not do that. further the state armories that had the best manufacturing equipment were needed to supply the British army.a lot of these guns were made with hand assembly rather than machines and didn't always adhere to the specs for the P53.
>>18247869at Vicksburg the Confederates had better equipment than Grant's army most had Enfields while Grant's troops were carrying a motley assemblage of infantry arms including M1816 flintlock conversions, M1842 muskets, various imported European arms, etc. there were several different ammunition types used in the AoTT which complicated logistics.
>>18247896A domestic P53 Enfield made in the British state armories with the correct cartridge type was a first-class weapon for its day, better than the M1861 Springfield which fouled from powder residue after being shot a few times and its sight was inaccurate. You could shoot an Enfield all day long and never have issues with the thing fouling. OTOH as you said many of the Enfields used in the ACW were lower quality export versions usually fired with .58 cartridges instead of the correct .577 round.
>>18247721Artillery probably caused more casualties in the ACW than earlier conflicts. In the Revolutionary War and Napoleonic Wars artillery mostly just fired solid shot. this sometimes caused casualties but the main point of it was to induce the enemy to panic. shells were used but they were unreliable and rarely worked. by the ACW they did have reliable shells (though the Union ones were much better than the Confederate ones) as well as canister shot which didn't exist in George Washington's day.
>>18247756a gut injury would be worse than a chest one. hit the liver, you bleed out quickly. hit the intestines, you die of peritontitis. if shot in the chest hitting the heart or aorta would be fatal, but it might also hit the lungs which while painful you had a better chance.
>>18247937it's true that a lot of AoTT soldiers bitterly complained about castoff European guns but that overlooks the fact that many were decades old junk often in poor condition and using the wrong ammo type. i mean they probably wouldn't have complained about a Potsdam musket if it was in good condition and firing the correct .71 ball instead of the .69 balls they were using them with.
consider that the ANV took twice as many casualties as the AOP in the Seven Days Battles and E.P. Alexander in his memoirs blamed this on nearly half the Confederate soldiers using smoothbore muskets while the AOP had mostly riflesthen consider that at Shiloh Bragg decided to repeatedly banzai charge the Hornet's Nest and take huge losses from Union soldiers carrying rifles when his troops had mostly smoothbore muskets
>>18248040>Braxton Bragg commanded the largest of the Army of Mississippi's four corps at Shiloh with 14,000 men, about 10,000 of them actually shouldering a musket. These troops had been previously stationed at Pensacola, Florida and had nearly no combat experience. On paper, Bragg was an excellent choice to lead them as a highly experienced West Pointer with 23 years of service in the regular army prewar including the Mexican War and was known as a stern drillmaster.[9]
>>18248040not his fault. Johnston and Beauregard fucked up the battle plan and the former was too busy acting like a regimental commander and got himself killed and the latter was behind the lines and too busy preparing a self-aggrandizing battle report for Jefferson Davis. to summarize:>Beauregard thought he was Napoleon and believed an enemy knocked out would stay knocked out--Grant and Sherman had a more realistic understanding of war than him>the Confederate corps commanders fought essentially separate battles with no coordination, and Bragg could never cooperate with or acknowledge any colleague as his equal>Confederate logistics were shit--nobody tried to disentangle the troops after they got thrown into one dense mass during the battle or try to get units resupplied>Confederate reconnaissance was also shit--nobody knew Buell was coming until Forrest scouted around and saw his army crossing the river, and when he tried to inform Beauregard he had no idea where his headquarters even was>There was so much elaborate, formal and self-congratulatory prose in all of the Official Reports it takes take time to weed out the facts, except of course for Bragg when everyone except himself failed to do their duty properly
>>18248067Beauregard was sent west in Feb. 62 and decided on force concentration by combining the assorted Confederate commands into one large army. Also being Beauregard he was fond of imaginative but totally unachievable plans and in that spirit he drafted a battle plan at Shiloh that could never work with the terrain and mostly green troops.
>>18248040The consistent pattern with Bragg is that the guy always developed tunnel vision in battle. He was a good strategic planner but when it came to tactics he would just narrow-focus on one obstacle (the Hornet's Nest, Round Forest, Thomas's line on Snodgrass Hill etc) and keep trying to pound it into submission.
Bragg's letter to his wife after Shiloh is an absolute screamer. One hundred percent totally self-aggrandizing.
>>18248088he was an excellent drillmaster and no doubt he shaped the AoT into a disciplined fighting force instead of the untrained mob it was at Shiloh
Bragg's major blunders:>excessively harsh disciplinarian>allowed a much smaller Union force to capture Pensacola>retreated after Stones River>sat in camp too long, got out-maneuvered in the Tullahoma Campaign>won Chickamauga, failed to follow up on it, also lost a staggering 18,000 men that couldn't be replaced>argued with his subordinates constantly>getting his army totally routed off the field at Chattanooga
>>18248154>excessively harsh disciplinarianAlthough some discipline was no doubt required, Bragg's version of it bordered on sadism at times. He shot deserters on a regular basis, even one tragic instance where a soldier deserted because his wife was ill and needed him at home. Cleburne pleaded with Bragg for mercy but he said no way. yet the next day he granted clemency to another deserter who was known as a coward. that execution got widely publicized in the Southern press and Bragg was excoriated for it.
>>18248154outside Shiloh he was also totally a headquarters operator who never got near the front lines
>>18248161A commanding general really shouldn't be in the front lines now, should he? AS Johnston did that and paid for it with his life.
>>18248154uh...invading Kentucky? he brought wagonloads of muskets for army recruits but the amount of them he got could be counted on one hand.
>>18248170Kentucky is an interesting case because it is culturally closely aligned to the South.>predominant white ancestry is Scots-Irish>was a slave state>most common religious denominations are Baptist and PentecostalOn the other hand Kentuckians decided there was no ultimate benefit to joining the CSA even if they felt more in common with an Alabamian or South Carolinian than someone from New York City.
>>18248158hey, Stonewall Jackson was a harsh disciplinarian as well. serving with him would have sucked.
>>18248179Jackson was a very strange guy>was an artillery expert>did make occasional fuck-ups like Kernstown but managed to recover from them>died early so he had a martyr thing going for him>the furniture in his home was all ordered from New York and other Northern states to his custom specs as he correctly knew that he could get higher quality furniture there than anything the South could produce>he'd also visited health spas in New England prior to the war and acknowledged that they were the best in the country>many Dixieboos don't like hearing thisPoint is Jackson wasn't Bragg, he was a far more flexible guy not as ideologically rigid.
>>18248166Grant usually kept his HQ close to the front. See how far McClellan's HQ was from the front in the Seven Days and at Antietam.
>>18248154>Perryville>Bragg didn't know until 10/9 that he was facing the entire 55k man Union army with just 16k men of his own>Kentuckians weren't coming out to enlist>supplies were iffy, the region had been hit by a drought, and the best retreat out of the state was via the Cumberland Gap which would become impassable in wintertime>most likely the only good option by mid-October was to retreat from KY while the weather was still favorable>Chickamauga>unlikely that he could have finished off the AoC in Chattanooga and his army also lost way too many men>Stones River>Bragg does nothing on 1/1>he had Rosecrans in a corner and had no idea how to finish him off--the Union right was never even tested>perhaps the AoT had taken too much of a beating on 12/31 to get anywhere but still he didn't even try
>>18248191Bragg's problem seems to be that he usually never had enough manpower to carry out his plans>Perryville>only able to bring 16k men on the field because Kirby-Smith was an independent commander and Bragg couldn't just order him to reinforce him>Stones River>Bragg would have originally had enough troops to be nearly equal to AoC's strength but again had to give some of them up for duty elsewhere>Chattanooga>Longstreet off in Knoxville
What're some good modern civil war history books? Ideally impartial, not looking for lost cause-ism or narrative driven stuff like Foote.
>>18248158Cleburne was one of the only generals Bragg seemed to have a positive opinion of. That said Cleburne also thought executing deserters was cruel and excessive.
Bragg was one of those unapologetic hard-nosed regular officers who never understood volunteer troops and pretty much hated everything outside army life. At Shiloh he absolutely wasted lives that didn't have to be wasted attacking the Hornet's Nest instead of trying to flank the Union position.
>>18248158in another incident, when the AoT retreated after Perryville Bragg issued a strict order against discharging weapons. this was necessary because the army had to make as little noise as possible to not be noticed by the enemy. one soldier tried to shoot a chicken as they passed a farm, ended up wounding a slave instead, and Bragg had the man shot as soon as they'd moved a safe enough distance from the Union army and the shot could not longer be heard by them.
During the Mexican War some disgruntled soldier tried to frag Bragg (lol) by putting an artillery shell with a slow fuse under his cot as he slept. The shell exploded, but the cot absorbed all of the blast energy so it was demolished but Bragg was unscathed.
>>18248213The AoT had pro and anti-Bragg factions. As you might guess his biggest supporters were the troops that had been part of his old Pensacola command. These were mostly in the Hindman/Withers division of Polk's corps. OTOH Breckinridge's division was a center of anti-Bragg sentiment.
>>18247756Weapons don't become deadliest by being bigger and doing more damage. Precision is what kills. We learned this in the Cold War.
>>18248251the Orphan Brigade also hated him for having one of their guys shot and for getting them butchered at Stones River
>>18248251>PolkAbsolute idiot.>thinks he's God's gift to the CSA even though he'd served in the army like three months 36 years earlier>fucks up repeatedly in battles>since he was a Davis bff of course nothing was going to be done about that
