The Spinning Ball: The Minie Rifle

^{Four Minie rifles, all with percussion locks, and a smoothbore flintlock.}

General Lee’s troops had been fighting here for three days. At around 3 p.m., July 3, 1863, the final stroke was about to begin. The three Confederate brigades of Pickett’s division, joined by six more from Hill’s corps – 15,000 to 17,500 men – dressed ranks in a line 1,000 yards long and marched, rifles on their shoulders, toward the Union positions on Cemetery Ridge about a half‑mile away.

Regimental battle flags fluttered in the breeze, as the troops marched in time with their drums. Robert E. Lee watched the steady lines admiringly, confident that his “invincible” troops would pierce the Union center and end this dreadful war.

A few minutes later, the steady lines, most of the regimental colors and all of the drums were gone. In their place was a panicked mob of about 7,000 men.

Pickett’s division, which had led the charge, had lost two thirds of its men.

Histories give much of the credit to the destruction of Pickett’s Charge to the Union artillery, which had held its fire to save ammunition during the artillery duel that preceded the charge. But a much more potent force was the weapon in the hands of the common infantry soldier: the minie rifle. Because of the invention of Captain Charles Claude Etienne Minié of the French Army, rifles could at last be loaded as fast as smoothbores. In all modern armies, the infantry was equipped with rifles, called rifle muskets to show that they were basic military weapons, able to take bayonets, not the specialized rifles of the past, which were basically hunting weapons.

Rifles had been around since the 16th century, but they were so slow to load that the military had ignored them. The lead bullet had to be large enough to force the “lands,” the raised portion of the spiral rifling, to cut into the bullet.

That was necessary to impart a spin to the projectile as it traveled down the barrel. And that meant the slug had to be literally hammered down the barrel.

Later, sportsmen discovered that, if the bullet was wrapped in a greased piece of cloth or leather, the rifling would spin it if the twist were not too rapid. But even using a greased patch, loading was still far slower than loading a smoothbore. Besides, black powder, the only propellant available at the time, left a lot of solid residue in the barrel. After a few shots, this black gunk filled the rifling grooves and made loading practically impossible.

What Captain Minié did was invent a bullet that was considerably smaller than the bore, so there was no trouble loading it, but that when the charge was fired, expanded into the rifling grooves and spun as it left the muzzle. Minié’s first bullet had an iron cup inserted into the hollow base of the conical lead bullet. When the powder charge exploded, it drove the cup into the bullet, which forced the sides of the bullet into the grooves. Later ordnance experts discovered that the iron cup was not necessary: the explosion alone was enough to expand the base of the bullet. Because the Minié bullet was longer than a round ball, it was also heavier. That meant it had greater “sectional density,” which resisted retardation by the atmosphere and gave it greater penetration.

The close fit of bullet to the bore greatly increased accuracy. The bullet of a smoothbore, being smaller than the bore, literally bounced around inside the barrel as it traveled through the gun. And, of course, the spin imparted gyroscopic stability and prevented unequal air resistance on the front of the bullet.

A British officer in the Revolutionary War, Major George Hanger, said, “A soldier must be very unfortunate indeed who shall be wounded by a common musket at 150 yards, provided his antagonist aims at him.” Hanger also said that only if a musket were perfectly bored, as few of them were, would a soldier be likely to be hit at 80 yards.

The rifled musket would hit man‑sized targets at 800 yards.

The American Civil War was a good – and gory – example of how generals fight the previous war and what happens when they do. Lee’s tactics at Gettysburg would have seemed quite familiar to his fellow Virginian, George Washington.

Pickett’s troops lined up, dressed ranks, shouldered their rifles, and marched up to the enemy. But where soldiers in the 18th century might wait to see the whites of the enemies’ eyes, the Yankees began picking off Pickett’s men almost as soon as they began to march.

In the 1860 census, the population of the United States was 31,443,321. In the Civil War, there were 364,512 Union deaths and 133,821 Confederate deaths – although Confedrate figures are almost certainly incomplete. Even with the grossly inadequate Confederate figures, that 498,333 death toll amounts to 1.6 percent of the entire population. In World War II, U.S. forces suffered 407, 316 deaths; the U.S. population was 132,164,569 in the 1940 census. The American Civil War remains in both proportionate and absolute term the bloodiest war in our history.

That was the result of the universal use of rifled weapons and smoothbore tactics.

Besides the slaughter of infantry, the Minié bullet – “minnie ball” to the troops – also meant the end of the traditional cavalry charge. A man on horseback makes a big target, and he can seldom lie down or take advantage of cover provided by the terrain. After a few bloody lessons, the generals adapted cavalry tactics to the new conditions more quickly than they changed infantry tactics. Most of the cavalry fighting in the Civil War was done by dismounted troopers. Cavalry were used mostly as mounted infantry and some mounted infantry outfits, like Wilder’s “Lightning Brigade,” were used as cavalry.

Towards the end of the Civil War, American infantry occasionally modified the traditional charge by increasing the use of skirmishers and advancing by rushes. On the defensive, they used trenches and other field fortifications to an extent unseen until World War I. It took a long time for the lessons to really sink in, though, especially in Europe. In South Africa, the British had to relearn the lessons in 1881 and in 1899 when faced with improved rifles (see Chapter 24). And in World War I, there were still cavalry units on the Western Front preparing to exploit the breakthroughs that never came.