Discussion Repeaters Versus Muzzleloaders

[Saphroneth]

It would have required that early in 1861 Federal officials have the prescience to understand that the war was going to be something other than a brief spat. It would have required that ordnance officials understand and admit the clear superiority of breechloading weapons over muzzleloading arms. It would have required that there be agreement on which breechloading arm(s) to manufacture. And, it would have required that the selected arm(s) be both reliable and of interchangeable parts manufacture.

Honestly, I think the amount of attention the Ordnance officials gave to breechloaders was correct - which is to say, they gave massive contracts to the manufacturers, but didn't retool Springfield. This was the prudent thing to do.

 

[CowCavalry]

I am waiting for the hackneyed "that d*** Yankee rifle that you load on Sunday and shoot all week" statement to show up in this thread

 

[Saphroneth]

I am waiting for the hackneyed "that d*** Yankee rifle that you load on Sunday and shoot all week" statement to show up in this thread

If you only need to fire one shot a day, then you're probably good with a muzzle loader.



Interestingly I think there's a possibility of a realistic tactical doctrine of mixed brigades once repeaters come in en masse - have some battalions be "rifle battalions" with full power rifles whose job is long range fire, and others be "repeater battalions" whose job is close-in fighting.

 

[Rhea Cole]

So what? What matters is how many of them were produced early enough that they could reasonably have seen combat before the end of the war. The 230,000 number is over 80% composed of weapons produced after the Confederates surrendered.


When exactly was this?

I feel I should point out that if it was in 1863 or later then 500 men is actually a pretty reasonable brigade - it'd be on the small side, but e.g. Kelly's brigade was only 530 men at Gettysburg.

Frankly, I do not understand the insistence on a confrontational tone. I posted the total number produces as a "factoid". That is defined as an interesting data point, nothing more. My postings on the ability of outnumbered units armed with repeaters to achieve fire superiority are factual. The pa

...actually, the other thing I feel I should point out about that example is that there is no earthly way those cavalrymen could have been using anything like the Spencer's full fire rate for three and a half hours. Even if they were each firing an average of one shot per minute over this firefight that lasted ca. three and a half hours, they'd each have burned through 210 shots for 10,500 shots total.
If they'd been using the Spencer's full fire rate the number gets much more extravagant. The Spencer is sometimes quoted as up to fourteen rounds per minute, and even at 10 rounds per minute you're looking at over 100,000 rounds.


Now, I think it's quite plausible that a group of cavalrymen could drive off an attack with a burst of intense fire from their Spencers. But that's not a 3 1/2 hour firefight.

To paraphrase my man Sergeant Bennett of the 9th Michigan, 'Three & half hours was good enough at the time.' In other words, 3 1/2 hours is what is in the reports. It is not my custom to supplant my personal opinions in place of the historical record. So, I will leave this as it is.

 

[Saphroneth]

Frankly, I do not understand the insistence on a confrontational tone. I posted the total number produces as a "factoid". That is defined as an interesting data point, nothing more. My postings on the ability of outnumbered units armed with repeaters to achieve fire superiority are factual.

But you don't seem to be willing to say when this is, so we can look further into it.

As for the "factoid", it's at best irrelevant and at worst misleading. You've previously claimed that the Ordnance boards should have purchased more Spencers, and in that context it is entirely relevant to point out that Spencer production was dolefully slow for most of the war and rather irrelevant to say that eventually (over ten years, most of them peacetime) so many were made.
It's especially important to be clear on this because the total Spencer production number is often claimed as a wartime production number, which overstates the true wartime production by a factor of 5-10.


As for outnumbered units armed with repeaters achieving fire superiority, I could say the same about outnumbered units armed with muzzle loading rifles and good training. (I could say the same about outnumbered units armed with muzzle loading rifles and a wall.) It's important to develop a synthesis of all the available information rather than relying on individual anecdote.

To paraphrase my man Sergeant Bennett of the 9th Michigan, 'Three & half hours was good enough at the time.' In other words, 3 1/2 hours is what is in the reports. It is not my custom to supplant my personal opinions in place of the historical record. So, I will leave this as it is.

And do the reports claim that the fighting was constant, or that there was an attack and then a long pause before another attack? The two mean different things.

 

[Saphroneth]

Aside from cost and ammunition consumption, were there any areas with respect to performance that a Springfield or Enfield was superior to a Henry or Spencer. For instance, were they more accurate in trained hands or significantly more range?

What led me to this question was, I was speculating today. What if the Union raised a sharpshooter brigade and gave them repeaters? Would this just be the most elite unstoppable force in warfare in 1865?

To answer this question from my own understanding, repeaters are effectively short ranged weapons and are thus less accurate at range. Training a sharpshooter brigade and giving them repeaters would make them extremely effective on the battlefield in 1865, but I would argue that they would be no more effective overall than training a sharpshooter brigade and giving them the short Enfield rifle.

 

[thomas aagaard]

The Rifled Musket by Claud E. Fuller contains a reproduction of a test run at the Washington Arsenal in February 1860. 20 weapons ranging from .69 cal smoothbores to breech loading carbines were fired in controlled tests at ranges up to 500 yards. Shot patterns from a standard 10X10' target were carefully charted. It is a visual reference worth a thousand words. Various tests included firing at 100, 300 & 500 yards by a single man using a rest to squads of 10 soldiers firing as skirmishers. One very interesting series is ten men firing five shots from a smoothbore with buck & ball. At 200 yards not only did the number of balls hitting the target fall off dramatically, many of the buckshot that did hit did not penetrate the paper target. On the next page, a .58 caliber rifle "with a steel barrel" scored more hits at 300 yards than the smoothbore at 200. Eight to ten out of 25 rifle shots hit the target at 500 yards. It is visual evidence like that which has fueled my skepticism in the smoothbore vs rifle debate. The book is a treasure trove of contemporary information. Everybody should have a copy on their Civil War bookshelf. $37.75 is the online price these days.

And again you try to use this book as evidences for something it do not provide evidences off.
Firing at known ranges remove the critical part of hitting at long range. Correct range estimation.

That test do no in any way tell us anything about the combat effectiveness of the weapons in the hands of men who are more or less untrained in the science of long range shooting.

The only thing that example prove is that a rifled firearm is more precise than a smoothbore at long range.
Something no one here question.

 

[BillO]

I'd like to thank everyone contributing to this thread. This is why I still hang around.

 

[Saphroneth]

And again you try to use this book as evidences for something it do not provide evidences off.

It's just occurred to me that Feb 1860 tests can't really say much about the performance of the Spencer, can they? It wasn't finished then.

 

[Saphroneth]

Between 1861 and 1865, the Federal Army contracted for a total of 1,525,000 Springfield rifle muskets, of which only 643,439 were delivered by the contractors during the entire war: 42 percent of the Springfields contracted for by the Federal Army.

And indeed, of the 854,000 weapons contracted for by January 1862, only 205,000 would be delivered before the end of the war in April 1865. (The difference is presumably in contracts raised later.)
The government seems to have been throwing contracts for 10,000 weapons or more at anyone who could plausibly claim to be able to put rifles together, and some who couldn't. They even gave Sharps an open ended contract for basically "all the weapons you can produce until further notice".
This is actually how JP Morgan got his start IIRC - he purchased old carbines and resold them to a general in the field for a massive markup.


Here's the numbers for almost all the breechloaders:

• Sharps- 6,000 carbines ordered 4 July 1861; contracted to 'supply this department with Sharp's carbines to the utmost capacity of your factory until further orders' on 21 December 1861, with further such orders being made for 3 months from 26 June 1862, 9 September 1862, and 19 December 1862; 1,000 rifles ordered 27 January 1862, 1,000 more ordered 6 February 1862; 2,000 rifles and 22,933 carbines delivered by January 1863.
• Burnside- 800 ordered 16 July 1861, 7,500 ordered 27 August 1861, 2,500 ordered 21 November 1861; 5,244 weapons delivered by January 1863.
• Smith's- 10,000 ordered on 27 August 1861, 7,000 delivered by January 1863.
• Gallagher- 5,000 ordered 17 September 1861; 5,000 more ordered 22 September 1862; 7,162 delivered by January 1863.
• Marsh- 25,000 ordered 14 October 1861, none ever delivered.
• Merrill/Jenks- 600 ordered 25 October 1861; 5,000 ordered 24 December 1861; 1,400 ordered 28 November 1862; 5,901 delivered by January 1863.
• Gibbs- 10,000 ordered 13 December 1861, first delivery of 550 made 30 May 1863.
• Cosmopolitan/Union/Illinois- 1,140 ordered 23 December 1861, order completed 2 July 1862; 2,000 more ordered 4 August 1862, with 1,000 delivered 11 April 1863.
• Spencer- 10,000 ordered 26 December 1861; 600 delivered by January 1863.

Henry's factory was about 230 a month throughout the whole war.
It should be clear from these numbers that BL contractors got big contracts. They just couldn't fulfil them.

 

[thomas aagaard]

Some authors have asserted that the Federal Army, given the industrial power of the North, should have concentrated on the production of breech-loading arms, and met the initial need for arms through imports of muzzleloading weapons from Europe. This view is incredibly naïve.

I seen this idea, but with repeaters and that was obvious out of the realm of possibility.

But I have been thinking If at least some of the Springfield production lines could have been set up to make sharps instead?
And then actually use the system of having the two flank companies armed and train for the skirmishing.
(like some armies did earlier, KGL, the danish army and some others giving some of the men in a line battalion rifles and the rest flintlock muskets)
This would have made them more effective and since you can a lot easier kneel, resulted in fewer casualties.

But thanks for pointing our some of the issues with patents and similar. It is part of the system that one sometimes don't think about.

I guess the only way much larger numbers of breechloaders could have found its way into the field, would have been if designers in federal employment in the mid 1850ties had designed a good simple breech loader using paper cartridges... instead of the "springfield"
This would have solved the patent issue.

Just curious, Do you have any numbers on production time and price for a sharps compared to a Springfield?

 

[Saphroneth]

But I have been thinking If at least some of the Springfield production lines could have been set up to make sharps instead?
And then actually use the system of having the two flank companies armed and train for the skirmishing.
(like some armies did earlier, KGL, the danish army and some others giving some of the men in a line battalion rifles and the rest flintlock muskets)
This would have made them more effective and since you can a lot easier kneel, resulted in fewer casualties.

To be honest I'm not sure the production capacity would be there to make it worthwhile. Considering that the Union didn't feel it had enough domestic muzzle loading rifle production until the summer of 1863 (which is when overseas purchases stopped), and that the M1859 cost three times as much as a Springfield to manufacture, you're looking at a pretty hefty cost in rifles for the number of Sharps rifles you get.

Again, I think the training would do more (and be less costly!) than going for "wonder weapons".

Just curious, Do you have any numbers on production time and price for a sharps compared to a Springfield?

Cost was three times as much and is probably the best proxy, because time varies as a line gets more efficient.

 

[7thWisconsin]

If you only need to fire one shot a day, then you're probably good with a muzzle loader.



Interestingly I think there's a possibility of a realistic tactical doctrine of mixed brigades once repeaters come in en masse - have some battalions be "rifle battalions" with full power rifles whose job is long range fire, and others be "repeater battalions" whose job is close-in fighting.

It would have been a great theory, but I don't think actual battlefield practice reached that intentional level of sophistication.

 

[Saphroneth]

It would have been a great theory, but I don't think actual battlefield practice reached that intentional level of sophistication.

It's not exactly impossible to have a skirmisher/long range force married to a strike/short range force - I mean, that's basically the infantry component of Impulse Warfare, and that's Napoleonic.
I agree the ACW tactical sophistication never really reaches the Napoleonic level, but it's not impossible to achieve with a bit of divergence.

 

[7thWisconsin]

It's not exactly impossible to have a skirmisher/long range force married to a strike/short range force - I mean, that's basically the infantry component of Impulse Warfare, and that's Napoleonic.
I agree the ACW tactical sophistication never really reaches the Napoleonic level, but it's not impossible to achieve with a bit of divergence.

All true, but simply not the reality. One of the reasons the ACW was a clash between two armed mobs as far as Europeans were concerned.

 

[Saphroneth]

All true, but simply not the reality. One of the reasons the ACW was a clash between two armed mobs as far as Europeans were concerned.

I strongly suspect that one of the main reasons for this was a lack of depth of understanding - specifically a lack of good NCOs.

The reason Impulse Warfare is interesting though in this context is that it's a type of fighting that may as well be specifically designed to be used by armies high in motivation relative to their degree of training. Of course well drilled troops will conduct it better, but the basic concepts (the cloud of skirmishers, the column of attack, the light artillery accompanying the attacking columns) were executed by the levee en masse which was hardly a well trained army.

 

[Saphroneth]

So I thought as a point of interest I'd outline why the "three and a half hour firefight" simply cannot have been an actual firefight that (1) used the rate of fire advantage of the Spencer for (2) three and a half hours.

Peak ROF of the Spencer was above 10 rounds per minute, and there are 210 minutes in 3 1/2 hours. Assuming that the average rate of fire was ca. 2 rounds per minute for 90% of the time and that the other 10% of the time was burst fire with everyone firing at 10 rounds per minute, then that means the number of rounds fired during the fight by the cavalrymen would be on the order of 600 each.
The total mass of a Spencer cartridge was on the order of 30 grams. Multiply it out and you have every single cavalryman expected to carry 18 kilos of ammunition into combat - which is obviously too much. (If they were firing at full rate for the whole of the 210 minutes then the total comes to a literally staggering 63 kilograms!)

A more reasonable estimate of the amount of ammunition carried by a Spencer unit is one issue cartridge box each, which held 10-13 tubes each of 7 rounds. This would be 70-91 rounds and would weigh about 3 kg; if these were expended over a period of 210 minutes this would indicate an average per cavalryman of one round every two minutes.


This is of course all speculation, because we still don't know what battle the engagement was actually at. Let's see if we can work it out:

A 500 man skirmish line of the 5th New York was attacked by a division of Confederate infantry. The New Yorkers held them off until there ammo ran low. After suffering 80 casualties, they withdrew. The Confederate commanders reported that they had engaged an entire brigade. They had no idea that 500 cavalry men armed with Spencers had stopped them in their tracks. The point being, even a small number of Spencer Repeaters could have dramatic effect on a battlefield.

So this is the 5th New York Cavalry. Because they're armed with Spencer repeaters it's not 1861 or early 1862, and we're told that they suffered 80 casualties (which is probably a rough number rather than an exact one).

Investigation reveals that this seems to be Parker's Store, at the Wilderness, though the total reported casualties for the regiment at the Wilderness were 63 (18 KIA, 21 WIA, 24 captured). However, they're reported as "about 1,000 strong" (and were fighting as part of the 3rd Cavalry division, not alone) and during the battle they had to retreat five miles over the course of five hours.

It's actually hard to tell just how much the Spencer mattered in this engagement; from examination it's Heth's division attacking Wilson's cavalry division and driving them back five miles over the course of the day. They managed to prevent the Confederates taking the Brock Road, but if the units in question represent a pro-rata fraction of the formations involved then:

Wilson's division should be expected to be between 5,000 and 6,000 PFD, as 1/3 of the Union Cavalry Corps.
Heth's division should be expected to be not much more than 7,000 PFD (as about 1/9 of the Army of Northern Virginia - the AoNV contained eight infantry divisions and the cavalry corps).

So ~7,000 infantry attack ~5,500 cavalry and drive them back five miles.

Even before you look at what weapons they're using this is actually pretty good on the part of the infantry.

 

[leftyhunter]

All true, but simply not the reality. One of the reasons the ACW was a clash between two armed mobs as far as Europeans were concerned.

To be fair to both sides there was no large body of men who received extensive military training. There were various antebellum state and private militas but they encompassed a fairly small percentage of the US male population and their standard of training was variable.
It would not be until the 20th Century for a period of thirty three years that the US would briefly have a comprehensive military training system for the majority of able bodied men of military age.
Neither side in the ACW had an extensive firearms marksmanship training program with a few exceptions to the rule.
Leftyhunter

 

[67th Tigers]

The Spencers used in the war, both carbines and rifles, had serial numbers in a continuous sequence. There is no ser. no. 62,000 or above. Spencer delivered 11,471 rifles, and 45,733 carbines to the army. There are spaces in the sequence.

Other, post-war, patterns of Spencer restarted with their own sequences.

 

[Claude Bauer]

Aside from cost and ammunition consumption, were there any areas with respect to performance that a Springfield or Enfield was superior to a Henry or Spencer. For instance, were they more accurate in trained hands or significantly more range?

What led me to this question was, I was speculating today. What if the Union raised a sharpshooter brigade and gave them repeaters? Would this just be the most elite unstoppable force in warfare in 1865?

My unit once did a firing demo where we showed the difference in loading and firing rates between a Henry rifle and muzzleloading Springfields. We had a squad fire a single round from the Springfields, and then I fired off 11 rounds from my Henry before they could reload a second shot. As expected, the spectators were impressed. However, when I used my Henry at the Bentonville 150th reenactment, it didn't take long for that sandy soil to get into it, making me stop for minute during a scenario to clean it up. So, there were obvious advantages and disadvantages to both types of weapons from what I could tell, just from using them in these non-combat situations.