Hess has not written the last word on the rifled musket and its influence on the Civil War, but he has produced an important, well-documented book that provides the first systematic study of the rifle's true impact on the battlefield.
Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves.
Built on the Johns Hopkins University Campus. This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. Institutional Login.
LOG IN. Hess also provides excellent details concerning skirmishing and sniping in his fourth, fifth and sixth chapters. Skirmishers and snipers made excellent use of the rifle musket, particularly Confederate marksmen during the Overland campaign in Virginia and other battles late in the war. Hess argues that such naturally adept and specially trained marksmen made the only novel and truly effective use of the rifle musket during the Civil War and would continue to significantly impact warfare in later wars.
Skirmishing would soon disappear, but the roots of modern sniping can be seen during the Civil War. Hess is known for such sort of historiography as these chapters, which exhaustively document extremely specific themes, and each of the chapters adds to the concrete knowledge of a war that has been dominated as much by myth and misconception as reality in much of Civil War historiography.
Firstly, it is questionable that the muzzle velocity of a rifle musket is less than that of a smoothbore. His own primary-source study includes only twenty-four battles, a small number that certainly cannot be considered representative of all or most Civil War scenarios, even if Hess is correct in his point that combat typically took place at shorter ranges than made possible by rifle musket in theory.
However the main issue that haunts this work is more of a logical fallacy than a scholarly error. It is true that the average soldier did not utilize his rifle musket as effectively as he might have, had he undergone extensive training and fought on a battlefield with pristinely clear visibility. It is true that rifle muskets operated at approximately the same the rate of reloading that a smoothbore musket did.
It may also be true that Civil War combat took place on average at similar distances to combat in earlier wars, since even today much combat involving small arms takes place at comparatively short ranges. Other factors than the rifle musket made the Civil War modern, including the extensive use of defensive fortifications later perfected during the world wars of the early twentieth century, a subject about which Hess has written extensively. Many contemporaries were impressed with the new weapon's increased range of yards, compared to the smoothbore musket's range of yards, and assumed that the rifle was a major factor in prolonging the Civil War.
Historians have also assumed that the weapon dramatically increased casualty rates, made decisive victories rare, and relegated cavalry and artillery to far lesser roles than they played in smoothbore battles. An excellent book. It is well written and should be read by anyone interested in military history.
Provocative, stimulating,. His research is saturated with primary sources, his writing is lucid, and his arguments are logical. All serious students of the Civil War, especially of Civil War tactics and the minutiae of combat s style, will want to own this book. The War of , and the Napoleonic Wars, can be seen as the rise of the rifle.
Seeing the efficacy of similar British units during the early years of the Napoleonic Wars, specifically the 60 th and 95 th Rifles, the United States decided to follow suit. The American Civil War was a time of rapid technological advancement, and small arms were no different. Early in the war, some of the weapons on the battlefield had also seen action during the War of , fifty years earlier. Most were converted from flintlock to the newer, more reliable, percussion cap.
Some had even been rebored and rifled. The Springfield Model , the first rifled musket, was the first to use the new type of ammunition, as well as the Maynard tape priming system. This extended the effective range out to yards, with accurate fire up to yards. The Model saw service on both sides, especially after the Confederates captured Harpers Ferry and moved the machinery, which was producing the Model , to Virginia.
With the outbreak of war, the Union realized that it needed arms on a scale never before seen in United States history. Springfield armory quickly moved to simplify the Model , creating the workhorse of the Civil War, the Model The only major change being a return to the percussion cap system. Over a million Model s were produced, and saw extensive action with both sides. In the hands of a skilled soldier, the Model could accurately hit a target yards away, a fact emphasized by the sights that came standard with every weapon.
The technology of war was advancing rapidly, and tactics were lagging behind, with the average engagement range of 60 yards on a Civil War battlefield it is easy to see why casualty numbers became so horrific. For the Confederacy, chronic arms shortages led to purchasing weapons overseas. The English made, Pattern Enfield rifled musket was the second most used firearm of the war, and coveted by Confederate infantrymen. The Enfield was almost identical to the Springfield, but imported Enfields were often not of the highest production quality, resulting in a difficulty repairing and replacing parts.
0コメント