One hundred and fifty years ago, my home state of Arkansas boiled with controversy. Before the bombardment of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, , the Arkansas state legislators voted to stay in the Union. After Fort Sumter, they voted to secede and join the Confederacy. As the comment thread following this TTAG post shows, 15 decades still hasn’t been enough time for the controversies and conflicts surrounding the Civil War (or the War of Northern Aggression, if you prefer) to cool completely. One thing that both Billy Yank and Johnny Reb agreed on: the Pattern 1853 Enfield rifled musket . . .
Union Private Henry A. Strong wrote of the day in Sept. 1862 when his unit exchanged their old Austrian Lorenz muskets for “Enfields Rifles, which are a splendid gun.” So what the heck is a “rifled musket?
Designed to fire the .577 minie ball, the 1853 Enfield was issued by the hundreds of thousands by both sides, and was often regarded as the most accurate mass-issued rifled musket of the war.
The NRA has an article about an 1853 Enfield carried and dropped at Gettysburg by Confederate infantryman J.A Fallin. In his diary, Union Private Henry A. Strong wrote of the day in Sept. 1862 when his unit exchanged their old Austrian Lorenz muskets for
usket?” Why didn’t they just call it a rifle or a musket? This type of weapon was termed a rifled musket because it loaded from the muzzle like the old smoothbore muskets, yet featured spiral grooves cut into the bore that made the projectile spin, hence “rifled.”
It was the projectile that made the rifled musket revolutionary. Named the “minie ball” after its French military developer Claude Minie, this sub-caliber, conical lead bullet with a hollow base allowed troops to load their guns as rapidly as old-fashioned smoothbore muskets, but shoot with the accuracy of old-fashioned rifles.
The old-school rifles used patched round balls that tightly fit the bore, and after only a few shots, they became impossible to reload until somebody swabbed out the fouling—not an easy task while folks are shooting at you or charging at you with fixed bayonets. Because the minie ball had a diameter smaller than the bore, it dropped slickly down clean barrels, and could be easily rammed down barrels fouled with black powder residue from many previous shots.
When the powder charge behind the minie ball’s hollow base exploded, the hot gases forced the minie ball’s lead skirt to flare out and engage the rifling, creating a stabilizing spin. This spin made rifled muskets considerably more accurate over much longer distances than smoothbore muskets.
Unfortunately, neither the Union nor Confederate officer corps could easily put aside the Napoleonic tactics they learned at West Point, predicated on the relatively short range and inaccuracy of the old smoothbores. Adherence to these outdated tactics contributed to shockingly high casualties in battle after battle with the rifled muskets.
With an 1853 Enfield, skilled riflemen could hit man-sized targets at 500 yards. I have repeatedly hit a six-foot by two-foot target at 300 yards with my Euro Arms copy, and would love to find a range long enough for me to stretch it out even farther.
I can only imagine how terrifying it must have been to stand in front of a rank of hundreds of men shooting rifled muskets at me–even more so when I think that .577 caliber minie balls bring at least 500 grains of pure soft-lead hurt when they hit home. Some of the minie balls I shoot weight 575 grains. In contrast, the classic .45 ACP FMJ bullet weighs in at a measly 230 grains, or about half as much. And the Enfield launches its projectile at just under 1000 feet per second.
The soft lead construction and large diameter and weight of the minie ball helped account for the high number of amputations during the Civil War. When a lead slug that big and heavy hit an arm or a leg bone, the resulting splintery, pulpy mess was so devastated that even today’s medicine would have few options beyond amputation.
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Loading and shooting my ‘53 Enfield gives me shivery appreciation for the cojones it took to stand and exchange volley after volley of rifled musket fire across smokey fields littered with dead and wounded. And stand you would, because it’s damned hard to pour 70 grains of black powder down the muzzle of an Enfield if you’re lying on the ground, or trying to crouch behind cover.
The rifled musket’s sheer size makes taking cover a bit of a challenge. My ‘53 Enfield stands a fraction over four foot seven, from brass buttplate to muzzle. That’s only two inches short of being able to ride in my truck without a booster seat. That’s almost a foot taller than Herve Villechaize. It weighs 9 pounds, and when tipped with the 21-inch-long socket bayonet that I don’t own yet, it would make a formidable spear and a nasty club.
It’s not for nothing that the Mississippi troop monument at Gettysburg shows a Confederate soldier grasping his rifled musket by the barrel and swinging for the fences atop Cemetary Ridge.
Even though it’s long and heavy and slow to load, I love shooting my 1853 Enfield. With minie balls, it splatters jugs of water most satisfactorily. I once stapled up a life-sized bad guy target at 100 yards and fired 11 shots at it as rapidly as I could load and find the front sight somewhere on the target. It produced 11 hits, any one of which would have been completely disabling on any Civil War battlefield.
I have taken it into the deer woods a couple of times during muzzleloader season, but I’ve yet to see a deer while toting my Enfield. Like any other black powder arm, it spews billowy clouds of fragrant smoke, spits tongues of flame and speaks with that classic deep, dull BOOOM! And it gives me just a little sense of what it might have been like to have been a Civil War soldier when I hold one in my hands and look down its sights at a target.