And for those who doubt the power of cap-and-ball, blackpowder pistols.
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| Three hundred thousand killed with blackpowder muzzleloaders and two-hundred-seventy thousand wounded Source |
On a more serious note, blackpowder killed and wounded over a half-million soldiers in the US Civil War. By modern standards, the loads used in the Civil War were pretty wimpy, usually 60 grains of blackpowder behind 510 grain, 0.58" diameter miniball. That produced a very pedestrian 975 feet-per-second.
If bone was hit square on, that slow lead ball would remove a section of it. No way to fix that, yielding the huge amount of amputations. Also, the spit patch and old lard patch wasn't very clean, so sepsis was common too. Volley fire and massed formations were behind the times for the weapon improvements that had been made.
ReplyDelete"...massed formations...", you mean like Antifa?
DeleteMedicine, especially field medicine was abysmal at that point.
ReplyDeleteMany wounds that killed in that era are very survivable in 2025.
However, improvements in accuracy, bullet performance, and
kinetic energy delivered make today's weapons much more lethal.
The velocity wasn't much, true enough, but the size of that bullet combined with the quality of medical care saw to the death of many. The accuracy of the .58 caliber musket should not be underestimated either as a trained marksman was supposed to be able to hit a man sized target at five hundred yards and the English Whitworth rifle to do the same at one thousand. In modern times original Whitworths and the reproductions built from the original dies and tooling have shown that level of accuracy.
ReplyDeleteA lot of the wounded during The War Of Northern Aggression would have survived if they had access to medical care we have available today.
ReplyDeleteAntiseptic surgery (Joseph Lister) started to become common practice about ten years after the end of CWI. It wasn't universally accepted until about 1900.
DeleteA very large number of the wounded who eventually succumbed to their wounds would have had a much better chance with 1900 level understanding of sanitation.
WWI had the issue of being fought in the highly manured and septic fields of France.
Commercial quantities of moderately effective antibiotics arrived just in time for WWII.
Canister shot and shrapnel shot killed and wounded many of them. It was still musket balls. Just the delivery was different.
ReplyDeleteMany police still prefer a big ,slow bullet for self defense.
ReplyDeleteWhat Joe was referring to is the Minie ball which is a hollow base bullet used in muzzle loading rifles which were standard issue in both sides in CW 1. The hollow base caused the bullet to expand and engage the rifling so no patch was used. Patched balls were used only rarely and usually in Confederate militias that had not been fully armed.---ken
ReplyDeleteSNIP Joes comment: On a more serious note, blackpowder killed and wounded over a half-million soldiers in the US Civil War. By modern standards, the loads used in the Civil War were pretty wimpy, usually 60 grains of blackpowder behind 510 grain, 0.58" diameter miniball. That produced a very pedestrian 975 feet-per-second.
ReplyDeleteSNIP 45 ACP Smokeless Modern loading
Bullet mass/type Velocity Energy
230 gr (15 g) FMJ, Winchester 835 ft/s (255 m/s) 356 ft⋅lbf (483 J)
SNIP 45 Long Colt Black Powder loading
The .45 Colt originally was a black-powder cartridge, but modern loadings use smokeless powder. The original black-powder loads called for 40 grains (2.6 g) of black powder behind an Ogival & flat nosed 255-grain (16.5 g) lead bullet. These loads developed muzzle velocities of 1,050 ft/s (320 m/s). However, this load generated too much recoil for the average soldier and was, after a few years, reduced to 28 gr (1.8 g) of black powder yielding 855 ft/s (261 m/s) in Army tests.
Large bullet moving at "pedestrian" 900 feet per second seems to have been doing the job for a very long time.
The big-and-slow crowd will point to what a windshield on an F-150 moving at 80 feet-per-second will do to a bumblebee or a sparrow as proof of its effectiveness.
DeleteElmer Keith was once quoted as stating that the ideal elk cartridge fired a cast-iron wood-stove at 2400 feet-per-second.
LOL did Elmer actually SAY that?
DeleteThe General effect in real life (tm) of such a cannon would be fatal to both the shooter and the Elk.
Personally, the only Elk I shot dropped well enough from a 45 100 Sharps black powder.
While the Big Slow Bullets of the day had a fair amount of mass, and did much damage upon striking bodies, the sepsis and other infections killed nearly as as many as the actual bullets.
ReplyDeleteWhen you compare that casualty list with a population of 31 million you come up with 5-6% of the population. It would gave been hard to find many people who werent touched by the war, perhaps disproportionately in the south with a smaller base.
ReplyDelete