Rifled musket

Springfield Model 1861 Rifled Musket

Enfield Pattern 1853 Rifled Musket

The term rifled musket or rifle musket refers to a specific type of weapon made in the mid-19th century.

History and development

In the early 19th century, there were rifles, and there were muskets. Muskets were smooth bore weapons, firing round balls or buck and ball ammunition. Rifles were typically similar weapons, using the same type of flintlock or caplock firing mechanisms that muskets used. A rifle differed from a musket in that its barrel was rifled, which meant that it had grooves cut into the interior wall of the barrel which would cause the bullet to spin as it left the barrel.

Rifles had the advantage of long range accuracy, due to the spin imparted by the rifling. Muskets had the advantage of a faster rate of fire. In order for rifling to be effective, the bullet had to fit snugly into the barrel. Fouling, caused by normal firing of the weapon, would make it more and more difficult to load a bullet into a muzzle loaded rifle. This was not a problem for hunters, but for military use the slower rate of fire was significant.

Although outwardly similar, the way they were used in battle was quite different. Muskets had two functions. As firearms they delivered volleys of close range fire in close ranks. With fixed bayonets they acted as pikes, effectively a movable hedge of spikes which, before barbed wire, was almost the only defence against cavalry. Muskets had to be long enough for the muzzles of the rear rank’s muskets to project well forward of the faces of the front rank. The muzzle flash of such weapons is formidable - to have one going off inches away from a soldier’s face would have been at least distracting, at worst physically dangerous.

Rifles were not even used by some armies, such as Napoleon’s. Where they were used they were typically issued to small units of riflemen trained not to fight in close ranks, but as sharpshooters. Since they weren’t fired over other men’s shoulders military rifles could be much shorter than muskets, which made for a handier weapon and also meant that the tight-fitting balls didn’t have too long a distance to be rammed down the barrel.

The problem of slow loading caused by barrel fouling was solved by the Minié ball, which had been invented in the 1840s by French inventor Claude Etienne Minié. Despite its name, the Minié ball was not a round ball at all. It was bullet shaped, and had an expanding skirt. The skirt allowed the minié ball to be smaller than the barrel's bore, and since the skirt expanded when the weapon was fired, it still made a tight fit against the sides of the barrel, which caused less energy to be wasted in blow-by around the ball and also insured that the grooves and lands of the rifling would impart a stabilizing spin to the minié ball.^[1]

Minié Balls

In the 1840s and 1850s, many smooth bore muskets had their barrels rifled so that they could fire the new minié ball. These "rifled muskets" or "rifle muskets" combined the advantages of rifles and muskets. They were long enough to serve the function of muskets in close formations of line and square, they were as quick to load as the old muskets and as easy to use with a minimum of training. Yet the Minié-type rifled muskets were much more accurate than smooth bore muskets. The loose fitting ball in a smooth bore musket was only accurate to about 50 or 75 yards. Rifled muskets increased the effective range to about 200 or 300 yards, and a rifled musket could often hit a man sized target up to 500 yards away.^[2] Fully realising this potential accuracy still required skills only acquired through training and practice, a rifle-musket in the hands of a raw recruit would not have performed very much better than a smoothbore.

In the late 1860s, rifled muskets were replaced by breach loading rifles like the Springfield Model 1868.

Characteristics of rifled muskets

In the 1850s and 1860s the term "rifled musket" continued to be used even when the weapon was completely redesigned and was not just a modification to an existing smooth bore musket. In general, rifled muskets were the same length as the smooth bore muskets they replaced. This meant that they typically had about a 40-inch barrel and an overall length of about 55 to 60 inches. The first rifled muskets were just smooth bore muskets whose barrels had been rifled, like the Model 1842 Musket, which were usually larger .69 caliber weapons. Later rifled muskets tended to be of smaller caliber, like the .58 caliber U.S. Springfield Model 1855 or the .577 caliber British Pattern 1853 Enfield. Tests conducted by the U.S. Army in the 1840s and 1850s showed that the smaller caliber was more accurate at a distance.

Some weapons were produced in a longer "rifled musket" version and a shorter "rifle" version, such as the Springfield Model 1855. The rifled musket version had a 40-inch barrel and an overall length of 56 inches. The rifle version had a 33-inch barrel and an overall length of 49 inches.^[3] In the British forces the distinction was retained between the full-length muskets of the infantry as a whole and the short handy weapons of specialist rifle regiments and marines for whom a shorter version of the Enfield was produced. The long version had the barrel held to the stock by three metal bands, the shorter needed just two, so they are referred to as “3-band” and “2-band” Enfields respectively.

Rifled muskets typically used percussion lock systems, with some exceptions like the Springfield Model 1855 which used the Maynard tape primer system.

Use in battle

Rifled muskets were heavily used in the American Civil War. The American-made Springfield Model 1861 was the most widely used weapon in the war, and the British Pattern 1853 Enfield was the second most widely used. In earlier wars like the American Revolutionary War and the Napoleonic Wars, bayonets and blades accounted for roughly one third of all battlefield casualties. In the Civil War, the increased range of the rifled muskets noticeably reduced the number of bayonet casualties to less than one percent.

The British Enfield was also used in the Crimean War where its greater range gave it great success against the much shorter ranged Russian smoothbore muskets.

The rifled muskets were not always successful on the battlefield, however. In the Italian War of 1859, French forces defeated Austrian rifled muskets by aggressive skirmishing and rapid bayonet assaults at close range.^[4]

See also

• Springfield Rifle

References

External links

• Rifle Musket and Minié Ball
• The Enfield Pattern 1856 Rifle Musket