Smooth Bore Muskets

Hi:
Viewing the TV Series "Turn" it seems that the Smooth Bore Muskets have a longer range than I thought ?
I was under the impression that these Muskets accurate range were 50 yards maybe 75 yards ?

jimmyj said:

Hi:
Viewing the TV Series "Turn" it seems that the Smooth Bore Muskets have a longer range than I thought ?
I was under the impression that these Muskets accurate range were 50 yards maybe 75 yards ?

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Never heard of it.

As far as I'm aware the practical range of most smoothbore muskets is indeed 50-75 yards.

Of course I would no more expect to derive factual knowledge of firearms from a TV show than I'd expected to derive factual knowledge of space flight from watching "Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars".

A buddy claims minute of deer accuracy at 60 yards with his replica of a
French trade gun.

There was a reason for "volley fire".

50 yards was about it for this one with me behind it. Doesn't have a rear sight but I don't think it would matter much.

Actually with a trade gun you have a rear sight. Use the barrel flat just in front of the breach plug. Works great for windage and you might be surprised what kind of accuracy you can get. Try it you'll like it.

Taught to me by an old trade gun man about 35 years ago.

I'm not an expert on military tactics of yesteryear, but I believe Iggy is right on. Individual marksmanship was not paramount. The idea was to send a wall of lead in the general direction of the enemy.

Muskets were also made that were rifled.

Rack grade examples of the Brown Bess were made by various contractors as was the cartridges- rolled by orphans! The indifferent maintenance, sloppiness, and lack of training led to a reputation for inaccuracy. However, tightly fitted guns, in good trained hands and with good powder could hit the target at 125 yards or so.

Tightly patched, a properly fitted musket ball from my replica Pedersoli Brown Bess would usually find a silhouette target out to a 100 yards. But firstly, that replica was probably considerably better quality than the 18th century originals, and secondly, speed and volume of fire was paramount back then, so balls were not tightly patched, but on the contrary sized to easily slide down the barrel to facilitate fast loading, the result being a somewhat loose and unstable trip back out the barrel toward the target with attendant loss of accuracy.

That, of course, was the beauty of the later minie balls used in the rifled muskets of the Civil War era. They slid easily down the barrel for loading, but then the powder gases expanded the skirt and pressed it into the barrel's rifling, imparting a gas seal and a spin upon the bullet and greatly enhancing energy and lethality of the projectile, and a range up to 300 yards or more.

Often lead "bars" of about 1 pound were issued to soldiers. A hatchet was used to cut to length, 12 to the pound for English, or 16 to the pound for French. The same hatchet was then used to beat the chunks into a ball, sort of. The inconsistent shape of the balls helped the unit volley fir hit a greater area.

Ivan

GatorFarmer said:

Muskets were also made that were rifled.

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Sorry to disagree, but I define the term musket as does the dictionary "an infantryman's light gun with a long barrel, smooth-bored, muzzleloading, and fired from the shoulder." The term rifle should be used for any "rifled" barrel long gun. Defined as "a gun, especially one fired from shoulder level, having a long spirally grooved barrel intended to make a bullet spin and thereby have greater accuracy over a long distance."

I have owned and shot many smoothbores and the accuracy suffers greatly after 50 yards. Bench rest shot groupings at 50 yards are typically 6" or larger, so double that and you would miss most standard paper targets entirely. A rifled muzzleloader will easily group under 3" at 50 yards. Swaged bullets instead of sprue bullets and treated cloth patch reloading in smoothbores will help with accuracy, but without rifling, the ball is never stable in flight. Military of the era often used paper "cartridges" where you nip off the end of the paper and dump powder and jam the rest of the paper and ball down the bore and fire. The accuracy suffers further by the use of wadded paper as a patch. Accuracy back in the day was only measured by the effectiveness of mass volley fire.

Some early rifles were called "Rifled Muskets" as it actually described what they were. A firearm which looked like a Musket but with a rifled barrel. After the Civil War and during the westward expansion, many of the CW caplock rifled muskets were bored out for use as cheap shotguns to be sold to the pioneers headed west. In most cases, a shotgun would be more useful to them than a rifle. I once had one of those, which was Austrian (I think, at least not a Springfield or Enfield). No sights on it, probably were removed. Glass marbles fit the bore OK, and that's what I shot in it. It wasn't too difficult to hit a man-sized target at about 100 yards with it, even without sights.

DWalt said:

........After the Civil War and during the westward expansion, many of the CW caplock rifled muskets were bored out for use as cheap shotguns to be sold to the pioneers headed west. In most cases, a shotgun would be more useful to them than a rifle......

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Not just to the pioneers. Companies like Francis Bannerman's in New York bought up arms from rifled muskets to Navy cannons at scrap iron prices. He had hundreds of thousands of Springfield rifled muskets he bought from the government for basically nothing in the 1860s, and sold wholesale and I think also retail for $5 or less apiece right up until the company ran out in the 1920s or 30s. If you look through old catalogs from mail order sporting goods businesses of the late 19th century, a lot offered "sporterized" versions of these muskets for ridiculously low prices compared to their brand-name products. As a Civil War collector, which I once was, the thought made you weep.

I think there is some commingling of technology, application and terminology occurring in the thread.

In the late 1700s and early 1800s "rifles" were regarded as bing highly accurate, but were not considered suitable for the tactics of the era due to their slower rate of reloading, particularly after they have been fired more than 10 or so shots.


Getting a tightly patched ball down a badly fouled rifled bore can be a real challenge, and doing it quickly is unlikely. In contrast, you can continue to load un-patched round balls down a smooth bore, due to the reduced fouling and the greater clearances involved.

In essence, it's a choice between accurate, aimed fire and a large volume of fire. Given that the tactics of the day were predicated on ranks of soldiers facing each other at ranges of 80-100 yards, volume of fire prevailed. Consequently, the smooth bore musket remained the premier infantry weapon long after the rifle came into common use for hunting, sniping, etc.

What changed the equation was the minie ball, a conical projectile with substantially more weight than a round ball with a hollow base expanding skirt that allowed the projectile to be undersized so that it could be easily and quickly load in a fouled rifled bore. On firing, the skirt expanded to grip the rifling, and the rings in the base helped clean the bore minimizing to some extent the accumulation of fouling in the rifling.

The end result was that a longer, heavier projectile could be fired in a smaller caliber barrel with loading nearly as fast as with a smoothbore musket, but with the accuracy expected from a rifle. Thus in the US, you saw a shift from .69 caliber "smooth bore muskets" to .58 caliber "rifled muskets". Both types retained the same general features of the "musket" design, with the major difference being the presence of the rifled barrel.

In US service the smooth bore 1840 and 1842 muskets, while they pre-dated the minie ball, were designed with a barrel thick enough to accommodate rifling at some point, as even at that point there were experiments with various projectiles that would expand in a rifled bore during ramming, or firing. Eventually, many 1842 rifled muskets were rifled to accommodate a .69 caliber minie ball.

Ordinance tests however determined the .58 caliber minie ball was much more accurate than a .69 caliber minie ball, and that the .69 caliber minie was so heavy that it made the recoil problematic for many soldiers, further degrading accuracy.

In any event, by the time the American Civil War / War of Northern Aggression rolled around, you had troops in the field with substantial numbers of .58 caliber and .69 caliber rifled muskets that were capable of delivering effective aimed fire at ranges far greater than the 80-100 yard ranges that were common at the time.

The end results were devastating with the minie ball inflicting about 90% of the total casualties in the civil war, and doing incredible damage shattering limbs, and doing far more damage than the rounds balls used in the past.

The saving graces at the time, were the tendencies for troops to still either final to use the sights or to aim high, and the smoke created by masses of troop using black powder weapons. Realistically speaking, when you put a few hundred people on one side facing a few hundred people on the other side, and have them all fire black powder weapons, much of the visibility disappears after the first couple of volleys, unless you have a fair amount of wind that will continually clear it away. The limited visibility tended to negate the potential advantages of the rifled musket, at least when the wind wasn't blowing.

By the end of the Civil War, we had a preview of what WWI would look like in terms of extended sieges and trench warfare brought on by the far greater range and accuracy of the rifled musket, as well as with early models of the Gatling gun - two items that made survival above ground level difficult with large standing armies facing each other over contested ground.

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While we're on the subject, if you have a well made 1860 Army replica you may have noticed that the sights (notch in the hammer with a fixed front sight) are regulated impossibly high at a normal shooting distance of 15-25 yards, but they are however well regulated for shooting at people standing 80-100 yards away, reflecting the tactics of the day.

American Rifleman | Winchester Model 1895 Russian Musket the term musket, or foreign variations of the word, has also been applied to even centerfire repeating rifles. Winchester, Remington et al made "musket" versions of many firearms, such as the rolling block.

By the late 19th century and early 20th, a musket reference meant a shoulder arm in military configuration. Some like the 1895s used centerfire smokeless ammo.

To muddy the waters even further in the 1700s and early 1800s there are referances to gunmakers making "smooth bored rifles". These externally look exactly like a rifle of the era including rear sight, except that they are smooth bored and usually a little larger caliber than most rifles. I believe that there is one in the NRA museum in Alexandria which is attributed to JP Beck.

Don't know if it's still in print, but Edwards' "Civil War Guns" contains a treasure trove of information about civil war-era rifles and muskets, also carbines and revolvers. It's amazing how many different types were used, especially by the South. There were even a few flintlock muskets still in use, and quite a few flintlocks converted to percussion. Arms and ammunition logistics problems must have been a nightmare on both sides.

The only remaining authentic CW guns I still have are a Model 1849 .31 Colt C&B revolver (with the unusual 6-shot cylinder) and a 3-band .577 Enfield, both of which were used by one of my wife's ancestors (great-great-grandfather, I think) who fought in the CW. Being from Alabama, he was on the losing side. The Colt is on the low end of average, the Enfield is on the high end of average, with original bayonet. It was loaded when we came into possession of it - with a Minie ball. Both still fire OK, but I haven't shot them much.

While the Springfield and Enfield rifled muskets (approximately equivalent in performance) were capable of good long-range accuracy, in fact most of their users were not.

Muddy ....................up.......

The British had Rifle Regiments in the Napoleonic Wars (1800-15)...... based on what they had learned(tactics and gear) in the American Revolution..... they were armed with the flintlock Baker rifle and wore Green Jackets.....fought as light infantry and skirmishers.

IIRC the Baker rifle was good out to 150-200 yds..... when "properly loaded".

For some good light reading try the "Sharpe" books by Bernard Cornwell (sp)

GatorFarmer said:

American Rifleman | Winchester Model 1895 Russian Musket the term musket, or foreign variations of the word, has also been applied to even centerfire repeating rifles. Winchester, Remington et al made "musket" versions of many firearms, such as the rolling block.

By the late 19th century and early 20th, a musket reference meant a shoulder arm in military configuration. Some like the 1895s used centerfire smokeless ammo.

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Wasn't it common to refer to a "rifle" with a full length stock as a "Musket"?

BAM-BAM said:

Muddy ....................up.......

The British had Rifle Regiments in the Napoleonic Wars (1800-15)...... based on what they had learned(tactics and gear) in the American Revolution..... they were armed with the flintlock Baker rifle and wore Green Jackets.....fought as light infantry and skirmishers.

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C.S. Forester wrote a novel, Rifleman Dodd, about a soldier in one of those rifle regiments who was trapped behind the French lines. I enjoyed it when I read it many years ago. May need to find it and read it again.

I love the Flintlock Musket, wish i still had my BrownBess (Italian copy)