Mystery of the 27,574 muskets collected at Gettysburg

Posted: February 15, 2025 | Author: helytimes | Filed under: War of the Rebellion, WOR | Leave a comment

From Randall Collins, Violence: A Micro Sociological Theory. He’s speaking on firing rates among soldiers in wartime:

But the firing ratio in parade-ground formations was far from maximal. In American Civil War battles, 90 percent of muzzle-loading muskets collected after the battle of Gettysburg were found loaded, and half of those were multiply loaded, with two or more rounds on top of one another in the barre!

(Grossman 1995: 21-22); this implies that at least half the troops, at the moment they were hit or threw away their arms, had been repeatedly going through the motions of loading, but without actually firing, time after time. As we see later, casualties produced by these mass-formation troops were not high, and that could be attributed partly to non-firing, partly to inaccurate firing.

Collins thesis is that face to face violence is very hard for humans, it causes great stress and tension. In this section he’s arguing that even soldiers in battle have great difficulty shooting at each other, and often fire high or otherwise avoid shooting at each other. This detail got my attention, I wanted to know more. Collins source is David Grossman, On Killing. Grossman says:

Author of the Civil War Collector’s Encyopedia F. A. Lord tells us that after the Battle of Gettysburg, 27,574 muskets were recovered from the battlefield. Of these, nearly 90 percent (twenty-four thousand) were loaded. Twelve thousand of these loaded muskets were found to be loaded more than once, and six thousand of the multiply loaded weapons had from three to ten rounds loaded in the barrel. One weapon had been loaded twenty-three times. Why, then, were there so many loaded weapons available on the battlefield, and why did at least twelve thousand soldiers misload their weapons in combat?

A loaded weapon was a precious commodity on the black-powder battlefield. During the stand-up, face-to-face, short-range battles of this era a weapon should have been loaded for only a fraction of the time in battle. More than 95 percent of the time was spent in loading the weapon, and less than 5 percent in firing it. If most soldiers were desperately attempting to kill as quickly and efficiently as they could, then 95 percent should have been shot with an empty weapon in their hand, and any loaded, cocked, and primed weapon dropped on the battlefield would have been snatched up from wounded or dead comrades and fired.

There were many who were shot while charging the enemy or were casualties of artillery outside of musket range, and these individuals would never have had an opportunity to fire their weapons, but they hardly represent 95 percent of all casualties. If there is a desperate need in all soldiers to fire their weapon in combat, then many of these men should have died with an empty weapon. And as the ebb and flow of battle passed over these weapons, many of them should have been picked up and fired at the enemy.

The obvious conclusion is that most soldiers were not trying to kill the enemy. Most of them appear to have not even wanted to fire in the enemy’s general direction. As Marshall observed, most soldiers seem to have an inner resistance to firing their weapon in combat. The point here is that the resistance appears to have existed..

The amazing thing about these soldiers who failed to fire is the they did so in direct opposition to the mind-numbingly repetitive drills of that era. How, then, did these Civil War soldiers consistently “fail their drillmasters when it came to the all-important loading drill?

Some may argue that these multiple loads were simply mistakes, and that these weapons were discarded because they were misloaded. But if in the fog of war, despite all the endless hours of training, you do accidentally double-load a musket, you shoot it anyway, and the first load simply pushes out the second load. In the rare event that the weapon is actually jammed or nonfunctional in some manner, you simply drop it and pick up another. But that is not what happened here, and the question we have to ask ourselves is, Why was firing the only step that was skipped? How could at least twelve thousand men from both sides and all units make the exact same mistake?

Did twelve thousand soldiers at Gettysburg, dazed and confused by the shock of battle, accidentally double-load their weapons, and then were all twelve thousand of them killed before they could fire these weapons? Or did all twelve thousand of them discard these weapons for some reason and then pick up others? In some cases their powder may have been wet (even through their oiled-paper coating), but that many? And why did six thousand more go on to load their weapons yet again, and still not fire? Some may have been mistakes, and some may have been caused by bad powder, but I believe that the only possible explanation for the vast majority of these incidents is the same factor that prevented 80 to 85 percent of World War II soldiers from firing at the enemy. The fact that these Civil War soldiers overcame their powerful conditioning to fire through drill clearly demonstrates the impact of powerful instinctive forces and supreme acts of moral will…

Griffith’s figures make perfect sense if during these wars, as in World War Il, only a small percentage of the musketeers in a regimental firing line were actually attempting to shoot at the enemy while the rest stood bravely in line firing above the enemies’ heads or did not fire at all.

Well now hang on.

Let’s start with, how do we know this? What’s our source? This statistic on the 27,574 muskets, where do we get that?

I don’t have a copy of The Civil War Collector’s Encyclopedia handy. But luckily, with all questions related to the American Civil War, you can find the answer on some forum or another, which led me to this article, citing a source from 1867:

It seems strange to me that you would ship loaded weapons from Gettsyburg to Washington. Wouldn’t that be dangerous? Or maybe they weren’t likely to go off without the percussion cap? I’m not expert on Civil War firearms and don’t intend to become one. Still, the mystery puzzled me. Wouldn’t most of these weapons be kinda fucked up from being knocked around and exploded and so on? What does it tell us about the firing or non-firing of soldiers during the battle? Maybe these weapons were loaded and their unlucky holders were knocked out of action before they could be used?

A source the forum posters frequently point to is Paddy Griffith, Battle Tactics of the Civil War. Paddy Griffith was an English scholar: here is a lovely obituary of him, he died in 2010.

Large, convivial yet dedicated to the serious analysis of military history, Paddy Griffith was a fearless challenger of the accepted versions of events and an iconoclastic war-gamer.

The absolute extremes of research in military history matters are often reached by war gamers and amateurs of various sorts. If you try and get to the ultimate authority on Civil War gunboats, for instance, you’ll end up being directed to The Western Rivers Steamboat Cyclopoedium, which is really a set of plans for model builders.

Anyway Griffith’s book arrived, and it’s excellent.

Vividly written, profound, a tremendous aid to understanding the Civil War in every way, from how troops carried their stuff and trained and spent their time to the macro history of the war, full of detail and extracts from memoirs and history. From the preface:

The past, of course, is a foreign country, and every historian is to some extent a tourist looking in from the outside upon the people and events he describes. In my own case, I have an added perspective as a British citizen who has literally been a tourist to many of the battlefields on which the Civil War was fought…

Both the tourist and the historian have a duty to be clear about their motives, especially in a case like the Civil War which remains important in modern-day life…

The experience of attaining military age also seems to have left me with another legacy, for like many another before me I became fascinated to discover just what a battle is, or was, like – preferably without actually venturing into one in person. I suspect that this somewhat unhealthy obsession is really quite common among military historians, and it can even be seen as a precondition of their calling. Each generation has had its own group of military writers who have wished to see the elephant of warfare without getting too close to it, and then relay their findings faithfully and truly to their readers.

It so happens that one of the most successful of all attempts to see the elephant in a war book was made in a novel about the American Civil War – about the battle of Chancellorsville, to be precise. This was of course Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, first published in 1894 when the author was only twenty-three years of age. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of this work to the general development of war writing, since its influence has been enormous and its perceptions remain as fresh and vigorous today as when they were originally penned. The amateur elephant watcher is especially captivated by what Crane had to say, and is led on inevitably into a closer examination of the Civil War battles. There is a sense in which Crane has consecrated these particular combats for every student of battles. I, for one, freely acknowledge my debt to him in much of what follows…

For the student of Napoleonic tactics, accustomed to a thin and insubstantial diet of secondary sources and unreliable data, the Civil War comes as a severe shock to the metabolism. It provides an unexpectedly rich feast of detailed personal memoirs, a cornucopia of fine regimental histories, and a solid dessert of circumstantial after-action reports. The student may gorge himself on these delicacies until he can move no more, yet still find that he has barely scraped the surface of what is on offer. In this respect, at least, the Civil War can indeed be seen as the first modern war. The spread of education and the desire to record personal experiences on paper is here exponentially greater than anything seen in Napoleonic times, even among Wellington’s endlessly scribbling light infantry. This wealth of first-hand evidence, furthermore, has been lovingly preserved and sifted by succeeding generations in a manner that puts modern Napoleonic studies to shame. Civil War history remains a living subject today, whereas Napoleonic analysis was all but killed off in 1914.° Indeed, this qualitative difference between the way the two eras have been studied may perhaps have helped to conceal their essential underlying unity.

Whereas the Napoleonic campaigns have been subconsciously relegated to a distant past, those of the Civil War are still being discovered in all their freshness from primary sources – lending them an air of modernity that may be subtly misleading.

There’s a touch of Bill James to Paddy Griffith’s passion. His book illuminated the War of the Rebellion for me in many ways. Among other things, it’s often pretty funny. You find this in the Civil War literature. Sam Watkins is very funny, even as he’s describing stumbling near-barefoot from disaster to disaster. Here’s Griffith describing a battle situation:

By 1864 it seems that there were numerous cases of combat refusal when an attack on fortifications was proposed. Even if this did not lead to a formal mutiny it could often lead to an ‘attack’ which went to ground almost before it had crossed its start line. The abortive ‘battle’ of Mine Run was an example of this on the grandest possible scale, since the entire Army of the Potomac came into position to storm Lee’s works but then thought better of it and went home.

The action of 35th Massachusetts at Spotsylvania provides a good example of how the 1864 fighting must often have been conducted. The regiment advanced behind another unit until it came under fire, when a bounty-jumper shouted ‘Retreat!’ and the whole regiment routed in panic. They rallied calmly when they had regained their own earthworks, insulted their new general (whom they did not recognise), then advanced again to a position in open ground one hundred yards from the enemy entrenchments. “Then the whole line lay down, without firing a shot, and in this position calmly sustained the fire of the enemy two or three hours, with little loss to us as the shells and bullets of the Confederates passed over our heads. The order was simply to ‘feel the enemy’, and as it was plain they were ready to receive us, no final assault was ordered.”

And that’s from their own regimental history! (Company I of the 35th Massachusetts was made up of men from Dedham, Needham and Weston, incidentally).

This decline to really get after it battlewise would seem well in line with Collins’ thesis, that people will do almost anything to avoid face to face violence. Griffith mentions many cases where individuals preferred to joke around or share supplies when they were supposed to be killing each other. On the other hand, Griffith describes plenty of situations where the two sides really did just stand there and blast away at each other at close range until one side couldn’t take it. As Shelby Foote says (discussing naval battles), it’s almost unbelievable, but they did it!

The amazing things about naval engagements are the accounts of men firing eight-inch guns at each other from a range of eight-feet.  I’m afraid that is beyond my understanding.  But they did it all the time in naval battles.  It was a very strange business.

Let’s return to the matter of the collected muskets from Gettysburg. Here’s what Griffith says

An often quoted set of statistics from Gettysburg has it that the Union forces salvaged 27,574 ‘muskets’ after the battle, of which 24,000 were loaded, including 12,000 loaded twice, 6,000 loaded between three and ten times, one with twenty-three charges and one with twenty-two balls and sixty-six buckshot. Some had six balls and only one charge of powder; others had six unopened cartridges. Others again had the ball behind the powder instead of the other way round.

It is open to doubt whether twenty-three full cartridges could in fact be physically squeezed into the barrel of a Civil War rifle, and still more dubious that the proportion of misloaded weapons in the sample (some 45 per cent) actually reflects the proportion in the whole of the two armies during combat. It is most likely that many of the guns salvaged by the Union forces after Gettysburg were discarded by their users precisely because they had become unusable, hence the figure of 12,000 should be seen as a proportion of the total muskets in the battle rather than of the total salvaged. That suggests that perhaps 9 per cent of all muskets were misloaded – a less dramatic figure, but nevertheless still very significant. If we add the unknown total of misloaded muskets which were either salvaged by the Confederates or retained by their original owners, we are forced back to the conclusion that a very high proportion of infantry weapons must indeed have become inoperative in combat due to faulty handling.

Thus, it seems like these extra-loaded muskets weren’t unshot because their holders didn’t want to, contra Collins and Grossman. It was because they were busted.

A Civil War battle like any battle was totally chaotic and loud; Griffith’s book is largely about the problems of dealing with chaos, confusion, missed communication, strange terrain, and how people handled or failed to handle these challenges effectively. How to approach the truth of what happened in such a situation is an endless puzzle. Trying to get as close as possible to the source in this case has proved interesting. Griffith got as close as we’re likely to get, here are his sources:

My guy was tracking down unpublished doctoral theses to make his war games as accurate as possible. Despite the somewhat grim subject matter (guys blasting away at each other) learning about Griffith has uplifted my feelings about human nature and the power of curiousity. For those without any particular passion for the subject Griffith’s cover illustration probably tells you everything you need to know about a Civil War battle, although ironically no source is listed beyond “Cover Design by Maggie Mellett”.

Hopper’s America, discussing that painting, Dawn at Gettysburg:

Hopper himself relayed a story, told to him by a guard at the Museum of Modern Art, about Albert Einstein’s viewing of ‘Dawn Before Gettysburg’ in a show at MoMA.

‘Einstein in going through the galleries had stopped a long time before this picture of mine,’ Hopper said, ‘and I suppose it was his hatred of war that prompted him to do this as these men were evidently all ready for the slaughter.’

It’s easy to see why this little painting has made such an impact over the years. The colors are breathtaking, in particular the blood red of the dawn sky.

The individual soldiers are just that: individuals. As Warner points out, one has a blister on his foot from marching. Another has just vomited and is leaning on his friend, deathly ill. A standing soldier is getting orders ready, representing duty to his country.

I’ll have to discuss these matters with my uncle Dan next time I see him, he lives quite close to the battlefield. As we’ve discussed before Civil War battlefields can be very peaceful and pleasant to visit. They tend to be preserved farm and pastureland. It’s nice to be in a field.

(Previous coverage of Gettysburg, and the War of the Rebellion in general).

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