WEAPONS OF THE CIVIL WAR
Ashley Champion
The basics of the weapons.
During the civil war a weapon was the one thing that made you feel safe. Once you did go on to the battlefield you had to decide wether you would let you weapon go or wether you would fight to the death and your weapon would die with you.
The more complicated stuff.
The weapons of the civil war included, hand guns, pistols, swords, knifes and a variety of other things. Muskets and handguns were the most popular to carry on the battlefield.
Minie ball
The mine ball was a new bullet that was very powerful. It was small and was made of iron and could kill a man in one single hit, but it was so very useful at long range and had very good aim. "The Minié ball was a conical bullet with three exterior grease-filled grooves and a conical hollow in its base. The bullet was designed by Minié with a small iron plug and a lead skirting. Its intended purpose was to expand under the pressure and obturate the barrel and increase muzzle velocity.
The precursor to the Minié ball was created in 1848 by the French Army captains Montgomery and Henri-Gustave Delvigne. Their design was made to allow rapid muzzle loading of rifles, an innovation that brought about the widespread use of the rifle rather than the smoothbore musket as a mass battlefield weapon. Delvigne had invented a ball that could expand upon ramming to fit the grooves of a rifle in 1826.[1] The design of the ball had been proposed in 1832 as the cylindro-conoidal bullet by Captain John Norton,[2] but had not been adopted."
Just another example.
Another weapon of the civil war is the harmonica pistol. "An attempt to create a multi-shot pistol by adding a horizontal magazine—some variations held up to 10 percussion cap or pinfire cartridges—the harmonica gun was probably invented and certainly patented by a Frenchman, J. Jarre of Paris, between 1859-1862. No musical instruments were involved. The name came from the shape of the magazine, and the weapon was also called the “slide gun.” An early manufacturer in the US was Jonathan Browning, father of firearms designer John Moses Browning. While looking like the sort of weapon a steampunk James Bond might carry, the harmonica gun proved too impractical for wide adoption. The user had to manually adjust the sliding magazine to center each cartridge under the hammer for every shot. Like VHS vs. Betamax, the much easier and faster shooting revolver finally won the day. The mechanism wasn’t limited to pistols—famed Texas Senator Sam Houston owned a percussion rifle (by Henry Gross) using a harmonica slide which is on display at the National Museum of American History." This pistol is very powerful and got it's name from it's design and it might not hit your target on the first shot from far away,but up close it could do some major damage.