Rifled Musket - History and Development

History and Development

In the early 19th century, there were rifles, and there were muskets. Muskets were smoothbore muzzle-loading weapons, firing round balls or buck and ball ammunition. Rifles were similar in that they used the same kind of flintlock or caplock firing mechanism, but the main difference was that their barrels were rifled - that is, their barrels had grooves cut into the interior wall which would cause the bullet to spin as it left the barrel.

Rifles had the advantage of long range accuracy, due to the fact that spin imparted by the rifling gave the bullet as it exited the barrel a more stable trajectory. Muskets had the advantage of a faster rate of fire. A muzzle-loaded weapon required the bullet to fit snugly into the barrel. The fouling caused by normal firing of the weapon would make it steadily more difficult to load into a rifled barrel. The greater accuracy and range made rifles ideal for hunting, 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 much as the pikes that they replaced, using formidable line and square formations. Compared to modern weapons a musket had a limited range and slow rate of fire, meaning that the bayonet played a significant role, accounting for roughly a third of all battlefield casualties during the Napoleonic and U.S. Revolutionary War eras. Bayonets were so effective on the battlefield that often the threat of bayonets was enough to cause an enemy to turn and run. Since they were used as pikes, muskets tended to be fairly long and heavy weapons. They tended to be about four to six feet in length (six to eight feet including the bayonet), with a weight of around 10 to 12 lbs (5kg), as longer and heavier weapons were found to be too unwieldy. The length of a musket also allowed them to be fired by rank, with no fear that the men in the rear ranks would accidentally shoot the men in front ranks in the back of the head. Muskets six feet in length could be fired in three ranks without fear of accidents.

The relative inaccuracy of the musket was not considered to be significant on the battlefield, because smoke from the black powder used at the time quickly obscured the battlefield and rendered the longer range of the rifle useless. 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 or designed for close-combat bayonet fighting, military rifles could be much shorter than muskets, which also made loading from the muzzle easier and reduced the difficulties associated with fitting the bullet into 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-Étienne Minié. Despite its name, the Minié ball was not a round ball at all. It was long and conical, with 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.

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" were long enough to serve the function of muskets in close formations of line and square, 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. This potential accuracy, however, 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 1850s and 1860s, new weapons produced with rifled barrels continued to be referred to as "rifled muskets" or "rifle-muskets" even though they had not originally been produced as smooth bore weapons. The term was only used for weapons that directly replaced smooth bore muskets. For example, the Springfield Model 1861 with its typical musket style lock mechanism and long barrel length was called a "rifled musket". In contrast, the Model 1860 Henry Rifle produced in the same time period did not replace a musket and did not have other musket-like characteristics, and was just referred to as a "rifle".

In the late 1860s, rifled muskets were replaced by breech loading rifles. Weapons like the Springfield Model 1868 were produced by simply changing out the lock mechanism of a rifled musket. However, once this change was made, the weapon was no longer referred to as a rifled-musket and was instead referred to as simply a "rifle".