TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog

Category: Arms & Armament

  • The Artillery Charge

    I have finished Earl Hess’s The Rifle Musket in the Civil War and will posting a review by and by, but before I do that I’d like to address one of his points, that of the role of the artillery. Hess and several other historians (e.g. Mark Grimsley, Gregg Biggs, etc.) have adopted the thesis […]

  • Earl J. Hess on His New Book The Rifle Musket in the Civil War

    Author Earl Hess was kind enough to write to TOCWOC and provide some information on his important new book The Rifle Musket in the Civil War.  He had the following to say: Was Paddy Griffith right when he suggested in 1986 that the rifle musket had relatively little impact on changing the face of battle […]

  • Book Review- “A Legacy in Brick and Stone” – The American Coastal Defense Forts of the Third System 1816-1867 by John R. Weaver II- Part I

    I came across this book when I visited Fort Pulaski last year for a living history immersion event called “The Immortal 600” in which I played a Confederate military officer being imprisoned in the casemate at Fort Pulaski, but I will save that for another post! At any rate, I decided to pick up “A […]

  • Pot Hunters, Sharpshooters, and Snipers

    Being raised in the South I’ve heard the term “pot hunter” all my life. It has nothing to do with hunting for pots (a pejorative reserved for archaeological looters) but rather means someone who hunts to put food on the table. Whatever appears on the dinner table was walking around in the woods a short […]

  • Small Unit Combat Reconsidered (and Analyzed)

    Speaking of stumbling, I came across a very interesting study on Civil War small unit combat effectiveness by Mark C. Barloon that I haven’t seen cited before. In this Ph.D. thesis Barloon attempts to use various types of statistical analysis to draw some conclusions about regimental-level combat performance. Here’s the abstract: Historians often emphasize the […]

  • The rifle controversy

    Thanks to James’s post I have just preordered a copy of Earl Hess’s upcoming The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat: Reality and Myth at a substantial discount. Hess’s book is the latest salvo on a long-running controversy about the role of the rifle and about Civil War tactics in general. In 1987 Paddy Griffith, […]

  • The Dangerous Space

    In an earlier post we looked at the “rainbow” trajectory of the rifle-musket, caused by its relatively low muzzle velocity. This feature made range estimation absolutely critical, and required some knowledge of the “dangerous space.” One manual of the day warned that if a riflemen fired an Enfield at a target at 570 yards with […]