Salvaged Arms

Salvage from the field was a major item in resupply: the Battle of Fredericksburg had material compensations for the Southern side. Lieutenant Colonel Briscoe Baldwin, Chief of Ordnance of the Army of Northern Virginia, reported 9,091 rifles and muskets with 255,000 rounds of assorted small-arms cartridges were recovered by Confederate scavenging parties after the battles of the 12th and 13th of December, 1862. The breakdown illustrates somewhat the equipment of the Union forces thrown against the Gray lines at the crest of the hill.

Newtype Springfield rifles were in the minority, 250 only having been taken. Improved muskets, those of the Ml 842 original percussion construction, tallied 3,148, with the cap-and-ball altered muskets of older patterns amount to 1,136 captured. Austrian rifles enough to equip a regiment were picked up, 772 of them. Only 78 Belgian muskets were recovered, and 42 Springfield muskets. This may have revealed a tendency to cull out Springfield-made arms from lots of, say, 1842 pattern guns which would also bear contractors’ marks. Mississippi rifles, the Ml841 pattern, totalled 478. Original flint muskets were in the minority, 13 being recovered, and a few large-bore Enfield muskets, .67 caliber, possibly of the so-called “sea service” type, and 59 Enfield rifles of the .57 caliber, were among the salvage. Eighty thousand caliber .69 cartridges, and 94,000 in caliber .57 and .58 were taken in good condition, plus 31,000 for the Mississippi .54 rifles, and 50,000 more in damaged condition, requiring sorting and possible remanufacture. The damaged guns were also picked up, 1,406 of assorted types, but only half of these, 692, were shipped on to Richmond. The balance might have been cannibalized for repairs on the spot by unit ordnancemen. While Colonel Baldwin did not so state, it may be that many of the non-standard or older guns were abandoned by the Rebels, in favor of a good Springfield .58 only to appear again in their ranks as “Yankee souvenirs” picked up by their comrades.
The spirit of “do it yourself” prevailed in the camps and lines when a battle was in the offing. Even soldiers who ordinarily might expect to be supplied with fixed (rolled paper) ammunition spent time in readying their ammunition boxes for the fray, while among most Southern regiments each man had to be a “handloading specialist” and make his own ammunition.
“The question of ammunition was one of the most important and serious,” wrote Brigadier General N. R. Pearce, CSA, some years after the War in discussing the preparations of Arkansas troops, at the batde of Wilson’s Creek, Battles & Leaders, Vol. I, pp 299. “As the Ordnance Department was imperfectly organized and poorly supplied, the men scattered about in groups, to improvise, as best they could, ammunition for their inefficient arms. Here, a group would be moulding bullets—there, another crowd dividing percussion caps, and, again, another group fitting new flints to their old muskets. They had little thought then of the inequality between the discipline, arms, and accoutrements of the regular United States troops they were soon to engage in battle, and their own homely movements and equipments. It was a new thing to most of them, this regular way of shooting by word of command, and it was, perhaps, the old-accustomed method of using rifle, musket, or shot-gun as gamesters or marksmen that won them the battle when pressed into close quarters with the enemy.”
Had General Pearce been able to read the Senate “roasting” of his counterpart, General Fremont, commanding the very troops that opposed him at Wilson’s Creek, he might not have been so sorry for his boys. Perhaps there was inequality between the discipline of the “regular” United States troops and the rebels, but that inequality was in part the creation of such drillmasters as Fremont’s Zagonyi, who turned ploughjockeys into swordsmen in six weeks. To listen to the Federal’s complaints about Austrian muskets that kicked heavily and were as dangerous to the user as to the person fired at, General Pearce would have got the impression the opposing forces were a little more nearly equal than he claims. And, assisting his Arkansas troops in the early days, was a little known gunsmith of Fort Smith, John Pearson, who transformed numbers of flintlock sporting rifles to percussion and may have bored out a good many to .54 or .58 caliber.