Rifling During The American Civil War

American Civil War The American Civil War started in April 12, 1861. During this time artillery pieces were rapidly developed from smooth bores to bores with rifling. Rifling was first invented in the late 1850s The United States Army had started experimenting and implementing bore rifling at the start of the American Civil War. It was believed that two-thirds of the confederate armies light howitzers where taken from the union forces. Artillery was rapidly shifting its capabilities of being able to fire multiple projectiles. The civil war rooted over many problems with slavery as the main issue.

The two largest artillery pieces used during the American Civil War were the Columbiads and Rodmans. They were strategically placed in forts
Rifling is a system of lands and grooves in a barrel which cause a projectile to rotate as it exits the muzzle, in doing so it improved trajectory and accuracy. Grooves are cut into the smoothbore piece lands are the original diameter and spaces left after the rifling process. Due to the greater amount of stress inflicted by the tight seal necessary for the projectile to rotate as well as greater pressure in the breech, rifled weapons had to be stronger. During the beginning of the Civil war, many artillery guns were smoothbore. Americans succeeded in adding rifling to existing artillery pieces in early 1861 as they tasked for re-boring and rifling the old smoothbores to be compatible with new ammunition being industrialized. In order to be accurate the projectile needed to engage the rifling but still must remain small enough to load from the muzzle during battle. This was reached in diverse ways, which fall into three major classes: expansion - where a ring or cup of soft lead or copper expanded at the rounds base by the gases at firing; forcing cone - where the rear of the projectile (paper-Mache, lead ring -iron cup) was forced toward the front, expanding a band of soft metal into the rifling; and shaped - where the projectile was the same shape but a smaller diameter, and had ridges or flanges which fit into the rifling (Melton, 1994). A very famous howitzer of the civil was Whistling Dick. An eighteen-pound confederate siege and garrison weapon. Whistling Dick was originally a smoothbore howitzer model 1839 now rifled. Due to some inconsistent rifling, all projectiles fired from the howitzer made a unusual whistling sound, hence the name “Whistling Dick”. The unwillingness of the United States Government to even consider progress in artillery ended on April 12, 1861 at 4:30 am. When the confederate army. Lieutenant Henry S Farley fired his mortar at Fort Johnson, South