Who collected weapons from civil war battlefields?

Muskets abandoned by Confederates in Second Battle of Fredericksburg, 1863.

Both Federal and Confederate armies conducted organized, after-action scavenging of battlefields they controlled, collecting muskets, bayonets, cartridge boxes, and other potentially useful items. The collections would be conducted by details organized by divisional officers.

Depending on the battle, of course, the scale of these collections could be huge. According to a report in the “Official Records” by Lt. John R. Edie, acting chief ordnance officer of the Army of the Potomac, some 24,836 muskets were collected at the battlefield of Gettysburg and shipped to the Washington Arsenal. His report made no distinction between Federal and Confederate arms. At the Arsenal, they would be inspected, cleaned, and repaired as necessary, and could be reissued to the troops.

During the siege of Petersburg, after the disastrous Battle of the Crater, a young sergeant named Augustus Meyers and a detail of men were sent out after dark to recover weapons.

“I collected upwards of fifteen hundred fire-arms, of which more than half were those of the Rebels,” he wrote later. “There were rifles, muskets and carbines; also bayonets, swords, belts and cartridge boxes. The arms were rusty from having lain on the field during several days' rain.”

“It was necessary to classify these arms, make a report of them and turn them over to the ordnance depot at City Point. This work kept me, with the assistance of the ammunition guard, occupied for several days. Arms that were charged had to be fired, or the charges withdrawn, which was difficult in their rusty state.”

“Some were doubly charged, and an occasional one had three, or even four, cartridges in the barrel, indicating that the soldier continued to load without noticing that his piece had not been discharged.”

“Such of the guns as had more than one charge in the barrel were fastened to a tree and, after fresh priming, we pulled the trigger with the aid of a string, at a safe distance. A few that could neither be drawn nor discharged, we buried in the ground.”

(From “Ten Years in the Ranks, U.S. Army,” by Augustus Meyers, 1914)

Another ordnance officer, Major (later colonel) Theodore T.S. Laidley, published an article in January 1865 criticizing the army’s insistence on the use of muzzle-loading rifled muskets and advocating breech-loading weapons. He bolstered his argument by giving the number of small arms (muskets and rifles) collected at Gettysburg as 27,574, of which 24,000 were loaded. He claimed that 12,000 of those had two charges in the barrel, 6,000 had three to 10 loads, and that one piece was crammed with 23 complete loads.

“What an exhibit of useless guns does this present! — useless for that day’s work, and from causes peculiar to the system of loading,” he wrote in a military-oriented but civilian-published magazine (from “Breech-loading Musket,” in United States Service Magazine, Vol 3, No. 1, January 1865.)

Laidley did not provide a source for his data, so we have to take his word for it if we want to accept his numbers. Some historians treat them with suspicion. However, there’s no doubt that Civil War soldiers not infrequently overloaded their weapons, or that the standard musket was rather prone to malfunction.

Source: Richard Lobb (Lifelong student of history)

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