Black Powder, White Smoke — July 2016

Black Powder, White Smoke

Black Powder Equivalency and

Revolvers in the Infantry Black Powder Equivalency

I recently had an email conversation with some friends, all experienced black powder shooters, firearms historians and authors, on the subject of black powder formulas and powder charge equivalency. The exchange began with Fred Ray’s question regarding an 1860s era load described as 76 grains of powder, without any detail on just what kind of powder that was. Fred wanted to know if there was some way to determine the modern equivalent in today’s available propellants.

So are the charge weights we read of in nineteenth-century books translatable into modern equivalents? I think not, and my viewpoint was reinforced by Bill Adams’ note that: “The period books called for ‘superfine,’ ‘rifle,’ ‘sporting,’ and various other types of powder,” for different applications, and what exactly they meant by that is uncertain. Bill added a fact that I was unaware of, that British manuals “often refer to “Fg or FG powder, but what that often meant was “fine glazed,” not coarse grained musket powder,” which would be the grain size identification in American terms.

Black powder is, at first glance, a simple product, with only three components. Even if we learn the proportions of charcoal, potassium nitrate (saltpeter) and sulfur in a given old time formula, the actual chemical composition, including, but not limited to, the type of wood used to produce the charcoal, is rather elusive, as are the exact manufacturing details and the grain size of the ultimate product. As Bill noted, “If we try equal weight charges of modern Swiss, Goex, Schutzen, and other powders in the same granulation, they tend to produce different velocities and felt recoil.”

In many years of N-SSA shooting, I stuck with a load of around 45 grains of FFFG Goex behind a Minié ball. The service load of the 1860s was 60 grains of “musket powder,” whatever that was. I initially equated nineteenth-century “musket powder” with Goex FFG, although it may actually have been closer to FG. The load worked well, shot well on breakable and paper targets and took three whitetail deer for me over the years.

Civil War Battlefield Parks

As a comment on the difficulty of interpreting antique formulas, Gary Yee, author of Sharpshooters 1750-1900: The Men, Their Guns, Their Story, offered up a convoluted sixteenth-century black powder production formula: “Of the diverse compositions of Gunpowder. We should be ill spoken of, if, that treating of fiery compositions, we should not first say something of that wonderful Gunpowder, that is the author of so many wonderful things. For it is an ingredient in all mixtures, and all depends upon it. Not that I have any mind to speak of it because it is so common, but of such things that have some new or hidden secret in them. It is made of four parts of Saltpeter, Brimstone and Willow coals, each of one part.”

The conversation reminded me of an episode of my misspent youth in Newark, New Jersey in the 1950s. I used to badger my parents to take me to historical sites on vacation every summer, and we went to Gettysburg, Antietam, Williamsburg and Jamestown, among other places. On one of these trips, I bought a paperback book produced by the National Park Service and titled Artillery through the Ages, which had a formula for black powder.

Once I discovered that I could buy sulfur, potassium nitrate and charcoal at the local drugstore on Orange Street, my friend Kevin and I brewed up a batch. It wouldn’t explode, but it did go up with a whoosh. Fortunately, we did not know enough to wet the powder, form it into cakes and then break it up into granules. If we did, we probably would have blown ourselves up.

In a final note, it should be mentioned that many muzzle loading as well as breech loading cartridge gun shooters in the late 19th and early 20th centuries used King’s “semi-smokeless” powder, which was apparently safe to use in arms designed for black powder pressures, provided good ballistics and was much easier to clean up after. Sort of a forerunner of Pyrodex? I don’t know, but that is another story.

Sixguns for Foot Soldiers

Though they were not issued revolvers, infantry soldiers on both sides often brought their own handguns to the war, and ignorance of the basics of gun safety, mixed with alcohol, occasionally led to some unhappy consequences. Two Jersey City militiamen heading south on a boat down the Delaware River in 1861 were “skylarking” with their privately owned revolvers and accidentally shot a fellow soldier.

As the war progressed, private handgun ownership in the infantry declined dramatically, due to the burden of extra weight on the march and the fact that commanders wanted to avoid accidents. In the 15th New Jersey Infantry, an 1862 regimental order banned handgun possession by enlisted men after an inadvertently discharged bullet bounced into a major’s tent and ricocheted off his boot.

Some infantry soldiers hung on to their handguns despite orders to the contrary, however. Private Alfred Bellard of the 5th New Jersey Infantry lost his when his knapsack was stolen following the battle of Williamsburg in May 1862. In the spring of 1863, Sergeant John Crater of the 15th New Jersey Infantry used his revolver to harvest chickens, ducks, pigs and rabbits to supplement issued rations. Another soldier in the 15th, Private George Henderson, owed his life to his revolver, but not because he used it as a weapon. Stuck in his pants under his coat, it stopped a Rebel bullet at the Battle of Salem Church in May 1863.

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Te Artilleryman is a quarterly magazine founded in 1979 for enthusiasts who collect and shoot cannons and mortars primarily from the Revolutionary War, Civil War to World War II.