While the term “buck and ball” is often used when describing smoothbore musket ammunition in the Civil War, the use of such ammunition was not unique to that conflict. It has a long history.
By the time of the American Revolution, it was common practice to load buckshot, along with a musket ball, in the cartridges used in .69 (.27-.29 buckshot) and .75 (.30-.32 buckshot) caliber muskets. In June 1776, George Washington recommended that his men “load for the first fire, with one musket ball and four or eight buckshot according to the strength of their pieces.”
Buckshot recovered from the walls of Nassau Hall in Princeton, where British soldiers were besieged during the January 3, 1777, battle, are on display in the museum collection of the Historical Society of Princeton; fired buckshot have been recovered during archaeological work at the Monmouth Court House battlefield. At Monmouth, Sir John Wrottesley, commanding the “first company of the first battalion of Guards” was grazed by a buckshot in close range fighting in a woodlot. As we all know, buck and ball became a standard load for .69 caliber smoothbore muskets by the time of the Civil War and was widely used during the first half of the conflict.
Many writers have assumed that adding buckshot to cartridges was a uniquely American practice. Research,
by Joe Bilby
however, related in detail in De Witt Bailey’s, Small Arms of the British Forces in America: 1664– 1815 (Woonsocket, RI: Andrew Mobray, 2009), indicates that is not the case. Bailey, in his “must have” work for students of 18th and 19th century firearms use, noted that British forces, at least in America, were using “buck and ball” cartridges at least as early as 1756, when a record of ordnance supplies at Fort William Henry on the shore of Lake George included fifty pounds of buckshot. On the 1758 expedition against Fort Duquesne, the men of each regiment were instructed to “provide themselves with buckshot” which was available from the artillery train. In April 1758 a ton of buckshot was shipped to Albany. In May 1776, British troops in Boston had 600,000 buck and ball cartridges, with four buckshot loaded in each, available for use, and 1,344 pounds of buckshot was sent to Rhode Island in 1778. In 1760, North Carolina Provincials repelled a Cherokee attack using seven buckshot and the roundball; Warren and Halifax county, N.C. militiamen used that same load at the 1780 Battle of Camden. Other types of multiple projectile loads were not unknown as well. In another variant, at least one British sentry served on guard duty with his musket loaded with a ball cut into eight pieces. In 1755 Colonel (later General) James Wolfe advised his officers to have their men load “two or three bullets into their pieces.”
Although the rifle musket was predominant on the Gettysburg battlefield, there were older .69 caliber smoothbore muskets used by some regiments on both sides. When the 6th Wisconsin Infantry charged the railroad cut west of town on July 1, a number of the Badgers suffered buckshot wounds from smoothbore “buck and ball” rounds. One Yankee struggling with the 2nd Mississippi’s color bearer for that regiment’s flag had “a ball and three buckshot… through the skirts of my frock coat…” Around 10% of the arms captured by the Union I Army Corps that day were smoothbores.
The New York and Pennsylvania regiments of the Irish Brigade used their smoothbores to good effect when they closed with the enemy on the slope of a stony hill adjacent to the Wheatfield, but perhaps the most significant smoothbore story at Gettysburg was that of the 12th New Jersey Infantry. While awaiting Pickett’s charge in their position at the “Inner Angle” on Cemetery Ridge, the Jerseymen disassembled their buck and ball cartridges creating massive ad hoc charges of fifteen or more buckshot for their Model 1842 muskets.
My own experiments with smoothbores indicate that the buckshot hits the ground about 75 yards away from the muzzle. The Jerseymen knew this. Although a general ordered them to open fire at 200 yards, the men of the 12th laid low until Confederate infantry came within fifty yards of their position, then delivered a massive volley into the 26th North Carolina, a regiment already battered on July 1, virtually destroying what remained of the unit. Years after the war, when the veterans of the 12th erected their Gettysburg monument, it was surmounted by one large sphere and three small ones and inscribed with the words “buck and ball.”
October 2020
My second topic for the day has nothing to do with black powder firearms but is Civil War related. As I write this Confederate monuments, mostly initially sponsored by the United Daughters of the Confederacy between 1890 and 1920 and erected around the south are being taken down. Most were created to redeem the reputations of southern soldiers in the conflict, with a secondary mission of symbolizing the return of white control to the post-Reconstruction south. You will never see a monument to James Longstreet or William Mahone, as these former Confederate officers aided in Reconstruction.
While I would rather see explanatory material added to these monuments, their disposition is up to local authorities, I agree 100% with the Gettysburg Guides, however, who are protesting an item in HR Bill 7608 (see additional commentary on page 6) that would remove Confederate monuments from battlefield parks. The Guides (and I) wish the battlefield monuments, that tell a different story, be left alone. The Guides put it better than I:
“The monuments representing all of the soldiers who fought here are a critical component of interpreting these sacred grounds,” Fowler said. Veteran battlefield guide Deb Novotny said, “The monuments serve as tools for us to tell the story not only of this battle but of the struggle of our nation to heal itself after the war.”