WI: The CSA had breech loading rifles in 1864

I know that the setting for this thread is rather ASB but I'd rather have it analyzed hear than in the ASB section because I want cooler heads, with more historical knowledge, who will take this setting more seriously, to discuss it. I'd appreciate the help since it will aid me in writing a TL I'm working on.

So lets say for whatever reason that in 1864 the CSA gains the means to convert the captured Springfeild 1863 model rifles in their possesion into breech loading rifles like the Springfield model 1870, and is given access to a supply of .50-70 Government model cartridges to match the number of converted rifles.

Here are the specifications of the 1870 according to wikipedia:

"The trapdoor Springfields had originally been designed as an inexpensive method of converting Springfield Model 1863 muskets into breech loading rifles, which dramatically improved their rate of fire from about four shots per minute to about a dozen shots per minute. The original trapdoor Springfields had replaced only the firing mechanism, and had used a barrel liner to reduce the caliber from .58 to .50. This barrel liner proved to be unreliable in the field, and later trapdoor Springfields, like the model 1870, abandoned the barrel liner method and used newly manufactured barrels instead.
There were two versions of the Springfield Model 1870, which differed slightly from each other. The first version was produced in 1870 and 1871. The rear sight was improved, and the receiver was shortened to create the Model 1870 receiver. The rear sight on the first Model 1870 was almost against the receiver. 1,000 of these rifles were manufactured.
The second version was produced in 1872 and 1873. In this version the rear sight was moved up so that it was about half an inch away from the receiver. This version also featured a double shouldered ramrod, which differed from the first Model 1870 that had used the Model 1868's ramrod. The second version Model 1870s also had a long high arch on the underside of the breech block, which differed from the first version which had a shorter arch identical to the Model 1868 . . ." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_Model_1870

I doubt that the presence of these weapons would cause the generals of the CSA to change their tactics very much (but if I'm wrong please tell me) so without changing them how might the outcomes of many of the major battles in 1864, specificaly the CSA losses, be different by giving the their armies a weapon which may change the average shots/minute of the soldiers using them from approx. 4 to 12? Would their defence of Petersburg or Richmond be more successful, or what about General Hoods attacks on the Union Army of Tenn. ? Could Sherman have been kept out of the Carolinas?

Please let me know, and thank you to those who do.
 
Please let me know, and thank you to those who do.

Military industrial production was a huge headache for the CSA. I have a hard time picturing them making enough of these ("Allen Conversions," as they were called) to have an impact on the big picture. Consider that repeating firearms already existed, in types far superior to the Allen, but producing or buying them in quantity was probably beyond the means of the cash- and resource-strapped CSA.

And if they DID get them, the North with its vastly more productive economy would simply have copied and produced them in greater numbers for its own army.
 
And then there are the issues of repeaters being seen as a logistical nightmare just by their nature.
 
Military industrial production was a huge headache for the CSA. I have a hard time picturing them making enough of these ("Allen Conversions," as they were called) to have an impact on the big picture. Consider that repeating firearms already existed, in types far superior to the Allen, but producing or buying them in quantity was probably beyond the means of the cash- and resource-strapped CSA.

And if they DID get them, the North with its vastly more productive economy would simply have copied and produced them in greater numbers for its own army.
Thanks, I already figured as much but I mainly wanted to know what sort of impact you'd think the guns would have on the outcome of certain battles.
 
How many units are converted over?

The whole ANV (for instance)? A division? A few regiments (total)?

And how late in 1864?

Some battles this might make a big difference, if there are enough - but others not so much. Assuming the Confederacy is able to pull this off as a surprise at first, for discussion's sake.
 
And then there are the issues of repeaters being seen as a logistical nightmare just by their nature.

Yep, soldiers tend to fire more ammo with repeaters and the South would have problems with supply that much more ammo. The North didn't have that problem.
 
Yep, soldiers tend to fire more ammo with repeaters and the South would have problems with supply that much more ammo. The North didn't have that problem.

Exactly. Even if the Confederacy can produce an appropriate amount, the number of wagons the average Confederate unit had for supplies is insufficient.


I wouldn't say repeaters would be useless, but the odds of them turning things around is pretty low unless they stay Confederate only (unlikely to say the least) and are available in large quantities (which makes the logistical nightmare that much worse).

Not to mention that there aren't that many model '63 Springfields to convert, I think, so if that's the limit . . .

A decent number of model '61, but I'm not sure of '63 (or how much it matters).
 
How many units are converted over?

The whole ANV (for instance)? A division? A few regiments (total)?

And how late in 1864?

Some battles this might make a big difference, if there are enough - but others not so much. Assuming the Confederacy is able to pull this off as a surprise at first, for discussion's sake.

Exactly. Even if the Confederacy can produce an appropriate amount, the number of wagons the average Confederate unit had for supplies is insufficient.


I wouldn't say repeaters would be useless, but the odds of them turning things around is pretty low unless they stay Confederate only (unlikely to say the least) and are available in large quantities (which makes the logistical nightmare that much worse).

Not to mention that there aren't that many model '63 Springfields to convert, I think, so if that's the limit . . .

A decent number of model '61, but I'm not sure of '63 (or how much it matters).
There were approx. 700,000 1863s produced between 1863-65 how many were captured though I do not know. So to handle the numbers issue lets also say that the Confederates can also procure the parts to convert Springfield 1861s into Model 1866s which where the only breech-conversions for the 1861 that I know of. The 1865 was slightly less easy to use than the 1870s but that is a detail that I do not believe should be of major focus in this discussion. There were approx. 1,000,000 1861s produced so the number in confederate hands will be in the thousands.

When it comes to the time in 1864 that the conversions become available I did not want to set a specific date. Yet for conversations sake lets say its around spring time when the first of them can come into use for the ANV and the armies of Tenn. with the numbers spreading over the following months as more and more rifles are converted.

I also want to admit that I know the ability for the confederacy to produce the parts needed for these conversions would be impracticle in OTL so lets avoid that detail for now at least. When it comes to how the resources would be/could be transported and how soon the Union could copy and produce these parts for themselves though is something I'd like to have discussed.
 
Thanks, I already figured as much but I mainly wanted to know what sort of impact you'd think the guns would have on the outcome of certain battles.


How many units? How many guns? Overall, not a lot of difference in who wins what campaigns. Perversely, the war might be shorter since the casualty rates could be expected to increase and the CSA couldn't hope to sustain losses like the North could.

Fredericksburg against repeating firearms... /shudder.
 
I also want to admit that I know the ability for the confederacy to produce the parts needed for these conversions would be impracticle in OTL so lets avoid that detail for now at least.

As long as you come back to it eventually. Without a rational answer to that question, the scenario is mere fantasy.
 
... how soon the Union could copy and produce these parts for themselves though is something I'd like to have discussed.

Probably very quickly indeed. The armories that produced them were in the north anyways, so they would have been in a fine position to adopt the changes on a rifle they're producing anyways. A few months? Nothing galvanizes a military bureaucracy into accepting change like seeing its enemy get shiny new toys.
 
There were approx. 700,000 1863s produced between 1863-65 how many were captured though I do not know. So to handle the numbers issue lets also say that the Confederates can also procure the parts to convert Springfield 1861s into Model 1866s which where the only breech-conversions for the 1861 that I know of. The 1865 was slightly less easy to use than the 1870s but that is a detail that I do not believe should be of major focus in this discussion. There were approx. 1,000,000 1861s produced so the number in confederate hands will be in the thousands.

As long as it's roughly evenly effective in the end. . . so let's say the Confederacy has enough to (theoretically) reequip both the AoT and ANV in full - for discussion's sake, it's probably less.

Now for the fun part of gathering them to be converted, and then redistributing them.

When it comes to the time in 1864 that the conversions become available I did not want to set a specific date. Yet for conversations sake lets say its around spring time when the first of them can come into use for the ANV and the armies of Tenn. with the numbers spreading over the following months as more and more rifles are converted.

Hm. A few regiments probably won't make much of a difference - increase casuality figures but won't change battles.

And if let's say the Stonewall Division (known as such because it was Jackson's old division) gets some, the Union will have examples fairly early on - OTL sees it largely captured on May 12th.

I also want to admit that I know the ability for the confederacy to produce the parts needed for these conversions would be impracticle in OTL so lets avoid that detail for now at least. When it comes to how the resources would be/could be transported and how soon the Union could copy and produce these parts for themselves though is something I'd like to have discussed.

Faster than the Confederacy can reequip everyone, I think. And that's counting sending the new guns to the Army of the Potomac and Sherman's army group.
 
Could anyone tell me how the outcomes of battles preformed by generals mainly considered poor, such as Hood, could be changed simply by adding greater fire power? Such as Hood's performance during his Tenn. campaign for example could extra fire power be a deciding factor in battles such as the ones during that campaign? If not are there any battles during the ACW that could be changed by this POD?
 
Could anyone tell me how the outcomes of battles preformed by generals mainly considered poor, such as Hood, could be changed simply by adding greater fire power? Such as Hood's performance during his Tenn. campaign for example could extra fire power be a deciding factor in battles such as the ones during that campaign? If not are there any battles during the ACW that could be changed by this POD?

Nothing comes to mind. I can't think of an battle decided by "we couldn't shoot enough bullets." Mostly it was, "we didn't have enough people to absorb the bullets already flying." I'd like to think that if added firepower had been demonstrated, generals on both sides would have abandoned the mass charge over open ground. However, fifty years later IOTL the generals of WW1 were still doing it, so I guess that's wishful thinking.
 
The American Army had breechloading rifles with the 1819 Hall rifle made in Harper's Ferry, Virginia (captured intact by the Virginia militia just as the Civil War started, the 2nd major riflemaking plant of the American military.) Some of these were used into the Civil War and designed as a flintlock originally, had fewer logistical issues than a percussion-capped rifle. Gave excellent service in the Mexican War. The Sharps breechloading carbine (184:cool:was an evolution of that rifle and 60,000 (?) were in Union cavalry and some infantry units' hands by the end of the war and the Confederates were producing a decent copy of the Sharps, the Robinson, by the middle of the war so scaling up it's production would have been another option for your ATL. It gave a 3-400% increase in rate of fire and with a better gas seal, significantly longer effective range and more accuracy, hence their issue to skirmishers which the Confederates were perfecting already so a disproportionate impact, but using paper cartridges so logistically nowhere near the burden of metallic cartridges.

The Confederates had vast numbers of high quality British Enfield muzzle-loading rifles with the British were already experimenting with conversion to breechloaders using the Snider system-1866 issue as well I think (which most likely influenced Allin's design considerably at Springfield Armory.) You're cutting out a chunk of the rear of the barrel, replacing it with a new chunk on a hinge, changing the hammer and that's about it, very fast and cheap conversion that would have easily been within Southern capacities. It doesn't have to be a metallic cartridge either, just being able to load while prone or kneeling under cover with a paper cartridge is a big advantage in battlefield survivability and rate of fire.

The North had metallic cartridge repeaters deployed by the start of the war in volunteer and lucky units later on, the 7-shot Spencer rifles and carbines that saw better than a 100,000 in service and made a noticeable impact and the much rarer early Winchester repeater, the 14-shot Henry rifle which was mostly purchased by officers and some volunteer Midwest cavalry units. Making a brass or copper cartridge case from raw stock takes as many as 27 separate production steps (bullets are much easier) and that would have been stressful for the South's very limited machine tool and machining industry (nearly all of that was in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and around the Great Lakes) but something the British or French were already gearing up for.

Smith & Wesson revolvers had been using metallic cartridges since their introduction in 1857 (and they'd developed much of the Henry and it's cartridges.) Converting cap and ball revolvers to cartridges was well within the capacity of many self-trained gunsmiths, let alone revolver factories in the South like Leech & Rigdon, so if cartridge cases were coming in from France (like the LeMat Revolver) , the sustained rate of fire of Confederate cavalry would have gone up considerably, giving them outsized impact.

The first effective breechloader, the Ferguson rifle, was in use during the American revolution and was at least thrice the rate of fire of other rifles then but wasn't broadly adopted by the British Army despite making and using about a thousand in South Carolina. The Hall breechloader, which really pioneers interchangeable parts, is adopted in 1819. Gun designer John Browning's father had several breechloader designs he made for the Mormon trek to Utah in the 1840's that gave decades of service and made a considerable difference. The Sharps is available by about 1850 (see Bloody Kansas), the Burnsides, Gallagher, Peabody (which becomes the British Martini-Henry breechloader service rifle), Henry, Spencer, and others are available by the start of the war or shortly after.

Rate of fire is huge, as is how readily reloading can be done under cover as opposed to standing to operate a ramrod the length of a 40" barrel. It would help considerably in the smaller Southern forces matching the larger Union forces assuming the Union took a long time to adapt, and the era's correspondence reveals scaling up production at the civilian rifle plants making all of the breechloaders was extremely challenging, see Frank Seller's history of Sharps. So it might extend the war, change a few battle outcomes depending on when the conversions reached significant numbers in the field, and significantly increased Union casualties...it's a subtle question.
 
The Union Army could have been armed with breechloaders of various types early on, the head of Ordnance Dept put the kibosh on it because he felt it would cause the soldiers to waste ammunition.. As soon as the CSA has enough breechloaders to make a difference in a battle or two, the prejudice against breechloaders will fade away quickly & the north will have lots of them with plenty of ammo in the hands of their troops and you may even see the Gatling adopted earlier.

The reality was even in 1861 the CSA had essentially zero ability to produce/convert rifles that were breechloaders, and zero ability to make metallic cartridges - paper yes but they would need to produce lots more, and with better tolerances than muzzle loaders tolerated. The UK & France did not have breechloaders in mass production at that time, and would not be giving them or selling them before they had equipped themselves so no way the CSA could import them (even if they could pay for them).

The only way they make a difference is if the CSA has LOTS of them & LOTS of ammo early on like 1861/1862 and can "win" early battles very decisively getting France & UK to recognize it and keeping the north from ramping up to crush them. By 1864 they are toast and all some more modern equipment can do is slow the coming of the inevitable.
 
The limitation of machine tool makers, skilled machinists, process engineers to upgrading Southern arms this way is based on they're all self-taught geniuses at this point and there's only a few dozen in the North at this point, the bottleneck in scaling up (which means building many custom machine tools first AND training novices to use them...the 1851 Colt revolver required inventing 90 new machine tools to do each part of the process, flexible tooling was just coming out.) However the British especially had a lot of these folks and during the war many of the firms and workers in Manchester-Birmingham...the cluster for both cotton textiles mfg. and making all of the precision, complex equipment for those, were starving. So giving them contracts to make breechloaders like the Sharps (which the British had bought some to test) or the Spencer etc. would have been quite possible just as Singer Sewing Machine, Underwood and Smith Corona Typewriters, IBM, General Motors, International Harvester, etc. adapted over quite quickly in WWI and WWII to make pistols (1911's) and rifles (M-1 Garand, M-1 Carbine.) Vast quantities of British-made Enfields made it to the Confederates through blockade runners and the Confederates had already gotten quite a bit of gold to England for arms-buying and ship-building. They just didn't think of this and that's not a weird POD, sending a Confederate buyer to England who'd worked at Harpers Ferry Arsenal to really understand the tooling issues is all it would take and those were local Virginians working there so volunteers would be likely.

The other POD could be 1857 where instead of a pushy New York City shirt mfr. being the dominant investor of a group in the Volcanic Arms Company, Oliver Winchester, you have a Southerner as the primary investor and he moves the small, prototyping team to his home city in the South (Birmingham? New Orleans? Atlanta?). That would bring 3 top-notch production experts from the Robbins & Lawrence rifle factory (30-40,000 rifle contracts for the Army, inventors of the universal milling machine, significant role in interchangeable parts/quality control/mass production methods, Lawrence was working out the Sharps breechloading design as head of that firm by then): B. Tyler Henry, Horace Smith, and Daniel Wesson. Not only have they been laboring to turn the Hunt-Jennings design into a functional repeating rifle/pistol using metallic cartridges (the 1858 Volcanic rifle which become the Henry rifle which becomes the 1866 Winchester rifle as well as Smith & Wesson cartridge revolvers) they're experienced mass production guys who can design and build the machine tools needed. They're ideal "seed corn" to build a repeating rifle factory of scale in the deep South at the right time and Confederate Army contracts would fuel that while Union Army contracts eluded them throughout the war beyond 10-15,000 rifles, in part because of their production capacity and in part from Winchester's focus on remaining in control of the company which stifles additional investors. Jefferson Davis and General John Breckenridge had both been U.S. Secretary of War overseeing the Army Ordnance Division, and Davis probably saw Hall carbines in use during his Mexican War service, so they might well have been more receptive along with Stephen Mallory at Navy and Judah Benjamin...they funded the Hunley submarine and other wonder weapons when they could.
 
They don't have the industrial or logistical capability to use them, they had enough difficulty providing a consistent supply of ammunition for single-shot rifles. The Union also did not make a consistent use of these weapons, and it *did* have the ability to supply them moreso. Though admittedly given the rather fragile nature of Civil War logistics it's difficult to see the Union making use of those weapons by themselves in a protracted offensive.
 
They don't have the industrial or logistical capability to use them, they had enough difficulty providing a consistent supply of ammunition for single-shot rifles. The Union also did not make a consistent use of these weapons, and it *did* have the ability to supply them moreso. Though admittedly given the rather fragile nature of Civil War logistics it's difficult to see the Union making use of those weapons by themselves in a protracted offensive.

Agreed, it could well end the war quicker. Soldiers tend to use ammo quicker when they can and breech loaders allow you to do just that. The CSA army could well run out of ammo in a battle or two because they are firing too much ammo. The way to counter it is to put strict restrictions on how much ammo a soldier can have. The problem with that is if you do that you might as well stick with muzzle loaders which are cheaper and easier to build.
 
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