Named after Napoleon III of France, this gun - more like a cannon - was a muzzle-loaded smoothbore gun that fired 12-pound rounds. It was a heavy gun and not the best for carrying, but it still was a deadly weapon during the Civil War.
The LeMat was actually two guns in one because it could fire a single shotgun round with a flip of the switch on the side. 42 caliber and could hold 9 bullets at once. This is the most lethal handgun of the Civil war. With the advancement of weapons such as the rifle and cannon, it didn’t prove itself effective in most battles. In fact, it was used to kill only about 1 percent of soldiers. The bayonet wasn’t used very often during the Civil War.
Sure, it could be used if needed, but soldiers died more often from rifle shots and cannon blasts than from swords. Swords like these were more of a status symbol than a weapon. It later became the gun that “won the west.” Click to see the more advances gun in action: It uses a lever-action system to fire bullets repeatedly. Rather than manually filling the rifle with gun powder and bullets, it used a single bullet and black powder encased in a single metallic cylinder, like bullets today. Similar to the rifle above, the Henry Repeating Rifle can shoot 2-4 shots per minute and has 16 shots in one magazine. RELATED: The 13 Civil War battles fought in Kentucky Henry Repeating Rifle Roughly a million of these were produced during the Civil War.
In 1861, it cost about $20 to produce one (that’s about $570.70 in today’s equivalent).īecause Confederate and Union soldiers were not highly trained on this rifle nor in proper marksmanship, they fired and reloaded in a line at the same time to maintain accuracy and focused firing. An experienced soldier could shoot up to 3 rounds per minute at an aimed distance of 500 yards. It was loaded through the tip of the barrel with gun powder to shoot a Minié ball. This was the most popular gun during the Civil War. This was before airplanes, tanks, and advanced boats, so the weapons produced were those created for on the ground soldiers.
When the Civil War started in 1861, there wasn’t a huge selection of weapons used other than canons, rifles, and swords (mainly for command).
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