Round Balls from Battlefield?

[DonMountain]

My wife's mother's recent husband died. And in cleaning out his pile of "stuff" in his closet, they found three round balls that my wife gave to me. Two of them look like iron balls and measure between 0.95" and 0.99" in diameter. The other one is a round lead ball measuring 0.685" in diameter. I know he was an avid military rifle shooter and originally had several to a bunch of old military rifles including several 03 Springfields and 30-40 Krags. We had long talks about shooting in the last year or so and he liked talking about being a belly gunner in a B-17 during WW-II shooting twin 50's. And I heard him talk about his interest in the Civil war and the firearms of the Civil war. So, my question is, what could these round balls be from? A firearm of some sort? Maybe grapeshot from a Civil War battlefield? What would fire a round lead ball of 0.685" in diameter?

[Thumbcocker]

Canister shot maybe but I think most of that was iron. Maybe the balls from buck and ball cartridges. Both sides used smooth bores at various times during the war.

[DonMountain]

Canister shot maybe but I think most of that was iron. Maybe the balls from buck and ball cartridges. Both sides used smooth bores at various times during the war.

These 1" balls are iron. The smaller ball appears to be lead.

[reivertom]

If the iron balls are aged and look like they were dug, they could very well be canister shot. A CW battlefield dug roundball would have a white oxidation crust all over it.

[Nueces]

69 caliber was an old standard military musket diameter. Brown Bess, Charleville, Harper's Ferry, etc.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

The Confederacy used a lot more 1842 muskets, of .69 caliber, than rifles in the early stages of the war. So did some Northern volunteer regiments, but the Confederacy had a considerable proportion of them by the end. By the battle of Chancellorville the use of a smoothbore was regarded as prime evidence that Stonewall Jackson had been shot by his own men.

From a picture in the Wikipedia article, those iron balls sound about the right size for American Civil War canister-shot. Had they been lead, as was sometimes used, you might have found little flats where they contacted the adjacent balls.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canister_shot

[gnoahhh]

Iron balls of that diameter are Grape Shot. Rarely used on a battlefield, rather more common for use in naval guns (to cut down the rigging of an enemy ship when firing broadsides side-by-side). Canister shot was literally a big tin can packed with .69 caliber lead balls. Used extensively on battlefields, it was like a giant shotgun- very effective against massed formations of men. The tin can ruptured on discharge, letting the balls fly freely. I took part in artillery demonstrations, and I'm here to tell you, the pattern from a cannon shooting canister shot was wide and unavoidable.

A .69 caliber ball weighs about one ounce, or 16 to the pound. Artillery was commonly designated by the weight of the projectile it was designed to shoot. Ie: a 12-pound Napolean Gun (the most commonly used field piece in the Civil War) shot a 12 pound projectile, be it round iron ball, hollow exploding shell, or canister shot. Ergo, a 12-pounder round of canister shot contained 192 .69 lead balls. Imagine withstanding the blast of one of those discharges. In the heat of battle, with the enemy closing in on a gun position, the gunners often resorted to firing double canister rounds in one shot, as fast as they could load and fire- about 3-4 shots per minute if they were good. A battery of Napolean guns was virtually impregnable from a frontal assault- a couple of volleys from 50-100 yards could wipe out a battalion of infantry.

It wasn't fun being a foot soldier tasked with taking out a battery of enemy artillery.

Both sides were armed primarily with .69 smoothbore muskets at the start of the war. There weren't enough of the then new .58 rifled muskets to go around. As the war progressed, the .69's were replaced as .58's became available, and by mid-war few were in service on either side. Some units preferred to keep their .69's though. They were a little faster to reload plus had the advantage of having the capability to shoot "buck-and-ball" loads- one .69 ball with three buckshot balls nestled on top of it. The idea was that the .69's were more formidable in volley fire when the enemy was "up close and personal"- but that was offset by their poor performance when the enemy targets were more than 75-100 yards away. (Not that the .58 Springfields and .577 Enfields weren't bloody awful formidable in their own right when the enemy was was almost upon you with fixed bayonets. )

I've shot deer with both .69 roundballs (out of a M1816 converted to percussion) and .58 Miniès (out of an original M1861 Springfield) and I'm here to tell you a wound channel from either one ain't pretty.

[Ballistics in Scotland]

Grapeshot is usually considerably bigger, and did indeed find more use in naval warfare, where the range was frequently longer. But notable victims of grapeshot on land included the Marquis de Montcalm, Marshal Lannes for whom Napoleon wept, Pakenham at New Orleans, Nelson's arm, and the Earl of Uxbridge to whom the Duke of Wellington said "By God sir, you've lost your leg", and who replied "By God sir, so I have." But the last two survived with mere amputation, nonsense to complain. Uxbridge lived to a ripe and energetic old age, and climbed along the bowsprit of the schooner "America" 36 years later. to get a line on why he had lost the Cup he had donated.

I also saw quite severe gunshot damage to a church in Paris, and asked someone if it had happened in the Second World War. But it was Napoleon's "whiff of grapeshot", wmuhich saved the Revolution he afterwards supplanted, and very likely saved him from the guillotine as a supporter of the recently purged extremist Robespierre. It was most unlikely to be 1in. balls that did that.

I also have a round lead ball which I picked up just outside Quimper in Brittany in 1970. It is deformed, but appears to be just a trace under the true 16ga of .662in. and 438gr. That is a bit too small for any French military musket and large for a pistol, so it was most likely fired from a sporting gun, of the size which was the most popular in France right into the breechloading era.

The Napoleon cannon was indeed a good one, and designed largely by the future Emperor Napoleon III when he was a perfectly genuine artilleryman, like his illustrious uncle. But it was of 12cm. caliber, not a 12-pounder. That is about the same as the 9-pounder which was about the most useful British field-gun of the period. It sacrificed the advantages (and slow loading) of rifled muzzle-loaders, and didn't have the range with roundshot of heavier smoothbores, but was about as light and mobile a device as you could get, for delivering that much case or grapeshot. A pretty good rule of thumb is that artillerymen win battles with roundshot, but save themselves and their guns with case or grape. It copied the British single block trail, and it is widely believed in France that it was waiting for the mud to permit movement of his guns, built on the heavier double-trail Gribeauval system, that prevented Napoleon I from winning Waterloo before the Prussians came up.

[baogongmeo]

If they're from the Civil War they could be from case shot or canister.

[gnoahhh]

If they're from the Civil War they could be from case shot or canister.

Look up▲

[Thumbcocker]

Good video comparing buck and ball and mine https:// youtu.be/4aUTlldgdg8

[baogongmeo]

From looking through the U.S. ordinance manual of 1861 the closest match for your iron shot would be canister from a 12lb. field howitzer. Could not find any grapeshot that small or case shot that large.

[curator]

I have round balls found on battlefields from 1753 to to 1863. Any dropped round ball will have a significant white coating of oxide. The first iron round balls (canister/grape shot) appear is the AWBS. Most of the iron round shoot is canister/grape. Not all of this was lead or iron, so there is always confusion. Anything from Northern units is likely to be iron but Southern units may well have used lead balls as that was what was available at the time. There was a lot of "make-do" near the end of the war.