He’ll speak about a few of them April 16 at the Springfield Civil War Symposium, the same day his fellow presenters at the Clark County Heritage Center will offer portraits of Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis and a pair of Ohioans, William Tecumseh Sherman and Ulysses Grant.
All four men, as it turns out, were very much caught in the spokes of one of the artifacts in the LMU museum’s collection: an Enfield rifle.
Made in England, whose soldiers had used it to great effect in the Crimean War, the Enfield in the collection at LMU was used by a Confederate soldier, though the Enfields were used by both sides.
Although cannon and other artillery certainly claimed lives, Wilson said the Enfield and its American cousin, named for and manufactured in Springfield, Mass., the high tech weapons of the time were responsible for upwards of 85 percent of the immense number of Civil War casualties.
The Enfield was revolutionary because it was the first rifled musket that was practical for use on the battle field.
Rifling is the term for the grooves cut inside the barrel of a gun, the effect of which is to cause the bullet coming out of it to spin, a spin that allows it to cut through the air more quickly like the spin on a baseball pitcher’s fastball.
Whereas the “smooth bore” predecessors — call that because they had no rifling — were accurate at 75 to 100 yards, Wilson said the rifled barrels of the Enfield and the Springfield made them accurate more than five times that range.
Particularly early in the war, the consequences of that were was lost on many commanders trained in the earlier weaponry.
In the time of smooth-bore muskets, commanders massed their troops together in the field so that when a volley was unleashed, there would be a better chance that some of their scattering shot would hit troops massed across the field from them.
Although the massing troops armed with Enfields made for a more devastatingly accurate volley, it at the same time made the mass of troops easy targets for the equally more accurate weapons being fired at them.
The result was mutual slaughter, meaning that one spoke extending from the Enfield leads to the medical practices developed and the mass of amputations carried out in Civil War hospitals.
Tactically, the Enfield also rendered not only obsolete but largely futile the earlier military culture’s romance with the charge across an open field.
What once had been seen as heroic became a senseless source of slaughter at places like Cold Harbor, where thousands of Union soldiers fell in minutes before Confederate riflemen firing from a distance and protected by rocks, walls and hastily constructed battlements.
Many see the turning point in the war as the Confederate charge up a long, open stretch of land toward Union troops at Gettysburg in the same light.
The accuracy of the Enfield and Springfield rifles in fact increased the importance of building fortifications, the reason so many photos of the Civil War dead include images of earthworks and timbers in the frame.
Because of its devastating power on the battlefield and production in England, another one of the spokes radiating from the Enfield leads to a better understanding of North and South’s foreign policy toward England during the war.
Although the North came to rely more on the Springfield-made rifles, it did use Enfields and was keenly aware that the South, with its limited manufacturing capacity, was utterly dependent on getting them from England.
“The first ones who made the connection” with that spoke radiating from the Enfield “were the southern agents who purchased as many (Enfields) as they could and had them shipped South before the (Union) blockade,” Wilson said.
For its part, the Lincoln government railed at Britain over the sales of weapons to the South, and through the first half of the war the British shot back with claims of neutrality and protests that the Union blockade interfered with their trade.
The British, of course, had reasons to be coy.
One, the United States was the former prized colony that had severed that relationship by war, and a split of the former colony would weaken it as an international force.
Two, even more than in colonial days, the cotton raised in the South in volumes increased by the invention of the cotton gin provided the raw material for British mills, an important part of the British economy.
And so, in an important way, one spoke emanating from a consideration of the Enfield rifle leads to slavery in foreign as well as domestic politics.
Wilson said the British “backed off” their protests to the Lincoln administration over its blockade of the South only after the Emancipation Proclamation, when the president announced the purpose of the war was not just to preserve the Union but also to end slavery.
Britain itself had abolished slavery in 1833 and, in British politics, the moral sentiment against it outweighed the economic benefits of relations with the South. It was a political reality not lost on Lincoln.
In the end, the effective blockade of weapons didn’t bring an end to the war, for a reason Wilson pointed to.
Although their government was unable to import Enfields, Confederate soldiers were able to procure both Enfield and Springfield rifles from fallen soldiers on the battlefield.
Moreover, since both were designed to use the French developed “Minie ball,” ammunition needed to continue the fighting also could be procured after a battle.
There is one more spoke from the Enfield not lost on museum curator Wilson as a native of Springfield.
The third and final reading of the 1833 legislation that prohibited slavery in the British Empire came three days before the death of William Wilberforce, who had championed it for decades.
Wilberforce is the namesake, of course, of the Ohio village and university established in 1856 along the Underground Railroad, and is but a short drive from the building that used to house South High School.
To register for the Springfield Civil War Symposium, call the Heritage Center at 937-324-0657.
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