Muskets in the American Revolution
The weapon most people used during the American Revolution was the musket, known as "Brown Bess" by many because of the way its barrel turned brown after it aged a bit.
This is the firing mechanism of a musket used in the American Revolution. The flint screwed in to the mechanism would hit the pan, sprinkled with gunpowder, when the trigger was pulled. The spark coming from that contact would cause an explosion that would carry through a tiny hole in the pan (see below) where the gunpowder lay. The hole passed into the musket's barrel, igniting a much larger charge of gunpowder within and firing a lead musket ball out of the barrel.
Soldiers carried their "bullets" in cartridge boxes like this one, carried by a re-enactor in Williamsburg.
Here is a close-up view of the pan where the gunpowder explosion happens. The re-enactor is pointing at the hole that the explosion goes through to ignite the powder inside the barrel of the gun.
Muskets were very poor weapons because they were slow to load, they occasionally exploded in your face and they were extremely inaccurate due to the difference in size between the musket ball and the width of the barrel.
When a musket had rifling along the inside of the barrel, the musket ball came out faster, went farther and was more accurate. Here's what rifling inside a Revolutionary War era cannon looks like:
Check out this website from Colonial Williamsburg to find out more about Colonial weapons and how they were used: http://www.colonialwilliamsburg.org/Foundation/journal/Winter08/tactics_slideshow/
Historian in Residence © 2007 Mary Anne Christy |