Civil War Bullets

[ktbi]

I know a lot of you back East recover Civil War bullets on your digs. I saw this picture on-line and could not pass it up. Hope it is useful to some of you....Ron

 

[Rockhounder55]

Thanks Ron. Now I have to find the ones I bought when we visited Gettysburg in 1968. ~Mike

 

[Plumbata]

That is cool; it would make some awesome posters. Thanks for sharing.

I don't know much about all the different bullets but there was some fascinating technology in use, to a limited extent, during the war. Congreve rockets, Ketchum hand-grenades with fins, the deadly (for user and recipient) excelsior hand grenades, which if memory serves, had 21 percussion cap nipples evenly distributed around the sphere, and the confederate "machine gun" which fired a little over 1 one pound rounds per second. If the rebels had more of the latter, or other smaller-caliber machine guns in existence (albeit limited) at the time they would have kicked butt. Anyway, my favorite of the bullets was the Gardner Exploding Bullet:

Getting struck with a huge slug back then was bad enough, but then having it explode inside you? The pure definition of wicked.