YouTube video transcript

a Confederate soldier captured in Tennessee in the summer of 1863 said something to his capttors that got repeated up the chain of command until it reached men who could barely believe it. He said the Yankees had a rifle you could load on Sunday and shoot all week. It sounded like a joke. It wasn't. For 2

years, Confederate infantry had understood exactly how Civil War combat worked. a volley, then a pause while both sides reloaded, then another volley. That pause was where men caught their breath, where officers reorganized their lines, where the whole rhythm of a battle lived. And then on certain fields starting in 1863, that pause simply stopped happening on

the other side of the field. Union soldiers kept firing continuously. Without the reload gap, Confederate veterans had built [music] their entire tactical instincts around. This is the story of why that happened, how it worked, and why it terrified experienced Southern officers more than almost anything else they encountered in the [music] entire war.

To understand why a continuously firing rifle broke something in the minds of experienced Confederate officers, you have to understand what combat actually sounded like and felt like for the first two years of the Civil War. Because the entire tactical system both armies used was built around a mechanical limitation nobody questioned because nobody had an

alternative. The standard infantry weapon on both sides through 1862 and into 1863 was the muzzle loading rifled musket. Weapons like the Springfield Model 1861 and the imported British Enfield. And loading one of these weapons was a physical process that took real time even for a well- drilled soldier. A soldier had to tear open a