The bullet was made out of soft lead, had a conical shape, and had anywhere from two to four rings at the base. To provide ease of use in combat situations, the minié ball was made slightly smaller than the intended gun bore so it could be pushed down the barrel with little resistance. The minié ball was primarily the invention of two French army captains, Claude-E’tienne Minié and Henri-Gustave Dolvigue, in 1849. Considered by many to be a significant technological advancement in the 1840s for its supposedly marked increase in range and accuracy, this bullet was initially expected to have a revolutionary impact on battle tactics however, as recent scholarship has shown, the ball’s impacts were most significantly felt not in the number of men it felled on a battlefield, but in the severity of the wounds it inflicted on its targets. A closer analysis of the bullet’s impact on the human body also reveals a deeper glimpse into Civil War hospitals, medicine, and an entirely new scale and scope of death with which Victorian Americans were forced to come to terms as the war’s long casualty lists poured in from both on and off the battlefield. However, this small and compact bullet can teach us far more than simply the horrific bloodletting it caused on the battlefield itself. When Claude-E’tienne Minié perfected the minié ball in 1849, it is doubtful he knew of the carnage that it would cause in the American Civil War some twelve years later.
By Isaac Shoop ’21 Minié balls (via Wikimedia Commons)
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