How did Civil War soldiers reload and fire the .58 Springfield?
Metal cartridges did exist at that time. A lot of pistols used them, and the first operational machine gun (Gatling’s famous gun) used metal cartridges. Very shortly after the Civil War metal cartridges became standard for rifles, with the development of the Winchester Rifle in America and the Martini-Henry in military use by the British. But I’m not sure that it was industrially possible in 1864 for the Union, let alone the Confederacy, to produce metal cartridges at the rate they would have been consumed by the war. One day of combat in a large battle could consume upwards of a million rounds of ammunition. That’s a lot of brass.
What the heck; I may as well talk about the Sharps, too. It came in two versions, a long rifle and a carbine. The Union cavalry was eventually armed with the carbine. It used a paper cartridge, too, but it wasn’t the same. The cartridge contained powder and a bullet and had a long paper tail. The soldier opened the breech of the rifle with the lever, shoved the cartridge in, bullet first, and closed the breech again with the lever, which sheered the back of the cartridge off, spilling out the powder. The soldier then affixed a cap to the hammer and was ready to fire. This was very fast compared to muzzle loading. But what was even more important is that it could be done prone. Union cavalry used on the battlefield acted as mounted riflemen. (If anyone ever made a sabre charge on a battlefield during the Civil War I’ve never heard of it.) They’d move to where they were needed and dismount. One man in four would hold horses, and the others would move forward and begin to fire. The Confed
