Strange and Obscure Stories of the Civil War

by Tim Rowland

  Rifling—filing long, spiral grooves into gun barrels to spin the bullet—was a technology had been around for centuries, but rifles had not proved to be terribly effective in the field of battle. To work, the muzzle-loaded bullet had to snugly contact the grooves, and consequently it took some time and effort to ram the bullet down the barrel into place. Such a project might be suitable for snipers or for shooting squirrels, but on the field of battle, time was more than money—it was the difference between life and death.

  Still, smoothbores had an accuracy of only about fifty yards, whereas rifles could be depended upon at five times that distance, and some even had a puncher’s chance at a halfmile. This is theoretical; under the pressure of battle, there was seldom time to compose an artful, accurate shot at great distances. The great cry of officers to their men was “Aim low!” an antidote against the odd propensity in battle to point the weapon at a forty-five-degree upward angle.

  Barely a dozen years before the outbreak of the Civil War, a French army captain, Claude Minie, had hollowed the bottom out of a regular bullet, and a new standard for ammunition had been set. When the gunpowder detonated, the sides of the bullet flared outward like a hoopskirt in an updraft. It was easy to load, but the expansion of the lead solved the problem of contact with the barrel. In the 1850s, the U.S. War Department in general, and specifically Lt. J. G. Benton, an ordnance expert at the Harpers Ferry arsenal, was experimenting with these new projectiles.

  In a controlled test, the future of the round ball was sealed: “At four-hundred yards, the flight of the round ball was so wild that all further practice was suspended,” a War Department report stated.

  That same report experimented with all manner of bullets and barrels, technologies that would be in place for the start of the war—for the North at least; the South was still mainly armed with antiques, but captured both Federal guns and gun-manufacturing equipment in quantities that compromised the Union’s advantage.

  This technology had a profound effect on strategy and tactics, and, it might be argued, helps in part explain why—even though the North developed the gun technology and had it in greater amounts—the South was the prime beneficiary.

  The Minie ball was a tremendous advantage for the defense. Previously, when an attack was initiated from a half mile away, there wasn’t a whole lot for the defending infantry (stationed, perhaps, behind a stone wall or in a sunken road) to do but watch and wait until the attackers got to within a couple hundred feet of the defensive works. A charge across a vast, open field was not suicide then. Aggression typically paid off. But with highly accurate rifles, such a charge might be under constant infantry fire from the first step.

  The South had its aggressive actions to be sure, but in sum it was fighting a defensive war against Northern invaders. These new long-range weapons fit them perfectly. During the signature action at Fredericksburg, Virginia, in late 1862, the South settled in behind a stone wall and picked off Federal soldiers like tin cans as they clamored up from the river. So horrific were the odds for the North that the Southern boys wondered if they were fighting a war or committing mass murder.

  By contrast, some of the South’s most notorious defeats, at Gettysburg and Franklin to name two, could be blamed on over-aggression.

  Long-range weapons favored cautious, defense-oriented generals such as Gen. James Longstreet, considered by some to be the finest corps commander for either side. On the Peninsula campaign, as McClellan threatened the outskirts of Richmond, the notoriously polioesque commander kept playing defense and winning—at which point he would retreat, play more defense, and win again. It’s a bit of a stretch, but not much, to say that McClellan succeeded often enough that soon he was right back in Northern Virginia, where he had started out from in the first place. During Gen. Ulysses Grant’s Virginia campaign, Lee repeated McClellan’s win-and-retreat pattern of two years earlier. Grant (who did have the advantage of attrition on his side as well) lost his way to the steps of the Confederate capital.

  By then, it was dawning on commanders that strong defensive earthworks were the key to if not victory, then at least to not losing. When Grant settled in outside Petersburg, the two armies settled into nine months of what one general described as “a mutual siege.” Lee’s army had to be starved out of position. But this stalemate was an ominous precursor to the trench warfare of World War I, where armies battled back and forth for years over possession of a few extra feet.

  By the end of the war, both sides were digging in and lobbing cannon and mortar shells at each other. The stalemate at Petersburg was a harbinger of the trench warfare of World War I. (Courtesy National Archives)

  Another peek into the future was provided by the Spencer Repeating Rifle, which was almost too advanced for its own good. It could fire six or seven shots in about the time than it took to load and fire the standard rifle of the day. The Battle of Hoover’s Gap in central Tennessee in the summer of 1863 was and is overshadowed by the somewhat simultaneous action at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, and perhaps that’s why its significance was lost. In order to prevent Confederate reinforcements from being sent to Vicksburg, U.S. Col. John Wilder’s “Lightning Brigade” blew through the gap with a blaze of firepower that seemed all out of proportion to the men behind the guns. Southern officers looked searchingly at each other:What could the Federals have? With no clue about the repeater, the Confederates finally assumed they had been overwhelmed not by a brigade, but by the entire army of the Cumberland, and proceeded to hightail it fifteen miles to the rear to Tullahoma.

  “I think the Johnny’s are getting rattled,” wrote a Union soldier to the folks back home. “They are afraid of our repeating rifles. They say we are not fair and that we have guns that we load up on Sunday and shoot all the rest of the week.” One group of Southern boys surrendered to a Michigan cavalry unit just so they could see the repeater up close—or so the story went.

  The soldiers were convinced, but not the U.S. War Department, which was concerned that such a fast rate of fire might tempt soldiers to, well, fire fast. This might contribute to a waste of ammunition and to a man’s failure to put enough care and consideration into his shot. This “they can shoot it fast, or they can shoot it right” nonsense sent the frustrated inventor, Christopher Spencer to seek an audience with President Lincoln. Lincoln, as he so often had to do, overrode the hang-ups of his underlings. But it could have happened much earlier. Failure to adopt the Spencer sooner was, wrote historian Bell Irvin Wiley, “one of the major tragedies on the Union side.”

  Big-gun technology was not advancing as rapidly, but the weapons were still impressive. Today we oft look at the scattered sampling of cannon that is standard fare of battlefield parks everywhere, and see a militaristic version of Antiques Roadshow. This wasn’t the case in the war, of course. Each new Napoleon, Parrott, or Whitworth, its freshly painted wheels gleaming, its iron hardware or bronze barrel glinting in the sun, would have seemed every bit as modern and wondrous as an Abrams tank seems to us today. Each gun had its personality. A Whitworth could lob a shell a mile and a half with accuracy. Its loading mechanism was flawed, however, and it became one of those guns that would kill in front and cripple behind. The North generally couldn’t be bothered with them; soldiers could tell when they were being used against them, however, because the shells produced a horrible shriek that could be heard above the general roar of war.

  Good gunners, the expression had it, could—unless unnerved by the tension of war—knock the bottom out of a flour barrel from a mile away. And the setup was no less impressive.

  A standard battery might be comprised of six guns that it took seventy to one-hundred men and nearly that many horses to operate. A two-wheeled cannon and its two-wheeled ammunition chest would be pulled by a team of six horses, and was not nearly as cumbersome as it sounds. The outfit was forty-three feet long and could turn in a forty-three-foot circle. The standard televised artillery reenactment—a big old draft horse deliberately lugging a ca
nnon into place—is useful from a symbolic standpoint but bears little resemblance to reality. Instead, the piece would more likely be pulled by a team of fine athletic Morgans that could supply speed that draft animals could not. During battle, a battery would thunder into position, horses at a full gallop, cannon and caisson wheels bouncing high in the air and pinwheeling rooster tails of mud as high as a house. An experienced artillery team could set up and have the first shot off in a grand total of forty-five seconds.

  Yet even the most advanced technology of the day could have its low-tech moments. For the Confederates especially, ammunition wasn’t always plentiful. When cannonballs were short, it became necessary to chop up sections of a split rail fence and ram the wood into the barrel. At one point during the Battle of Antietam, Confederates resorted to firing sections of iron rail. This irregularly shaped projectile provided Union soldiers with some memorable moments, one for the uncharacteristic sound it made screeching through the sky. The second was that, unlike round projectiles, there was no predicting where these rails would bounce when they hit the ground. They would bound along helter-skelter and a soldier could never assume it wouldn’t change course in a blink and come straight at him.

  A full record of all the stuff ever jammed down the barrel of a cannon can never be constructed—most devastating at shorter ranges was the canister shot, which was basically a flimsy tin can jammed full of metal shards. When fired, the tin would disintegrate and a nest of deadly projectiles would fan out and rip large holes in enemy lines. Just about anything was fair game for canister grist. At Gettysburg, Winfield Hancock was struck by enemy fire. Painful as the wound was, he took great joy in noticing that his flesh had been pierced by a nail. The desperate Confederates, he believed, had run out of traditional ammunition. In fact, the shot had not hit him at all. It had hit his saddle and driven into his leg a nail that fastened the layers of leather together.

  The weaponry technology advanced by the Southern side primarily came courtesy of two brothers who, if you were to ask a little boy, just might have had the two best jobs in Confederacy: One was in charge of gunpowder, the other in charge of bombs.

  The Rains brothers, according to an extensive survey in the Civil War Times, did not seem to be close (they were separated by fourteen years and before and after the war lived across the nation from each other) and appear to have come by their incendiary careers independently. The younger brother George had perhaps the more conventional and more crucial job of the two and was responsible for producing the South’s gunpowder. He scoured the confederacy in search of nitrates, taking them where he could find them, whether it was in limestone caves, company latrines, and residential outhouses. The residents were not universally enthusiastic about this particular aspect of the war effort, the connection between fertilizer and bombs not being as familiar as it is today. His state-of-the-art works in Augusta supplied the South with 3 million pounds of the finest gunpowder ever produced. Without George Rains’s genius for powder, the South might have had to depend on imported gunpowder shipped in on blockade-runners, never an ideal form of supply. In a war in which everything else was in short supply, powder was the one commodity that was absolutely essential to have in quantity, and without Rains it is possible, if not probable, the South would have run disastrously short.

  George’s brother Gabriel began the war in the field as a brigadier general, a position in which he was not an overpowering success. He was quickly ushered by the Confederate hierarchy into a job where train wrecks were a good thing, not a bad thing—his assignment was to invent explosive devises to sabotage Union transport. Gabriel happily began to cook up an arsenal of what were then called torpedoes, but would be recognizable today as mines. He also concocted a Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner–like assembly of booby traps, most notably a bomb disguised as a chunk of coal that would explode when unwittingly shoveled into the boiler of a train or ship. Rains planted his mines in roads and in poorly defended Southern harbors. He would brag that, armed with his “torpedoes,” a gang of workmen and couple of mules could stop an army.

  His progress, however, was slowed in a couple of unforeseen ways. Along with all the other things it lacked, the South had no wire. The blasting cap or fuse (made famous by Ben Franklin a century prior) depended on wire to set off the primary charge that detonated the main charge. So Rains assembled a team of female thieves to cross enemy lines in search of wire; they hit the mother lode when they dredged a length of wire-rich cable in the Chesapeake Bay.

  Worse, there was no small amount of discussion on both sides as to whether the mines were ethical. McClellan cried foul, and even the South’s own Longstreet forbade their use in his command. The North threatened to march Southern prisoners in advance of their columns, and on at least one instance lashed a Confederate soldier to the bow of a ship until he disclosed the location of the mines. Finally, the South concluded the mines were okay for defense, but not simply as a way to inflict a few more random deaths on the enemy.

  The mines did their best work in Southern harbors, sinking a dozen (and perhaps several dozen) Union ships. If nothing else, the psychological effect was significant, and sea captains became reluctant to go anywhere near Southern ports. The South discovered it could even dump empty barrels into the rivers with good effect on deterring skittish pilots. Not all Northern sailors were put off by the presence of the mines, most famously Union flag officer David Farragut who, in Mobile Bay, turned them into a historical and pop cultural icon when, warned of the mines, he snorted, “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.” Throwing caution to the wind, he sailed into the sea of bobbing bombs. It might seem funny to us now, but apparently his crew was not amused at the time, holding their breath and clenching all applicable muscle groups each time they heard the clap of a fuse being activated by the hull of their ship. Farragut was lucky; mines that had been floating in the salt water for any amount of time would corrode, one of their primary shortcomings in the days before stainless steel.

  Gabriel Rains was a Southern master of explosives. Armed with gunpowder and a cunning mind, he developed coal-shaped bombs that would go off when shoveled into the boilers of enemy ships. (Courtesy Library of Congress)

  Another incendiary shortcoming was the occasional unreliability of the help. A flotilla of mines was prepared at one of Rains’s factories to keep the Federals from steaming up the Mississippi River. A slave known as Old Pat was in charge of dispersing the floating bombs and sent along in a wagon full of weaponry. But either Old Pat was one of those people who does not have a mind for details, or his heart wasn’t in “The Cause,” because he neglected to anchor the mines to the river bottom and they all floated harmlessly out to sea.

  In the 1932 obituary of another slave, Louis Carroll of Bamberg, South Carolina, an independent account of Confederate bomb-making came to light, this one an effort at designing a more conventional torpedo. Carroll, then a boy, would help his owner, Dr. Francis Carroll, affix a bomb to a hollowed-out six-foot oak log six inches in diameter. The explosive-packed log boat was propelled across the pond with a coiled spring, and apparently it was hell on stumps on the opposite shore. But in a demonstration before Charleston authorities it drew mixed reviews. The newspaper reported (with no apparent sense of irony): “The boat would correspond to the present-day submarine, except that it traveled on the surface, which was its apparent weak point.”

  Like many of the South’s schemes as the war wound down, it was a plausible idea, but somewhat ahead of its time.

  1Soldiers liked to keep track of, and brag about, their successes. After Shiloh, an officer dryly noted that he had been “searching diligently for the past five days for the man who didn’t kill General Johnston.”

  CHAPTER 10

  A Foreigner Joins the Fight

  The potato famine that extended into 1853 drove thousands of Irish out of agricultural turmoil there and into political turmoil here. By 1860, America’s political parties were a mess, as they fragmented, coalesced int
o new parties such as the Americans and the Know Nothings, and then splintered all over again. By then, technology had helped kill off the Whigs; railroads and telegraph worked against that party’s strategy of telling people in the South one thing, and people in the North another. Whigs were done in by communication much in the way that some politicians of today have been done in by Twitter.

  American political parties had incentive to bring immigrants into the fold; men of power got two advantages in one, herding workers off to their factories and securing their votes in the process.

  These men were technically free; in many ways their position was only marginally better off than captive labor in the South. Children had no protection from hard labor. Wages were so trifling that survival, one economist wrote, depended on “ruthless underconsumption.” Living conditions were squalid and crowding in some parts of New York was said to rival Calcutta.

  European immigrants were generally opposed to slavery, but at the same time a bit antsy about how the flood of additional labor—should the slaves be freed—would affect their economic situation. Still, patriotism to their new land eventually won out for many of them, and perhaps 140,000 men signed up for military service more or less straight off the boat. Most went with the Union, but certainly not all.