Why were cannons used in the civil war

Mountain and prairie guns, the smallest of the basic artillery had to be able to be broken down and transported by carriage throughout the countryside. Originally, powder was unreliable and unpredictable. Lemont DuPont of the DuPont company developed powder which could be tailor made for its intended purpose, providing for extra firepower and accuracy.

Sadly, that dream of an end to violence did not come to pass. More famous Confederate attempts at volley guns were seen mainly in North Carolina. The Vandenburgh Volley gun was originally invented by a Yankee, made in England, and then bought by Confederates.

The gun itself was, at pounds. Made of brass, it housed a cluster eighty five. The governor of North Carolina at the time allegedly purchased one gun and another two were able to slip through the coastal blockade and make it inland where one was captured near Salisbury, North Carolina, and the other was possibly added to the armament of Fort Fisher near Wilmington.

The Union needed to intercept ships bringing goods to the Confederacy from overseas. Navy blockades. In a battle against another Ironclad however, they were often evenly matched and sometimes only sunk due to accidents or weather related incidents. Impenetrable above the water line, they were still built on wooden hulls making them highly vulnerable below.

To take advantage of this vulnerability, and break the blockade, Confederate engineers designed craft to go below the waves in the form of submarines, like the C.

Hunley, torpedo boats, and mine-like torpedoes. Each craft was often powered by either man or steam and was outfitted with a spar attached to the bow which held an explosive charge which could be rammed into the wooden undersides of blockading ships and ironclads.

Unfortunately, one of the easiest ways to see the impact of changing military technologies is through the wake of death and destruction it leaves behind.

In total, roughly , were killed in the war with over 30, in North Carolina alone. To keep the death toll at bay, such large leaps forward in weapons technology needed to be countered with leaps forward in personal protection, defense technology, and battlefield medicine. In the Civil War unfortunately, military technology was only countered with more military technology leading to an ever increasing spiral of injuries and casualties. Barnett, Bertram. Stephenson, Frank.

Combs, Edwin. Price, William H. The Civil War centennial handbook, , Project Gutenberg Edition, Miller, Francis Trevelyan. The photographic history of the Civil War : thousands of scenes photographed , with text by many special authorities.

New York : Review of Reviews Co. Hazlett, James C. Hume Parks. Field artillery weapons of the Civil War. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Drury, Ian, and Tony Gibbons. The Civil War military machine: weapons and tactics of the Union and Confederate armed forces.

A gun meant to fire only pound projectiles could weigh well over half a ton. Artillery teams would need about six animals per gun to move it into position, and about six or eight to move the caissons, the carriages that carried powder and ammunition. Fact 4: The Civil War saw the widespread use of rifled artillery pieces with grooves running down the tube.

These grooves would force a projectile to rapidly spin as it flew through the air, like a large, metal football, which would stabilize it. The guns, therefore, could fire further and much more accurately than the older style of smoothbore cannon.

Fact 5: Like previous wars, Civil War artillery could fire multiple types of ammunition. Cannonballs were solid, round objects that would ricochet off the ground and often used to target fortifications and enemy artillery. Case shot was an anti-personnel projectile, meaning it was used against soldiers. It was a hollow shell filled with scraps of metal called shrapnel. Once fired at an approaching formation, the shell could explode in mid-air, spreading the shrapnel across a large radius.

As the enemy got closer, gunners would switch to canister or grapeshot. The crew would load the gun with a coffee can-sized container filled with small metal balls. Once fired, the can would disintegrate, spreading the balls outward in a fan, essentially like a giant shotgun. Fact 6: Accidents and misfires were common, and often fatal, on the Civil War battlefield.

Caisson carriages, which carried extra black powder, were also prone to explode if hit by an enemy shell, as one Confederate gunner who fought at Gettysburg attests. The Parrott Rifle, an experimental gun developed for the union, was also somewhat unreliable due to the cast iron used to make it, but it was still widely used given how cheap it was to produce.

Fact 7: The Union held a distinct advantage in artillery over the Confederacy thanks to its superior industrial infrastructure. They were difficult to bring down, and once down were difficult to keep down, even with the impact of the large-caliber Minie bullets. The battery was fighting with five guns, and in a short time the five teams of six horses came under fire. Within minutes only two of the 30 animals were still standing, and these all bore wounds. One horse was shot seven times before it went down.

Other horses were hit, went down, and struggled back up, only to be hit again. The average number of wounds suffered by each horse was five. The Confederates were firing from a cornfield approximately yards away. By far the greatest number of horses were lost to disease and exhaustion. Again referring to the 10th Massachusetts Battery, reports reveal a dismal trail of horses dying from disease or being put to death because of exhaustion. Between October 18, , when its service began, and April 9, , when Lee surrendered, the battery lost a total of horses from causes other than combat.

Of these, died from disease. The most prevalent disease in the battery was glanders, which claimed 45 horses. Glanders, a highly contagious disease that affects the skin, nasal passages and respiratory tract of horses and mules, was also called farcy or nasal gleet in wartime reports.

The losses to exhaustion can be keyed to specific events. Even when the surrender came, the killing chase continued to take its toll, with an additional 22 horses being put to death due to exhaustion between April 10 and April The horses were worked hard and long, but it had to be so.

A battery racing to catch up with a retreating enemy or to gain a position of advantage had no room for gentle treatment. The stakes were high, and the horses paid the price. The alternative might be defeat. A man on a long, hot march, pushed beyond what his body could bear, might drop out temporarily and catch up with his company later.

Horses had no such choice. Harnessed to the limbers, they pulled until they fell or, as happened in most instances, until they harmed their bodies beyond healing, and then were shot. Mud or dust seemed to plague every movement of troops.

Of the two, mud was the greater problem for the artillery. Dust created great discomfort, but little more. While an artilleryman might find it difficult to breathe and intolerably itchy in the suffocating dust, the guns and caissons could still be moved. Mud, on the other hand, often made movement impossible. Sinking below their axles in holes full of clinging muck, guns and caissons could be moved only with superhuman effort, the men pushing at the wheels and extra horses pulling on the traces.

Sometimes guns were simply abandoned to the mud. A battery moved at the same speed and covered the same distance as did the troops to which it was attached. This distance could be anywhere from a few miles to 20 or 30 miles a day.

When a battery moved independently, it was not limited by the movement of the troops and was thus free to cover as much ground as it could. All in all, there was not a great deal of difference in the distance traveled.

Such gains as there were resulted from the absence of thousands of marching infantrymen, supply trains and other units cluttering up the roads. The battery was then able to travel without long delays due to the inevitable traffic jams caused by jostling troops. The battery marched with the XII Corps. The longest distance traveled in one day was 21 miles, while the shortest was Brigadier General E.

Alexander, chief of artillery in Lt. James P. The march of 17 miles began at 1 a. One way or another, at Gettysburg and dozens of other Civil War battles, the humble horse and his human masters soldiered on. Whether plodding through the dry, stifling dust, struggling in clinging mud, rushing up to a position at a jolting gallop or creeping backward in a fighting withdrawal, the men—and the horses—always did what had to be done.

They moved the guns. This article was written by James R. By Lonnie R. Speer John Gilleland developed a revolutionary double-barreled cannon meant to sweep Union infantry off the field. Rolled into position was a newly forged cannon ready for test-firing, one that everyone present could clearly see was no ordinary cannon.

Although a trained eye might have noticed that the cannon was slightly wider than a normal gun of that size, it did not look all that abnormal until one examined the muzzle end. There, two side-by-side 3-inch-diameter bores stared back at the observer, rather like a giant double-barreled shotgun.

The breech end was also abnormal; it had three touchholes, two permitting each barrel to be fired independently and one in the center allowing both barrels to be fired at once.

Its inventor, year-old John Gilleland—an Athens carpenter and cabinetmaker before the war and now a private in the Mitchell Thunderbolts, a homeguard unit composed of men too old for active service—prepared the new gun for firing. Several of the spectators milling around the gun had contributed to its financing. Its casting at the foundry had been personally supervised by Thomas Bailey, a longtime Athens resident and member of the Thunderbolts.

A target of several upright posts was erected a short distance away. Gilleland, with the help of others, rammed balls of solid shot, connected to each other by a foot length of chain, into each barrel. An excess length of chain was allowed to drape down toward the ground between the two barrels. The men gathered behind the gun as Gilleland approached the breech, attached a lanyard to a friction primer and carefully inserted the primer into the center vent.

Gilleland had designed his new weapon to fire mainly "chain shot," two cannonballs connected by heavy chain, intended to mow down large formations of enemy troops like so many acres of wheat. Chain shot had been used routinely in naval warfare as far back as the s. It was invented by the French, who preferred to incapacitate opposing ships by knocking down and destroying their masts and rigging during pitched battles, as opposed to the British preference of pounding the hulls of enemy ships with shot aimed at the waterline to stop and sink them as quickly as possible.

Eventually, the use of chain shot became a common naval procedure, perfected by the Spanish. The outbreak of Civil War hostilities renewed efforts to find a successful method for using chain shot in field artillery. Various inventors submitted plans and prototypes to both the Union and Confederate governments, including forked cannons, but the strange-looking weapons proved impractical or else failed to produce the desired results.

Gilleland had read many newspaper stories and accounts of experienced troops returning to Athens after major battles; he realized that although the Confederate armies were often quite effective in the field, they suffered from a lack of manpower and were easily flanked by greater numbers of Union troops. In an effort to equalize the manpower situation, the Athens inventor set out to design a cannon that would bring down large numbers of enemy soldiers at one time.

The design that Gilleland settled on was a double-barreled 6-pounder, cast in one piece with a 3-degree divergence between the two bores that would fire the projectiles at a slight angle away from each other. Thus the projectiles, fired separately but simultaneously, would pull the chain taut between them as they hurtled across the battlefield, somewhere between waist- and chin-high, cutting down troops like a giant scythe. At the first test-firing, observers watched intently as Gilleland stepped up to the cannon and gave the lanyard a hard yank.

First one barrel and then the other thundered into action. The cannon jumped violently in recoil and spewed its connected shot erratically across the field, missing its intended target. Undaunted, Gilleland recharged the barrels and rammed more connected shot into each.

Again the weapon was touched off, and again the twin barrels grudgingly bellowed, blasting the chain shot across the horizon and into a thicket of pine. Several more firings were made in an effort to synchronize the barrels.

Primed again and loaded with more shot, the gun again was touched off. This time the chain snapped immediately. One ball tore into a nearby cabin, knocking down its chimney; the other spun off erratically and struck a nearby cow, killing it instantly.

The gun had begun to demonstrate its desired effect—wanton killing and destruction—but not to the degree that the men had hoped. Gilleland nevertheless considered the test-firings a success.

Some of the investors were not so sure. The cannon was sent to the Confederate arsenal in Augusta, Ga.