Artillery Basics

It is easy to forget that the field artillery was almost as a dependent upon horses as the cavalry. Gibbon held that a battery of six light guns needed 110 horses to take the field and an even larger number would be required for a battery of mounted artillery. As the principle motive power for the guns, they were a prime target for the opposing force; disabling the horses meant that the guns were at risk of capture.  Horses, like the soldiers who depended upon them, were also subject to the rigors of disease, poor rations, and the too-often squalid living conditions of an army camp. The death toll has never been calculated, but the cost of the War in horse flesh was surely enormous.

Basic Terminology

This is a schematic of a Napoleon, with the addition of a chamber purely for illustrative purposes. (From Dean S. Thomas, Cannons: An Introduction to Civil War Artillery)

Typical gun carriage, limber and caisson arrangement

Nomenclature

By the early nineteenth century artillerists in most western countries had settled on a standard method of naming cannon, based on the weight of the solid shot used with the piece. Since all shot was spherical, and typically made of iron, this weight corresponded with the bore size of the piece. Any cannon with a 3.67-inch bore would use a shot weighing six pounds, and would be known as a six-pounder; a cannon with a 4.62-inch bore would be a 12-pounder. (You mathematics aficionados will note that the ratio of the bores is a good approximation to the cube root of two, since the volume of the spherical ball, and therefore its weight, increases in proportion with the cube of its measurement.)

The system of ordnance adopted by the U.S. Army in the 1840's was the picture of simplicity: six- and 12-pounder field guns, 12-, 24-, and 32-pounder field howitzers, 12-pounder mountain howitzers, 18- and 24-pounder siege and garrison guns, and 32- and 42-pounder sea-coast guns,. To this were added columbiads and mortars. The principal modification to this system prior to the War was the substitution of the light 12-pounder as the field weapon of choice.  However, this system was soon made obsolete by necessity and technology.

                              Field Gun Information coming soon .............!!!!!!

Types of Ammunition

Solid Shot
For smoothbores, cast-iron solid shot is the familiar spherical cannonball; for rifles, the elongated projectile is called a "bolt". Both were useful for counter-battery fire or attacking fortifications; the superior power of the rifle bolt was the technological development that made masonry fortifications obsolete, a fact graphically demonstrated by the ease with which the walls of Fort Pulaski were breached early in the War.

Shell
Shell, as its name implies, is a hollow iron projectile filled with a bursting charge of black powder. All round shell, and some rifle shell, used a time fuse to ignite the bursting charge; Rifle shells could also use percussion fuses.

Case Shot
Also called shrapnel or shrapnel shell after its inventor, British artilleryman Henry Shrapnel, case shot was an improvement on the simple shell by the addition of small lead or iron balls to the interior of a thinner-walled projectile. The balls were embedded in a matrix of sulphur or coal-tar. Case shot was designed to explode in the air, so nearly always used time fuses.

Canister
Canister is simply a tinned-iron can full of iron or lead balls packed in sawdust. When fired, the effect is that of a giant shotgun blast. Canister is essentially short-range anti-personnel ammunition.

Grape Shot
Grape Shot is similar in concept to canister, but has fewer and larger balls, held together with iron rings or trussed up with fabric and twine. (The latter is "quilted grape shot", sometimes referred to as "quilted grape" or "quilted shot".) It is often erroneously stated that this was purely naval ammunition, but grape was at least occasionally issued to field and foot artillery.

RETURN HOME