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. After lengthy testing by Colonel George W. Rains, commandant of the arsenal, the cannon was sent back to Athens. Gilleland was incensed and fired off several angry letters to the Confederate government in Richmond.
Unable to get the government to adopt the gun or to perfect its performance, Gilleland contacted Georgia Governor Joseph E. Brown and tried to solicit his interest.
That, too, failed. The gun remained in front of the Athens town hall for use as a signal device in the event of enemy attack. In August , when citizens learned that Brig. Both barrels were loaded with canister. Upon the approach of Union troops, who greatly outnumbered the homeguard units, a four-shell barrage was fired, and the enemy quickly withdrew from the area. The cannon saw no other action after that skirmish. It was moved back to town and sat in front of the town hall for some time.
The originals are believed to have been made by Thomas Bateman, the father of the founder of the Worshipful Company of Wheelwrights. These wheels are of a very heavy stature and each weigh in excess of half a ton. This page contains a snapshot of the guns that we have repaired or produced.
Reviews No reviews Be the first to write a review. This phenomenon could stimulate the following driving questions: Why does the cannon move backwards when the cannon is fired? Why is the cannon on wheels? What causes the cannonball to fly out of the cannon? What would happen if the cannon couldn't roll backwards? Performance Expectations. Science and Engineering Practices. Disciplinary Core Ideas.
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