Field ArTillery - US Army Center Of Military History

50 The OrganizaTiOnal hisTOry Of field arTillery
Major Mordecai (seated, left) with fellow
members of the U.S. Military Commission to Crimea
lacked the range and the 6-pounders the effectiveness in close fighting that made
the Napoleons so deadly. 13 In addition, the heavily wooded and rough terrain of
many Civil War battlefields meant that much of the fighting was conducted at short
ranges where the Napoleon, with its heavier shell and case shot, was often more
destructive than other artillery.
American engineering and manufacturing ingenuity was also at work during the
prewar years. In the mid-1840s, 1st Lt. Thomas J. Rodman, while serving as an Army
officer superintending construction of heavy seacoast guns known as Columbiads,
began to experi ment with new manufacturing techniques based on developments
in French and naval gun making. He devised a new method of casting iron guns
by cooling them from the interior, which gave them additional strength in firing,
and the War Department directed that large ordnance pieces be cast in accordance
with his theories. In the mid-1850s, experiments with the forerunners of rifled
cannon began at Fort Monroe. In 1860, a board of artillery and ordnance officers
was established to make further tests on rifling, and the board submitted its report
13 Jac Weller, “The Field Artillery of the Civil War,” pt. 1, Military Collector & Historian 5 (June
1953): 29–32; Jennings C. Wise, The Long Arm of Lee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp.
65, 75, 340–41. For detailed information on the ordnance used during the Civil War, see Warren Ripley,
Artillery and Ammunition of the Civil War, 4th ed. (Charleston, S.C.: Battery Press, 1984).