Civil War Articles by Julian WilliamsCivil War Weapons Dangerous In More Ways Than One!
This article was compiled by Julian Williams.
When Redding Duncan Cameron (Short Duncan) of Telfair County told humorous and exaggerated stories of shooting Yankees out of trees like squirrels and having his own head "dented" by a bullet, we wonder about those old weapons of yesteryear. By the way, he went on to say the doctor just inserted a corkscrew in his skull, pulled mightily and the dent popped out with a loud "plunk!" (Floris Perkins Mann, History of Telfair County).
Seriously, as men carried their old smoothbore muskets with them from home and others acquired the converted muskets with rifled barrels (grooves inside the barrels to spin the bullet and give it more accuracy), weapons evolved into killing tools of intensifying stopping power. And they would have evolved even faster had it not been for conservative leaders like Henry Knox Craig of the Ordnance Department who was pushed into changing from smoothbore .69-caliber muskets to .58-caliber rifles. This was before the Civil War; the nation was intact. In fact, the man who did the pushing was none other than Jefferson Davis, then Secretary of War for the United States of America. He was to soon become the President of the Confederacy.
But the old men who could not ride and shoot but who held the power of the pen were hard to dislodge from their positions of critical decision-making. Even after they got rid of Craig another conservative named Ripley came along. He did not even want the army to be equipped with the new single-shot breechloading rifles. He certainly did not want them to have those that fired multiple rounds of jacketed bullets. No, sir! That would waste too much ammunition. He thought a man ought to open the cartridge box which hung at his waist, grab a cartridge, tear it open, drop the powder and bullet down the barrel, ram the bullet home, put on a musket cap, cock the musket, and fire. (Clint Johnson).
It was this kind of thinking from the "high-ups" that caused a Marine officer named Robert E. Lee to have to use muskets to capture John Brown at Harpers Ferry against bad odds. Brown was using the new breechloaders.
This same kind of thinking probably caused a tragedy we now know as "Custer's Last Stand." While Custer and his troops were firing single-shot carbines, the Sioux and Cheyenne were assaulting with repeating Winchesters! And that was after the Civil War - in 1876.
But, back to the Civil War. Those Yankees in the trees who were trading shots with Reb R.D. (Short Duncan) Cameron of Company B of the 49th Georgia probably had the upper hand most of the time. They had better weapons.
Some folks don't know that General Burnside of the Union army was at one time was a gun manufacturer. The story goes he made a pretty good carbine but the caps (much like the roll of caps on children's cap pistols) would stick and jam the mechanism of the rifle. However, later this was corrected in other versions of his weapon and had he stayed with gun-making he might have been more of a success than he was as a general.
But evolving, though painful at times, seemed to be necessary to improving firearms. The next evolving involved the Colt repeating rifle. It was something of a cross between a rifle and a Colt revolver. The latter was popular with both sides during the war. But only limited numbers of the new rifles were ordered for the United States Army. The new rifle had a nasty little habit that made it highly unpopular with the soldiers - it often blew off the fingers of the man firing the thing!
A shooter had to be careful lest the black powder sparks from the firing cylinder, lined up with the barrel, would leak over to the other cylinders (lined up with the fingers holding the forestock); result, missing fingers! For this reason many men refused to use the rifle.
To make matters worse and the competition even more uneven, the repeating Henry rifle evolved. The thing would shoot fifteen times as fast as a soldier could pull the trigger and work the two-motion lever that ejected the cartridge and cocked the hammer. Many a Southerner said of the Yankee weapon, "They load 'em on Sunday and shoot 'em all week!" That would be enough to discourage any adversary holding a ramrod musket.
Despite the rather obvious advantage of the high tech weapons, some conservative radicals just would not accept the fact that the modern arms were here to stay.
One of the best (or worst) examples of this resistance could be found in our own governor, Joe Brown, of Georgia. Ole Joe was really in the Dark Ages. Having absolutely no military training did not keep him from having a hard head. He armed his Georgia troops with pikes - long knives attached to the end of wooden poles. He said his awesome weapons "never fail to fire and never waste a single load." Hundreds of these stick poles out of the military manuals of Julius Caesar were stockpiled before wiser Georgians convinced him that he was sending future voters to certain death. That turned him around and headed him in better directions.
Later, in some places, it didn't seem to matter much whether the voter was dead or alive.
Thank goodness, poor Governor Brown did not shoulder alone this honor of advocating archaic weapons. His counterpart up North was Colonel Richard Rush who rounded up his Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry from the rich homes of Philadelphia. They became known as "Rush's Lancers" and, as historian Clint Johnson said, "they were not the smartest fellows ever to climb on horses." The pig-stickers worked OK until the enemy found out they could shoot their attackers long before they were reached by the menacing sharp sticks!
But the winner of all weird weapons had to be the double-barreled cannon. Unfortunately, it was also a Georgian who invented this contraption. If you want to see it, go to Athens and you will see it on the grounds of the City Hall - if they haven't moved it. It looks almost like a conventional cannon except for its twin barrels. The theory was that two cannon balls - connected by a generous length of chain - could be fired simultaneously and that great havoc would result. This proved to be correct but not in the sense envisioned by its advocates!
The havoc resulting was not the controlled sweeping away of the enemy soldiers but the uncontrolled journey of the two balls and the attendant chain - ultimately causing the death of a nearby cow. Needless to say, a good idea, perhaps, did not result in a good invention in the 1860's. Ironically, today, this application would probably work fine with the precision of modern-day computers.
It is not known, how many Yankees, if any, Redding D. Cameron (Short Duncan) killed, but they sure didn't kill him. He survived the war, despite the odds against him. And while he shot at the Yankees, his brother, A.J. Cameron, because of his great skills as an artisan in tool-making and machining, was hired by the Confederate government to make and temper swords at Milledgeville. Both are buried at the Bethlehem Church Cemetery (Sand Hill) near the communities of Jacksonville, Cobbville, and Workmore, in Telfair County.
