Evidence of 32 lbers of Different Sizes (CWT) in the War

HMS Rose, La Rochelle.jpeg

500 ton 28 gun sixth rate reproduction of HMS Rose, La Rochelle in 1996
During the age of sail, cannons & carronades served very different purposes. A frigate, for example, would typically be armed with long nine, twelve or eighteen pound cannon. Those guns would be arrayed upon a single deck. A sixth rate like the HMS Surprise made famous by Patrick O'Brian's novels & the movie Master & Commander had 28 nine pound cannon. Not listed in her armament were carronades. They were mounted on the weather decks above the main battery. The short barreled, large caliber carronades were only used at close range where antipersonnel & destruction of the opponent's rigging was a priority. The carronade was largely made superfluous when heavy frigates like the U.S.N. Constitution became the norm. The shortest mast of the Constitution, the mizen, is the same height as the main mast of the HMS Rose, which gives you some notion of the scale between the two.

Constitution under sail.jpg

USS Constitution under topsails
Carronades required less than half the crew than cannons did & could be fired at a greater rate. The shower of man killing grape from a carronade at close range was brutal. Line of battle ships like HMS Victory carried 78 pound carronades.

If you wanted to stand off at ranges of 800 yards or more & pound a target, the cannon was what was needed. At ranges of 300 yards, a carronade could deliver devastating fire at an overwhelming volume. During the Civil War, the use of 32 pound carronades at Fort Donelson, for example, has more to do with availability than any perceived tactical advantage they may have had.
 
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I suppose the 11 inch, 10 inch and 9 inch Columbia's all went to all went to Richmond and Charleston such was the influence of politicians on the military, imagine how useful they would have been at New Orleans . I read one account of a battery at Vicksburg having an 11 inch Columbiad but couldn't see where it might have come from so I thought that it was probably incorrect.
 
The other night I came across a thread, which of course I can’t locate now, showing a diagram of various sizes of naval cannons, particularly the old 32 lbers which the US Navy started to standardize on post War of 1812, iirc. Since they wanted a uniform battery on their ships, but of course on a wooden ship you can only put heavy guns so far up, the Navy made many different CWT (centiwieight/hundrthweight) Guns of various sizes but all of a standard caliber. I imagine the result was a few 32 lbers that actually were quite short ranged and maybe not the best design. Regardless, I got to thinking: I know ships everywhere from sailing sloops of war, to converted civilian ships, to river gunboats served during the war and could have some pretty mixed batteries over time. I don’t recall anyone distinguishing between the various 32lb gun patterns, but are there any records on that point? Did some of the smaller, “upper deck” 32 lbers see use as armament for ships that couldn’t take the bigger 32s? Which type of 32 were picked to be converted to erzatz rifle early in the war, and ect?

I'm sorry that I took so long to reply to this. I use a VPN on my desktop to protect things and ever since last year, CWT blocks it so I fell out of the habit of checking here. I’m fascinated by this series of guns, so I have researched a lot about them.



The shift to an all-32-pounder armament (shell guns notwithstanding) was spurred by a similar development in England, based on an 1829 proposal by Melville, First Lord of the Admiralty, which is outright stated by JA Dahlgren in his correspondence. The American Navy was about a decade behind, but it was a drastic shift that actually lowered the firepower for some ships (like the 42-pounder guns on ships of the line and some frigates), while drastically increasing it for others.



There were already 32-pounders of 60 cwt that dated from the 1816 Gradual Increase program that were in use in large numbers in the Navy. These equipped ships of the line, the Raritan class of heavy frigate, and the new USS Congress frigate. As far as I can tell, these were not replaced with the new 32-pounders at least by 1845, nor were they intended to immediately, which makes sense since they weren't an inferior caliber. The system did replace all of their carronades and lighter guns in most ships immediately, however. These GI guns were the ones listed as “old style” in the Gosport list.



I’ll use Dahlgren’s words from his book on shell guns as to how the ships were supposed to be armed:

The first-class frigates carry 32-pounders of 57 cwt (hundredweight), and four 8-inch shell guns of 63cwt on the gun deck, with 32-pounders of 32 cwt, four 8-inch of 55 cwt, and two 32-pounders of 51cwt (for chase) on the spar deck. One or two of the heaviest ships have 32-pounders of 42 cwt on the spar deck. The 32-pdr of 46 cwt were only designed for a few frigates of inferior weight.



Sloops of war are armed according to their size: the largest with 32-pdrs of 42 cwt and 8-inch of 63 cwt (ed. Cyane, Saratoga, Portsmouth, et al); the next with 32-pdrs of 32 cwt and 8-inch of 55 cwt (ed. Boston-class and similar), and the smallest with 32-pdrs of 27 cwt (ed. Dale-class).



In 1853, a Bureau Regulation, approved by the Navy Department, excluded the 32 of 51 cwt, and 8-inch of 55 cwt from the Armaments of Frigates, and directed that ten 8-inch of 63 cwt should be carried and collected in one division on the gun deck.



Line-of-battle ships have their gun decks, whether two or three, and their spar desks, armed respectively like those of frigates.



The 27 cwt gun had some issues from its extreme lightness (about 10 cwt heavier than a normal 32-pdr carronade). Recoil forces were heavier because the gun was fairly light and this lack of mass also left it comparatively weak. They were built with a 24-pdr-sized powder chamber like a carronade, but these were later bored out on all but the ones lost on Yorktown. Despite this, some of the 27 cwt guns were still used on ships like the Hatteras, Itasca, Mohawk, and Mystic, though their biggest numbers were still installed in the Dale-class sloops they were designed for.



My records indicate the following production runs:

32pdr 27 cwt: 210

32pdr 32 cwt: ~300

32pdr 42 cwt: 414

32pdr 46 cwt: 66

32pdr 51cwt: 102

32pdr 56cwt: 744

8-inch shell gun 55cwt: 186

8-inch shell gun 63cwt: 417

64pdr shot gun 106cwt: 16

10-inch shell gun 86cwt: 33



There was also an early 41 cwt 32-pdr from the late 1830s, designed for the sloops Cyane and Levant, that was a predecessor to this run of 1840s-era guns. 40 of those were made, as well as a run of 24 improved models for Saratoga. One of the former guns and three of the latter survive. Several were captured at Norfolk and used by Confederate forces, including two recovered from the CSS Chattahoochee. The earlier guns were also a weaker design and had powder chambers, but the later stronger ones did not.



There was an additional heavy 62 cwt gun that was probably intended to replace the old Gradual Increase 32pdrs of nearly the same weight on ships of the line, the Raritan class of heavy frigates, and the new Congress. These were never issued for sea and were declared obsolete. Somewhere between 230 and 346 were made and 226 were stored at Gosport. Most, if not all of the production run were captured by the Confederacy and one was later used as the bow pivot gun in the ironclad CSS Savannah.



The 51 cwt gun was withdrawn in 1853, along with the 8-inch shell gun of 55 cwt (except for some intermediate-sized sloops). Some of them were used again during the Civil War though, such as the gunboat USS Ethan Allen, which had four 51 cwt guns and two 32 cwt guns. Those 32 cwt guns were popular for arming purchased vessels. The 42 cwt guns were popular for this too, as well as on dedicated warships, such as Kearsarge’s broadside guns being 42 cwt pieces. Since I forgot to mention it earlier, the 57 cwt gun was the basis for most of the “banded and rifled” conversions, such as the one recovered from CSS Georgia.


I still have not delved too much into the 46 cwt guns yet. Dahlgren notes they were meant to be the armament for a “few frigates of inferior weight”, by which I take to mean Constitution and United States. Constellation and Macedonian (second class frigates) still had their 18 pounders and were scheduled to replace them with 42 cwt guns. The 28 x 46 cwt guns listed as captured at Gosport are almost certainly the main deck armament of United States before she went into harbor duty there. Some others found use (listed as 47 cwt) on several purchased steamers by the USN during the war.



As far as carriages go, all of the 32-pounders and 8-inch shell guns were mounted on conventional 4-wheeled naval truck carriages. These differed from each other only in dimensions. I don’t have my copy of Spencer Tucker’s book on USN cannons in front of me, but I recall there is a table of these dimensions in the back of the book. This goes from the 32pdr/27 cwt all the way up to the 8-inch/63 cwt. The remaining two guns of the system, the 10-inch shell gun and 64pdr shotgun, were both designed as pivot guns and were mounted in normal pivot carriages.



Dahlgren’s shot and shell-guns book covers ballistic testing of each of those guns, and you can compare the tables in there to Royal Navy carronade tests. I can collate some of them later, but I didn’t want to add onto this already long post.
 
The other night I came across a thread, which of course I can’t locate now, showing a diagram of various sizes of naval cannons, particularly the old 32 lbers which the US Navy started to standardize on post War of 1812, iirc.

Sir - this one?


Thanks to @Talos

HTHs,
USS ALASKA
 
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