Need help...What is this? From my mom's collection.

Pete George (Civil War author, collector and digger) has noted that NO period reference to caltrops has been found. A keyword search of the Official Records for caltrop or similar terms shows no hits despite the ORs containing tens of thousands of official reports and correspondences of the War.

Makes sense to me Gandy. Like I said in the earlier post, I ran a pretty extensive and detailed search of period newspapers, using a variety of search terms*, and only came up with that one story by one correspondent, reprinted in three newspapers. So I think its safe to agree with Mr. George's conclusions.

*In addition to searching for the word "caltrop," I used every variation - caltrap, galtrop, cheval trap, galthrap, galtrap, calthrop, jackrock and crow's foot. Not finding any results that were related to such a device, I then used various combinations of the words "cripple/crippled," "horses," "cavalry," and "four." While there were numerous results of cavalry horses being crippled by gunfire, artillery, and other causes, only that one story referred to a device for the purpose .
 
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I also vote caltrop.

These things date back to antiquity.
Such weapons were thousands of years old by the 1860s.

I have no link to a source at the moment, but if what I recall . . . ancient Rome perfected the manufacture of caltrops.

I would imagine that a horse stepping on one of these would be much like one of us stepping on a leggo barefoot.
All of this talk about purposely crippling horses makes me cry!
It seems particularly cruel to deliberately cripple an animal in this way.

Yes to all of the above.

But we're not talking about cute lil' Shetland ponies.

A War Horse was the panzer of the day.
A caltrop was only an anti-tank weapon.
 
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I also vote caltrop.

These things date back to antiquity.
Such weapons were thousands of years old by the 1860s.

I have no link to a source at the moment, but if what I recall . . . ancient Rome perfected the manufacture of caltrops.





Yes to all of the above.

But we're not talking about cute lil' Shetland ponies.

A War Horse was the panzer of the day.
A caltrop was only an anti-tank weapon.
Panzer's are inanimate objects that don't feel pain or suffering and were purposely built for war and killing men...horses were born innocent, possess emotions and were being "loyal" to man in facing down the enemy without any knowledge of their potential pain or death.
 
Not cruel if you think of the animal as another weapon that must be neutralized.

Just speaking generally - I think many unmounted horses were not made into targets because soldiers had better morals at the time. They did not blame the horse for being in the war and perhaps were not so quick to kill them...again speaking in generalities...
 
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