I had never heard of these two.
Martin
The Rains Brothers
In the first month of 1864 an expert from the Confederate Torpedo Bureau entered the office of Jefferson Davis with a curious object-an iron casting, heavy and black, for all the world like a lump of coal. The President, turning it in his hands, pronounced it “Perfection itself.”
It was a small bomb, designed to be tossed into a Federal coal barge, whence it would be shoveled into an enemy warship’s boiler with devastating effect.
The secret weapon was soon in action, and one of its victims was the captured blockade-runner Greybound, which exploded and sank under mysterious circumstances in the James River. The notables, General Ben Butler and Admiral David Porter, were among her startled passengers. Investigators laid the blame of Confederates who had sneaked aboard as “roughly dressed stowaways,” planted their bombs in coal bunkers, and fled. Porter sent orders through the fleet that coal barges were to be guarded around the clock-and that strangers found with lumps of imitation coal were to be shot.
This invention was the work of General Gabriel J. Rains, the elder son of a cabinetmaker from New Bern, North Carolina, a West Point graduate who had been mooning over explosives since his days in the Seminole War. His younger brother, George Washington Rains, also a West Pointer, was busy making most of the Confederacy’s gunpowder.
The Rains boys were mysterious figures to most of their contemporaries and are largely overlooked by historians, though they were outstanding munitions whose innovations did much to improve the art of administrating violent death.
Gabriel, fifty-eight when the war opened, was a brigadier general in early ’62 when the Federals drove between the York and the James toward Richmond. He made a memorable debut.
Federal cavalry trotted confidently in the sandy roads after the retreating Rebels, but under the hoofs of their horses explosives flared, and casualties were considerable. Many companies bolted in panic. They had stumbled onto the first land mines used in battle, clever little devices made by Gabriel Rains after the earlier design of Samuel Colt, complete even to tin shields against rain.
There were more of these weapons, and the Northern press soon thundered against Rebel barbarity: mines had exploded in wells, around houses, in bags of flour and carpetbags, and around telegraph poles- the counterparts of the modern booby trap had had claimed several Union lives. The Confederate commander on the front, James Longstreet, was almost as indignant as the enemy press, and forbade further use of the mines.
Rains denied that he had rigged booby traps, but he took credit for the land mines in the road. The affair became a Confederate policy squabble, for Rains appealed to Richmond over Longstreet’s head, and Secretary of War George Randolph (who was Thomas Jefferson’s grandson) took the inventor into the War Department where he was safe from Longstreet. Randolph announced the policy: “ It is admissible to plant shells in parapet to repel assault, or in a road to check pursuit…. It is not admissible to plant shells merely to destroy life and without other design than that of depriving the enemy of a few men.”
Rains reported to President Davis on the possibilities of experimental explosives and was asked to head to Torpedo Bureau; a few months later the bureau filled General R.E. Lee’s order for hundreds of torpedoes and mines to bar the James River to enemy shipping. Months afterwards federals were reporting mines in the river, most of them fired by wires leading from the banks. They ranged in size to 1,950 pounds.
At the end of the war the Untied States Navy reported greater loss of ships from torpedoes than from all other causes combined. Rains estimated his bag of enemy ships sunk by torpedo at fifty-eight. It was a quiet and still largely unrecognized revolution in naval warfare.
Rains solved some t***** problems. There was not a foot of wire in the Confederacy for his electrical mines; he sent women operatives behind enemy lines to steal. His biggest haul was an abandoned enemy cable in the Chesapeake Bay, which he shredded and used in hundreds of mines. The Confederate Army was also an adversary, both in the struggle for supplies and claims of victory. For months the Torpedo Bureau squabbled with General D.H. Maury over Laurels for sinking the Federal monitor Tecumseh at Mobile.
Rains had too little money for his work. He began with an appropriation of $20,000 for torpedoes, but though this rose to $350,000 in 1864- and soon afterward to $6,000,000-it was too late.
Despite everything, he built torpedo factories at Richmond. Wilmington, Mobile, Charleston, and Savannah. In one “munitions plant” on the Mississippi a few men under a shed packed glass demijohns with powder, attached crude ignition devices. Piled them on a wagon, and saw them them off under “Old Pat,” a Negro driver whose duty was to drop them into the river, where the current was to take among an invading Federal fleet.
By one means or another torpedoes spread through the Confederacy. Seven of twelve Federal shops on a foray up the Roanoke River in North Carolina were victims of the floating mines. Before Fort Fisher, near Wilmington, North Carolina, a great field of buried torpedoes helped to hold Federals at bay until the very end of the war. In May, 1864, the USS Steam Corvette Commodore Jones, torpedoed in Virginia waters, was blown fifty feet into the air, according to witness, and lost 147 of her 150-man crew.
Rains said that the Richmond approaches were guarded by 1,300 land mines in 1864, many of them operated by trips cords to be pulled by hidden Confederates when unwary Union soldiers walked nearby. To prevent Southern deaths in the mine fields, each torpedo was marked with a red flag by day and a shielded lantern by night. At the fall of Richmond, Federal columns were guided through the mine fields by Rebels, but a few incautious bluecoat looters were killed by explosions.
Brother George Rains provided most of the powder for torpedoes, mines, shells, and virtually all other Confederate munitions. George had led the West Point class of ’42 in scientific studies and served as professor of chemistry, geology and mineralogy, but when he was assigned to make gunpowder for the Confederate armies had not so much as seen a powder mill.
Rains had operated ironworks in Newburgh, New York, but otherwise had no obvious qualifications as munitions maker. Even so Chief of Ordnance Josiah Gorgas gave him a free hand.
As Jefferson Davis said, hardly a round of ammunitions had been made in the South for fifty years, except during the Mexican War. By the most optimistic estimate there was powder enough for one month of war, providing there was light fighting.
(More to come)
Martin
The Rains Brothers
In the first month of 1864 an expert from the Confederate Torpedo Bureau entered the office of Jefferson Davis with a curious object-an iron casting, heavy and black, for all the world like a lump of coal. The President, turning it in his hands, pronounced it “Perfection itself.”
It was a small bomb, designed to be tossed into a Federal coal barge, whence it would be shoveled into an enemy warship’s boiler with devastating effect.
The secret weapon was soon in action, and one of its victims was the captured blockade-runner Greybound, which exploded and sank under mysterious circumstances in the James River. The notables, General Ben Butler and Admiral David Porter, were among her startled passengers. Investigators laid the blame of Confederates who had sneaked aboard as “roughly dressed stowaways,” planted their bombs in coal bunkers, and fled. Porter sent orders through the fleet that coal barges were to be guarded around the clock-and that strangers found with lumps of imitation coal were to be shot.
This invention was the work of General Gabriel J. Rains, the elder son of a cabinetmaker from New Bern, North Carolina, a West Point graduate who had been mooning over explosives since his days in the Seminole War. His younger brother, George Washington Rains, also a West Pointer, was busy making most of the Confederacy’s gunpowder.
The Rains boys were mysterious figures to most of their contemporaries and are largely overlooked by historians, though they were outstanding munitions whose innovations did much to improve the art of administrating violent death.
Gabriel, fifty-eight when the war opened, was a brigadier general in early ’62 when the Federals drove between the York and the James toward Richmond. He made a memorable debut.
Federal cavalry trotted confidently in the sandy roads after the retreating Rebels, but under the hoofs of their horses explosives flared, and casualties were considerable. Many companies bolted in panic. They had stumbled onto the first land mines used in battle, clever little devices made by Gabriel Rains after the earlier design of Samuel Colt, complete even to tin shields against rain.
There were more of these weapons, and the Northern press soon thundered against Rebel barbarity: mines had exploded in wells, around houses, in bags of flour and carpetbags, and around telegraph poles- the counterparts of the modern booby trap had had claimed several Union lives. The Confederate commander on the front, James Longstreet, was almost as indignant as the enemy press, and forbade further use of the mines.
Rains denied that he had rigged booby traps, but he took credit for the land mines in the road. The affair became a Confederate policy squabble, for Rains appealed to Richmond over Longstreet’s head, and Secretary of War George Randolph (who was Thomas Jefferson’s grandson) took the inventor into the War Department where he was safe from Longstreet. Randolph announced the policy: “ It is admissible to plant shells in parapet to repel assault, or in a road to check pursuit…. It is not admissible to plant shells merely to destroy life and without other design than that of depriving the enemy of a few men.”
Rains reported to President Davis on the possibilities of experimental explosives and was asked to head to Torpedo Bureau; a few months later the bureau filled General R.E. Lee’s order for hundreds of torpedoes and mines to bar the James River to enemy shipping. Months afterwards federals were reporting mines in the river, most of them fired by wires leading from the banks. They ranged in size to 1,950 pounds.
At the end of the war the Untied States Navy reported greater loss of ships from torpedoes than from all other causes combined. Rains estimated his bag of enemy ships sunk by torpedo at fifty-eight. It was a quiet and still largely unrecognized revolution in naval warfare.
Rains solved some t***** problems. There was not a foot of wire in the Confederacy for his electrical mines; he sent women operatives behind enemy lines to steal. His biggest haul was an abandoned enemy cable in the Chesapeake Bay, which he shredded and used in hundreds of mines. The Confederate Army was also an adversary, both in the struggle for supplies and claims of victory. For months the Torpedo Bureau squabbled with General D.H. Maury over Laurels for sinking the Federal monitor Tecumseh at Mobile.
Rains had too little money for his work. He began with an appropriation of $20,000 for torpedoes, but though this rose to $350,000 in 1864- and soon afterward to $6,000,000-it was too late.
Despite everything, he built torpedo factories at Richmond. Wilmington, Mobile, Charleston, and Savannah. In one “munitions plant” on the Mississippi a few men under a shed packed glass demijohns with powder, attached crude ignition devices. Piled them on a wagon, and saw them them off under “Old Pat,” a Negro driver whose duty was to drop them into the river, where the current was to take among an invading Federal fleet.
By one means or another torpedoes spread through the Confederacy. Seven of twelve Federal shops on a foray up the Roanoke River in North Carolina were victims of the floating mines. Before Fort Fisher, near Wilmington, North Carolina, a great field of buried torpedoes helped to hold Federals at bay until the very end of the war. In May, 1864, the USS Steam Corvette Commodore Jones, torpedoed in Virginia waters, was blown fifty feet into the air, according to witness, and lost 147 of her 150-man crew.
Rains said that the Richmond approaches were guarded by 1,300 land mines in 1864, many of them operated by trips cords to be pulled by hidden Confederates when unwary Union soldiers walked nearby. To prevent Southern deaths in the mine fields, each torpedo was marked with a red flag by day and a shielded lantern by night. At the fall of Richmond, Federal columns were guided through the mine fields by Rebels, but a few incautious bluecoat looters were killed by explosions.
Brother George Rains provided most of the powder for torpedoes, mines, shells, and virtually all other Confederate munitions. George had led the West Point class of ’42 in scientific studies and served as professor of chemistry, geology and mineralogy, but when he was assigned to make gunpowder for the Confederate armies had not so much as seen a powder mill.
Rains had operated ironworks in Newburgh, New York, but otherwise had no obvious qualifications as munitions maker. Even so Chief of Ordnance Josiah Gorgas gave him a free hand.
As Jefferson Davis said, hardly a round of ammunitions had been made in the South for fifty years, except during the Mexican War. By the most optimistic estimate there was powder enough for one month of war, providing there was light fighting.
(More to come)