The Rains Brothers

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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)
 
The gunpowder of the day, as George Rains knew well, was made of three-quarters potassium nitrate {known as saltpeter or niter} and small amounts of sulphur and charcoal. It seemed hopeless to find enough of the first two ingredients in the Confederacy, and if they were found, they would be quite impure, making faulty gunpowder inevitable.
Rains went like a prospector into the limestone caves of Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and Arkansas, and found earth so rich in nitrate of lime that he put crews to digging it, and later formed a niter and mining bureau. By a simple chemical process—saturation with lye made from wood ashes—he rendered this earth into saltpeter. An idle mill near Nashville, Tennessee, was soon making powder and a stamping mill furnished its ingredients. Rains began on July 10, 1861, and by late October was turning out 3,000 pounds of powder daily at Nashville; since there were no experts, Rains was forced to act as overseer.
He wrote a booklet on collecting saltpeter, gathered a force of newly trained men, and with them at work, returned to Richmond. He sent agents to Europe for more nitrate, and eventually smuggled 2,700,000 pounds through the blockade. Most singular of all, he divided the south into districts, each with crews to dig the earth from privies and latrines, and even collect the contents of chamber pots—all to be dumped into niter beds for processing.
Some of the war’s most entertaining bawdy songs came from this practice, on both sides of the lines.
George made progress. By November of ’61 he was producing another 1,500 pounds of powder daily in Richmond. He then made an important find—an English pamphlet describing the world’s most modern powder plant, the Waltham Abbey Works. Though it contained no drawings, the booklet was so complete that Rains, with the help of C. Shaler Smith, a young architect and engineer, built the finest gunpowder mill of the day. He erected a giant complex which lay for two miles along a canal at Augusta, Georgia, a spot chosen for its safety from Union raiders, and as a central base supply. The factory was built with materials from every corner of the Confederacy.
The huge Tredegar Iron Works at Richmond built for Rains twelve circular iron plates and twenty-four 5-ton rollers—some 250 tons of machinery. He got four more rollers from Macon, Georgia, and Chattanooga, Tennessee. He ordered from another Tennessee plant an iron shaft almost 300 feet long, a foot thick at the center—an engineering marvel of its time. A gear wheel 16 feet in diameter was fixed to the center of the shaft, giving it motion. This piece of skilled metal work was cast in Atlanta.
Rains found in a cotton mill a steam engine of 130 horsepower with five boilers and a 14-tone flywheel, all made in the North before the war; he took the power system apart and hauled it across the south to its new home. He ordered a dozen iron evaporating pans from works on the Cumberland River, Tennessee, and big retorts and iron slip cylinders from an Augusta shop. Copper boilers were made from converted turpentine and whiskey stills brought in from seaports and backwoods. Tin and zinc from roofing came from Mobile. Iron and coal for castings came from North Carolina and North Alabama and raw copper from Ducktown, Tennessee.
By the end of 1861 the price of powder coming through the blockade had climbed to three dollars per pound—and since Rains made a million pounds that year, he calculated that he saved the Confederacy almost two million dollars. After spending heavily on his factories, he showed an immense “profit”; his Augusta plant cost the Confederacy about $385,000.
The maze of buildings concealed many miracles worked by Rains and his men. Impurities in saltpeter ruined powder by absorbing moisture, thus it must be crystallized and washed over absorbing moisture, thus it must be crystallized and washed over and over. The plant consumed from 8,000 to 10,000 pounds daily; the vital spot was the refinery room.
Rains had cleverly arranged evaporating pans in this room, with canal water flowing under them for cooling, and hot air from separate furnaces heating others. The room was thus free of ashes and smoke. When it was found that the volume was too great for his working force, Rains devised machinery which filled the pans, pouring boiling liquid into drains and crystallizing vats on scheduling. One refinement was a vat which agitated during evaporation, so as to produce tiny particles. Soon, Rains boasted, he could run the process three times daily with only two or three workmen. His saltpeter he thought “unmatched anywhere.”
A sulphur refinery taxed Rain’s ingenuity, for he had to remove all traces of acid, and his supply was by no means pure. Most of the sulfur came from Louisiana planters who had imported it before the war to refine their sugar crops. The sulphur must be treated until, when powdered and evaporated on glass, it would leave no stain. Distillation was the key Rains used. The sulphur was melted, poured into wooden boxes 5 feet tall and 10 inches square at the bottom, tapering upwards. As it cooled, impurities trickled down and the relatively pure upper portion went into kettles, was vaporized, condensed in water-cooled coils, then collected in its purity. Rains bolted and pulverized it like flour before he was done, using iron wheels five feet in diameter which revolved on a bed of iron. Rains used silk to bolt his sulphur so long as it lasted, but the South’s silk supply was soon gone. He devised a better scheme.
As the pulverized sulphur was revolved in barrels fastened on hollow axes, hot air was blown through, depositing the finest sulphur dust in an adjoining room.
Charcoal was the next problem. Willow was said to make the best, but this was soon exhausted, and Rains tested cottonwood, which he found to be equally good. He had the wood split in to sticks less than two inches square, and packed them into iron cylinders, covers sealed with clay, and the bottoms perforated to permit the escape of gases-which in turn supplied most of the furnace heat necessary for the process. The wood burned to charcoal within two hours, was lowered into the canal below for cooling, then went into pulverizing barrels, where it was beaten to a powder by tumbling bronze balls. After boiling, it went to the weighing room to be combined with other ingredients. Rains made up charges of 45 pounds of saltpeter, 9 pounds of charcoal and 6 of sulphur.
This mixture was moistened and heated by steam until it became slush; it was then cooled into a cake, a product Rains thought the finest ever processed. He had used his microscope to improve on his British predecessors.
He was that carbon particles, even when finely ground, were pitted with tiny holes. Since saltpeter was the active ingredient of gunpowder, it would be made to fill these pores. Thus Rains developed the method of reducing the powder to slush, allowing the niter to crystallize partially within the charred carbon. This step also reduced the final rolling process from four h ours to one.
Rains had a dozen rolling mills, separated for safety, stretching some 300 feet along the canal. Their walls were ten feet thick in places, with glass fronts in case of explosion. Workmen operated long levers by a friction gear built under the floors, in order to control the dangerous rollers. Above each roller was a thirty-gallon water tank which was connected with each of the other rollers in the mill, rigged to spill its contents at any given moment. In short, any explosion would bring instant drowning of all the cake gunpowder. Rains had but three explosions inside the plant, only one causing injury. But before safety precautions were taken, an accident outside the main plant blew three tons of gunpowder, sending up a 500-foot column of smoke and flame, and killing seven men, a boy and a mule-all the result of a workman smoking in violation of orders.
Bronze wheels, vibrating screens, and sieves finished the powder process, grading eh final product. Big guns on the battle fronts, especially the seaports, used powder in pieces an inch square, weighing about an ounce per cube; but small weapons must have the most finely ground powder. Rains also designed a superior powder box to replace kegs for shipment, and reported that there were no explosions in delivery.
He developed an “electro-ballistic” machine to test arms fired with his gunpowder, and duplicated an apparatus for determining the pressure in gun barrels.
Rains produced 2,750,000 pounds of gunpowder at Augusta in three years, furnishing most of that fired by Confederates east of the Mississippi. The plant never worked to capacity, and even when a rush order for 22,000 pounds of powder came from Charleston, it took only two days’ production. Powder captured here was used after the war by the United States School of Artillery Practice at Fortress Monroe, and pronounced superior. President Davis said sadly that if such fine powder had been in the magazines of the cruiser Alabama, she would have sunk the USS Kearsage, and have been saved for further deadly raids on enemy shipping.
Today, despite the work of these brother geniuses in munitions, readers can find reference to them only by arduous digging, Records of the Confederate Torpedo Bureau are lost and presumed destroyed. The only full account of the Confederate powder factories, written by General George Rains, is on of the rarer Civil War pamphlets, seldom seen except by scholars straying from the beaten path.
 
Thanks for the post, Martin. Very informative and interesting.

Rains got his start with torpedos and explosives at Yorkville. At the time, they were considered an ungentlemanly way to wage war. That attitude soon changed, as you have so ably described, to a CSA mastery of the art -- most likely due to Rains.

More, please.
 
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