MARIETTA, Ga. — Any casual student of the Civil War can tell you which generals were at which battles, but it’s far more difficult to say with pinpoint accuracy that a certain weapon was used in a certain battle.
It’s even more challenging to prove that a certain cannon took part in a specific battle, or was the one depicted in a photograph taken at the time. Only a scant handful of still-existing cannon have been linked without doubt to a specific battle or photograph — and one of them is a centerpiece in the reopened museum in the Kennesaw Mountain Battlefield Park visitors’ center.
The cannon in question belonged to the Union Army of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman and took part in the Atlanta Campaign of 1864 — and likely was in the thick of the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, according to park Supt. John Cissell.
It also is the cannon depicted in several well-known pictures taken shortly after the fall of Atlanta by noted photographer George Barnard, according to Cissell and historian/author Dr. David Evans of Athens, Ga., who helped write the script for the newly expanded park museum.
“Of all the thousands of cannons on both sides, it is very difficult to place a particular gun at a particular place at a particular time. That’s what makes this gun such a rare find and a marvelous addition to the museum,” he said.
The cannon is one of first things you see on entering the museum, which reopened Nov. 22. It is just inside the museum door, with its muzzle pointed into the museum and at a Confederate flag mounted on the opposite wall. The gun is notable not only because it can be definitively traced to a specific battle and unit and photograph, but also because the photo in question was one of the few taken in connection with the Atlanta Campaign.
Hundreds, probably thousands, of photos were taken that summer of the armies under Lee and Grant in Virginia, but Sherman had prohibited all Northern civilians from coming any further south than Nashville because he needed the maximum capacity of the Western & Atlantic Railroad to supply his army. Thus there were no photographers and only a few sketch artists accompanying him.
Once Atlanta fell, however, Sherman realized photos would help trumpet to the world what his army had accomplished, and also that photos of the Confederate fortifications he had encountered along the way might help impress his superiors in Washington with his triumph, according to Dr. Evans. So he told Barnard to come to Atlanta.
Among the sites Barnard photographed were the battlefields at Resaca and Allatoona, New Hope Church, Kennesaw Mountain and the Atlanta battlefields. Barnard compiled the pictures in a now highly collectible limited-edition volume titled, Photographic Views of Sherman’s Campaign.
Several of the pictures were taken in October 1864 in and around a fort built by the Confederates but occupied at the time by Union troops left in Atlanta while the bulk of Sherman’s army chased the Confederate army back through northwest Georgia.
The fort in question stood approximately on the site of the present-day Fox Theater, a Moorish-style movie palace built in the 1920s on Peachtree Street.
One of the photos was a close-up of the muzzle face. When examined with a magnifying glass, a viewer can make out an inscription around the rim of the bore: “No. 211, Revere Copper Co., 1229 lbs., 1863, T.J.R.”
Translated, its registry number is 211; its manufacturer was the Revere Copper Co. of Boston (yes, operated by a descendant of Paul Revere and making pots and pans today); the weight of its bronze tube is 1,229 pounds; it was cast in 1863; and it was inspected by well-known ordnance officer Thomas Jackson Rodman.
The cannon is a smoothbore Napoleon named by its French designers not after Napoleon Bonaparte but after his nephew who then ruled France, Emperor Napoleon III. The Napoleons were the mainstay of both armies’ artillery and fired a 12-pound projectile.
So how did the cannon photographed by Barnard wind up in the museum? It remained on active duty until 1895, when it was one of hundreds of by-then obsolete cannon the army “surplused” to the first national battlefield parks. This gun was one of 255 given to the Chickamauga-Chattanooga Park in 1892, per the Chief of Ordnance Report, according to artillery historian Wayne Stark.
So things remained until the late 1980s, when artillery author and historian Ed Olmstead was doing a survey of the park’s artillery. “He came to us and said, ‘You know, I think you have a really rare piece on Missionary Ridge,’ and sure enough, there was one,” said Cissell, who at the time was stationed at that park.
After Cissell was promoted to head the Kennesaw Mountain park, he prevailed on his old boss at Chickamauga to transfer the gun. “He realized it would have more meaning here than at any other national park in the country,” because of its connection with the Atlanta Campaign, Cissell said. “We were tickled that they worked out a deal with us.” In comparison, there are only 30 cannon in the Kennesaw park.
The trade took place in 1995 and the next two years were spent restoring the gun. Tom Bailey of Woodstock, Ga., crafted a new carriage and the cannon was put on display in the lobby of the newly expanded visitors’ center in 1999, although there was nothing to alert visitors to its significance.
The new museum goes out of its way to make up for the earlier oversight. Despite its age, the cannon is in “very, very good condition,” Cissell said. “It’s a little shinier than it was, but not as shiny as it would have been. A lot of people think Civil War artillery pieces and weapons were not well taken care of, but that was not the case. Those soldiers took good care of their weapons, just like good soldiers do today.”
Record keeping was a lot sketchier during the Civil War, and it is difficult to track a cannon’s progress from unit to unit or battle to battle. Stark said that artillery batteries filed quarterly reports, some copies of which survive; however, the great majority were filed at the National Archives “until the mid-1950s when someone there decided they were unimportant and destroyed them.”
Despite the difficulties, Evans has come up with a highly educated guess as to which unit the cannon in the Barnard photo belonged to.
“One of the fascinating things about George Barnard is that he was never satisfied with taking just one picture, and he took at least three pictures of that gun,” Evans said. Two of the pictures show a Union soldier wearing on his hat a star, the insignia of Sherman’s XX Army Corps.
Each of the corps’ three divisions wore a different colored star — but Barnard, of course, was shooting in only two colors — black and white. Between the photo caption and his knowledge of which troops were garrisoning the trenches on Atlanta’s north side, Evans surmised the man belonged to the First Division. There were two batteries of artillery assigned to that division, one of which was equipped with rifled cannons and one with the Napoleons.
That allowed Evans to determine that in all likelihood, the cannon was part of Battery M of the 1st New York Light Artillery, which had six of the guns under the command of Capt. John D. Woodberry.
That battery — and thus that cannon — also would then have taken part at Resaca, New Hope Church, “would have been in the thick of things” at the Battle of Kolb’s Farm and would have been in the Battle of Peachtree Creek, Evans said. Depending on when in 1863 the cannon was cast, it might also have seen action at Gettysburg and Chattanooga with the XX Corps, which, under the command of Gen. Joe Hooker, was shifted that fall from the Army of the Potomac to Chattanooga.
As 1864 drew to a close, the gun would have accompanied Sherman on his fabled March to the Sea, Evans said.
Stark, who is co-author with Olmstead and Spencer Tucker of The Big Guns: Civil War Siege, Seacoast, and Naval Cannon, has information which clarifies some of the cannon’s presumed history.
He said Napoleon No. 210 was accepted for payment of Dec. 10, 1862. It was the last gun delivered in fulfillment of the Revere company’s five orders totaling 210 Napoleons.
Revere made no more Napoleons until after it received an order dated June 17, 1863, for 33. The first guns cast against this order were 17 that Rodman inspected and accepted for payment on Aug. 5, 1863. Stark says the foundry numbers are not in the records, but it is inferred that they were numbers 211-227.
For this reason, Stark said that gun No. 211 could not have been at Gettysburg, “but it might have made it to Chattanooga in time for that action.”
(About the Author: Joe Kirby, who is editorial page editor of the Marietta Daily Journal, originally wrote this story for The Civil War News.)