"More on Continental Artillery" Topic

Since Harold Peterson's Round Shot and Rammers arrived yesterday, I have jotted down some of the answers to questions that were put on the Continental artillery regarding the Swedish 4-pounder regimental piece, iron work and painting of that and gun carriages, the origin of American artillery pieces, and gun tube production in America during the War of the Revolution. I do hope this will be helpful.

I'm posting the material in four parts.

Part I:

Swedish 4-pounder:

‘As the years went on there were some gradual changes in the French artillery. Most of the Valliere guns had been conceived as firing from fixed positions. Even the 4-pounder was heavy for field use in direct support of infantry despite the fact that Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden had demonstrated the value of regimental pieces more than a century before. The wars of the 18th century continued to prove Gustavus right, however, and eventually the French turned to his country for a gun they could use for this purpose. Sweden had developed a light 4-pounder some years earlier, and the French began to use it informally, probably in the 1740s. It was a fine little gun, short and light, and it mounted on a sharply angled carriage of its own design. Moreover this carriage featured an elevating screw with a crank handle that was well in advance of its time. In 1756 the French formally adopted the gun and began its manufacture in their own foundries.' 51.

‘Among those cannon that America received from France were some of the light Swedish type 4-pounders that the French Army was using for regimental pieces. Thirty-one of them, for instance, arrived with their carriages on the ship Amphitrite early in 1777, and Knox welcomed them immediately. He was less pleased with the other guns of the Valliere System which were on board. They were too big and too heavy for his purposes, he thought, even the 4-pounders. Each of these 4-pounders, Knox estimated, would contain enough metal to cast three light 6-pounders sufficient for service, and he asked that the French guns be melted down and recast in this fashion. The carriages could be cannibalized for parts.'-57.

It should be noted that the French army did not have a field artillery system prior to the adoption of the Gribeauval System. The older Valliere system was actually a heavy artillery system, that Valliere and those who agreed with him, believed that the pieces would be suitable both for siege and open field battles. They were not which is why in 1763 the French Minister of War, Choiseul, directed Gribeauval, who had experience with both the Prussian and Austrian field artillery systems, to develop a suitable modern one for the French Army.

Part II:

US Artillery Material:

‘…there was little that Knox could to about material. The Americans had to take what they could get. They were able to cast guns themselves, but the rest of their train of artillery consisted of pieces acquired from France or captured from the enemy, found in colonial arsenals, or taken from ships. Naturally this led to a great multiplicity of types and sizes. All of the British and many of the French sizes were in use, and since the French sizes differed from the British, they either had to be segregated or rebored to British calibers. Some complexity of an American artillery train can be gained from Knox's estimates of the needs for the campaign of 1778:

‘Brigade artillery, seventeen brigades, with four guns each: sixty-eight pieces to be 3-, 4-, or 6-pounders; with the park-two 24-pounders, four 12-pounders, eight 5.5-inch howitzers, ten 3- or 4-pounders, ten 6-pounders; for the reserve-to be kept at a proper distance from camp-thirty 3-, 4-, and 6-pounders, two 12-pounders, one 24-pounder; all the foregoing brigade, park, and reserve guns and howitzers to be brass. In addition, twelve 18-pounders, twelve 12-pounders, battering pieces, on traveling carriages, together with two 5.5-inch and twelve 8-, 9-, and 10-inch mortars; the battering pieces and mortars to be cast iron.'-57.

Part III:

Guns produced in America:

‘When Americans did make artillery of their own, they followed British patterns. As a matter of fact, John Muller's A Treatise of Artillery appeared in a pirated edition in Philadelphia in 1779, dedicated to ‘George Washington, General Henry Knox and Officers of the Continental Artillery.' It was the only technical treatise on artillery available to American artificers, and so they followed it. Thus American guns were apt to be fourteen calibers long with trunnions on the center line of the bore as Muller recommended, even though British guns held to the older designs. Aside from Muller's influence, British designs and theory predominated because they were what Americans had become familiar with in the years before the war. Naturally they clung to them. Also they were better designs than the Valliere System, and news of the Gribeauval types had not yet reached America in detail.'

‘Some of these tubes made in America were simple and even crude. Others were quite handsome. Some of the brass pieces bore decorations just as their European counterparts did, but the liberty cap on a pole and the sunburst replaced the royal cypher or royal arms. The letters ‘US' and ‘UC' (for United Colonies) also appear on some guns and so do the maker's name, the place, and even the date of manufacture.'-59-60.

Part IV:

Iron and Paint:

‘As in the British service, oak was preferred for building carriages in America. When they could not obtain oak, however, Continental artificers used other hardwoods including walnut and chestnut. Elm and beech were recommended for wheels, but hickory appeared on occasion as did almost any other tough wood when necessity required it.'

‘When it came to color, however, American carriages seem to have offered a variety of hues unparalleled by any other nation. The iron gun tubes were almost always painted black, and the hardware of the carriages also was painted black as a general rule. In some instances, though, the mountings seem to have received a coat of red lead. This may have been caused by a paint shortage, for it was the wooden elements that offered the real variety of colors. At the beginning many of them seem to have been painted gray like those of the British artillery. In 1776, for instance, General Philip Schuyler ordered sufficient materials ‘to paint 250 carriages of a lead color…' The Charles Wilson Peale portrait of Washington at Princeton shows him leaning against a gray gun carriage, and the paintings of the battle of Princeton by James Peale and William Mercer, done shortly after the event, show a similar gray carriage. At the same time, however, these paintings also illustrate a red brown carriage. This may have been done to indicate an imported Valliere System carriage or it might be an American carriage, for there is some documentary evidence to show that the Continental Artillery sometimes painted its carriages that color, too. It might even indicate a carriage that had not been painted at all, but merely oiled and allowed to weather. By 1780 there are references to painting carriages blue, perhaps under the influence of the French, who had changed to that color with the Gribeauval System, and before the end of the war in 1783 blue seems to have become standard for all American carriages.'-60

Interesting information Kevin. Thanks for posting it.

Any notes on artillery taken from the British at Saratoga? How many were captured from the French from 1759, and repurposed? These would have been Valliere.

Were any of these French guns at Ticonderoga? Or were they all British manufacture?

Again, what about the "Swedish" Hessian guns captured at Trenton?

Supplying such a variety of guns must have been a nightmare for Knox. The quick fix would have been re-boring to 6 pounder.
Thinking about the math makes my brain hurt. . It's been a few years…decades.
But, supposing a French 4 pounder is really a 5 pounder in the English system. Since the weight of the spherical cannon ball depends on the volume, the increased volume (V = 4/3 π r^3) is not all that much larger.
I shall leave the calculation of how much brass would have to be bored as an exercise for the student. (See above about brain hurting…)
A robust barrel, and the Valliere (Swedish? Hessian?) guns seemed to be, could take this internal shaving.

It's too bad Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, was a Tory. He could have worked out the Laws of Thermodynamics working for the USA, instead of Bavaria. His studies were based on meticulous heat measurements while boring out cannons.

The calibers available for use by the armies were the following:

Brass:

Long Guns:

1-pounders.
3-pounders.
4-pounders.
6-pounders.
9-pounders.
12-pounders.
24-pounders.

Howitzers:

5.5-inch.
8-inch.

Mortars:

4.5-inch.
5.5-inch.
8-inch.
10-inch.
13-inch.
16-inch.

Iron:

Long guns:

1-pounder.
2-pounder.
3-pounder.
4-pounder.
6-pounder.
9-pounder.
12-pounder.
18-pounder.
24-pounder.
32-pounder.

Carronades:

18-pounder.

Howitzers:

3.5-inch.

Mortars:

13-inch.

The above information was found on page 115 of The Book of the Continental Soldier by Harold Peterson.

Other information on artillery of the War of the Revolution can be found in:

-The Light 6-pounder Battalion Gun of 1776 by Adrian Caruana.

-Grasshoppers and Butterflies: The light 3-pounders of Pattison and Townsend by Adrian Caruana.

The original French 4 pounders are mounted into the walls of one of the buildings of the old Frankford Arsenal in Philadelphia. I've seen a gun tube engraved with being captured at Saratoga. At Yorktown there use to be a Hessian 6 pounder (not sure where it was captured). I believe Saratoga Battle Field Park has several original AWI gun tubes.

John, there are three types of people, those who are good at math and those who aren't.

A robust barrel, and the Valliere (Swedish? Hessian?) guns seemed to be, could take this internal shaving.

The Valliere gun tubes were indeed robust. And they were too heavy to be used successfully as field artillery.

The Prussian field artillery pieces, developed and produced in the 1740s, used 100 pounds of metal for every pound of shot, the Austrian Lichtenstein System of 1753 used 120 pounds, and the new Gribeauval System of 1763 used 150 pounds as Gribeauval believed that both the Prussian and Austrian pieces were not robust enough and Gribeauval's pieces had a longer gun tube life than either the Prussian or Austrian pieces.

As for the Valliere System, the 4-pounder weighed 563 kilograms, the 8-pounder 1028, and the 12-pounder 1566. In comparison, the 'three calibers' of the new Gribeauval field artillery weighed 290 kilgrams for a 4-pounder, 580 for an 8-pounder, and 880 for a 12-pounder. Gribeauval effectively halved the gun tube weight for his new field artillery system.

For weight of ammunition the French 4-pound shot weighed 2 kilograms, the 8-pound shot 4 kilograms, and the 12-pound shot 6 kilograms. Using 2.2 as the conversion rate from kg to pounds, the 4-pound shot weighed 4.4 pounds, the 8-pound shot 8.8 pounds, and the 12-pound shot 13.2 pounds.

The standard calibers established for the French artillery were 4-, 8-, and 12-pounders.