Weird Island

27. GETTYSBURG GUN: A Cannonball Trapped in Time

Episode Summary

In the entrance of the Rhode Island state house there is a cannon with a cannonball stuck in its muzzle. And for 100 years, no one checked to see if that cannon was filled with explosive gunpowder. To Visit: Rhode Island State House | 82 Smith St, Providence, RI 02903

Episode Notes

In the entrance of the Rhode Island state house there is a cannon with a cannonball stuck in its muzzle. And for 100 years, no one checked to see if that cannon was filled with explosive gunpowder.

To Visit: Rhode Island State House | 82 Smith St, Providence, RI 02903

Episode Source Material:

Episode Transcription

If you were to visit the Rhode Island Statehouse, you might notice something in the foyer of the main entrance as you walk in. There’s a large cannon on a carriage - or on wheels. Now, there’s a lot to see in the State House, so you could be forgiven if you were to walk right by it without looking too closely. But if you were to look closely, you’d notice something a little bit unusual about this cannon.
Right in the muzzle, or the mouth, of the cannon is a cannonball, half sticking out. This cannon was last fired in 1863 during the Civil War battle at Gettysburg, PA. And on that day, a Confederate cannon took a shot across the field and hit this Union cannon dead on.. It’s pretty unlikely that a shot would be so accurate, considering these cannons could have been as far as a mile or more away. Cannon fire went pretty far. And this direct shot, it dented the muzzle. So when the Union Artillery men tried to load a new cannonball in, that ball got permanently stuck. And it’s been stuck ever since.
Now if that isn’t weird enough, there’s something else.
100 years later, in 1962, someone was thinking about that gun. And they said, you know, I think there’s still a powder bag, down in the barrel, and sure enough, there was. A highly explosive bag of powder was still in the muzzle.
Yep, that’s right. For 100 years, that cannon, with a cannonball in it, was full of highly explosive black gunpowder! And I didn’t know this, but it turns out that gunpowder doesn’t get less explosive over time. Oh no, it gets more sensitive and more dangerous as time goes on. So it’s incredibly lucky that after all of that time, there was never an explosion.
Hi, I’m Sara. And you’re listening to Weird Island. Each week, I’ll be telling you about the strangest stories I can dig up from my tiny little state of Rhode Island. And this week, I’ll be joined by special guest Stephen Evangelista, who is going to help me tell the story of Rhode Island’s Gettysburg Gun and the men who fought in Battery B First Rhode Island Light Artillery.
I have to confess something - topics that have to do with wars, they… kind of freak me out. In school, I had a hard time learning about wars and battles. They just felt so massive, and I would get easily overwhelmed by the scale and magnitude. I couldn’t keep battles straight or succinctly communicate what happened when or why it happened. So, today, I have a special guest on who helped me conquer my apprehension by reminding me that wars--they’re fought by people. Real people, just like me and you, with stories and histories and feelings of their own. And that’s something I can wrap my head around.
There were thousands of letters, and all of these diary pieces to read through. I never set out to write the book, formally, I just sort of had access to this collection and as I started to read this stuff, I could see these stories behind the battery emerging, the stories of their lives. Not just of the battery and what they did, but the stories of their lives. It’s not the unit itself that’s important, it’s the people that were in it. That’s what makes anything anything. It’s the people.
I won’t be telling you the whole story of the Civil War, but the story of that cannon that stands in the statehouse and the men who stood right beside it in battle on the day it got hit. Those men were part of a military unit called Battery B, First Rhode Island Light Artillery. And Stephen, who’s joining me today, is the author of a book, called “Our Story,” all about the individuals who served in that battery.
But before we get into the story, if you’re like me you might be wondering - what exactly does Battery B mean?
So Battery B First RI Light artillery was an actual military unit during the Civil War. And there were actually several batteries that came out of Rhode Island that were all part of the first RI Light Artillery. So there was Battery A, There was Battery B, There was Battery C. In fact Rhode Island was known for producing the best artillery units
And a Battery is essentially a military unit that specializes in manning cannons. But those cannons, they were referred to, confusingly, as guns. When you say guns during the civil war, you’re not talking about rifles, you’re talking about cannons. And they say, Oh well he was carrying a gun. Well a gun is actually a cannon and in this case, each battery consisted of six guns or six cannons and it took eight men to man one gun.
Yes, 8 men would operate one single cannon - and all in, Battery B consisted of 139 individuals, whose job it was to support the infantry, or the soldiers, by going into battle first to break down the enemy’s defenses.
They would try to knock down buildings. They would try to knock down defenses before the infantry would step up. So they were trying to really weaken the other side before the human beings would step out onto the field, and most of them got annihilated. And that was sort of their job.
And they were in every major engagement of the Civil War, from Fredericksburg to Antietam to Gettysburg to Reem station. All the way through to the Appomattox courthouse, which was where, in the end, Robert E Lee surrendered the Confederate Army to General Grant. And Battery B was on the road when the Confederate surrender flag dipped below their flag.
But it was at the famous Battle of Gettysburg that this cannon, cannon number four out of six, would fire its last shot and make history. And not just because of that cannonball stuck in the muzzle.
Now, Gettysburg was an incredibly important moment in the Civil War. That three day battle involved the largest number of casualties of the entire war -- and the Civil War in total was the deadliest and costliest war fought on American soil. And Gettysburg is described as the turning point because of the Union’s decisive victory.
Well the Battle of Gettysburg was significant for many reasons, and of course I’m not an expert on Gettysburg, there are thousands of books written on Gettysburg, the three day battle. But if you ask historians, that’s the furthest point north that the Confederate army made during the course of the Civil War. Gettysburg they called the high water mark of the war, because that’s the furthest point that the Confederate Army made north. And after that, they never made it that far again. You know, Lee had taken his army into Antietam MD a year before, and he became more bold and took the army into PA in 1863, but really, Sara, I think when you think about Gettysburg, it really was a pivotal moment because had the Union lost that battle, I really think that the Confederate army would have continued waging war in the north, and that would have had a very different effect on the outcome of the war.
When Battery B arrived just outside of Gettysburg, they had been on the march for days.
They were marching from Falmouth VA to Gettysburg, which was about a 40 mile march.
And even the strongest of the bunch were tired, beat down. These weren’t professional soldiers. These were ordinary people who had volunteered for battle. And there are these incredible little details about who they were between the battles that really stood out to me. There was this man named Alfred Gardner, and he was one of the men who was operating cannon number four. And in his spare time, he would go on what he called “tramp” looking for rare flowers which he would press into a little book and send home to his wife. And after that march to Gettysburg, though he was exhausted and he had run out of paper and stamps to write home, he wrote in the margins of his bible that he felt cheerful, though the march had been difficult, and he wished that his wife could be there just for a moment to hear the roar of the guns and experience what he was feeling. But only if there was a fast horse to whisk her home again.
And on the morning of July 2nd, they were sort of roused from their sleep at 2am and they marched the final 8 miles into Gettysburg, and they went right into the line of battle on July 2nd and they suffered some pretty heavy casualties on July 2nd, as did the Union army and the Confederate army, and that night when they were just you know sort of recovering and both armies were for the moment on both sides of the field and they had stopped firing, they knew that the battle wasn’t over. And so when July 3rd dawned, many of the men wrote in their diaries that it was really, really quiet. Really quiet. And it was hot, it was humid, it was drizzling a little bit. And these men were just waiting. It was a stillness - they said it was a stillness unto death. They knew something ominous was going to happen and it wasn’t over yet. It was like two people staring at each other, like a staring contest. And no one’s going to blink. And so about 1:00 in the afternoon, a signal blast from a Confederate artillery went off and they knew, everybody knew “That’s the signal gun. That’s how this battle is going to begin.”
And all at once, more than 100 Confederate guns opened fire. And right in the middle of the Union line stood Battery B.
There’s a place called the Copse of Trees, and it was where Robert E Lee had directed his artillery to aim and concentrate their fire. It was the center of the Union line, and Battery B was right next to the copse of trees, right to the left of those trees. And on that day, July 3rd, they only had four guns on the field, not six, because they didn’t have enough men to man six guns. And the fourth gun, which was closest to the trees, was being commanded by SGT Straight.
Straight had joined Battery B two years prior, in September of 1861 - just nine months after his son was born and his wife passed away during childbirth.
That day at Gettysburg, he was joined by Gardner, who I mentioned earlier, who was not only part of his crew, but his close friend and his tent mate. They were also joined by a man named William Jones and a number of other men, some from Battery B and some from another battery because they didn’t have enough men.
And during the course of that artillery barrage, a confederate shell actually traveled over the mild expanse of the field and it struck SGT straight’s gun right on the top of the muzzle. And it happened right when Alfred Garner was ready to load a round into that muzzle. And when that detonation happened, that explosion basically decapitated William Jones and it ripped the left arm and shoulder from Alfred Gardener. And in that moment when the smoke cleared, SGT Straight thought maybe his crew had actually fired a round, but he realized quickly that that wasn’t the case. And so he ran up to Alfred Gardener, who was by then sitting against the cannon’s wheel, with his left arm and shoulder nearly torn off. And he bent down, and he really couldn’t do anything. He really couldn’t render any aid. It was going to be a fatal wound. All he could do was listen to what Alfred Gardener was going to say. Now it’s really loud, and there was smoke and all kinds of chaos, and through all that Gardener said, “Tell my wife I died happy. And give her this bible.” And think about that for a moment. Here’s this man, he’s bleeding to death. And all he wants is that message to get back to his wife that he died happy. And he, with his right arm, his good arm, he lifted that arm and he shook the hand of SGT Straight and he said goodbye. And then witnesses in their letters say, even over the roar of all those guns going off, they could hear Alfred Gardener say, “Glory be to God. Alleluia, Amen. I am happy.” and he died.
Now the gun itself was still ready to be fired, so SGT Straight grabbed the solid shot, and he tried to ram it down the barrel. But before that, he ripped it off this thing called a ?? and he took the powder and he threw that down the barrel, and he tried to ram this solid ball into the tube so it could be fired. But what was happening was that because that muzzle was dented, as he was trying to shove the ball in there and the gun was so hot from use, the gun started to fuse around that ball.
Straight grabbed an axe to try to jam the cannonball into the cannon, and today if you go visit the cannon, you’ll see the marks left by the axe. But just as he began doing that, the cannon was hit again, this time in the spoke of the wheel. And in the aftermath the largely destroyed cannon was retired off the field.
But while the cannon had fired it’s last shot, its role in the battle wasn’t over.
As Battery B was retreating from the field, the Confederate artillery officers actually could witness them leaving the field, and they thought, “Oh, well, we’ve had an effect on the Union line,” and at the same time, the Union artillery officers commanded that all of the guns on the union line fall silent. And part of that was that they were going to bring up fresh artillery batteries. But from the auditory perspective of the Confederates, they thought, “Ah, we’ve had our effect. We’re going to now bring the infantry out and they’re going to now march across this field, and they’re going to punch a hole in the Union center.
This attack, launched by the Confederate Army, triggered by Battery B’s exit from the battlefield, is known today as Pickett’s Charge, and it was really the climax and defining moment of the Battle of Gettysburg. The attack resulted in over 6K Confederate casualties and marked the end of the Battle of Gettysburg, a really crucial moment for the Union in the Civil War.
And that all happened because that ball got stuck in that muzzle.
After the battle ended, SGT Straight wrote to Garner’s wife and told her Alfred had been killed. Later that month, Gardner’s half-brother arrived at Gettysburg and found Alfred’s makeshift grave, exactly where Straight said it would be. He then carried his brother’s body home and buried him in the grave that Alfred had dug for himself just days before he had enlisted.
The other man who had been killed alongside Gardner was William Jones, and Jones had enlisted under an alias. His real name was John Mahony.
And when he’s killed at Gettysburg, his mother never knew, because she never saw the name John Mahony come up in any of these death notices. And so, all these years later, after the war, the surviving battery members finally get in touch with his mom, Margaret, and they relay the story to her, that her son was dead, and she never knew it because she never knew that he had changed his name to William Jones… And so 27 years after his death, the mother finally gets the pension from her deceased son.
Straight survived the Battle of Gettysburg, but following the battle, his health deteriorated, and he died later that year.
The cannon itself never fired another shot, but it survives today and it’s known as the Gettysburg Gun.
I mentioned earlier that 100 years after the battle, someone realized this cannon was still filled with highly explosive gunpowder. And even though it had stood for 100 years without exploding, they had to be super careful when they did finally remove the gunpowder.
They were using almost 2lbs of powder. It was just a massive explosion. Today, reenactors use about 12 oz. or so. So it gives you an idea of how much more they were using, because they were pushing a projectile out for over a mile - sometimes a mile and a half. So it’s just amazing how that gun sort of didn’t explode and kill anybody while it was sitting in the Statehouse.
So the RI national guard carefully removed the gun from the RI statehouse, drilled a hole in the cannon’s tube and submerged it in an olympic sized pool and waited for all of the gunpowder to seep out, and then they brought it back up again, put it back on its original carriage, and there it sits in the RI statehouse, in the lobby, again, with the ball still lodged in the muzzle, just as it was when it was last fired, on July 3rd, under SGT Albert Straight.
Today, you can check out the cannon. You can see the fused cannonball stuck in the muzzle. The axe marks where Straight tried to jam the cannonball in. Over 39 gunshots on the carriage. And the drill hole where the National Guard extracted the gunpowder.
And all of those scars on the cannon, they’re real. They’re the marks of desperation. They’re little pieces of the stories of all of the people who came into contact with this - object, really - and made it what it is. This incredible relic.
These men weren’t professional soldiers. I think that’s the point. They were regular people. They were printers. They were students. They were policemen, they were just regular people. And they found themselves living during an extraordinary time, and they enlisted, basically they volunteered, and they sacrificed their lives for people that they didn’t know. And as it turns out, those people were us.
Thank you so much for listening. And thank you so much to Stephen Evangelista. I couldn’t have told this story without your help and incredible research. If you’re interested in learning more, I’m linking Stephen’s book, “Our Story - The Lives and Legacy of Those who Served in Battery B First Rhode Island Light Artillery” in the show notes. If you liked this episode, I’d love it if you could share it with your family and friends. Or you can email me or send me a recorded voice memo at weird rhode island @ gmail.com. See you next week as we dig up more stories about all things weird and wonderful in the little state of Rhode Island. Until next time!