Grasshopper Cannon
The grasshopper was a light British 3-pounder field gun of the later eighteenth century, a short bronze barrel on a small carriage that could be pulled by a horse in shafts, dragged by its crew or broken down and carried. Its nickname is usually said to come from the way it jumped when fired, or from the look of its carriage legs. It was made to go wherever the infantry went, and it saw wide service in the American Revolution, most famously in the pair Tarleton lost at the Battle of Cowpens in 1781.
Also known as Grasshopper gun, light 3-pounder, British 3-pounder, galloper gun, 3-pdr grasshopper
Origins
In the eighteenth century European armies attached light guns to their infantry battalions to give them close fire support, a practice the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus had made famous a century before. The British Army's lightest regular field gun was the 3-pounder, which fired a round iron ball of three pounds. In the 1770s a very light 3-pounder was mounted on a new type of carriage, designed to be moved quickly over rough ground, and it came to be known as the 'grasshopper'. The name may come from the gun's habit of jumping back and up when fired, or from the carriage, which could stand on a pair of short legs like an insect's. Grasshoppers went to North America in numbers during the Revolutionary War, where there were few roads and armies often moved through forest and backcountry.
Design & Construction
The gun was a short bronze barrel weighing about two to three hundredweight, well under a quarter of a ton, mounted on a light wooden carriage. Instead of a trail and limber in the usual way, the grasshopper carriage could be fitted with shafts so that a single horse could pull it, and the crew could drag it with ropes over ground a horse could not cross. It could also be taken apart and carried on pack horses. It fired round shot to a range of several hundred yards and, at closer range, canister: a tin can of musket balls that turned the gun into a giant shotgun. A crew of about six to eight artillerymen served it.
Combat Use
Grasshoppers were used across the American campaigns, from Burgoyne's march on Saratoga to the southern war. At the Battle of Cowpens on 17 January 1781 Banastre Tarleton brought two of them, with a small Royal Artillery crew, into the attack on Daniel Morgan's lines. They fired on the American infantry through the fight, and when the British line collapsed the gunners stood by their pieces until they were cut down or captured, and both guns were taken. A later tradition claimed that these same two guns had been captured by the Americans at Saratoga, retaken by the British at Camden and then lost again at Cowpens, but historians have found no proof of this.
Legacy
Light 'galloper' guns like the grasshopper were a step toward the horse artillery of the Napoleonic Wars, in which guns and crews all moved fast enough to keep up with cavalry. The 3-pounder itself was too light to do much damage against formed troops at range, and armies gave it up for 6-pounders and later the Napoleon 12-Pounder. Grasshopper guns survive in museums in Britain and the United States.
Sources
Hughes, B. P. British Smooth-Bore Artillery: The Muzzle-Loading Artillery of the 18th and 19th Centuries. Arms and Armour Press, 1969.
Peterson, Harold L. Round Shot and Rammers. Stackpole Books, 1969.
Manucy, Albert. Artillery Through the Ages. National Park Service, 1949.
Babits, Lawrence E. A Devil of a Whipping: The Battle of Cowpens. University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
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