Napoleon 12-Pounder

Origins

Before the 1850s a field battery carried two different kinds of piece: guns, which fired solid shot on flat trajectories, and howitzers, which lobbed explosive shell. Louis-Napoléon, Emperor Napoleon III and a serious student of artillery, sponsored a single 'gun-howitzer' that could do both, and the French canon-obusier de 12 of 1853 made the idea work. The United States Army, impressed by French reports, adopted its own version in 1857 as the 'light 12-pounder gun,' universally called the Napoleon. It was only beginning to enter service when the American Civil War broke out in 1861, and within two years it had become the standard smoothbore of both armies.

Design & Construction

The Union Napoleon is a bronze tube of 4.62-inch bore, about 66 inches long and weighing roughly 1,200 pounds, smooth-surfaced with a swelled muzzle and no reinforcing rings; it rode a standard wooden field carriage with 57-inch wheels, drawn with its limber and ammunition chest by a team of six horses. Bronze was preferred to iron because it gave warning — bulging rather than bursting — before failure. The gun fired four kinds of ammunition, all fixed to wooden sabots with the powder bag: solid shot to about 1,600 yards at five degrees' elevation; common shell, a hollow ball with a fuze; spherical case or shrapnel, a thin shell packed with musket balls; and canister, a tin can of 27 iron balls that turned the gun into a giant shotgun at under 400 yards, double-loaded at point-blank range. A gun detachment was eight men under a gunner, and a well-drilled crew could fire two or three aimed rounds a minute.

Combat Use

Northern foundries — Ames, Revere Copper, Miles Greenwood and others — cast more than a thousand Napoleons, while the Confederacy, short of copper, made about five hundred at Tredegar and smaller works, some in iron and many with a distinctive straight muzzle. Rifled guns like the 3-inch Ordnance Rifle outranged the Napoleon, but in the broken, wooded country where most Civil War battles were fought, range mattered less than weight of fire at close quarters, and many gunners preferred the smoothbore. The Napoleon's canister broke Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg in July 1863 and tore apart countless assaults from Shiloh to Franklin; infantry advancing with the Springfield Model 1861 against a line of Napoleons faced something close to a wall of iron. Cavalry of both sides, armed with the Model 1860 Light Cavalry Saber and the Sharps Rifle, learned to stay clear of them.

Legacy

The Napoleon was the last great smoothbore field gun: rifled steel breech-loaders made it obsolete within a decade of Appomattox. It remains the iconic cannon of the Civil War, and hundreds of originals survive, most visibly on the battlefield parks of Gettysburg, Antietam and Shiloh, where they mark battery positions to this day. Its French parentage links it to the artillery of the Napoleonic Wars tradition, and full-size reproductions fire live in reenactment and North-South Skirmish Association competition; original tubes with foundry marks and inspector's stamps are prized, and costly, collector pieces.