Bombarding Charleston: Museum chronicles city's many sieges
By Bruce Smith, Associated Press
CHARLESTON, S.C. – They were the messengers of death in America's bloodiest war: special rifle ammunition that caused mayhem on Civil War battlegrounds, artillery shells designed to blow ironclads out of the water and early mines and napalm
They are one display in a new exhibit at the Charleston Museum in the city historians say has been bombarded more than any place in the Western Hemisphere.
As part of the sesquicentennial of the war that started in nearby Charleston Harbor and saw the city bombarded by Union shells for 567 days, the museum is mounting the exhibit Blasted: Assorted Projectiles and Explosives of the Civil War.
More than 100 rarely seen items from museum collections are on display through Sept. 10 chronicling the shot and shells used in the war in which historians estimate more than 600,000 died.
The items include a rare Confederate Quinlivan shot, a solid shot used against ironclads and one of only four thought to be in existence.
There's a two-chambered shell that was an early form of napalm that Union gunners lobbed at the buildings of Charleston. The shells had an explosive charge in one chamber and in the other, a mixture of coal oil, coal tar and petroleum that would splatter and burn.
"This exhibit goes into the nitty-gritty of things that are not normally discussed," said Grahame Long, curator at the museum founded in 1773 and which is the oldest in the nation.
The exhibit has more than 100 items including models of torpedoes - what we today would call mines - that were anchored in the waterways around Charleston during the Union blockade. If a ship's hull hit the detonating pin, the torpedo would explode. But they sometimes caused more problems for the Confederates than the Yankees.
"The problem is that salt water corroded them and they would break free and float aimlessly with the tide," threatening Southern vessels on the rivers and harbor, Long said. Torpedoes adapted as land mines were used to defend Morris Island where, in 1863, the black 54th Massachusetts made the attack commemorated in the movie Glory.
The most chilling display is far smaller. It shows exploded Minie balls, the rifle ammunition that could be fired at longer range on the battlefield. The round tumbled when it hit flesh, causing gaping wounds. Photos show the damage from the balls developed in the years before the war.
"During the war the weaponry outpaced the tactics" Long said. He said while weapons could fire farther, many officers still used the European method of lining their men shoulder to shoulder to mass their fire on the enemy. That made them easy targets in the open field.
Officers saw the casualties, but developing new tactics took time.
"There actually were quite a few leaders on both sides who experimented with methods of overcoming the basic problem approaching a line of infantry under fire," said Maj. Ben Richards, a historian at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was criticized early in the war for urging his men to use field fortifications - such as digging trenches and foxholes - as protection from the enemy, he said.
"But as the war went on, you see that becoming much more common," he said. Other officers, he said experimented with massing their fire, not along an entire line of attack, but at a small point in the enemy defenses to achieve a breakthrough.
Officers also tried more open order with the troops, instead of keeping them in close formations. That meant a change in thinking for officers on both sides, said Maj. Joe Scott, a colleague of Richards' in the West Point Department of History.
"Part of the issue was they didn't think they could trust soldiers by themselves to get from point A to point B," he said. "The European vision of warfare that influenced American warfare was you can't trust soldiers to do anything by themselves and you need an officer in front of them and an officer behind them."
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