The development of a viable mountain artillery cannon began in France in 1821. The French had learned in the Napoleonic Wars that regular field artillery pieces were often too cumbersome to be able to go into many mountainous regions. The Spanish had used small howitzers that proved to be superior in mobility and usefulness to the opposing French guns. Development of a French model had stalled at the end of the Napoleonic era, but by 1821 the French army began again to look for a useful mountain gun. They tested 10 existing barrels from the earlier program and 50 prototype tubes, 30 guns and 20 howitzers. A gun was designed to shoot a projectile on a flat trajectory at a target, while the howitzer fired a round in a much higher, arcing flight. A howitzer could fire over friendly forces without the need of very much of an elevation, while guns required high elevations or clear fields of fire so that they did not endanger friendly soldiers. Finally they decided to go with the howitzer system for the new cannon.
Twenty-six prototypes were then tested and modified while looking for the optimum new system. On May 17, 1828, the French Ministry of War formally added the mountain howitzer to their inventory. Within a couple of years the French had developed the standard field carriage and the pack carriage for use with the new gun. The French never used the cannon in a war, but they licensed its production in America in the early 1830s.(1) In 1836 Secretary of War Lewis Cass added the French Mountain Howitzer to the artillery system of the United States Army. By 1839-1840 howitzers were beginning to equip several American artillery batteries.(2) The Americans found ways to use the guns that had never occurred to the French, and they put it to widespread use against Indian warriors and each other.
Only three American companies are known to have produced mountain howitzer tubes, Cyrus Alger and Nathan P. Ames Companies of Boston, and Tredegar Iron Works of Richmond. Alger's foundry received the first contract to produce the mountain howitzer, and he delivered the first twelve tubes in May, 1837. Alger and Ames only produced a few barrels each year, but never in the large numbers that other types of artillery pieces were manufactured in, even in the tight budgets of the pre-Civil War years. By 1846 the ones made by Ames were only up to barrel number 25 in the army's records. In December, 1846, Ames received a contract to provide twelve new barrels to replace twelve lost in a shipwreck off the coast of Mexico in the war, but five of the "lost" barrels are known to exist today around the country. One was even found in the chapel at Fort Jay, Governor's Island, New York in its original packing crate, having never been removed or used after it was cast. The foundries also provided barrels for other buyers, such as one lost by Free-Staters in the fighting in Kansas in the 1850s, which later saw use by Missouri Confederates in the War. Two Alger barrels were also provided to the Navy for testing, and a smaller naval version would later see service with the Navy in every theater of the Civil War. Tredegar Iron Works of Richmond, the top Confederate foundry, is not known to have made any mountain howitzers before the War, but it did produce a few during the War for Southern use. Only 21 or so howitzers were known to have been made between February, 1862, and March, 1863, by Tredegar. Neither Ames nor Alger is known to have produced any barrels during the Civil War, but at least two Alger barrels have been found dated 1870 and with numbers outside of the original production series indicating that the army continued to see a use for them after the War was over. Over the production run these two companies made at least 442 mountain howitzers, 328 barrels by Alger and 114 by Ames. (3)
The following pages will detail much of the actions that the howitzer participated in throughout its career. These actions are broken down by theater and year. The combats described are exhaustive, but are probably not all inclusive.
1. Heinrich Dietz, "Guns of Interest," The Artilleryman, Spring, 1997, pp. 10-11.
2. William E. Birkhimer, Historical Sketch of the Organization, Administration, Materiel and Tactics of the Artillery, United States Army (New York: Greenwood Press, Publishers, 1968), p. 282.
3. James C. Hazlett, Edwin Olmstead, and M. Hume Parks, eds., Field Artillery Weapons of the Civil War (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1988), pp. 134-39 and 294-97.