Because of their light weight and maneuverability mountain howitzers were placed in many coastal forts. They were intended to serve as a defense against landing forces trying to seize the fort, which could not be engaged by the large guns that were the main armament of the coastal forts. One at Fort Sumter, South Carolina was stationed there from before the war, and was manned by the 1st South Carolina Artillery as part of their service at the fort throughout the war. The howitzer never saw action as the fort was never directly attacked by a landing force.
Just prior to the Civil War mountain howitzers were stored at several of the forts in the western frontier, especially those in Texas. At Fort Davis, southeast of El Paso, the post ordinance consisted of one 6-pound field howitzer and two mountain howitzers. One was stored at Fort Stockton. However, the spokes on its wheel were loose from the extremely dry conditions in that region, and it was eventually sent back San Antonio. Two were assigned to Fort Chadbourne in central Texas. The San Antonio Barracks was the main arsenal for all of the frontier forts in the state. Twelve mountain howitzers were among the stores it contained. These seventeen mountain howitzers, and several more, were captured when the state seceded. Some would be placed in river defenses, and eight of them went with Henry Hopkins Sibley's expedition to New Mexico.(1) These two batteries would be used at the Battles of Valverde and Glorieta. Mountain howitzers would become one of the most common weapons of batteries fighting in the Trans-Mississippi Theater.
Several regular army batteries were equipped with mountain howitzers when the war began. Battery A, 1st Artillery took four as they rushed south from Fortress Monroe, Virginia to Fort Taylor, Florida in January 1861. Mountain howitzers helped to hold several of the Florida forts when most of the others in the South were soon in Confederate hands.(2) A 4-gun battery of mountain howitzers was sent, as part of an expedition from New York, to reinforce Fort Pickens, Florida. The howitzers were light, so that moving them would not require many men in a fort already out-numbered by the local secessionists. Also, their small carriages would enable them to move easily on the cramped walk-ways of the fort, or upon the sands of Santa Rosa Island. The timely arrival of this group of reinforcements staved off any attempt by the locals to seize the fort. Howitzers were a vital part of the forces that held onto Forts Pickens, Jefferson and Taylor. These forts kept several ports closed to the Confederacy which needed every port it could get its hands on.(3)
Howitzers were also used in defenses on both sides of the front lines. Many units were rushed to Washington D. C. when the war began to defend the capital. Among those units was the 7th New York Militia Regiment, which took along a mountain howitzer to defend the city.(4) One was stationed as a part of the Chain Bridge defenses leading into Washington.(5) The Confederates also used them in their defensive fortifications. Mostly because they did not have very many cannon so they had to use every one they had, including the howitzers. At St. Augustine, Florida two howitzers were a part of its defenses.(6) Fear of invasion along the larger rivers played a big part in the locations of defenses in the South. At Camp Beaumont, Texas, three miles south of the town of Jefferson, two mountain howitzers were placed at a sharp bend in the Neches River to intercept any Union invasion force.(7) In the Texas Marine Department the hastily-converted merchant ships C.S. Josiah H. Bell and the C.S. Uncle Ben each had one mountain howitzer as part of their armament.(8)
Besides being out-ranged in any cannon-to-cannon duels the howitzer was also about the same range as the standard infantry rifles of the Civil War era. The Model 1861 Springfield Rifle Musket and the Model 1853 Enfield Rifle Musket were the two most prevalent rifles of the armies on both sides in the Civil War. 700,000 Springfields were made in the U. S. in the war years and an estimated 900,000 Enfields were imported by both sides. The average infantry arms had an effective range of around 800 yards, about the same as the mountain howitzer. Some of the sharpshooter rifles, such as the hand-crafted American rifle, had an accurate range of 1,000 yards and up to 1,500 yards for the British-made Whitworth rifle. So not only could most artillery out-range the howitzer, but most infantry rifles had about the same range. This made working on a howitzer a very dangerous proposition in any heavy fighting. The mountain howitzer was designed in an era when the standard infantry arms were short range, smoothbore muskets, but it was destined to see most of it service in an era of longer-range rifles and many of its cannoneers were killed or wounded because of this disparity in performance.(9)
1. J. J. Bowden, The Exodus of Federal Forces From Texas, 1861 (Austin, TX: Eakin Press, 1986), pp. 8-9, 11-12, 22-24, 27-28.
2. Captain I. Vodges to Colonel L. Thomas, 31 January 1861, War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies [hereafter OR, with appropriate series and volume numbers] ser. I, vol. 1, (Washington, DC: U. S. Government Printing Office [hereafter GPO], 1880), pp. 357-58.
3. Colonel Harvey Brown to Lieutenant Colonel E. D. Keyes, 15 April 1861, OR, ser. I, vol. 1, pp. 377-78. Brown discusses the taking of howitzers with his expedition. Also, Captain Montgomery C. Meigs to Brigadier General J. G. Totten, 25 April 1861, OR, ser. I, vol. 1, pp. 394-400. Meigs talks about the advantages of the mountain howitzers and the saving of the forts by the last-second reinforcements.
4. William C. Davis, The Battle at Bull Run: A History of the First Major Campaign of the Civil War (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), picture #10.
5. Ronald H. Bailey, Forward to Richmond: McClellan's Peninsular Campaign (Alexandria, VA: Time Life Books, 1983), p. 25.
6. George T. Ward to Secretary of War Leroy P. Walker, 10 May 1861, OR, ser. I, vol. 1, pp. 467-69.
7. Bill Winsor, Texas in the Confederacy: Military Installations, Economy and People (Hillsboro, TX: Hill Junior College Press, 1978), p. 10.
8. Winsor, Texas in the Confederacy, pp. 66-67.
9. Earl J. Coates and Dean S. Thomas, An Introduction to Civil War Small Arms (Gettysburg: Thomas Publications, 1990), pp. 16-23, 28-29, and 34-35. In these pages Coates and Thomas describe the standard infantry muzzle- and breech-loading rifles of the Civil War.