The Rebel Bomb Brothers And Others Like Them

By Carole E. Scott

Behind the front lines, men like the bomb brothers, Gabriel James Rains (1803-1881) and George Washington Rains (1817-1898), played a significant role in giving the Confederacy a chance to win the war. Gabriel built land and naval mines. George manufactured gunpowder.

Gabriel and George were born in North Carolina. Both were West Point graduates, Gabriel in 1827 and George in 1842. Gabriel remained a U.S .army officer until he resigned to join the Confederate army. He had served as an infantry officer in both the Second Seminole War and the Mexican War. George, who served in both the Corps of Engineers and in artillery and had taught chemistry, mineralogy, and geology at West Point, resigned his commission in 1856 to become president of an iron works in New York state. While Gabriel was designing what may have been the Confederacy's most important defensive weapon, torpedoes, George was solving its gunpowder (black powder) problem.

George observed that, “The entire supply of gunpowder in the Confederacy at the beginning of the conflict was scarcely sufficient for one month of active operations, and not a pound was being made throughout its limits. To enter upon a great war without a supply of this essential material, and without effective means of procuring it from abroad, or of manufacturing it at home was appalling.”

Historian James M. McPherson calls Josiah Gorgas, chief of the Confederacy’s Ordnance Bureau, Munroe St. John, head of the Niter and Mining Corps, and George Rains, superintendent of the Augusta Powder Works, “the unsung heroes of the Confederate war effort”. Gorgas selected George to construct an immense, state-owned industrial complex in Augusta, Georgia whose most significant component was the powder works.

In 1864, Gorgas wrote in his diary, “Where three years ago we were not making a gun, a pistol nor a saber, no shot nor shell (except at the Tredegar ironworks)—a pound of powder—we now make all these in quantities to meet the demand of our large armies.” When General Robert

E. Lee surrendered in 1865, his men had been without food for three days, but each of them had seventy-five rounds of ammunition. While the Confederacy’s need for imported gunpowder was eliminated, and a domestic armaments industry was created, its major source of armaments was Great Britain.

Desperate to protect its thousands of miles of coast and rivers, the Confederacy turned to inexpensive to build mines, all of which, whether used on land or in the water, were called torpedoes. Torpedo makers were spurred by a law passed in a secret congressional session that authorized rewards for inventors of new naval technologies, including submersibles and mines that were condemned as infernal machines by Union officers. (The Confederate Congress conducted all important business in secret sessions.)

Brigadier General John Bankhead Magruder, commander in 1862 of Confederate forces in the Virginia Peninsula, had witnessed the use of mines by Russia in the Crimean War when St. Petersburg was protected by naval mines with electric detonators. Magruder had his men mine the sands around Yorktown and its streets and houses. When ordered to evacuate Yorktown, Gabriel had his infantrymen bury on their evacuation route to Williamsburg four, powder filled, artillery shells with detonators attached. An advance of Union cavalry came to a halt after its horses’ hooves caused them to explode. Subsequently, Federal troops made stomping Confederate prisoners march in front of them.

As Union troops moved through deserted Yorktown, its streets erupted in fire as artillery shell mines were set off. Wires connecting such things as carpet bags and barrels of flour to mines also victimized Union troops. Gabriel said such tactics were no worse than the Union’s indiscriminate bombardment of Yorktown’s innocent men, women, and children. Gabriel said he was willing to use a more sensitive primer he invented only because the South was being invaded by an army of abolitionists with the avowed purpose of extermination.

After the Battle of Seven Pines, General Robert E. Lee suggested Gabriel place torpedoes in the James River, and he did. Gabriel’s experience with mines dated back to the Second Seminole War when he had the soldiers in the small, northern Florida fort he commanded plant mines around it. In 1862, he was quietly made director of the new Torpedo Bureau. As a cover, he was also made superintendent ofthe Bureau of Conscription. In 1863, he was relieved of the latter position so he could spend all his time on mines. Deception, he believed, is the art of war.

Put in charge of Coastal Defense was Mathew F. Maury, an astronomer, navy officer, historian, oceanographer, meteorologist, cartographer, author, geologist, and educator. Maury, who perfected an electrical naval torpedo, began placing torpedoes in the James River near Richmond. Maury’s torpedoes were connected to galvanic batteries ashore with salvaged telegraph wire insulated with gutta-percha. A lookout detonated the torpedo by closing the circuit when an enemy ship was over it.

An advantage of electrical torpedoes over the contact torpedoes Gabriel made to protect Confederate ports was that Confederate ships could pass through them safely. The South’s small supply of wire significantly limited how many electrical torpedoes could be constructed. A stroke of luck for Maury was a storm that washed ashore ten miles of telegraph wire the Union had placed across Chesapeake Bay that he was able to recover.

For two years Hunter Davidson, who succeeded Maury when he went abroad to acquire supplies and ships, commanded a small gunboat and was in charge of the Submarine Battery Service on the James River. For several years after the war, Maury, Gabriel, and Davidson each took credit for developing the Confederacy’s torpedoes. Confederate mines made the James virtually impassable.

Obviously, mines were a way to offset the Union’s manpower advantage, deter night attacks, and fight the blockade of the Confederacy’s ports, but Confederate as well as Union generals objected to the use of mines because it was unchristian. Confederate Secretary of War,George Randolph, finally stepped in to end an increasingly heated argument between General James Longstreet and Gabriel by drafting a series of ethical standards for the use of torpedoes. Randolph decreed that explosive devices could be used to check pursuit, defend a work, or sink aship, but they could not be used for the sole purpose of killing enemy soldiers, a position Gabriel agreed with.

As the Union’s strategy evolved into what today is called total war, and the Confederacy began to be overwhelmed by the Union’s much better equipped and supplied, larger army and vastly larger navy, opposition to the use of torpedoes evaporated. Both sides used torpedoes, but they were more important to the Confederacy. Late in the war hard pressed generals, including Longstreet and others initially opposed to using mines, asked Gabriel for more than he could provide.

Unlike many other generals, Gabriel did not view war as heroic and honorable combat. After the war he wrote that, “Each new invention of war has been assailed and denounced as barbarous and anti-Christian, yet each in its turn notwithstanding has taken its position by the universal consent of nations according to its efficiency in human slaughter.” He said that, “The subterra shell is like a sentinel who never sleeps,” and “Ironclads are said to master the world, but torpedoes master the ironclads.” He hoped that in the future weapons would so terrible that wars would cease to be fought.

Gabriel’s torpedoes’ operation and function was like today’s contact mines. His torpedoes were ignited by a primer he designed composed of 50% potassium chlorate, 30% sulfuret of antimony, and 20% pulverized glass. When a thin copper cap covering this mixture was crushed, the chemicals detonated, igniting a fuse made of gunpowder dissolved in alcohol that exploded the powder in the torpedo. His mines included the “subterra” percussion shell, the naval barrel torpedo, and the “submarine mortar” or “submarine battery,” a series of percussion mortars mounted on a submerged wooden frame. He also used the “Singer torpedo,” a glass demijohn nnaval mine, and the horological torpedo, a time bomb.

Naval mines either floated on the water or were tethered below its surface. Gabriel’s keg torpedoes were naval mines made from beer barrels to which wooden, conical ends were added.

The most successful of the war’s torpedoes, keg torpedoes were sealed with pitch inside and out. Weights attached to their bottom caused them to float fuse-side up. Keg torpedoes contained from 35 to 120 pounds of powder. Gabriel’s land mines were made of sheet iron. Each contained a fuse that was protected by a thin brass cap covered with a beeswax solution.

The first warship sunk by a torpedo was the iron-clad U.S.S. Cairo on December 12, 1862 while it was engaged in clearing mines from the Yazoo River. This torpedo was a large demijohn enclosed in a wooden box fired with a friction primer connected by a line to a torpedo pit on shore where a lookout hid. Torpedoes detonated from shore destroyed seven of twelve Federal vessels steaming up the Roanoke River to capture Fort Branch, North Carolina on December 9, 1864. A huge field of mines delayed the loss of North Carolina’s Fort Fisher until January l5, 1865. Some of the boats engaged in laying torpedoes were destroyed by accidental explosions. A torpedo could be installed in a river by a few men in a day.

Gabriel traveled throughout the Confederacy teaching men how to construct torpedoes. He established torpedo factories in Richmond, Wilmington, Mobile, Charleston, and Savannah. Mines were placed in harbors, towns, defensive lines, supply depots, rivers, bridges, ships, railroads, and fortifications. Gabriel mined the ports of Charleston, Mobile, Savannah, and Wilmington. A boiler torpedo found in Charleston’s harbor contained 2,000 pounds of powder. 2,363 torpedoes were buried to defend Richmond.

In 1863, a Union admiral proclaimed Charleston to be impregnable. Union General Gordon said that, “Torpedoes were as abundant as blueberries; they floated ashore from the ocean, were discharged in the currents of the river and inlets, dug up in the sand or found…in the parapets of Wagner and Gregg.” In addition to mines in its harbor, during the siege of Charleston in July 1863, land mines were buried so close together and so near the surface that a soldier could not avoid stepping on one. On March 12, 1863, Federal Secretary of the Navy Gideon Wells wrote in his diary that, “The attack on Charleston will be delayed…Little is known of obstructions and torpedoes, but great apprehensions are entertained.”

Mines made it possible for the Confederacy to station fewer men in its forts. There were only about 200 Confederate soldiers stationed at Fort McAllister, which defended Savannah. Late in the war Union General W. T. Sherman reported that "the rebels' land torpedoes at Fort McAllister killed more of our men than the heavy guns of the fort." Sherman’s men attacked from the land side of the fort, whose cannons were pointed toward the water when the attack began. As happened elsewhere too, captured Confederate soldiers were made to find and dig up unexploded torpedoes.

The success of torpedoes led to the construction of torpedo boats which carried mines on the end of long spars attached to their bows. Because they sat low in the water, they were difficult to see and presented a small target for U.S. navy ships’ gunners. On multiple occasions these boats were able to detonate torpedoes against Federal ships’ sides. A submerged version of a torpedo boat, the. Hunley, was the first submarine to sink an enemy ship. Because men had died testing it, Gabriel refused to set foot in it.

In February 1863, the Confederate Congress authorized Edgar C. Singer to form a company of men for a special torpedo service attached to the Bureau of Engineers called Singer’s Submarine Corps. Its devices were protected by patents. Formed later was a Singer Secret Service Corps that helped finance Horace Hunley’s submarine. First to put Singer to work for the Confederacy constructing torpedoes was General J. B. Magruder, who was then in Texas organizing troops to recapture Galveston. On the Yazoo River a Singer torpedo sank an iron clad, the U.S.S. Baron DeKalb. The torpedo that sank it was anchored in the channel and exploded under her as she passed over it.

Gabriel, Maury, and Singer and Dr. John R. Fretwell placed mines in Mobile Bay. Corrosion soon caused many of them to become inoperable. Union ship captains reported listening in horror to the sounds of torpedoes scrapping against the hulls of their ships which did not explode. For the safety of blockade runners, the minefield on the western side of Mobile Bay was marked with buoys. On the eastern side of the bay there was a narrow, clear channel so blockade runners and other friendly ships could reach Mobile. Overlooking the clear channel was Fort Morgan, whose cannon and the Confederacy’s best ram, the C.S.S. Tennessee, were unable to prevent the Union from closing Mobile Bay in August, 1864. The U.S.S. Tecumseh hit a torpedo and was sunk with a loss of 93 men when it veered left to engage the Tennessee. Heavily fortified Mobile was not taken. Unrecorded subterra shells claimed lives for decades after the war ended.

In early August, 1864, two Confederate Secret Service agents dispatched by Gabriel were able to place a twelve pound horological torpedo aboard an explosive-laden barge at the Union’s City Point, Virginia supply depot. Fifty-eight men were killed, and 126 were injured. The estimated cost of the damage was four million dollars. Showered with dust and debris from the blast was General Ulysses Grant.

One of several innovations by Confederates was the coal torpedo invented by Thomas Courtenay of the Confederate Secret Service. It was an explosive device set in a block of cast iron dipped in beeswax and pitch and covered with coal dust and filled with black powder. On November 27, 1864 on the James River the engine room of the U.S.S. Greyhound, the floating command post of Major General Benjamin Butler that included a gilded saloon and a crew outfitted by Butler, exploded. Aboard the ship with Butler were Admiral David Porter and an Ohio Congressman. The sinking of the Greyhound was thought to have been caused by a mine, possibly one disguised as a piece of coal. Years later Porter wrote that, “In devices for blowing up vessels, the Confederates were far ahead of us, putting Yankee ingenuity to shame.”

Gabriel claimed his torpedoes sank 58 Union ships. In 1865, the U.S. Secretary of the Navy reported that torpedoes were responsible for the loss of more ships than from all other causes combined. There is no measure of the losses caused by land mines.

Like his brother, George Rains served in the Seminole and Mexican wars. During the Mexican War he was brevetted major for gallant conduct and served as aide-de-camp to General Winfield Scott. He resigned from the army in order to accept the presidency of the Washington Iron Works in Newburgh, New York. Later he became president of the Highland Iron Works in Newburgh. In 1861, he obtained a number of patents for inventions relating to steam engines and boilers.

Describing his initial activities as a Confederate colonel, George said that, "I almost lived in railroad cars devising plans, examining the country for locations, hunting up materials, engaging workmen, making contracts, and employing more or less every available machine shop and foundry from Virginia to Louisiana." First he located sources in caves in Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, and Georgia of the potassium nitrate (usually called saltpeter or niter) needed to make gunpowder and put crews to digging out the bat guano from which it was extracted. He also resorted to "mining" outhouses and chamber pots, establishing niter beds from this waste material. About 2.8 million tons more was brought in through the Union blockade. About 130 tons of Sulphur was obtained from Louisiana that had been purchased before the war to be used by planters in making sugar. The wood from which charcoal was made was acquired locally.

In Augusta, Georgia, the site of a pre-war arsenal, George supervised the construction of the Augusta Powder Works. Erected in only eight months, it was the world's second-largest powder works, It was patterned after the most up-to-date powder plant in the world, England's Waltham Abbey Works. There George produced 2,750,000 pounds of gunpowder in three years, furnishing most of the gunpowder used by the Confederate army at a cost well below the cost of imported powder. Up to 6,000 pounds a day could be produced. Augusta was selected because of its central location, its canal and river, its railroad facilities, and security from attack. Because it was never attacked, the Works continued in operation right up until the end of the war.

The Augusta Works were in operation from April 10, 1862 to April 18, 1865. When it ceased operation there may have been enough gunpowder there for up to another year’s fighting. After the war, the U.S. Army used left over powder from this plant for artillery practice that it classified as "very superior--the very best."