Grenade!: The Little-Known Weapon of the Civil War

By Joseph G. Bilby | America's Civil War  | 2 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

The naval grenades were issued to Banks’ troops in time for his next attack, which took place on June 14. Special ad hoc grenadier units were created, including one of five companies from the 4th Massachusetts and 110th New York Infantry and another of 100 men from the 28th Connecticut Infantry. The grenadiers were ordered to sling their muskets, closely follow the skirmish line up to the enemy parapets, toss their grenades and continue the fight as skirmishers.

Banks’ second attack proved to be another disaster, and Port Hudson would hold out until the fall of Vicksburg made the post untenable. During the second ill-fated Yankee attack, most of the grenadiers did not get close enough to the enemy to use their hand grenades. Those who did had some of their grenades thrown back at them. That fact, along with the special training requested by Banks, suggests they may have been issued the hand grenades invented in 1861 by William F. Ketchum. Ketchum’s grenade featured a cast iron cylinder filled with gunpowder and tapered on both ends, with one end fitted with a plunger and percussion cap to facilitate detonation on impact. A dowel with four pasteboard arrowlike vanes was inserted in the opposite end to aid with the grenade’s flight. Sometimes Ketchum grenades would not strike a hard enough object to detonate, allowing them to be tossed back.

At Vicksburg the hand grenade shoe was initially on the other foot, and Confederate defenders used them to repel General Grant’s attempt to take the town by storm on May 22. According to Confederate Maj. Gen. John H. Forney, “hand grenades were used at each point with good effect” against the Union attack. The “grenades” the Rebels used, however, were not purpose-built hand grenades like those the Union Navy supplied to their forces at Port Hudson, but 6- and 12-pound artillery rounds with short fuses that were tossed or rolled onto the attackers. Colonel Ashbell Smith of the 2nd Texas Infantry reported that “to clear the outside ditch, spherical case were used as hand-grenades,” and these were the most common Vicksburg Rebel grenades, although one source states that the Confederates also used glass bottle grenades like those employed by the Russians in the Crimean War.

As the Vicksburg siege developed and Union forces pushed their trenches and saps forward and dug mines under the city’s defenses, the Rebel use of artillery shells as improvised grenades increased. The men of the 55th Illinois countered the enemy tactic of rolling grenades over the parapet by blocking them with a board held up by bayonets at the edge of the Union trench. It worked, and only one shell hurt any of those in the ditch, bursting against one soldier and killing him.

The Confederates soon improved their grenade techniques, however, organizing artillerymen whose guns were disabled or otherwise unusable into a specialized “hand-grenade and thunder-barrel corps.” The grenadiers proved very effective in repelling Union forays.

In an attempt to counter these tactics, the Federals created their own grenadier corps, initially turning to the Navy for genuine hand grenades that were supposedly more portable and easier to pitch than artillery shells. One report, however, cited that “naval hand-grenades…from their peculiar form could not be thrown any considerable distance.”

The statement, coupled with the source of the grenades, indicates that the naval grenades in question were probably Ketchums, especially since the unexploded remains of some have been found by archeologists and relic hunters in the Vicksburg lines. Despite problems with those weapons, designated Yankee grenadiers, including Private William Lazarus of the 1st U.S. Infantry, assumed the job of bomb tossing. It was dangerous work, and Lazarus was killed after throwing only 20 grenades.

Confederate grenades were no more able to save Vicksburg than Yankee ones were able to capture Port Hudson, and the city capitulated on July 4, 1863. Improvised shell-grenades, however, continued to be widely used in other defensive situations by Rebel troops throughout the war, including at Chattanooga and during the Atlanta campaign and the siege of Mobile and, along with turpentine “fireballs” in the Confederate defense of Morris Island and Fort Sumter in 1863. Federals rolled grenades on Southerners trapped in a ditch outside Knoxville’s Fort Sanders in November 1863.

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