For over 200 years the caissons of the United States Artillery have gone rolling along, over hill and down many a dusty trail. Ill equipped and poorly trained in the early days, it was nevertheless well led with Washington's selection of Henry Knox to command the Regiment of Artillery in 1775. Among the troops retained at the end of the Revolution was Alexander Hamilton's old Company of New York Artillery that was part of the fifty-five man guard sent under Captain Doughty to guard the stores at West Point. This honored organization became Battery F of the 4^th Artillery in 1821 and in the 20^th Century became Battery D of the 5^th Artillery Battalion.

After 1787, although organized as distinct from the infantry, artillerymen were generally used as foot troops in the early days. In addition, Samuel B. Archer's company even served as marines on Stephen Decatur's flagship.

There was a battalion of artillery of fourteen officers and 281 men, including eight musicians from 1789 until 1794 when it was incorporated into the new Corps of Artillerists and Engineers. The appointment of two cadets to each company made the Corps "a nursery" for the training of officers. This lasted until 1802.

With the value of light artillery (where all men were horse mounted) well recognized, provision was made for such a regiment in 1808. Command of the first company went to Captain George Peter then stationed at Fort McHenry in Baltimore. But forthcoming and those on hand were sold by the economy-minded Secretary of War, Dr. William Eustis. Most of the proposed light companies were armed with infantry muskets, not an easy weapon to use on horseback.

In the early years, the light artillerymen were handsomely garbed in a blue coatee with high collar, three rows of gold buttons were enhanced by gold epaulettes and a red sash. A high glazed "tar bucket" shako was surmounted by a light colored pompom tipped with red, and white breeches tucked into knee-high boots rounded out their splendid uniform.

The four regiments of artillery in service when the Civil War came were provided for in 1821 and were then, respectively, commanded by Colonels Moses Porter, Nathan Towson, Walker K. Armistead and John R. Fenwick. It was provided that one company of each regiment be equipped as light artillery but nothing was done about it until 1838. Secretary of War Poinsett ordered Captain Samuel Ringgold to Carlisle to reorganize and re-equip his Battery C of the 3^rd Regiment. Another light battery was added to each regiment and, in an astounding upsurge of good judgment, Congress provided that the captains would not come from civil life but that the senior first lieutenants of each regiment would be promoted.

As early as 1824, President Monroe had pointed out that the geographical dispersal of the artillery was bad for discipline and efficiency. Consequently, an artillery school for practice was established at Fort Monroe to which companies would be sent for training and drill. By 1858 two batteries from each regiment were assigned there on rotation. In 1839 a company in each of the 1^st, 2^nd, and the 4^th were mounted under the far-sighted policy of Secretary Joel R. Poinsett whose contributions were many. This was accomplished over opposition, not to efficiency in itself but because it cost money. But in actual fact, these were not real "light companies" for all men were not separately mounted, the cannoneers rode on the carriages, thus they were actually "field" artillery. Birkhimer indicates that prior to the Civil War probably only Battery C of the 3^rd Artillery was ever a true light battery.

In the war with Mexico most of the artillery operated on foot. From their blue uniforms with the red stripes down the trousers, Lieutenant Colonel Child's artillery battalion acquired the nickname "redlegged infantry." In the course of the war the artillery was so successful, especially the light batteries, that another company from each regiment was mounted, making eight in all. From then on the policy was a crazy quilt pattern and it must have been most expensive to mount, dismount and re-mount the various companies at will or whim. Then Secretary of War Conrad decided that mounted artillery was good for "regular war" but not for frontier garrison duty. Just how they could be kept ready for "regular war" if not retained for training he never explained.

Although it was accepted that frontier service destroyed the efficiency of mounted batteries, and that it was better to post them in pairs for training purposes. New Year's Eve of 1860 found them scattered far and wide. Two were in Texas, one each in Utah and the Washington Territory. Of the four in the Department of the West, one had been mounted as cavalry and was not restored as light artillery until June of 1861.

By December 31, 1860, each regiment of artillery had a colonel, lieutenant colonel, and two majors just like the mounted and foot troops. There was an enlisted staff of a sergeant-major, quartermaster-sergeant and twenty-four each of artificers and musicians. But there were twelve companies instead of ten, each with a captain, two first lieutenants, and one second lieutenant. Three staff NCOs, four sergeants, eight corporals and sixty-two privates made up the enlisted personnel of ten of the companies while each of the two light batteries had seventy privates.

Prior to the Civil War, all batteries of artillery were in "instruction mode."  In an effort for conserve what little money the War Department received from the Congress, the amount of men, guns, and horses attached to each battery were reduced by one-third.  The numbers above are reflective of the reduction.  A fully staffed battery of artillery would be assigned six guns, 149 horses (plus the five horses owned by the officers), five officers, and 147 enlisted men.  The two light batteries would have 221 horses (plus the five horses owned by the officers) and 159 enlisted men.

The colors of the arm were of yellow silk with crossed cannon in the center above which were the letters “U.S.” with the regimental numbers below. The fringe was yellow while the cords and tassels were red and yellow mixed.

Of the 745 line officers, 212 were artillerymen. The First Regiment traces its origin to the Old Battalion of Artillery of 1789. After taking part in the Battle of Miami in 1790 it was split up, each of the four batteries being assigned to one of the four sub-legions. By 1794 they were reunited and organized into a "Corps of Artillerists and Engineers" but after eight years were separated from the Engineers and formed into a regiment under Colonel Henry Burbeck. In 1812 it was converted into the Corps of Artillery.

Despite its valiant deed in the War of 1812, the Corps was reduced in 1815 and again in 1821. In the latter year the Corps, Ordnance and the Light Artillery regiment were united and divided into four regiments. Ordnance was separated again in 1832.

The 1^st Artillery as of 1860, organized in 1821, contained many officers and men with battle experience. Through the years it had seen service in Florida and also enjoyed the pleasant, quiet of garrison life along the Atlantic.

During the Maine boundary dispute in 1840 an officers' mess was organized and to which officers of the Coldstream Guards, 7^th Hussars and other British regiments were invited. While waiting for war between their countries they held joint parties, dances and sleigh rides. There were horse-drawn sleigh races at Plattsburg, one of which, at least, resulted in the participants being charged with horse racing on Sunday but in all, the fraternizing did much to bring about mutual understanding.

In the field in the Mexican War and against the Seminoles, it was commended in every engagement in which it took part; below the border it lost twenty percent of its complement. After the war with Mexico the demands of the service took the 1^st Artillery, often by separate companies, from New York to Fort Washington, Maryland, to the gulf states, to California, Oregon and Texas. In 1847 Battery I had become a light battery.

In the war to come this venerable regiment would fire the first shot, at Fort Sumter, and the last artillery shell in April of 1865. One of its members would lower the flag, the first lowered under fire at Sumter and one of its officers, Lieutenant Loomis L. Langdon, would raise the Stars and Stripes over the Confederate Capitol four years later. The rammer staff and palmetto device on the regimental crest commemorates the defense of Fort Sumter by Batteries E and H while the hand and torch on the coat of arms preserve the memory of its service at Fort Pickens, Fort Jefferson and Key West.

As 1860 turned into 1861 and the last year of peace turned into one of war, the scattered regiment had four companies in Texas, one in Kansas and seven in the Department of the East with its headquarters at Baltimore.

John L. Gardner was the lieutenant colonel. A faithful soldier of forty-seven years service, he, with John R. Vinton, had held evening Bible meetings and delivered Sunday sermons in the Seminole War days. Now pressing sixty-eight years of age, he had just been relieved of the command of Fort Moultrie by Secretary of War John B. Floyd. Gardner had dared to suggest that the decrepit old fort should be repaired lest its sorry state be too tempting to eager secessionists.

The other field officers were Majors Erasmus D. Keyes, military secretary to General Scott, and Robert Anderson.

Organized like the other three under the Act of 1821, the 2^nd Artillery was substantially made up of troops from the old Northern Military Division. Due to the conflict between the President and the Senate as to whether or not the colonel must come from officers then in the army, the regiment had no one of that rank for a period covering parts of three presidential administrations! In honoring its past, "Chippewa," and "Lundy's Lane," appear upon its standard.

During the Nullification Crisis of 1832 the portion of the regiment in garrison at Charleston, South Carolina, was alerted for a possible attack. Three batteries were rushed into Alabama, the year following to support the government's policy of ousting white squatters illegally on land ceded to the Indians. Then the State government threatened to drive Federal troops out. In the catastrophe of Dade's Massacre, while en route from Fort Brooke, to Fort King, on December 28, 1835, Captain Gardner, Lieutenants Basinger and Henderson, of Battery C, had fallen. After an extended period in fever-laden Florida, where nine officers and 103 men had died in battle or from wounds or disease, the regiment was moved.

In 1839 James Duncan's Battery A, which later attained fame in the Mexican War, was detailed for training as a light battery. In 1860 it was under William F. Barry, and would soon win added laurels under John C. Tidball. It was the first flying battery of the Civil War, and the only one to wear the old horsehair plumes as part of its field equipment. In 1847 Batteries L and M were added with the latter becoming an additional light company. In 1860 Roland's old Battery M, was under Henry J. Hunt, who would earn highest fame but less noticeable gratitude as Chief of Artillery of the Army of the Potomac.

In "Bleeding Kansas" an entire battery was sent to look for a lone escaped slave while Battery B and part of Battery L were rushed from Fort Monroe, to Harper's Ferry, during the John Brown episode. By 1860 one company was in Texas, four in the West and seven in the East with headquarters at Fort Monroe. In late 1860, for some reason, three batteries were sent to various arsenals in the South while Battery B was moved to Texas. It is said that it was at the burial of a man from this unit, on the Peninsula in 1862, that Daniel Butterfield's "Taps" was first used as a requiem.

The field officers, under Colonel Matthew M. Payne, Lieutenant Colonel Justin Dimick, Majors Harvey Brown, and Martin Burke, were post commanders.

The 3^rd Artillery, also dating from 1821 came largely from companies of the old Southern Military Division. The "Swamps and Snakes" of the Everglades proved more lethal than bullets but seven officers and 113 died from disease. Part of it was at Charleston, during the Nullification Crisis, and Battery B lost Captain U. S. Frazser, Lieutenants Mudge, and Keais, and thirty-one enlisted men in Dade's Massacre in 1835. For the first time ever the entire regiment was mustered together at Fort Christmas, Florida on December 31, 1837.

The regiment fought in the Mexican War. At Palo Alto, the renowned Samuel Ringgold, of Light Battery C was mortally wounded, and command passed to Lieutenant Randolph Ridgley, who died by accident a few months later. Ringgold's battery had been mounted in 1838 and became the most famous of them all. Long noted for its smartness of dress, precision of drill, and soldierly qualities, thousands of people thronged the banks of the Patapsco River to be thrilled by its spanking maneuvers on the parade ground of historic Fort McHenry.

The beau ideal horse artilleryman, Ringgold, after passing to his soldier's death, was brought home and reinterred just before Christmas of 1846, amid ceremonies said to have been the most imposing military spectacle ever seen in Baltimore. Thousands visited his bier to drop a sympathizing tear upon his catafalque. A scientist as well as a soldier, he invented a number of items useful to the military. His funeral was a melancholy pageant with flags shrouded in mourning while the firing of cannon of the Eagle Artillery, added "no little to the sublimity of the mournful occasion."

During the Mexican War, Battery E was mounted as a horse battery and served under some of the best: Braxton Bragg, George H. Thomas, and John F. Reynolds. Then Thomas W. Sherman, relieved Bragg who took Ringgold's famed Light Battery C. Other units also served with distinction along the dusty road to Mexico City.

In 1849 Battery E, dismounted in 1847, again became the second light battery, when it was dismounted in 1851 and remounted again two years later.

On the 21^st of December 1853, Headquarters, staff, band and six batteries embarked on the commodious steamer San Francisco for California via Cape Horn. About nine in the evening of the 23^rd a terrible wind whipped up seas so mountainous that the ship became uncontrollable. In the morning, a huge wave swept much of the superstructure from the upper deck into the sea. Among those lost were Major John M. Washington, Captain and Mrs. Francis Taylor, Lieutenants Horace B. Field, and Richard H. Smith, Colonel Gates' son, some 180 soldiers as well as many civilians. In this terrible crisis, the ship's officers, those of the Army, Lieutenant F. K. Murray, USN, and the crew set examples of heroism and leadership as she was kept afloat by their desperate efforts.

On that Christmas Day the ship spoke to the Napoleon, which sailed on. At Boston, she gave the authorities the first knowledge of the difficulties of the San Francisco. On the 26^th another vessel was sighted but was lost in the dark, probably off the Delaware coast. Men now began to die from exposure and exhaustion. On the 28^th the bark Kilby stood by, threw a line over and took off 108 passengers. When a new storm blew up, the hawser parted and after a fruitless two day search the Kilby gave up and sailed for New York. On the morning of the 31^st the British ship Three Bells of Glascow lay to but the storm prevented her from helping the stricken San Francisco. On January 3^rd, the Antarctic of Liverpool came up and in the next two days removed 142 survivors whom she took to Liverpool. The Kilby transferred hers to the Lucy Thompson, bound for New York to which port the Three Bells also headed. The San Francisco was never heard of again.

On April 5, 1854, the stout 3^rd Artillery tried again when part sailed on the Illinois, and arrived at San Francisco a month later. The Falcon with four batteries almost repeated the experience of the San Francisco a month later, but was able to make it to Hampton Roads. The Illinois took them to California where they were joined by the rest of the regiment which had marched overland by way of Salt Lake City. In the five years of intensive Indian operations which followed, honors came to men whose names are high among the Civil War greats: H. G. Gibson, Edward O. C. Ord, and John F. Reynolds. Four batteries were moved up in support of Camp Pickett upon the occupation of San Juan Island, when it appeared that a third war with Great Britain might be in the making. But General Scott arrived in time to save the day.

In 1860 the 3^rd Artillery was spread wide with nine batteries on the Pacific Coast, two at Fort Monroe, and one in the Department of the West. Its headquarters were at San Francisco. Ringgold's old Battery C was commanded by Captain Edward O. C. Ord, born in Cumberland, Maryland, just over the blue ridges of the Alleghanies from the former's native Hagerstown. Bragg's old Battery E was now the White Horse Battery under Thomas W. Sherman.

Second in command was Lieutenant Colonel Charles S. Merchant, a survivor of the San Francisco tragedy. At the time of his death in 1879 he would be the senior officer by date of original commission. Major George Nauman would die in mid-1860 after forty years of service.

Recently promoted major, John H. Winder, was said to be still smarting under the adverse comments about his father's leadership at the Battle of Bladensburg, back in 1814. The "Rebel War Clerk" Jones would refer to him as a "stout gray haired old man from Maryland, applying to be made a (Confederate) general." As Commissary-General of Prisoners in the East, he gained an unenviable reputation and was probably saved from the hangmen's noose by his timely demise in February 1865. The behavior of Winder's imported secret police in Richmond, and his treatment of Union prisoners brought many complaints from the kind-hearted citizens of the Virginia capital.

The 4^th Artillery was also set up under the Act of 1821 and four years later Colonel Fenwick was ordered to set up an "Artillery School of Instruction" at Fort Monroe. In its six years on the Gulf Coast the regiment lost sixteen officers and over 200 men by disease, mostly from yellow fever, and suffered additional deaths from cholera on the Black Hawk Expedition of 1832. It served in the hunting grounds of the Creeks and the Seminoles, as well as in the west. Upon the death of Colonel Fenwick in 1842 the seventy-eight year old John De B Walback succeeded to command.

Batteries B and G were the light batteries. The first had been well trained by Captain John M. Washington who, as a major of the 3^rd Artillery, was lost on the San Francisco. In 1846 the regiment had marched some 700 miles from Carlisle, and sailed nearly twice that far to take part in the Mexican War. Lieutenant John Paul Jones O'Brien distinguished himself at Buena Vista, where Light Battery B lost some guns he affectionately called his Bulldogs. Later recovered by Simon Drum's Light Battery G, two are now preserved at West Point. Drum was killed in the war. Both of these batteries would earn laurels at Gettysburg, the former under Lieutenant James Stewart, one of its sergeants on the eve of the Civil War, the latter under Lieutenant Bayard Wilkeson, son of New York Tribune correspondent Samuel Wilkeson. Lieutenant O'Brien is sometimes mistakenly believed to have been the writer of the song "Benny Haven, Oh!," long sung at West Point in memory of that gentleman's off-limits establishment at Highland Falls, where errant cadets gathered around the flowing bowl.

In 1851, Battery B had been mounted on mules for service against the Indians and had been called the "jackass cavalry" by some irreverent foot troops. When some of the less proficient riders were bucked off they were after referred to as the "flying battery." Battery F, would be among the first troops called to the east as the Civil War came. With its headquarters at Fort Randall, seven batteries were in the West, three in Utah, and two at Fort Monroe.

The seventy year old Lieutenant Colonel John Munroe, second in command, was a kindly man with a sense of humor. One whose ready flow of anecdotes made him a welcome companion. Every morning was set aside for regimental business only, but after the day's work was done he devoted his time to personal enjoyment. Somewhat on the convivial side, when he felt the desire for a little more to drink, he always took it, he said.

The 4^th's senior major, Giles Porter, one of the many noteworthy real characters of the Army, had been on leave since 1858. Sarcastic but amusing, somewhat eccentric, he nevertheless had a sardonic sense of humor. On one occasion, he had told a sergeant who was riding a difficult mount that he rode it like a beer barrel. Mounting the horse to show how it should be handled, the major was promptly hurtled through the air with the greatest of ease. Porter was proud of his dun-colored mustache which curled at each end to the point of endangering his eyes while his enormous sword, trailing far behind him threatened the unwary feet of any who passed by. Well versed in military law and an expert in legal tactic, he once dragged out his own court martial for over six months. One wonders why, with such talent he bothered to employ the Texas lawyers who were also skilled at confusing the issues. Major William W. Morris was at Fort Ridgely, Minnesota.

From: Ness, Jr., George T.  The Regular Army on the Eve of the Civil War.  Baltimore, MD: Toomey Press, 1990.