[Music] when you go on Civil War battlefields today you see two main types of cannons some with green or blue barrels that are made of bronze or brass and some with black barrels that are made of cast or rod iron the green or blue barrel guns are the old guns the smooth BS they fire round cannon balls the black barrel guns the iron guns are rifled these are rifle pieces that that fire shells that spin as they leave the barrel and these more modern cannons are going to fire farther and more accurately um but both the guns essentially work the same way you can take a 10 or 12 lb solid piece of iron or lead shove it down the barrel with a bag of black gunpowder until the bag ends up here I'm going to puncture that bag with a pick through this thing called the vent and into the vent I'm going to put this a friction primer something that makes a spark right into there I'll attach the friction primer to a rope I'll walk outside the cannon and I'm going to look away and pull it okay and this will make a little spark this will ignite the powder bag inside and a huge explosion will issue from this cannon pushing the ordinance out of here and this gun I'll be in trouble if you fire this gun now will recoil 8 ft if you go to a reenactment today the guns as loud as they sound um were actually three times louder during the war CU they're not using as much gunpowder and they don't recoil at a reenactment but in the Civil War they did because there's a real shell in there and there's a much larger explosion and this solid piece of iron or lead can fly out of the cannon it can go a half mile or maybe even a mile maybe even a mile and a half from a rifle p piece accurately sometimes and it could disable enemy cannons it could sink ships in a naval battle could knock holes in buildings could knock tree limbs down on troops to wound and demoralize them but of course they have worse things shells that either fly out over the heads of the troops and explode by fuse or explode when they hit the ground by percussion and rain down into big bits of metal like this shrapnel invented by Henry shrapnel a British officer as a matter of fact now if they're getting close to my Cannon this is what I'm going to shoot canister or grape shot imagine between 12 or 20 s of these things packed in sawdust in a coffee can shove it down the barrel fire it out the can disintegrates and these things are going to fly out like a big shotgun blast it's called the unwelcome messenger a particularly devastating weapon I could not fire this gun by myself it takes a lot of people to do it ideally it takes eight soldiers to do it they all have their own job somebody sponging out the barrel to make sure sparks don't ignite and pre- ignite this cannon when you shove the bag of black gunpowder in there um two people are running the rolling the gun back in back into uh position after it had recoiled um somebody holding their thumb over the vent with a special glove just to make sure oxygen doesn't get in there and prematurely ignite the gun as well you're going to have somebody actually sighting the gun somebody aiming the gun somebody watching the effect of the fire saying little the left little the right and a couple of people running ammunition back and forth from the rear at uh two and frow those limbers behind me and in the distance back there you also see kons um these limbers and then the queson across the road are actually necessary to fire this gun these limber chests hold the ammunition and The Quon hold more ammunition as well as additional supplies that the battery needs so imagine eight or 10 men and 18 horses necessary to pull all this stuff around whenever you see one of these canons on a battlefield you can also learn a lot about a cannon by actually looking at it and in looking at the side of this gun the trunion I can see that it was made in the Phoenix iron company over here I can see that this gun this is a 3-in ordinance rifle a very Sleek gun made entirely of rot iron was patented December 9th 1862 it's a United States gun I can see here but when you look at the front you really start to get a lot of information this was the 583rd gun to come out of the Phoenix iron company in 1863 this gun might have been at this battle um the barrel weighs 816 lb and the inspector's initials were ttsl um you could go and actually try to track where this gun was during the Civil War these are original Civil War Cannon barrels mounted on replica iron carriages so when you go see these things on Battlefield pay respect these are the guns that actually helped fight the Civil War [Music]