This is a page of general information on artillery during the American Revolution and it usage by reenactors today. Artillery played an important part in the revolution, primarily in sieges. Artillery had to wait until the napoleonic period, twenty years later, before becoming a huge factor on the battlefield. The Reenacting hobby tends to reflect this, almost all guns used by reenactors of the revolution are light field guns and nothing like the huge batteries of guns seen at civil war reenactments is normally seen at our reenactments. This doesn’t mean that artillery is given a short shift by history or the hobby, it simply reflects that artillery's hay-day was still to come.
Artillery of the revolutionary war period was uniformly smoothbore and muzzle loading. Smoothbore means that the barrel of the cannon had no rifling, grooves cut into the barrel to spin the cannon ball. The lack of rifling meant that cannons were relatively imprecise at long range. Muzzle loading means the guns had to be loaded from the front, which could expose the crew to enemy fire and make the gun more dangerous to load. Cannons firing from forts or ships had to be pulled back from the wall in order to reload them, and then pushed back into place again before each shot. After each shot a new round is loaded by first pushing a bag of gunpowder down the barrel followed by a cannon ball. If any gunpowder from the last shot is still burning in the barrel it can ignite the next bag of gunpowder as it is pushed down the barrel, injuring the crewman pushing the bag. A wet sponge was run down the barrel after every shot to prevent this from happening, but it loading cannons was dangerous work.
Many types of shot were fired from cannons, but the two most common were round balls and cans filled with small shot, called canister. Round balls like large bullets that would be fired at enemy buildings or troops. In addition, round balls could bounce along the ground for some distance after they landed and continue to hurt anyone who got in its way. Artillerists tried to aim so that the ball would pass through as many units as possible, so that it would cause injury and disruption as widely as possible. Canister shot was used when enemy infantry got close to the cannon, it turns the cannon into a huge shot gun. Where a round ball might only hit two men in an attacking unit, if used well canister could cut down rows of men.
The Americans started the revolution with a serious shortage of cannons of all types. They were also lacked men trained to fire what cannons they did have. While this was never really solved during the revolution, General Henry Knox is credited with bring the American army up to speed. After the capture of Fort Ticonderoga he led an expedition to carry 59 cannons 300 miles across frozen ground to Washington's army besieging Boston. Knox's guns mounted on the heights over Boston forced the British Army to evacuate the city. Knox spent most of the revolution working to get the American artillery stabilized and professionalised. It was a hard task but it paid tremendous dividends at Yorktown, where the American and French armies captured a British army after a formal siege.
In field battles played an important, but not dominating role. Many Generals favored having artillery more for the moral boost it gave their own men than for the devastation it caused the enemy. Artillery size is normally given by the weight of the round ball it fired, ranging from siege guns firing 24 pound balls to light guns firing 3 or 4 pound balls. The guns normally used on the battlefields of the revolution ranged from 8 pounders, the biggest commonly seen, to the more common 3 and 4 pounders. In the southern campaign of the American Revolution, the most common gun was a so-called grasshopper gun, a 3 pounder on a light carriage that a small crew could easily maneuver. One such gun changed hands at least three times, from the British, to the American, and back to the British side during the southern campaign.
The original First Maryland Regiment's most famous brush with artillery came during the Battle of Guilford Courthouse. The First Maryland had bayonet charged the British Guards Regiment and was locked in a fierce struggle. The British Commander, General Cornwallis, was determined to drive the First away. He ordered his artillery to fire on the First Maryland, even though some of his own the fire would hit some of his own troops. By killing some of his own men with cannon fire he drove the First Maryland off. In the end, Cornwallis won the field but paid a terrible price for it.
The current First Maryland Regiment has no cannons. We are a very focused group in that we only reenact infantry. We feel that by keeping our impression simple, we can do a better job at it. We do interact with cannon on the field, both friendly and hostile, and I am pleased to say that safety is much more an issue today than it was during the revolution. Most reenactment cannon crews are very well drilled and follow rules to keep the chance of accidents to a minimum. If your primary interest in reenacting is artillery, we can recommend several units we work with that are very safety oriented. We in the First Maryland prefer to respect cannons at a proper distance, but the hobby is much richer because they are there!