Thread for all the Batteries out there and those who are passionate about the Civil War Artillery aspect of the game
- Would like to get all the batteries listed here in the main post
- Talk about the history of the battery you are in or started, which type of cannons does it have, battles it was in, etc. (NO RECRUITING)
- General Artillery history
- Commands you would use in-game
- Everything Battery / Artillery related
Richmond Howitzers History:
George Wythe Randolph, the first captain of the Richmond Howitzers, was born in 1818 at Monticello, the home of his maternal grandfather, Thomas Jefferson. Randolph was appointed a midshipman at the age of thirteen, and served in the navy for six years. Afterwards he studied law at the University of Virginia, and in 1850 moved to Richmond to practice his profession. He conceived the idea of the "Howitzer Battery", which began organization on November 9, 1859, himself as captain and Gaston Otey as First Sergeant.
The Richmond Howitzers grew into a battalion of three companies by May 1861. The original company, reorganized on May 8 with the election of Captain John C. Shields, was thereafter known as the 1st Company. In November 1861 Captain Shields was promoted to Lt. Colonel and transferred, to be replaced by Lt. Wm. Palmer. In March of 1862 Captain Palmer, who desired to go into army medical service, was replaced by 1st. Lt. Edward McCarthy.
An elite unit, the Howitzers served with distinction. The 1st Company Richmond Howitzers, a four-gun battery, participated at First Manassas, the Peninsular Campaign, Seven Pines, the Seven Days' Battles, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and the retreat from Richmond to Appomattox.
At Gettysburg, on July 2, 1863, its two rifled guns expended 200 rounds of ammunition in less than two hours at Devil's Den, and the next day, one piece alone expended 300 rounds in support of Pickett's Charge. The battery saw its commander, Edward S. McCarthy, killed at Cold Harbor; felled instantly by a sharpshooter’s minie ball.
The book: "Four Years Under Marse Robert," by Major Robert Stiles of Cabell's Batallion offers these observations of the Richmond Howitzers:
"The composition of the three companies was very similar; that is, all of them were made up largely of young business men and clerks of the highest grade and best character from the city of Richmond, but included also a number of country boys, for the most part of excellent families, with a very considerable infusion of college-bred men, for it was strikingly true that in 1861 the flower of our educated youth gravitated toward the artillery. The outcome was something quite unparalleled, so far as I know. It is safe to say that no less than one hundred men were commissioned from the corps during the war, and these of every rank from a Secretary of War down to a second lieutenant."
"Few things have ever impressed me as did the intellectual and moral character of the men who composed the circle I entered the day our guide led my brother and myself to the Howitzer Camp. I had lived for years at the North, had graduated recently at Yale, and had but just entered upon the study of law in the city of New York, when the war began... To my surprise and delight, around the camp fires of the First Company, Richmond Howitzers, I found throbbing an intellectual life as high and brilliant and intense as any I had ever known."