A Rains barrel torpedo
Photograph courtesy of James D. Julia Auctioneers, Fairfield, Maine, jamesdjulia.com.
A Rare Confederate Explosive Device Makes a Killing
The Artifact
A Rains barrel torpedo
Condition
The torpedo is in fine condition. Most of the tar remains on the outer surface, and most of the bands are intact, with only a few loose but secure. The primer fuses are authentic reproductions.
Details
Shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, North Carolina native and West Point graduate Gabriel James Rains resigned his commission in the U.S. Army to take a brigadier generalship in the newly forming Confederate forces. After receiving a serious wound during the Battle of Seven Pines outside Richmond the following year, Rains—who had had his men plant “torpedoes,” or makeshift land mines formed from explosive shells, to slow the advancing Army of the Potomac as it made its way up the Virginia Peninsula toward the Confederate capital—was tasked with protecting the James and Appomattox rivers from Union advance by employing “submarine defenses.”
For the next several months, Rains developed and deployed torpedoes in the James River before being appointed to head the Confederacy’s new Army Torpedo Bureau, a role that saw him oversee production facilities throughout the South. By war’s end, Confederate forces had planted hundreds of explosive devices on land and in sea; the latter were responsible for sinking at least 58 Union vessels. The Rains-designed barrel torpedo shown here was recovered during the war in Mobile Bay, the mining of which Rains had overseen for several months in 1864. It had been filled with gunpowder, fitted with percussion fuses (set to detonate on contact with a ship’s hull), and anchored to the bottom of the bay by a chain.
After the war, Rains worked as a chemist and as a clerk for the U.S. Army’s Quartermaster Department. He died in Charleston in 1881 at age 78.
Quotable
In 1877, Rains reflected on the enduring impact of the use of torpedoes as war weapons for the Southern Historical Society Papers: “Iron-clads are said to master the world, but torpedoes master the iron-clads, and must so continue on account of the almost total incompressibility of water and the developed gasses of the fired gunpowder of the torpedo under the vessel’s bottom passing through it, as the direction of least resistance.”
Value
$51,750 (price realized at James D. Julia Inc. in Fairfield, Maine, in October 2005). “This is one of two known examples of Rains torpedoes,” noted John Sexton, longtime consultant and cataloger for James D. Julia, at the time of the sale, “and is the only one with most of the original coating.”
Related topics: weapons
