Canister and Grape: You Wouldn’t Want to Get Hit with Either
The large shot on the left is from a 24-pounder grapeshot charge. At right, an iron 12-pounder canister ball seems small in comparison, but needless to say it was still deadly. At far right, a ping pong ball helps put the size of the ferrous killers in perspective.
Dana B. Shoaf Collection/Photo by Melissa A. Winn
Civil War Times Staff
August 2021
In a famous incident at the Battle of Antietam, Brig. Gen. John Gibbon jumped off his horse and raced over to Battery B, 4th U.S. Artillery, whose men were firing canister as fast as they could at Confederates across the Hagerstown Pike.
Gibbon noticed the battery’s 12-pounder Napoleons were firing high, and he directed the gunners to lower their muzzles so the canister would skip off the ground and up into the gray ranks. The adjustment was made, and the next blasts caused a grotesque plume of fence rails and Confederate soldiers to rise into the air.
Canister and its forerunner grapeshot were the most fearsome artillery projectiles of the conflict. Each fired iron balls into the air like giant shotgun blasts that shredded oncoming infantry formations and swept the decks of ships. Though the terms are often used interchangeably, as they were even during the war by soldiers, they were made quite differently. And by the Civil War, grapeshot was seldom used by field artillery batteries in either army, but some large garrison and ship-mounted cannons still made use of that round.
https://www.historynet.com/canister-and-grape-you-wouldnt-want-to-get-hit-with-either.htm
