BCHWHEN UNION AND CONFEDERATE FORCES DUG IN AT PETERSBURG, Virginia, in June 1864 and began engaging in siege warfare, they gained a new appreciation for mortars. Those guns had not often been major factors earlier in the war, except during assaults on seacoast fortifications, but their high arcing fire made them ideally suited to trench warfare.
Mortars came in many sizes. The biggest of them all was a squat seven-and-a-half-ton Union monster, mounted on a reinforced railroad flatcar stationed on a spur of the City Point & Petersburg Railroad. Officially designated a thirteen-inch seacoast mortar, Model 1861, it was nicknamed “the Dictator.” The massive gun was served chiefly by men of Company G, 1st Connecticut Heavy Artillery, led by Colonel Henry L. Abbot, a keen graduate of West Point. Colonel Abbot also had a larger responsibility—commanding the entire Union siege train (including siege artillery, vehicles, and troops) deployed against Richmond, which for the remainder of 1864 and early 1865 chiefly targeted the Confederates at Petersburg shielding Richmond.
The thirteen-inch mortar was the only gun of such dimension in the Union siege train. When fired, “it made the ground quake,” one soldier attested. But the Dictator did not fire often. In service for eighty-one days from early July 1864 until it returned to the depot permanently in late September, it hurled only 218 shells at the enemy. Charging the monster with 20 pounds of black powder and loading a 220-pound spherical shell (which had a diameter of slightly less than thirteen inches to fit the barrel) was a time-consuming business. So was aiming the gun. Because of its terrific recoil, which shifted the weapon two feet backward on its mount, and its flatcar twelve feet backward on the rails, it could be fired only in line with the track. Changing aim required moving the flatcar to a new position on the curving railway spur.
With a range of at least two and a half miles, the Dictator could easily shell central Petersburg, but it was used mostly to suppress a menacing Confederate battery in an entrenched position north of town, across the Appomattox River. Shells from the Dictator, fused to explode above the target, sprayed the enemy with case shot, consisting of dozens of iron balls, each weighing nearly a half pound. Colonel Abbot had conducted experiments in 1863 to perfect the technique, which proved well suited to the task of scattering Confederate artillerymen. Traveling at over two hundred feet per second, the case shot could kill or disable any man or horse it struck. BCH
RENOWNED MORTAR Colonel Henry Abbot, in black boots, stands next to “the Dictator” in 1864 with Brigadier General Henry J. Hunt (beside Abbot) and men of the 1st Connecticut Heavy Artillery. Photographers found the Dictator irresistible and helped make it famous.
