(title paraphrased from Simon Cameron, secretary of war, to Hon. William L. Dayton, US minister in Paris, 12 November 1861; United States War Department, The war of the rebellion: a compilation of the official records of the Union and Confederate armies, Series 3 Vol. 1 (1899), p.630)
Rifles and muskets
In Burnished Rows of Steel, during the engagements on the road to London and around the Niagara in May we are told that there are only a few thousand armed militia in Upper Canada and that the quality of their weapons is often substandard.
And here the scale of the garrison is below 10,000 men. Of these about 5,000 are probably regulars (considering the scale of the casualties at Rouse's Point) so there's perhaps 5,000 militia and volunteers present.
The total number of militia and RCR that can be enumerated here, defending everywhere further inland than Quebec, is 11,000. This agrees with TFSmith's suggestion that the largest force that the British could raise in Canada is 25,000 men.
What's hard to understand is why any of them have muskets at all.
As of December 1861 there were, according to reports, 15,000 rifles in store in Canada. At this time there were already a few thousand troops embodied and with rifles (at minimum the RCR and those active units of the Active Miltia) so the 15,000 total can be considered de minimis and a more appropriate total would be more like 20,000.
The Melbourne carried 30,000 stand of Enfield rifles, and many of these were sent down the sledge route in OTL. Certainly they were all in store in Quebec in 10 June 1862, but we don't know how they got there.
Other ships sent OTL also carried rifles: The Persia had 5,000, the Australasian had 5,000, and we can assume that more would have been sent with no climbdown.
Thus, assuming that merely 500 Enfields went down the sled route for each of the 73 days of activity of the sled route in the real world Trent affair, the total number of Enfields in Canada should be well over 40,000 by the time of the thaw.
Finally, navigation to Quebec opened historically in mid-April and so there has been two more weeks for rifles to travel.
Therefore, in a situation where the British are having to hand out muskets, either there are more than 30,000 rifle-armed Canadians in Quebec and only 11,000 in the rest of the Province of Canada – or the main question asked of new Canadian recruits is “would you like two Enfields or three?”
Bigger guns
Further colouring the situation is the issue of Canadian artillery. The only artillery which makes an appearance is brass 9-pounder muzzle loaders, and yet the Canadian arsenals were full of weapons to use – in the field, in gunboats, in forts, none of which appears to have happened.
As it happens, in the OTL in stores – exclusive of those guns already mounted in forts or the 38 field guns with the active militia – there were:
Brass field guns
13x 12 pdrs
6x 9 pdrs
5x 3 pdrs (saluting guns)
7x 24 pdr howitzers
7x 12 pdr howitzers
9x 5.5" howitzers
17x 5.5" mortars
23x 4.4" mortars
Iron fort guns
9x 68 pdr 95 cwt
625x 24 pdrs
64x 18 pdrs
73x 12 pdrs
22x 9 pdrs
6x 6 pdrs
4x 10" howitzers
2x 24 pdr howitzers
70x 68 pdr carronades
5x 42 pdr carronades
245x 32 pdr carronades
41x 24 pdr carronades
13x 18 pdr carronades
26x 12 pdr carronades
12x 10" mortars
28x 8" mortars
18 brass 18 pdrs, 12 Armstrong 20 pdrs and 10 12 pdr howitzers were sent from Halifax in January over the sled route.
Of the field guns already with the militia, by the 1863 report the batteries had the following guns:
Kingston Field Battery 2 9pdrs, 1 24pdr H
Hamilton Field Battery 3 6pdrs, 1 12pdr H
Port Colborne Field Battery 3 9pdrs
London Field Battery 2 9pdrs, 1 24pdr H
Toronto Field Battery 3 6pdrs, 1 12pdr H
Quebec Field Battery 3 6pdr, 1 12pdr H
Montreal Field Battery 3 6pdr, 1 12pdr H
Ottawa Field Battery 3 6pdr, 1 12pdr H
Brockville Gun Detachment 1 6pdr
With over a thousand fort guns of 18 pdr size or greater, one might perhaps expect there to be a few Canadian batteries forming some kind of resistance to the armies of Grant and Heintzelman - in fact, there is roughly one gun for every ten Canadian militia appearing in the story - but no such batteries seem to exist.
With such an unusual dearth of rifles, it would perhaps be simpler for the British and Canadians to repel the Union invaders by digging a very deep hole, waiting for the Union to fall into it, and pushing spare cannon over the edge to crush them.
In summer 2008 I was living 20 minutes walk from Kew and went sometimes to the National Archives. My primary focus of research back then was on the establishment books (a book which contains the establishment strength of every unit in the army), but I read the contents of box WO33/11. One of the items was a statement of how many weapons had been sent to Canada, and before news of the climbdown arrived 105,000 Enfields had been sent to Canada.
ReplyDeleteCan't put that one in without verification (though it makes sense as it's roughly the number of extras required for Canada to field 100,000 and the Maritimes to field 30,000), but for that many Enfields to be used up by the BROS-era Canadian militia each of them would have to carry an average of five.
DeleteThough I have to wonder whether it'd be helpful to publish the entire contents of WO33/11, if we can get hold of it...
The contents of box WO33/11 are varied. Some memos, a copy of Totten's 1840's report on US defences (which HMG had, and used), the September '62 report on Canadian defences and some reports on early Palliser shot experiments are what I remember. I was more interested in the latter, as experiments with flat vs round heads were showing better penetration for flat heads. If memory serves the next round of experiments introduced pointed heads.
ReplyDeleteThe Times of 10th February '62 (pg 10) reproduced the table I saw in WO33/11, reporting 105,550 Enfields had been sent to Canada and the Maritimes.