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| Fragile remains of pike (Courtesy of Old Governor's Mansion) |
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First of two parts
The 2003 restoration of the Old Governor’s Mansion in
Milledgeville, Ga., yielded a curious
– but perhaps not unexpected – find in the attic.
A staff member found the business end of a weapon -- an 18-inch blade that originally was joined to a 6-foot-long wooden staff -- on the top of an attic rafter. The pikes were
named for Gov. Joseph E. Brown, who lived in the mansion during the Civil War
and in February 1862 asked blacksmiths and others to produce 10,000 of the primitive weapons.
Recently, the mansion staff posted on Facebook a
photograph of the fragile blade, which mansion director Matt Davis said may have been in the attic since the 19th century (the pole is long gone). They asked followers to identify it. While a couple
guessed the artifact might be the top of a gate, others were spot on.
“Pike! Rather imaginatively planned to be used against
the Yanks by some sort of home guard defending their hearths,” one commenter
wrote. “Sherman’s men filled a coffin with them and held a mock funeral.”
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| Gov. Joseph E. Brown |
Though I was aware of the pikes, the post prompted me to
dig a little into their history and see whether any are in museum collections
across Georgia.
I had two underlying questions: Why would anyone think a
pike would be effective against a gun or other weapons? And where did the idea
come from? The whole concept seems ridiculous.
The answers are a bit complex, and there is some rationale to the idea, particularly if you put
yourself in the mindset of those living at the time.
As a 2012 article in The New York Times’ Disunion series
stated, the “pike was hardly ancient history. The
Duke of Wellington had put 79,000 pikes in the hands of the Spanish against
Napoleon, and they had proved superior weapons against cavalry charges during
the War of 1812.”
By early 1862, many of Georgia’s young
men were fighting in Virginia and the Western theater, and they had taken most
of the state’s guns with them, leaving civilians largely helpless should the
Federal army sweep in. “I need to arm every able-bodied person in the state of
Georgia,” the governor said of the predicament.
The pike was cheap to produce and could be used at close quarters. As Brown
said, they were reliable, suitable for militia, home guard units and able-bodied citizens. A few did make it to the front.
“The short-range pike and terrible
knife, when brought within their proper range, and wielded by a stalwart’s
patriot’s arm, never fail to fire and never waste a single load,” the governor intoned.
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| CCC worker with Joe Brown pike at Fort Pulaski (Courtesy of NPS) |
Brown is remembered for looking after
the welfare of Georgia and soldiers and civilians during the conflict, but his
resistance to the authority of the central Confederate government in Richmond
helped hinder the overall war effort, argues the New Georgia Encyclopedia.
Jim Ogden, historian at Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, told the Picket that the actions of Brown
and “others advocating the use
of pikes at the time of secession and the beginning of the fighting reflects
the views of most at the time that any war would be short and with little
bloodshed, that the other side did not hold their convictions very strongly at
all and would give up as soon as they were shown how strongly the opposing side
held theirs. They also reflect the fact that so quickly the size of the
military forces mobilized outstripped the supply of arms. They are or can
be a window into that era.”
But it wasn’t just a
shortage of arms that inspired Brown and other Southern governors to order the
manufacture of the spears. There was something even larger: fear of rebellious enslaved
persons.
Travel back in time to
1859, when the country was fractured over slavery and Southern states were on
the verge of secession. Radical abolitionist John Brown, while raising money to
launch an anti-slavery campaign in the South, hatched the idea of raiding the
federal weapons arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Va. (now West Virginia).
Brown’s contingent took
with them nearly 1,000 “John Brown pikes” that were intended for an army of
slaves to take the fight to plantation owners. Brown’s mission failed and
there’s some question of how many slaves actually took up the pikes during and
after the brief clash at Harpers Ferry.
Regardless, the discovery
of the pikes whipped up anti-North sentiment across the South.
Edmund Ruffin, a
pro-slavery and secession extremist, obtained several pikes and sent them to
governors with the message, "Sample
of the favors designed for us by our Northern Brethren.”
Brown embraced the
pike as a defensive weapon after the Confederate loss at Fort Donelson, Tenn.
The governor believed that “Had 5,000 reserves thus
armed and well trained to the use of these terrible weapons been brought to the
charge at the proper time, who can say that the victory would not have been
ours.”
About 7,000 of the pikes
were made in Georgia, while arsenals in Tennessee,
Virginia and Alabama turned out the spears.
“But they were treated as little more than a novelty, a relic of
strategies abandoned for the more dashing and inspiring offensives of Robert E.
Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia,” according to the Disunion article.
“It really served no practical military
purpose,” said Davis of the Old Governor’s Mansion, which is on
the campus of Georgia College. The mansion's pike has occasionally been put on display.
A cache of Joe Brown pikes was found in
1980 where Wilmington & Manchester Railroad cars were destroyed in South
Carolina during a federal attack in April 1865, at war’s end.
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Reproduction naval boarding pike at Old Fort Jackson (OFJ)
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Today, there’s a
scattering of pikes at Civil War and other sites in Georgia. Some are not associated with John or Joseph Brown, such as naval pikes.
The Atlanta History Center has a half
dozen in its collection. “We
have two of the retractable type, which are generally assumed (to be) Confederate,”
said senior military historian Gordon Jones. “But as you probably know, every pike is
either a ‘John Brown’ or a ‘Joe Brown,’ or sometimes both. It’s like dark
splotches on flags – always blood.”
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| CSS Chattahoochee pike (Courtesy of NCWNM) |
Jeffery Seymour, director of history and
collections at the National Civil War Naval Museum in Columbus, Ga., said the
venue has two naval pikes, both on display.
One was recovered from the wreck of
the Chattahoochee, a Confederate gunboat that was scuttled and burned nearby.
The museum has two Joe Brown pikes in storage.
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| Pike of undetermined origin, with replacement shaft (NCWNM) |
The National Infantry Museum at Fort Benning, near Columbus, has two pikes that are believed to be Confederate. Senior curator Jefferson Reed said one is a Joe Brown retractable pike; the other is a cloverleaf.
The collection of Old Fort Jackson in
Savannah has reproduction naval pikes, which were wielded to discourage enemy
sailors from boarding a vessel, said staff member Dianna Jowers.
The Civil War site came into possession of the weapon in
the mid-1930s, shortly after the fort was transferred from the War Department
to the National Park Service, and major repair work and rehabilitation were
undertaken by the Civilian Conservation Corps.
A park description of the “rare” item
mentions old church bells and iron from homes across Georgia were donated in
order to manufacture the pikes. “The blade, when not in use, may be lowered
into the hollow staff, but by release of a safety catch the blade is freed and
may be snapped out into position for action where it is firmly held in position
by another metal catch.”
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| CCC workers show off the Joe Brown pike at Fort Pulaski (NPS) |
By autumn 1864, after Maj. Gen. William
T. Sherman had taken Atlanta, the Confederacy was heading into its last throes,
and there was no spirited or effective resistance to the March to the Sea.
Offensive attacks across the Confederacy had largely failed. The pikes were
gathering dust.
Sherman’s legions in late November took
Milledgeville, then capital of Georgia. By then, Gov. Brown and
his staff had fled. Yankee troops held a mock legislative session, declared
“deep sympathy” for Brown “as now departed” and planned a symbolic funeral.
Soldiers
used a box that held 100 pikes as a casket.
“They found Joe Brown’s pikes, and
arming themselves with these, they formed a procession, arms reversed, marching
to the tap of the funeral drum through the main streets. Stopping at the
Baptist church, of which Joe Brown was a member, they there stacked their arms…
and listened to a very pathetic funeral discourse.”
Joe Brown would live another 30 years and people filed past his body in the newer Capitol in Atlanta.
Numerous pikes survive him.
COMING SOON: The “John Brown pike.” The roots of the
weapon, intended for a slave revolt, go back to Kansas.
