Mayfield Civil War Fort

Before the war, Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard had been one of the U.S. Army’s outstanding artillerists, and while commanding the troops defending Manassas he rushed to secure cannons for the fortifications and experienced crews to operate them because he feared an imminent Union attack. Most available guns were horse-drawn field pieces firing canister or solid shot weighing 10 or 20 pounds, like the Model 1857 “Napoleon” cannon typical of the artillery used at Manassas. After learning that Confederate forces had captured the U.S. Navy’s Gosport Shipyard in Portsmouth, Virginia, he requisitioned naval guns that were moved to Manassas by boat and then by oxen, with sailors from the newly created C.S. Navy helping transport them. William “Choctaw” King, a U.S. Navy veteran who joined the Confederacy’s new naval service, wrote to his wife on June 26, 1861, that he had spent four or five days mounting part of the 24 thirty-two-pounder guns, weighing from 4500 to 5000 pounds, on batteries being established there. By late 1861, some Manassas Junction earthworks had the distinctive “soda bottle” shapes of Dahlgren naval cannons, and the defenses of Manassas, completed in less than three months, consisted of 12 earthen forts armed with a variety of powerful artillery pieces.

Manassas, Virginia · United States