US Navy 32-Pounder of 42 Hundredweight Number 283

Dec 13

A US Navy 32-Pounder of 42 Hundredweight, Number 283, is displayed aboard USS Cairo at Vicksburg National Military Park. This cannon was cast in 1845 at the West Point Foundry. It is marked as weighing 42-1-11 Hundredweight (4,743 pounds). It was recovered in 1963 as preparatory work to recover the sunken USS Cairo in 1964. It was (and is) mounted on the port broadside of Cairo in the forward most position.

According to Elizabeth Hoxie Joyner’s book on USS Cairo, this 32-Pounder was dismounted from its carriage by the blast of the torpedo which sunk Cairo on December 12th, 1862. When recovered, the 32-Pounder was found double loaded with canister.

The 32-Pounder of 42-Hundredweight, originally a chambered gun, was developed as part of the 1845 system to be used in the main battery of sloops of war. It was similar in weight to 18-Pounders of an earlier generation of naval guns. In service it used a maximum 6-pound propellent charge to fire it’s 32-pound shot.

By the time of the American Civil War, the 32-Pounder of 42 Hundredweight was a relatively light cannon as far as naval guns were concerned. It was therefore used to arm a number of converted merchant ships taken into naval service.

Unlike the heavier 32-Pounder of 57 Hundredweight which survives in relatively large numbers (over 100 known examples), the 32-Pounder of 42 Hundredweight does not seem to have been kept in US Navy inventories into the 1880s and beyond when cannons began to be donated as monuments. Of the eleven known examples, six were recovered with USS Cairo. Two others were recovered from the wreck of USS Peterhoff.

Rarer still than the cannons of USS Cairo are the surviving carriages, one of which is displayed in the adjacent museum. Very few original wooden carriages survive from the Civil War. The example in the museum is displayed with a partial fiberglass barrel.