Item Number: M00534

Item Title: Confederate tin sabot straps from the Confederate supply train burnt by troops of the 54th Massachusetts

Price: $35

Shipping: Not included

Provenance: US

Model:

Type:

Book:

Location Recovered:

Description:Tin sabot straps probably for 32pdr cannon balls by judge of their size and length. I got a bundle of these straps that were on two boxcars of a Confederate supply train that was burned in what is known as “Potter’s Raid.” The boxcars were burned on a bridge on the Wilmington-Manchester Railroad in South Carolina.

In March 1865, while the rest of Sherman’s army marched into North Carolina, a detachment of Union soldiers drove toward Darlington in hopes of breaking the area’s railroad connections. Meeting resistance, they fell back. The failure irked Sherman, who called for a heavier force to finish the job. “[T]he food supplies in that section should be exhausted,” he wrote Major General Quincy A. Gillmore. “I don’t feel disposed to feel overgenerous. . . . Those cars and locomotives should be destroyed if to do it costs you 500 men.” Gillmore obliged, ordering Potter with 2,500 men, including detachments from the 32d and 102d U.S. Colored Troops, to move inland from Georgetown and “make all the display possible.”

The straps are fragile and in a couple places I have had to re-connect them using JB Weld. Last picture shown is how they were used to hold a cannon ball on its wooden sabot. Obviously, that photograph is for illustrative purposes only.