"Previous to this time I had never even examined a balloon... My assistant, after giving directions to the men holding the four ropes, told me to take my place in the basket [attached to the balloon]. I complied, and before being fully aware that such was the fact found that we were leaving terra firma, and noiselessly, almost imperceptibly, were ascending toward the clouds... I was urged to stand up also. My confidence in balloons at that time was not sufficient, however, to justify such a course, so I remained seated in the bottom of the basket... I interrogated my companion as to whether the basket was actually and certainly safe. He responded affirmatively; at the same time, as if to confirm his assertion, he began jumping up and down... "

So wrote Lt. George Armstrong Custer of his first ascent in a balloon in the spring of 1862. Ordered by Gen. William F. "Baldy" Smith to go up and reconnoiter Confederate positions, the young officer was introduced to a mount vastly different from a cavalry charger. This balloon was one of up to eleven "aerostats" employed on behalf of the Union Army in 1862 and 1863 by the civilian "United States Balloon Corps." This organization was born after First Manassas, when President Lincoln persuaded Gen. Winfield Scott to put an eccentric and flamboyant scientist on the governmental payroll as the head of the fledgling Union air force. Professor Thaddeus S. C. Lowe was an innovator in balloon technology, who carried telegraphs aboard his balloons in aid of airborne reconnaissance and even artillery fire control missions, and who invented a portable gas generator for balloon operations at or near the field of battle.

The Balloon Corps traveled with Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan to the Virginia Peninsula in 1862. There, the balloons were sent aloft every day, weather permitting, to make and revise maps and to watch the enemy. The Confederates soon learned to minimize daylight troop movements, where possible, when under scrutiny from observers in Lowe's aerostats. The value of airborne observation was proved when aerial observers became the first to notice the Confederate retreat up the Peninsula from Yorktown, and when balloonists kept tabs on Confederate maneuvers during the Seven Days' Battles.

Even the impoverished Confederates got into the act. Without the resources to fabricate a balloon, the plucky Rebels resorted to the expedient of a call for "every silk dress in the Confederacy" to make an aerostat. A "great patchwork ship of many and varied hues" was stitched together and was employed during the Seven Days, wrote Confederate Gen. James Longstreet after the war. This balloon was filled from municipal gas supplies, then tethered to a railroad engine or a steamship and towed to a point from where the enemy could be observed. "One day it was on a steamer," Longstreet wrote, "when the tide went out and left the vessel and the balloon high and dry on a bar. The Federals gathered it in, and with it the last silk dress in the Confederacy. The capture was the meanest trick in the war and one I have never yet forgiven."

The Union Army never seemed fully to grasp the value of aerial observation, and the Balloon Corps disintegrated after Professor Lowe's resignation, just before the Gettysburg battle. During 1862 and half of 1863, however, the Balloon Corps made literally thousands of ascents, night and day in all seasons, and frequently under fire, a proud record indeed.

Building a Miniature Balloon

The miniature balloon described below will add a striking and dramatic look to your gaming table, and will introduce a spark of novelty to any battle in which it is employed. [Editor's note: JRGS member Larry Reber makes and sells outstanding commercial versions of various Civil War balloons; contact larryreber@yahoo.com). The rules included are geared to "Johnny Reb," and presuppose the use of real and dummy unit counters upon which the balloon may spy. Confederate forces should be provided with a balloon only rarely. The side playing without a balloon should be afforded an ample number of dummy counters with which to play cat and mouse with the aerial observer.

The best looking material for reproducing the "net" from which balloon baskets were suspended is the net-type bag in which grapes or cherries are often sold in grocery stores. The thin-stranded material comes already formed in the proper shape. Simply take a round toy balloon (green or blue looks best on the gaming table) and inflate it to about the size of a baseball (any larger and the balloon becomes grossly out of scale). Stretch the net bag over the inflated balloon and bind the open end of the bag with a length of thread. Trim away excess net below the thread, leaving about three-quarters of an inch from which to suspend the basket.

A serviceable basket can be made from the lid of a small bottle of hobby paint, or some similar cup-shaped object. Drive a slim finishing nail through the center bottom of your "basket," then bend the point of the nail into a hook with pliers. Paint the entire basket an appropriate wicker shade and suspend the basket from the netting below the balloon.

To suspend your balloon above the battlefield, straighten a wire hanger and bend one end into a hoop approximately five inches in diameter. Bend the rest of the hanger up from the hoop perpendicularly, and bend an arm with a hook over the center of the hoop from which the balloon may be suspended by its netting.

As a final touch, add an "aeronaut." Stone Mountain's casting of an officer peering through binoculars, placed in the basket, makes an excellent aerial observer.