civil war manuscripts - American Memory from the Library of Congress

INTRODUCTION
On the morning of April 20, 1861, a large hydrogen-filled
balloon drifted serenely over the South Carolina countryside,
the tranquillity of its noiseless flight belying the boisterous
calls to arms then echoing throughout the Palmetto State. In
the gondola the pioneer aeronaut, Prof. Thaddeus S. C. Lowe,
looking strangely out of place in a long Prince Albert coat and
black silk top hat, was listening anxiously to trailing sounds of
gunfire, slightly muffled by the sea of green below, as he
searched for a place to land. Professor Lowe had been in free
flight from Cincinnati, Ohio, since 3:30 a.m., in an attempt to
test a theory that he could cross the Atlantic Ocean in a gas
balloon by entering the steady eastward flow of air in the middle
atmosphere. To prove that he actually had traveled in the
jet stream, Lowe had made his ascent while the ground wind
blew toward the west, and true to expectations, at an altitude
of about 7,000 feet, he was wafted eastward on currents of air
that followed the undulations of the land like an invisible highway
in the sky.
Professor Lowe's flight was supposed to have ended somewhere
along the New Jersey coast; unfortunately, when his rudderless
craft cascaded down the eastern slope of the Appalachian
Mountains, it was caught in a deep and fast-moving
southerly flow of air and set adrift several hours later over
South Carolina. Lacking enough buoyancy to sail back over
the mountains and unprepared for an ocean crossing, Lowe
was forced to the ground, ironically, in Union County, S.C.,
near the town of Unionville. The scenes that followed are worthy
of a tale by Charles Dickens or Samuel Clemens, for it
taxed the imagination of local officials and dignitaries to convince
the thousands of suspicious secessionists who poured into
the county seat to witness a Yankee hanging that the young
scientist was not a spy or saboteur. The whole experience so
exasperated Lowe that within a few weeks of his return to the
free states he was again sailing over the southern landscape,
this time as the chief aeronaut of the Army of the Potomac.
The military career of Professor Lowe, the manufacture
and use of aerial reconnaissance balloons, and the organization
and function of the U.S. Aeronautic Corps, which was first
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