Want believe this but I found a whole paper on Proposed Chemical weapon use in the civil war... They have union records on the topic that people ignored... I posted just two sections form the paper... the records just lying around... it is a short read and worth it...
Proposals for Chemical Weapons during the American Civil War
DISCUSSION The weapons ideas presented here are only a portion of those put forward by their innovators.
Many letters to President Lincoln—and probably to other officials on both sides—were thought written by “dreamers and cranks” and discarded immediately.3 Others undoubtedly survive in dusty files unnoticed by historians. Northern proposals predominate because the relevant U.S. government records are more complete and easily searched than those of the Confederacy.
Although the Confederacy appears to have made or tested at least two chemical weapons, no evidence has been found that any such implements were actually used. Nevertheless, a few points can be made about the ideas. They were more plentiful and varied than previously thought. Only one citizen had previously been mentioned as advocating cayenne pepper,3 but period sources reveal at least 11 additional proponents.4 –10,12–15 Ideas for using black pepper, snuff, mustard seed, veratria, hydrogen cyanide, and acids are described here for the first time. The constituents of the proposed weapons were generally commonplace substances. Almost all of them, including the MILITARY MEDICINE, Vol. 173, May 2008 503 Proposals for Chemical Weapons during the Civil War Downloaded from
https://academic.oup.com/milmed/article-abstract/173/5/499/4557756 by guest on 20 March 2020 plant-based materials, chloroform, acids—even chlorine, cyanide, strychnine, and arsenic— had medicinal uses.18 Weapons advocates described the toxic effects of the agents fairly accurately, yet physicians were ill-prepared to treat them effectively. Even today, treating toxic exposure to most of the agents would consist primarily of supportive care; exceptions include administering amyl nitrite, sodium nitrite, and sodium thiosulfate for cyanide poisoning and chelators for arsenic poisoning. Jo
hn Doughty28 (chlorine) and Joseph Jones30 (hydrogen cyanide) notwithstanding, the proponents of chemical weapons generally showed little appreciation for important practical considerations, such as the safety and ease of handling the toxic agents and whether they could be deployed in effective concentrations. Little concern was expressed about protecting friendly troops from the agents. One probable hindrance to the adoption of chemical weapons by the United States was the Army’s Chief of Ordnance, Brigadier General James W. Ripley, who was notoriously hostile toward new weapons.3
Moreover, the use of poisons in war was commonly considered unethical,
and an 1863 directive from the U.S. War Department (the “Lieber Code”) barred their use.65 Yet, just as some Northerners might have agreed with a snuff proponent from Vermont that “any mode of Warfare is honorable in putting down open rebellion,”16 some Southerners might have concurred with
the Mississippian who argued that using strychnine and arsenic was justified against a foe “whose whole and sole aim is our destruction.”32
John Doughty considered the moral question of using chlorine and “arrived at the somewhat paradoxical conclusion, that its introduction would very much lessen the sanguinary character of the battlefield, and at the same time render conflicts more decisive in their results.”2 Confederate incendiaries expert
John Cheves31 disapproved of poisoning and favored “stifling” the enemy “with the materials ordinarily used in war” as “more consonant with the spirit of the age” and “more practicable and quite as effectual.” He argued, “There is as much difference between poisoning and stifling as there is between throwing dust in a man’s eyes & putting his eyes out yet where only momentary blindness is wanted the first will do as well as the last.” The development of effective delivery methods has created modern counterparts of some of the seemingly quaint Civil War ideas. Pepper spray can be considered a descendant of D.A. Pease’s15 pepper-whiskey mixture, and snuff-filled bladders16 are not far removed from today’s “pepper balls,” frangible capsaicin-filled spheres fired by law enforcement personnel from devices resembling paintball guns.66 Doughty’s28 chlorine shells anticipated the release of the same gas from cylinders in World War I67; chlorine has also been used recently in terrorist bombings in Iraq.68
Other Civil War ideas have been used almost unchanged in more modern times. Joseph Jones’s30 idea of mixing a cyanide salt with hydrochloric acid has been employed to execute convicts in gas chambers, and his concept of placing those chemicals in adjacent glass vessels is strikingly similar to terrorist plans for devices to release hydrogen cyanide in public places.69,70 Nitric acid, another agent proposed during the Civil War,52 has been found among insurgents’ supplies in Iraq and thought possibly to be intended as a chemical weapon.71
The mores of the era, along with limitations in scientific knowledge and technology, helped preclude the use of chemical weapons during the Civil War. Changes in those factors, within a complex global milieu, have contributed to chemical agents being employed in more recent conflicts and becoming serious concerns in today’s war against terror.
CONCLUSIONS Civil War proposals for chemical weapons generally advocated using common agents, most often in explosive artillery projectiles. Although many were meant to temporarily disable the enemy, others may have been lethal if deployed in adequate concentrations.
Some of the ideas have closely related modern counterparts.