Blow up the White House?

[John Wideman]

(09-15-2018 08:30 PM)SSlater Wrote:  Do you believe that there was any intent to blow up the white house?
I do not believe there was ever any intent to do so. First off, no one had any powder strong enough to do it. (Dynamite was not invented until the late 1860's). ("Black Powder" was a slow burning charge.)
Further, Atzerodt was the one who created that phrase. (He was told that there was an intent to "mine the white house".) He added "that the Rebs were going to get up a party and then mingle-in, as they touched off the charges". "MINGLE- IN"? not likely!. Then the Rebs brought in their explosive expert, Thomas Harney, a land mine specialist.
Since the White House lawn was not fenced, it would have been a simple matter to bury all the mines necessary - very easily.
The whole idea of "Blowing up the White House" was created in Atzerodt's simple mind.

I'm sorry John Stanton has passed.
To clear up a couple of points in this posting.
Black powder if perfectly capable of creating a very large explosion as has been proved time and again. Black powder does not "burn", it deflagrates creating a very large amount of pressure, which is the source of its explosion. The trick is to contain the explosion long enough for it to build up the pressure. This was done repeatedly both intentionally with naval mines and land mines, tunneling (the Crater at Petersburg), sabotage (City Point in 1864) and accidentally (numerous incidents). Black powder is very sensitive to heat, but not to pressure. Ignition charges were usually made using fulminate of mercury which is very sensitive to both pressure and heat.
Black powder in a wood barrel was enough. During the Revolutionary War, David Bushnell, American patriot and pioneer naval warfare operator, used keg "torpedoes" to sink British ships.
Bushnell’s other attempt, also in 1777, was towing a horological torpedo to HMS Cerberus anchored near New York. Bushnell used a whaleboat to get the mine started toward the boat. With no ability to control the movement of the torpedo, he missed. Interestingly, the mine was fished up by Cerberus’s tender, a schooner. While the British sailors were examining the torpedo, they turned some wheels that released the flintlock and exploded the torpedo. They succeeded where Bushnell had failed. Several were killed and the ship set on fire and sunk.
Here is an original keg torpedo in the Smithsonian collection.
       

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(09-17-2018 10:23 AM)LincolnMan Wrote:  Thanks Gene for posting that. How far we’ve come that someone, especially with the celebrity status of her, can make such a statement without any apparent response from the authorites?

As I noted in a previous post, the plan to blow up the White House has been confirmed by later discoveries. Harney confessed and laid bare the plan. An experiment proved it would have been successful.