Contenders for the Balloon Corps
Several aeronauts saw the Civil War as an opportunity to not only serve their country but also get government funding for their projects. Two men got close to founding the Balloon Corps:
 
John LaMountain was a former seaman and the apprentice of John Wise, the “grand old man” of American ballooning. In 1959, the two men and a third companion crashed Wise’s ballon Atlantic during a shakedown flight before their attempt to cross the ocean. LaMountain bought the damaged balloon from Wise, fixed it up, took it on an experimental flight that crashed in the Canadian wilderness, and became a national hero with the help of a somewhat embellished newspaper article of his exploits.
 
When the war broke out, he offered his services but could not convince President Lincoln’s cabinet. He did, however, secure the support of General Benjamin Butler at Fort Monroe, who had him make reconnaissance flights as a freelancer. LaMountain practiced free (untethered) flights, which allowed him to get directly above the enemy, but also put him largely at the mercy of the wind. He was credited with making the first recon flight that brought back useful information. In August 1861 LaMountain flew his balloon from the steam tug Fanny, arguably making the vessel the first aircraft carrier in history.

General Butler was later relieved of his position at Fort Monroe, and LaMountain was reassigned to the Baloon Corps, which had been founded under the control of Thaddeus S. C. Lowe by then. The two men clashed constantly. This was partially because of Lowe’s insistence on tethered flights, but more due to LaMountain’s jealousy and garrulousness. He kept performing extravagant stunts, alienating other aeronauts of the Corps and attacking his superior, including in a newspaper article. In the end, Lowe found it impossible to work with LaMountain and had him dismissed in February 1862.
 
The most successful candidate and eventual chief of the Balloon Corps was Thaddeus Sobieski Constantine Lowe. A self-educated man, his meteorological theories and balloon building skills were well-recognized by the scientific community. Like Wise and LaMountain, Lowe was also planning a trans-Atlantic flight. In April 1861, a week after the Civil War broke out, he was blown off course during a test flight, landing in Unionville, South Caroline, a Confederate state. He was promptly arrested as a Union spy but was let go thanks to his silver tongue, scientific reputation and the testimony of an acquaintance – he later boasted he was the first Union prisoner of war. He was summoned to Washington, D.C. along with his balloon on his return home.

Lowe himself almost met that fate once. Like Wise, he was at the First Battle of Bull Run, and made his own flight after Wise botched his chance. Still using free flight, he reconnoitered the Confederate lines, but was then fired on by Union soldiers as he was trying to return and land. In the end, he had to land behind Southern lines and twisted his ankle on touchdown. He briefly met a Union unit but couldn’t keep up with them due to his injured foot, and had to hide out in a field and wait for rescue. The rescue came in the shape of his wife Leontine, who disguised herself as a poor local woman out looking for firewood, complete with manure smeared over herself to hide the scent of her perfume. She procured a buckboard wagon covered in canvas and went behind the Confederate lines to rescue her husband and his equipment.
 
Probably in no small part thanks to his adventure, Lowe eventually settled on tethered flights launched about a mile behind the frontline. The launch spot and Lowe’s small camp around it were usually established in an area surrounded by hills to hide it from Confederate artillery. Ascent and descent sometimes carried some peril as the balloon came under cannon fire, but no serious harm was ever done, and the balloons were safe once they were above most cannons’ maximum elevation. The tether also allowed a telegraph cable to be strung around it with an operator in the basket making real-time reports. Other methods of communication were flag or hand signals, a megaphone, or a written message placed in a bottle, and ran down the tether line. Light signals could be used at night, and later in his tenure Lowe had aeronauts simply descend and make an oral report.
 
The balloons
Lowe had seven balloons constructed to his own specifications, using India silk for the balloon, lightweight cotton cording and a varnish mad with Lowe’s secret recipe to make the balloon airtight. The smaller Eagle, Constitution and Washington were one-man aerostats for quick, low-altitude flights; the larger Union, Intrepid (Lowe’s favorite), Excelsior and United States could carry several people and a telegraph. The Excelsior was only used as a backup and the United States never left storage, prompting LaMountain to go on a diatribe about how Lowe was hoping to buy these unused after the war. (We don’t know if that was true.)

A true showman, Lowe made sure to put the balloons to propaganda use as well. The Constitution was adorned with a large portrait of George Washington and the color image of a spread eagle. The Union bore the Stars and Stripes. The largest aerostat, the five-man Intrepid, bore a portrait of General George McClellan carried by an eagle. (Lowe was attached to McClellan’s command in Yorktown and wanted to ingratiate himself with his superior.) The baskets were also adorned with stars and stripes.
 
One early limitation of balloons was access to lifting gas. Coke gas was available in cities, but the inflated balloon then had to be transported to the deployment site. In October 1861 Union was filled up in Washington and headed out to Lewinsville. The group ran into trouble at Chain Bridge, a fully covered and trellised bridge across the Potomac. The balloon handlers had to climb on top of the bridge and pull the balloon after themselves that way. The ordeal took nine hours – after arriving, a gale force wind added insult to injury by snatching away the Union (though it was later recovered).
 
Lowe invented portable gas generators, small enough to be loaded on buckboards, to reduce dependence on city gas. These contraptions were made of copper plumbing and tanks which could be filled with diluted sulfuric acid and iron fillings to create hydrogen gas right on the spot where the balloons were meant to be flown.

On September 24, 1861, in the early days of the Balloon Corps, Lowe was sent to Fort Corcoran across the Potomac from Washington to overlook the Confederate encampments at Falls Church, Virginia. There was a Union artillery battery hidden nearby in a location from where they did not have a view of the Confederates. Using signal flags from the air, Lowe directed blind cannon fire, turning it accurate after a few rounds of correction. This was a precursor to the use of forward artillery observers.
 
The Peninsula Campaign
The battles on the Virginia Peninsula moved inland into heavily forested areas with no suitable balloon launch sites. The converted coal barge USS George Washington Parke Custis had everything removed from its deck that could get entangled in a tether, and was used as a floating platform to launch balloon flights. It’s often claimed that this made the Custis the first aircraft carrier in history, even though LaMountain had already made his own ascent from the Fanny at an earlier date.

Lowes’s balloons made countless ascents during the Peninsula Campaign and provided valuable information at many battles including Gaines Mill, Hanover Courthouse and Seven Pines. At the last, Union General Samuel Heintzelman and a contingent of his troops found themselves on the Confederate side of the river with no way back as the water washed away the nearby bridges. Confederate troops were closing in on them. McClellan thought the Southerners were only making a feint, but from his vantage point in the sky, Lowe knew the threat was genuine. His message prompted a quick repair of the nearest bridge and the sending of reinforcements that saved Heintzelman.
 
During the same battle, Lowe wanted to transfer from the Constitution to the Intrepid to get a better view from higher up. The Intrepid, however, was still an hour away from being inflated. He had his men cut out the bottom of a camp kettle and used the rest as a connector between the two balloons’ gas valves. He then had the gas of the Constitution transferred directly to the Intrepid, finishing the procedure in 15 minutes.

The Corps is grounded
The Balloon Corps offered a great service with its aerial reconnaissance, but Lowe faced a constant uphill battle. While he had the support of some high-ranking officers like McClellan, he ran into constant resistance by lower-ranking pencil pushers who were reluctant to assign money, materials and men to a lowly civilian – and a carnival showman at that!
 
Lowe caught malaria in the area near the Chickahominy River and was out of service for more than a month. By the time he was back up on his feet, the Army of the Potomac had been ordered to withdraw to Washington, and his mules and wagons were commandeered for the withdrawal. The Balloon Corps was eventually placed under the purview of the Army Corps of Engineers, and one Captain Cyrus B. Comstock in particular. Comstock was offended that Lowe had a higher salary (equivalent to a colonel’s) than him, and reduced it to one-third of what it was. After some useless protests, Lowe resigned in outrage and returned to civilian life where he later revolutionized the cold storage industry with his inventions. Direction of the Balloon Corps defaulted to two of Lowe’s men (and former rivals for the position), but they were less competent, and the corps ceased to exist by August 1, 1863.
 
The spirit of Lowe’s Balloon Corps did, however, survive in an indirect way. Many European powers sent military observers to the American Civil War, and one of these observers was a young German officer. After the war, he stayed in the United States and traveled for a while. During his travels, he met a fellow ethnic German who was one of Lowe’s aeronauts, and the man took the soldier on his first ever balloon ride. Many years later, the officer credited this experience with instilling in him an obsession with lighter-than-air aircraft. His name was Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, and he designed the world’s best-known airship.