I was re-reading the battle at Yorktown in the Peninsula Campaign and that General was named Rains (don't you spell your name Raines?). Anyhow General Gabriel J. Rains had planted torpedos...land mines... around the fortifications, he was convinced of the "vast advantage to our country to be gained from this invention." Rains had experiminted with these devices as far back as 1840, during the Armies war against the Seminoles. McCllean considered this "guilty of the most murderous and barbarous conduct"....another example of whose oxen are being gored.

Rains also mined the waters of the nearby York River. By the end of the war more ships were lost to torpedos than from all other causes combined. Rains claimed his torpedos sank fifty-eight Federal ships.Rains however didn't have an easy time, he lacked electrical wire and the Confederacy lacked that as it lacked many other things. So he dredged up abandoded Union cables from the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay and shredded them into wire and used them for his bombs. Rains suceeded in finding enough wire to do the job. Though many southerners were against his invention, Rains convinced the Confederate Government to let him fill the James River with torpedos, he would also plant thirteen hundred mines around Richmond.

His brother George was given command of munitions in Augusta Georgia. He too had a problem, the Confederacy lacked gunpowder, they even lacked the prime ingredient, potassium nitrate, better known as saltpeter. George found some in limestone caves throughout the South but not nearly enough. George put out a call for chamber pots and outhouses. His men dug up privies and latrines and dumped the smelly but inevitable by-product of human nutrition into saltpeter ponds.. They then processed it into potassium nitrate. The (Word deleted by administration) to saltpeter scheme worked and supplied gunpowder. Innovative fellows huh? I had thought you might be related, I see the names are spelled different. Had you however heard this before?

Chase.