Union soldiers find dummy defenders and wooden cannon after storming a Confederate trench in Julian Scott’s 1872 painting “Sold.” Both sides used such phony weapons—known as Quaker guns—during the conflict as a means to mislead the enemy. Scott, who served as a fifer in the 3rd Vermont Infantry during the Civil War, may have had first-hand knowledge of such fakery. At the siege of Yorktown in 1862—where outnumbered Confederates employed Quaker guns to deceive Union forces as to their true strength and numbers—Scott braved Rebel fire to rescue wounded comrades from the battlefield, an act for which he’d later be awarded the Medal of Honor.
