Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction

by Allen C. Guelzo

  This situation was all the more galling to nonslaveholding whites, who had grudgingly supported the slave system precisely because black slavery was the one social fact which gave them any sense of equality with white planters. Military life forced slaveholders and nonslaveholders into a relationship of class and command that denied race-based equality among whites. Frank Robinson, a Louisiana soldier, complained that “the life of a common soldier… is a great deal worse than that of a common field hand. … Those commissioned officers… are just like the owners of slaves on plantations, they have nothing to do but strut about, dress fine, and enjoy themselves.”29

  In many cases, the discipline problem lay not so much with the volunteer soldier as with the volunteer system itself, since volunteer regiments were usually allowed to elect their own officers from among themselves, officers who might be popular as good fellows but who knew neither how to give orders and get them obeyed nor even what kind of orders to give. “In the sense in which the term is understood in the regular armies of Europe,” admitted John William Jones, a Southern Baptist chaplain, “we really had no discipline.” At his worst, the volunteer officer could be fully as ignorant and irresponsible as the men he was supposed to command. Thomas Hyde began the war as an officer by “drilling as much as possible by day and studying by candle light in the evenings.” Charles Wainwright was more exasperated at the officers the volunteers elected than at the volunteers themselves. “Their orders come out slow and drawling, then they wait patiently to see them obeyed in a laggard manner, instead of making the men jump to it sharp. …” This was because, as Wainwright realized, the officers had “raised their own men and known most of them in civil life.” A Northern missionary at Port Royal was shocked to see “officers and men… on terms of perfect equality socially” in the Union army. “… Off duty they drink together, go arm in arm about the town, call each other by the first name, in a way that startles an Eastern man.”30

  Time and the Confederate and Federal governments eventually weeded out the worst of the incompetent officers. The Federal army imposed qualifying exams for commissioned officers after First Bull Run, and the Confederacy followed in 1862. The qualifying exams were woefully easy to pass, but even so, some were not able to do so. Dillon Bridges of the 13th Indiana Cavalry was examined by a three-man board after being elected captain of Company M in 1864 and failed to answer some of the most obvious of the thirty-nine questions on the exam:

  Q. How are battalions placed?

  A. Can’t tell. …

  Q. Moving in column of fours and you wish to form platoons, what command?

  A. Can’t tell. …

  Q. What course would you pursue in sending or receiving a flag of truce?

  A. I do not know. …

  Q. Have you ever studied the tactics or Army regulations?

  A. Not half an hour. All I have learned has been from observation.

  Bridges was eventually prevailed upon to resign his captaincy. Company M’s second lieutenant, John A. Chapman, who confessed that he was “not capable of standing an examination,” was passed by the examining board after a few perfunctory questions about picket duty.31

  Even if Dillon Bridges had studied “the tactics or Army regulations,” none of that might have made him a more effective officer. The prevailing tactics books—by Winfield Scott, William Hardee, and, after 1862, Silas Casey’s System of Infantry Tactics—were long on the technicalities of drill, such as basic weapons handling and movement in and out of formations, but painfully short on real instruction for combat. Given the inexperience of the average volunteer officer, the limitations of the tactics books, and the disposition of the handful of available regular army officers toward a war of fortification and maneuver, the result for the average soldier was that drill became his training for realities of actual battlefield fighting. One Ohio colonel, Jacob Ammen, recorded how he handled and instructed both his volunteer officers and men: “Daily drills—daily recitations in tactics—take the starch out of some, and others are learning fast. And now I superintend—select an officer to drill the others in the morning, one squad drill, company drill, and Battalion drill in the afternoon. … I drill the sergeants daily, in length of step, time and preserving distance.”

  All of this was effective for bringing large and unwieldy bodies of men to the battlefield itself, but it generally turned out to be useless once the shooting started, especially as units lost cohesion and started to take casualties. When the 24th Michigan came under fire for the first time in December 1862, the regiment’s colonel could think of nothing better at that moment to steady his men than to put them through the manual of arms. “His sonorous orders: ‘Attention, battalion! Right dress! Front! Support arms…’ were heard over the field, and with all the precision of a parade, the orders were obeyed… while the air was torn with cannon balls and the very hills seemed to rock with the reverberations.” It made a grand sight, but it was also a telling testimony to the real inability most Civil War officers suffered in not knowing how to direct their men under the terrifying conditions of real combat. “Instead of practising the men in the simple flank and line movements used in battle, or at targets, or in estimating distances,” complained Union artilleryman Frank Wilkeson, “they were marched to and fro and made to perform displayful evolutions,” which would have been commendable if war had been a “competitive drill for a valuable, and maybe, sacred prize,” but which were worse than useless “in a rugged, wooded country where the clearings were surrounded by heavy forests… and where practice and practice and still more practice in estimating distances was required, if we were to fire accurately and effectively.”32

  The most important result of this preoccupation with drill was that few units, either North or South, were actually prepared to carry an attack forward under fire. Captain Edward Hewett, a British observer from the Royal Engineers, was annoyed to find that “neither side can be manoeuvred under fire, and this is about the secret of the whole present American War.” The volunteers can “be brought under fire, and when there will stand well,” but they were too undertrained “either in morale or field movements to advance, change position or retire—The moment they have to manoeuvre, they get into confusion and break, this their own officers admit. …”

  Their own officers did admit it. “It is astonishing how soon, and by what slight causes, regularity of formation and movement are lost in actual battle,” remembered David L. Thompson of the 9th New York. “Disintegration begins with the first shot. To the book-soldier all order seems destroyed, months of drill apparently going for nothing in a few minutes.” For one thing, the American terrain, with its thick woods and comparatively poor system of internal roads made battlefield maneuver by the book an impossibility. William Tecumseh Sherman observed:

  We… had to grope our way over unknown ground, and generally found a cleared field or prepared entanglements that held us for a time under a close and withering fire. Rarely did the opposing lines in compact order come into actual contact, but when … the lines did become commingled, the men fought individually in every possible style, more frequently with the musket clubbed than with the bayonet, and in some instances the men clinched like wrestlers, and went to the ground together. Europeans frequently criticised our war, because we did not always take full advantage of a victory; the true reason was, that habitually the woods served as a screen, and we often did not realize the fact that our enemy had retreated till he was already miles away and was again intrenched, having left a mere skirmish-line to cover the movement, in turn to fall back to the new position.

  Confederate general Daniel Harvey Hill put the matter even more simply: the Confederate soldier “was unsurpassed and unsurpassable as a scout and on the skirmish line,” but “of the shoulder-to-shoulder courage, born of drill and discipline, he knew nothing, and cared less. Hence, on the battlefield, he was more of a free lance than a machine. Whoever saw a Confederate line advancing that was not crooked as a ram’s horn? Each ragged
Rebel yelling on his own hook and aligning on himself.”33

  Still fewer officers were trained in how to use their regiments’ firepower properly. Target practice was almost unknown in both armies, and when it was tried, the results were usually too pitiful to be encouraging. The 14th Illinois tried to practice target shooting at a barrel set up 180 yards away from the firing line: out of 160 tries, only four shots hit the barrel. The 5th Connecticut scored even more poorly: forty men firing at a barn fifteen feet high from a distance of only a hundred yards managed to score only four hits, and only one below the height of a man. At Bull Run, Col. William B. Franklin was exasperated even by the regulars of his 12th U.S. Infantry: “It is my firm belief that a great deal of the misfortune of the day at Bull Run is due to the fact that the troops knew very little of the principles and practice of firing. … Ours was very bad, the rear files sometimes firing into and killing the front ones.”34

  George Eminhizer of the 45th Pennsylvania received no weapons training at all at Camp Curtin in 1862, and was greatly embarrassed by the command to load his rifle. “I did not know how,” Eminhizer recalled. “I turned to my comrade on the right and said: ‘Can you tell me which end of the cartridge I must put in first?’ He loaded the gun for me.” At least Eminhizer did not have to learn his lesson under fire. Ulysses Grant remembered seeing raw Federal soldiers coming under attack at Shiloh who had been issued weapons only days before, on the way up the Tennessee, “and were hardly able to load their muskets according to the manual.” Their officers knew no better, and Grant could only concede that it was perfectly natural “that many of the regiments broke at the first fire.”35

  The weapon which the volunteer was expected to master, on his own or otherwise, would depend largely on which branch of the service he volunteered to serve in: the infantry, the service of the common foot soldier; the cavalry, that of the horse-mounted soldier; or the artillery, which serviced the various sizes and shapes of cannon that supported the infantry or protected fortifications. Both armies also recruited engineering and medical services and attracted a plethora of chaplains, clerks, and civilian peddlers known as sutlers, who accompanied the combat soldiers on campaign. The infantry was the backbone of the army, and the burden of winning a battle or a campaign invariably rested on the skills and endurance of the infantryman. Approximately 80 percent of the entire Union army was infantry, with 14 percent serving in the cavalry and 6 percent in the artillery. In the Confederate army, the differential was much the same: 75 percent of all enlisted Confederates served in the infantry, with another 20 percent in the cavalry and the remaining 5 percent in the artillery.36

  The basic infantry weapon was the Model 1861 United States Rifle Musket, frequently known as the “Springfield” (from the Springfield, Massachusetts, armory where most of them were made), a 58.5-inch-long, single-shot, muzzle-loading rifle, weighing 9 pounds 4 ounces and fitted to carry a 21-inch-long triangular socket bayonet, which converted the rifle into an improvised pike for close-at-hand fighting. The rifle musket was, in theory, a distinct improvement over the inaccurate and short-range smoothbore muskets that had been the common weapon of armies from the mid-eighteenth century up through the wars of Napoleon Bonaparte. The standard British Army’s “Brown Bess” musket was dependable for hitting a target only up to 40 yards, useful for hitting things in general only up to 80 yards, and little more than guesswork at 140 yards. (During Wellington’s campaigns in Spain, it was estimated that one casualty was inflicted for every 459 shots fired.) For that reason, musket fire was best delivered in simultaneous-fire volleys, propelling a large cloud of bullets at an oncoming enemy force, which would compel it to stop, return fire, or go to ground (in which case it was unlikely to start moving forward again).37

  The rifle musket, however, featured spiral grooving on the inside of the musket barrel that gripped the bullet as it was fired, gave it a spiral twist, and thus straightened its flight to its target. Rifles had been in military use for almost a hundred years, but their loading process was tedious and difficult, a problem not solved until the 1840s by French army captains Louis-Etienne de Thouvenin and Claude-Etienne Minié, who experimented with cone-shaped bullets that made the loading process substantially easier. Due to the deadly slow spin imparted by the grooves (the rifling, which gave the weapon its name), a rifle musket firing one of Minié’s conical, soft-lead slugs (hilariously misnamed the “minnie ball” after its designer) could hit an eleven-inch bull’s-eye at 350 yards and could penetrate six inches of pine board at 500 yards.

  The rifle musket received its first practical tests in North Africa in 1846, the Crimean War (1854–56), and the North Italian War of 1859, and in short order the British Army reequipped its soldiers with a British-made version of the Minié-system rifle, the .577 caliber Enfield, followed by the Austrians (who developed the .54 caliber Lorenz rifle in 1854), the Russians, and the United States, with then secretary of war Jefferson Davis presiding over the development of the .58-caliber Springfield. Federal arsenals manufactured almost 700,000 of the 1861 Model Springfields for use during the war, while twenty private Northern arms manufacturers supplied 450,000 more. Approximately 400,000 Enfields were run through the blockade to equip the Confederate armies, who had no access to the Springfield rifle beyond what could be scavenged from battlefields, along with an assortment of Austrian Lorenz rifles, Belgian-made Minié rifles, and smoothbore conversions.38

  The rifle, however, remained slow to load, requiring a sequence of nine separate steps (known as “load in nine times”). Each Minié ball, packed into a cigar-shaped paper tube along with sixty grains of black powder, had to be removed from the soldier’s cartridge box, torn open with the teeth, emptied into the barrel through the muzzle (which required standing the weapon upright on its stock), and rammed home with a long thin steel ramrod. Then the infantryman would have to raise the musket, fit a percussion cap onto the nipple of the lock plate above the trigger, and pull the trigger, exploding the percussion cap and igniting the powder charge in the barrel. Although the optimal firing rate was three rounds per minute, the practical reality under battlefield conditions was closer to one round every four to five minutes.

  The Sharps Rifle, a .52 caliber rifle that could be loaded from the rifle’s breech rather than by the muzzle, was invented by Christian Sharps in 1844, and was favored as a sharpshooter’s rifle. But even the Sharps rifle was still a single-shot, one-by-one affair. It remained for Christopher Miner Spencer, a Connecticut inventor, to develop a seven-shot repeating rifle, firing manufactured brass cartridges from a magazine in the stock of the rifle, which streamlined the tedious and dangerously exposed process of loading and reloading. Alongside Spencer’s rifle, the Colt Patent Firearms company introduced a repeating rifle with a peculiar five-chambered revolving cylinder, while the New Haven Arms Company’s Henry repeating rifle could carry fifteen rounds in its magazine, and could reload a new cartridge and eject a spent one with a single lever motion.39

  Oddly, the repeating rifles failed to get the approval of the army’s chief of ordnance, James Wolfe Ripley. Part of this distrust may have been simple obstinacy on the part of the sixty-seven-year-old Ripley. Ripley had at least some justification in fearing that the move to rapid-fire repeating rifles would put too much stress on the federal arsenals’ ability to supply the repeaters’ ammunition in sufficient quantities to the Union armies. Breech-loading repeating rifles encouraged soldiers to blaze away without regard for supply, and Ripley had enough trouble supplying soldiers with sufficient ammunition for their muzzle-loaders without having to think of the quantities of expensive, brass-encased repeating cartridges he would have to supply for an army full of repeaters (Spencer cartridges cost more than two dollars apiece). As it was, an early government contract for 10,000 Spencer repeaters was nearly lost by Spencer when his small factory was unable to keep up a supply of the weapons or their ammunition. Whatever else was wrong with the Springfield, it was a simple and durable weapon and cost little more
than half the price of a Henry repeater or a Spencer, while the Enfield and Springfield both accepted the same standardized Minié ball.

  These arguments were perfectly plausible to an army bureaucrat; they meant a good deal less to the soldier in the field. In 1861, Colonel Hiram Berdan went over Ripley’s head to the president to get authorization to arm his two regiments of United States Sharpshooters with the Sharps breech-loading rifle; and in 1863 Colonel John T. Wilder offered to buy Spencer repeating rifles for his brigade out of the contributions of the men themselves. (Ripley relented on this occasion and refunded the cost of purchase to Wilder’s men.) Wilder’s men got the first test of their repeaters in June 1863, when they easily outshot both Confederate cavalry and infantry at Hoover’s Gap, Tennessee. In August Spencer got an opportunity to display his repeating rifle before Abraham Lincoln, and on September 15 Ripley was officially retired. By January 1865, the Ordnance Bureau was no longer even considering new models of muzzle-loaders. By contrast with Union hesitancy, the Confederates were much more willing to experiment with new weapons and were happy to capture as many Spencers as they could. But the South lacked the technology to manufacture its own copy of the Spencer, and it had no way at all to manufacture the special metal cartridges for use in captured repeaters.40

  The most common tactical formation that the volunteer infantryman fell into was the “line of battle”: a regiment drawn up in two long ranks, one behind the other, with a thin curtain of skirmishers in front to clear the advance and another thin curtain of sergeants and lieutenants in the rear to give orders and restrain cowards and shirkers. Attack in line of battle had been the formula for the British army’s successful assault against the Russians at the Alma River in 1854, and the received wisdom was that “the formation in line—that is to say, the extended volley, followed by the charge—is the most effective” at winning victories.41