But the ultimate limitation of the rifle revolution in the Civil War was the meager training imparted to volunteer soldiers by the volunteers’ officers, who were often incapable of superintending much more than basic drill movements. “I found it far more difficult to make officers than soldiers,” wrote crusty Edward Cross, especially when officers in regiments like the 1st Minnesota “brought their books to the drill grounds and prompted themselves or corrected their errors by referring to the books.” Even the West Point–trained officers “who came to us, & who were invaluable to us, were very green,” admitted a Virginia cavalryman. Target practice and instruction in how to move to the attack under fire went by the boards. When one Illinois regiment lined up to target-shoot at a barrel 180 yards away, only 4 shots out of 160 tries hit the barrel. In the 5th Connecticut forty men firing at a barn fifteen feet high from only 100 yards’ distance managed to score a mere four hits, and only one below the height of a man. At First Bull Run, William Buel 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.” William Izlar of the 1st South Carolina remembered a fierce exchange of volleys at a distance of no more than 100 yards in which the chief casualties were “the needles and cones from the extreme top” of the pine trees all around them. He guessed that only one round in 500 ever hit anyone. A Federal captain watched in disbelief as his men fired off “at an angle of forty-five degrees,” hitting little or nothing, “and the instances of their firing into each other are by no means rare.” What ran up the Civil War’s enormous casualty lists was not expert marksmanship or highly refined weapons, but the inability of poorly trained officers to get their poorly trained volunteers to charge forward and send the enemy flying before the bayonet, instead of standing up and blazing away for an hour or two in close-range firefights where the sheer volume of lead in the air killed enough people to be noticed.11
But the technology of nineteenth-century warfare only accounts for the physical constraints placed on tactics at Gettysburg. The armies at Gettysburg were also restrained by a body of tactical doctrine with long roots back to the 1790s, and the great debate over the virtues of “column” and “line” in combat. It is a risky simplification to suggest that the line of battle was the British tactic—the “mode of attack peculiarly suited to British infantry.” But it was characteristic of British training to maximize the power of single-shot, muzzleloading firearms by spreading a unit (in the British case, the 250-to-350-man regiment) out into two or three lines which allowed the full play of musket fire along its front. It would be equally risky to suggest that the column was the French tactic, the massing of troops behind a narrow front that, like swinging a ram, could smash into, and disrupt, an enemy infantry formation and make it run for its life. But this was, in general, how matters had played out in the Napoleonic Wars. The great virtue of a British line was its ability to deliver musket fire by volley and its relative invulnerability to artillery fire, since artillery rounds could not hurt more than a handful even in the event of a direct hit; the great defect of line was that it was very difficult to get it to move together or to move swiftly, especially over uneven ground.12 A French column, on the other hand, could move very fast and very easily, and develop tremendous forward momentum, which was a decided plus in reducing the amount of time an attacking force was exposed to enemy musket fire; the defect of column, however, was that it presented an enormously fat target to artillery, which could do hideous damage to a tightly packed column with just a few well-placed rounds.13
Column’s principal reliance was on the bayonet rather than volley fire, since most of a column’s body would have no clear field of fire; but a solid column, moving at collision speed and tipped with the menacing steel shanks of bayonets, could spike through a terrified line like a javelin through cardboard. “The bullet will lose its way,” was the rule in the Crimean War, “the bayonet, never!” Column was also flexible; attack columns could be formed of regimental columns stacked by company lines, or division columns stacked by brigade. The introduction of the rifle musket had comparatively little effect on either column or line as attack formations; if anything, the rifle encouraged an entirely separate formation, in the shape of clouds of open-order skirmishers which were thrown out like curtains in front of big infantry formations. They could use the rifle’s accuracy and distance to better effect at picking off enemy artillerymen and officers. “A battery can keep back or destroy masses of the enemy,” wrote one Maine artillery officer, but “it cannot successfully contend with a line of skirmishers. To resist them would be like shooting mosquitoes with musket balls.” It was artillery more than infantry that felt the sting of the rifle; artillery now had to be bracketed by supporting wings of infantry, or kept well to the rear to fire over the heads of infantry lines.
But good skirmishing required a higher level of training, and this, too, was something which the Civil War armies greatly lacked. In 1862, the Confederate government authorized the creation of “sharpshooter” battalions to provide specialized skirmish details, and two entire regiments of sharpshooters were raised for the Army of the Potomac by Hiram Berdan in 1862. But beyond these units, actual training in skirmish tactics remained painfully limited. “It is a melancholy fact that three out of four who entered the service” received no instruction in skirmishing, lamented Francis Walker, the chief of staff to Winfield Hancock’s 2nd Corps. “Indeed, most regiments in the service had as little idea of skirmishing as an elephant.”14
And so the debate between column and line continued through the 1850s and beyond the Civil War. At the Alma in 1854, the Russian infantry preferred to fight in column, and they were amazed when Lord Raglan deployed his two British divisions into line of battle and moved to attack the heights behind the Alma River straight ahead in line. “We had never before seen troops fight in lines of two deep,” wrote a Polish officer (who ended up fighting in the Civil War, too), “nor did we think it possible for men to be found with sufficient firmness of morale to be able to attack in this apparently weak formation” and rout their enemy. The French, meanwhile, continued to fight in regimental columns, stacked two companies at a time, as did the allied German armies which invaded France in 1870; at Solferino in 1859, the French emperor Napoleon III piled up columns three regiments deep, so that an attack column could be composed of as many as eighteen ranks of infantrymen, sometimes only a yard behind one another. All of this, Civil War generals had to read, mark, and digest.15
Where the Civil War battlefield differed most from European battlefields was the absence of cavalry. The most basic rule of nineteenth-century battle since Napoleon had been:
Artillery prepares the victory;
Infantry achieves it;
Cavalry completes it, and secures its fruits.
But for all of the romance attached to the U.S. cavalry in the Indian Wars of the later nineteenth century, most of the American military’s first century of existence minimized the use of cavalry (in the Revolution, Washington had used his cavalry contingents mostly for reconnaissance and raiding, when he used them at all). There were, in fact, no Regular cavalry units in the army until Congress authorized two regiments of dragoons in 1833 and 1836. Even though American cavalry officers were eventually sent to the French cavalry school at Saumur to learn the intricacies of cavalry tactics, the army never pushed development of its mounted arm to include a heavy cavalry regiment (for direct use against infantry) or lancers (to exploit the disintegration of enemy infantry formations already on the run).16
One reason for this odd reluctance to invest in a fully operational mounted service was symbolic: just as the American republican tradition sat uneasily beside the notion of permanent professional armies, nothing made Americans more uneasy than the image of the mounted soldier (t
he vision of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry hacking down protesters with their sabers in the Peterloo Massacre in 1819 remained a toxic one for cavalry through much of the nineteenth century). But just as persuasive a reason for minimizing cavalry in the U.S. Army was its sheer cost. Mounted troops were enormously expensive to maintain, requiring at least six months to train just in riding drill. Beyond that, admitted one veteran officer, another “three years had been regarded as necessary to transform a recruit into a good cavalryman,” all of which cost money with no sign of immediate return on the investment. Cavalry horses were even more costly. A cavalry brigade in the Crimea consumed 20,000 pounds of fodder a day (in addition, each horse required five gallons of water), and that did not even begin to reckon with the cost of the horses themselves or their attrition (in a six-month period in 1854–55, British cavalry in the Crimea lost 932 of its 2,216 horses to sickness). It was easier for budget-conscious American Congresses to stint the cavalry, authorizing only light cavalry regiments.17
Moreover, the heavily forested terrain of North America did not lend itself very easily to the kind of line-breaking charges of heavy cavalry that distinguished European battlefields. Although some sporadic attempt was made at the beginning of the Civil War to diversify both Union and Confederate cavalry (the most signal example being the creation of “Rush’s Lancers”—the 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry—at the prompting of George McClellan), the sudden onset of the war not only found the U.S. Army shy of an officer cadre which could train diversified cavalry units, but with neither the time nor the inclination to create them. “Our cavalry are too often satisfied with a few discharges of their pistols and carbines, and then ‘retire’ to give the infantry a chance,” complained a Confederate infantryman in 1863. “An idea that cavalry are only fit for spying out the enemy’s position, picketing, and opening the fight, seems to prevail.” The proof was in the numbers: at Waterloo, the ratio of Wellington’s infantry to cavalry was approximately four to one; in the Crimea, Raglan’s army had thirty infantry battalions and ten cavalry regiments; at Sedan in 1870, MacMahon’s Army of Chalons had an infantry–cavalry ratio of six to one; at Gettysburg, Lee’s ratio of infantry to cavalry was ten to one.18
The hard result in the Civil War was that, as Francis Lippett complained in 1865, “neither side had a sufficient force of true cavalry to enable it to complete a victory, to turn a defeat into a rout, and drive the enemy effectually from the field.” By the end of the Civil War, the light cavalry forces of both armies finally concentrated on providing wide-ranging screens that concealed infantry movments from prying eyes, or on behind-the-lines raiding missions to interdict the flow of enemy supplies. “The Americans in their vast country … used cavalry wisely in sending it off on distant forays to cut communications, make levies, etc.,” wrote the keen French military analyst Ardant du Picq, in 1870. Significantly, there are comparatively few instances in the Civil War where worthwhile intelligence was garnered by cavalry operations. Cavalry screens might provide some limited amount of news, but screening was primarily a protective operation, and any information the screening units might produce was usually limited to scrapings against the enemy’s cavalry screens. At Chancellorsville, James Ewell Brown Stuart had provided Lee with the key information that Joe Hooker’s right flank was dangling, unprotected, in the air; but Stuart had been able to contribute this vital tip because Hooker’s cavalry had galloped itself out of reach and supplied no cloak against Stuart’s probing. Even then, it was not Stuart, but two of the locals—Jackson’s chaplain, Beverly Tucker Lacy, and Charles Wellford—who supplied Lee with the crucial information about access roads for an attack. “Raiding,” and not intelligence collection, “was Stuart’s hobby,” wrote one of Stuart’s staff officers, and “it was urged with all the earnestness which characterized him whenever his heart was set on any particular object.” In the Army of the Potomac, intelligence collection was being done by a tightly knit cadre of operatives attached to Col. George Sharpe’s Bureau of Military Information. Sharpe’s scouts, in turn, were supported by Signal Corps detachments which could establish chains of flag stations from Harpers Ferry to “South Mountain, Monterey, Greencastle … up to Parnell’s Knob, in the Cumberland Valley,” and by networks of civilian spies and “scouts” (who were scarcely more than spies).19
As the task of cavalry on the Civil War battlefield shrank, the task of artillery expanded. The U.S. Army’s artillery in 1861 had fallen off considerably from “the high reputation which it had gained in Mexico … There was no chief nor special administration for that arm, and no regulation for its government.” Experience soon changed that, in both the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia. Americans might be, as John Ropes wrote, “an unmilitary people,” but in the mechanical attractions artillery offered a nation of tinkerers, “the American soldier seems, in fact, to take naturally to artillery.” In 1805, Napoleonic armies deployed something less than 2 artillery pieces per 1,000 infantrymen; seven years later, at Borodino, Napoleon had expanded his artillery to 5 guns per 1,000 infantry, and at Wagram, Borodino, and Waterloo he had concentrated grand batteries of over 100 guns to be used in smashing opposing infantry to mush. In 1863, the Army of Northern Virginia brought 283 cannon with it on the Gettysburg campaign, and would have brought more but for lack of horses (and the fodder they required) to haul them; the rebels would capture 26 more guns along the way. The Federal artillery at Gettysburg comprised 372 guns (including horse artillery batteries and an artillery reserve of 118 pieces to be deployed in any emergency), so that the Army of the Potomac actually had a field ratio of artillery to infantry that exceeded European patterns (the ratio of the Prussian 3rd Army at Sedan was approximately 4 pieces per 1,000 infantry).20
Not only had the artillery grown in numbers, it had grown in organizational capacity, as both Joseph Hooker and Robert E. Lee reorganized their artillery arms into quasi-independent commands, with clusters of batteries attached to different corps commands and a large artillery reserve to be deployed at the discretion of a reserve chief. And like their European counterparts, American artillerists tended to behave as though they owed nothing to anyone. “Gunners are a race apart,” ran the British doggerel, “hard of head and hard of heart.” At Waterloo, it was all senior British officers could do to prevent independent-souled artillerymen from throwing away their energy and their ammunition on counterbattery duels with opposing artillery batteries. “Do not direct your fire on the enemy’s artillery,” sternly advised a British artillery handbook, “unless your troops suffer more from his fire than his do from yours.” The same was true among American artillerists. “The captain of a battery has a very independent position,” wrote an officer in the 13th New York Battery, “and it lies with him almost entirely whether his battery is a good and serviceable one or not”—or what targets he would choose. (The Army of the Potomac’s chief of artillery, Henry J. Hunt, would actually impose a rule of firing no more than “one round from each gun in two minutes; and that rate should only be reached at critical moments”; otherwise, “one round in four to six minutes is as rapid as should be permitted.”) And it was a rule of thumb among gunners that a concentration of eighteen guns, like the Russian battery at Borodino or the eighteen guns with which Auguste de Marmont saved the day at Marengo for Napoleon, could shake whole regiments apart and break up any infantry assault.21
Controlling the artilleryman’s instinct to let loose was vital, and never less so in the Civil War than at Gettysburg. The chief responsibility of artillery was (according to the U.S. Army’s Instruction for Field Artillery) “to break an enemy’s line or prevent him from forming.” This could be done in three ways, beginning with the use of the long-range shell (timed by fuse to explode over the heads of oncoming infantry and spraying white-hot shards of shell or small lead shot over the heads of the enemy). If this did not disperse the attackers, mid-range solid shot would. Gunners would aim to “graze” solid shot at 400 yards so that it would ricochet at just th
e right level and smash the maximum amount of human flesh and bone in its path. Like some brutal nemesis, or “like a rock skipped upon the surface of the ocean by the powerful arm of a giant,” solid shot could be watched “bounding like rubber balls,” landing “with a heavy thud” and coming “right at the line with the sound of a huge circular saw ripping a log.” “A dozen at a time” could come “bounding along like footballs,” hitting “the ground once or twice” and caroming off at unpredictable and lethal angles into an oncoming infantry formation. William Wheeler, in Oliver Otis Howard’s 11th Corps, “saw an infantry man’s leg taken off by a shot, and whirled like a stone through the air, until it came against a caisson with a loud whack.” Another officer in the 11th Corps on July 1st noticed how “many officers dismounted or bent low whenever they felt the pressure of the air created by the shot,” except for “one unfortunate officer [who] was nailed by a six-pounder against a big tree. I got hold of his bushy hair and pulled him down, as he presented a ghastly appearance.” If neither shell nor shot stopped attackers, the cannoneers’ last resort was close-range canister—a tin can filled with lead balls that could be blasted directly from the muzzle of an artillery piece in a thirty-two-foot-wide spread at 100 yards, like so many pumpkin slugs.22
When it was well laid, artillery could cause destruction of absolutely hellish proportions, physically and emotionally. Explosive shells used at long distances multiplied the stress experienced by enemy infantry because under shell fire neither flight nor aggression are possible. “Spherical case shot”—the kind of explosive shell filled with “scores of cast-iron bullets”—was particularly dreaded by Henry Nichols Blake in the 11th Massachusetts because it “could not be avoided … and was very destructive.” Solid shot was, if anything, even more horrible, since the low muzzle velocities of nineteenth-century artillery guaranteed that attacking infantry at anything less than 1,000 yards could actually see solid shot flying at them from the muzzles of aimed guns. But artillery also had its limitations. Gunners who opened fire at enemy infantry too early in the process of the attack would exhaust themselves from sponging and loading, and the heat from overextended periods of fire could cause bronze or brass gun barrels to droop or to burst, especially in high temperatures.23
Gettysburg: The Last Invasion Page 7