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

by Allen C. Guelzo

  As the line moved forward, alignment was maintained by sergeants and corporals on the flanks of the lines, bearing small flags called guidons in their musket barrels; and by a color guard in the center of the front line, bearing the regiment’s national and state flag. In the midst of movement and battle, these regimental colors could be the most important markers and pointers of all, since they could be seen and followed when drums and orders could not be heard. The position regimental colors occupied in battle also made them the most potent emotional symbol of the Civil War soldiers’ group identity. Attempts to capture or defend regimental colors under near-suicidal conditions became appallingly routine in Civil War combat, and the example of the 19th Massachusetts, which lost thirteen color-bearers within ten minutes of fighting at Fredericksburg, is a case in point:

  The two color-bearers, Sergt. Ronello B. Creasey, of Co. I, and Corp. Winfield Rappell, of Co. B, were among the first to fall, but the colors were instantly picked up and the line hastily withdrew. Re-forming under cover of the canal bank, the regiment again advanced. … Again the color bearers were shot down. Sergt. Charles B. Brown, of Company G, was the seventh man to grasp the colors and he quickly received a wound in the head which stunned him. Lieut. Hume, thinking the wound a mortal one, told him to give up the colors, but he refused saying, “I will not give them to any man.” Finding that he was fast becoming weak, Brown rushed out in advance of the line, staggered and fell, driving the color lance into the earth; and there he lay, dizzy and bleeding, still grasping the lance with both hands until Lieut. Hume caught them up. A color corporal then took it, while Edgar M. Newcomb grasped the other, the bearer of which had also fallen. Lieut. Newcomb shouted “Forward” and the quivering line sprang on again, but as he spoke the brave lieutenant was hit by a shot which passed through and shattered the bones of both legs below the knees. As he fell, he handed his color to Second Lieut. J. G. B. Adams, who was then in command of Co. I. “Don’t let them go down!” exclaimed Newcomb. (“It seemed as if I grasped for death, expecting every moment to be my last,” said Lieut. Adams afterward.) Instantly the color corporal with the other flag was felled by a wound and it was grasped by Sergt. Chas. L. Merrill, of Co. C… and he, too, fell wounded. The man who seized the flag when Sergt. Merrill fell was at once struck down by a ball and as the color again dropped, Lieut. Adams caught that also. He now held the two flags of the regiment in his hands. … Realizing that it meant sure death and probably the loss of both colors if he stayed where he was, Lieut. Adams rushed across the field to the left and reached the shelter of a fence.42

  No wonder that, when the colonel of the 51st New York asked his regiment “if they would exchange” their old bullet-shredded state color for a new one, “the boys let up such a yell as convinced the Colonel that the City would have a good time getting that old Flag.” Lieutenant George Washington Whitman (Walt Whitman’s brother) of the 51st added, “It has 15 or 20 bullet holes in it and the staff was shot in two at New Bern, and we think a great deal of it.” James Madison Williams had a similar reaction when the 21st Alabama was sent a new flag to replace the one damaged at Shiloh: “I like the ragged old flag torn with the enemy’s shot, that we carried through the fight, better than all the flags in the Confederacy. …”43

  Heroic as all this seems, it also appears to modern eyes as puzzlingly suicidal, since few things seem more counterintuitive on a battlefield than soldiers standing up in plain view in neat, tightly bunched lines, as if on parade instead of in combat, offering themselves as perfect targets to their enemy. And it would have been, had the new weapons technology of the rifle musket been as revolutionary as it seemed. While the rifle musket offered increased range and accuracy to its users, the increases were limited by two factors. First, rifle muskets, like the old smoothbores, still used black powder as a propellant, which not only quickly fouled the barrel with caked powder residue but also kicked out billowing clouds of whitish gray smoke. These banks of powder smoke “hung pall-like over the fields and woods all day along the battle lines,” often becoming “so thick and dense sometimes during the day that it was impossible to discern anything fifty paces away, and at midday the smoke was so thick overhead that I could just make out to see the sun, and it looked like a vast ball of red fire hanging in a smoke-veiled sky.”44 All the technological improvements in accuracy and range would mean nothing if a target could not be seen.

  Second, the rifling in the barrel slowed the speed of the round (the old Brown Bess smoothbore had a muzzle velocity of 1,500 feet per second; the new Enfield’s rifling dropped the muzzle velocity to 1,115 feet per second). Lacking that speed, the rifle’s Minié ball followed a curved trajectory that could drop as much as fourteen feet over 300 yards. A rifleman had to be carefully trained to make allowance for the drop of the bullet by aiming above the actual target (which is why rifle muskets were fitted with backsights, to induce the rifleman to raise his rifle above the line of sight while seeming to aim straight at the target) and by mentally calculating the distance and speed of his target, since the bullet would drop onto its target rather than hitting it in a straight line in front of him.45

  The rifle may have had the potential for greater accuracy and longer range, but only under ideal conditions, with clear lines of sight and exact knowledge of the range of the target at each moment. That meant that the actual improvements in killing power offered by the rifle musket remained limited. One South Carolina officer thought the hitting rate of the rifle came down to only 1 in 400. Lt. Cadmus Wilcox, who was commissioned in the 1850s to write a handbook on the use of the rifle musket (and who would later serve as a Confederate general), insisted that “a Rifle, whatever may be its range and accuracy, in the hands of a soldier unskilled in its use, loses much of its value.” It required “the most detailed and thorough practical instruction as to the means of preserving the piece, and… teaching the soldier the art of firing”—little of which was ever possible under the actual conditions of combat.46

  The only practical way to make the infantry’s firepower count, even armed with rifle muskets, was the old-fashioned method of delivering simultaneous-fire volleys. That, in turn, required bunching infantrymen into lines so as to maximize the concentration of fire and sufficiently multiply the likelihood of hitting enough targets to give an attacker second thoughts. The musket’s only real offensive use was as a means of suppressing a defending enemy’s fire until the attacker had moved near enough to close with the bayonet. It was the sharp, menacing bayonet that would crack a defending enemy’s courage and send the enemy fleeing pell-mell to the rear. The bayonet also required bunching and drilling of its own so that a unit of attacking infantrymen could drive through a defender’s volley and be on top of them with the bayonet before the defender could reload. “No troops,” declared Sir Charles Napier, “stand a charge of bayonets, and whoever charges first has the victory.” No wonder, then, that the goal of combat was still to close with the bayonet as quickly as possible. British experience in the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 had shown the value of the bayonet over and over again, and as he exhorted his troops before the battle of Solferino in 1859, Napoleon III warned them, “In battle, remain closed-up and do not abandon your ranks to run forward. Avoid too great an élan: that is the only thing I fear. The many arms of precision are only dangerous from afar; they will not prevent the bayonet from being, as it was before, the terrible arm of the French infantry…”47

  Every battlefield of the 1850s seemed to reinforce the lesson that the bayonet would cause defending formations to disintegrate, even when armed with rifles. At the battles of Montebello (May 20, 1859) and Magenta (June 4, 1859), French bayonet charges still won the day against Austrian units armed with rifle muskets. A sublieutenant in Patrice de MacMahon’s 2nd Corps at Magenta described how “we were in column by platoons at section distance; we advanced in echelons, with the second battalion a little bit back, a company of skirmishers in front… Reaching within 150 meters of the Austrians, one could distin
ctly see wavering in their lines; the first ranks were throwing themselves back on the rear ranks.” No one less than Karl Marx’s partner in writing The Communist Manifesto, Friedrich Engels, announced that “the Italian War proved to all who could see, that the fire from modern rifles is not necessarily so very dangerous to a battalion charging with spirit… passive defense, if ever so well armed, is always sure of defeat.”48

  The task of a good line officer, therefore, was to master the combat algorithm—to be able to calculate, on the spot, the distance and oncoming speed of an attacking force and understand how many volleys might be needed to halt or disrupt the attackers, and how to keep his troops well in hand. On the offensive, the officer would be able to calculate the depth of the enemy’s force, their rate of fire, how much distance he could cover at a speed which would shorten the defenders’ opportunities to fire, and how fast he could push his troops until they are ready to close with the bayonet. He would also understand when reinforcement was required and how artillery could best support his troops. All of this would require elaborate training in drill, bayonet, and firing procedures, both for officers and for men in the ranks—a finishing school in training that the volunteer armies of the Civil War lacked the leadership and the time to acquire. The raw inexperience of Civil War officers, the poor training in firearms offered to the Civil War recruit, and the obstacles created by the American terrain generally cut down the effective range of Civil War fire combat to little more than eighty yards, at which point the technological advantage of a rifle over a smoothbore musket shrank to the vanishing point.

  Five years before the Civil War broke out, a three-man U.S. military commission (whose junior member was none other than George B. McClellan) warned, “As a nation, other than in resources and general intelligence of our people, we are without the elements of military knowledge and efficiency of sudden emergency. … We possess a nucleus of military knowledge in the country barely sufficient for the wants of our army in time of peace.” Sure enough, in 1861 officers and men who were unschooled in the need to close with the enemy ended up slugging matters out in short-range firefights, piling up bullet-riddled corpses until one side or the other collapsed and retreated. Instead of pressing attacks home and accepting the higher danger of the assault for a shorter period of time, Civil War volunteers were more likely to go to ground, and as the war grew longer, soldiers on both sides entrenched more and more—a development that West Point–trained regular officers were not reluctant to applaud.49

  The American volunteer, remarked the British army’s Capt. Henry Charles Fletcher (an officer in the elite Scots Guards, and a veteran of the Crimea), possessed “indomitable perseverance, cheerfulness under fatigue and hardship, diligence in entrenching, and stubbornness in defending these entrenchments.” But “the rapid, well sustained attack, which in many of the great European combats has led to important success, does not appear adapted to the qualities” of the American soldier. That, in turn, was what made so many of the immense and bloody battles of the Civil War surprisingly resultless. Elisha Paxton, a lieutenant in Stonewall Jackson’s brigade, complained in 1862 that “our victories… seem to settle nothing; to bring us no nearer the end of the war. It is only so many killed and wounded, leaving the work of blood to go on with renewed vigor.”50

  The terrific rates of death in the infantry might have persuaded more men to seek service in the cavalry or artillery had those components not had their problems, too. Artillery in the nineteenth century could be roughly divided into two groups, field artillery and heavy artillery. The field artillery was organized into regiments composed of ten batteries, with each battery made up of six cannon, and each cannon pulled by a team of six horses, along with ammunition chests and portable forges. The guns themselves were hitched to limbers, and they were served by crews of up seven men who aimed, fired, and loaded them in a sequence even more complex than the “load in nine times” required for a rifle musket.

  The size and tasks of the guns varied almost as much as the infantry’s weapons, and they could vary from the light, portable mountain howitzer (with a bronze barrel only thirty-seven inches long) to the big cast-iron 10-pounder and 20-pounder Parrott rifled guns (so named from their inventor, Robert Parker Parrott, as well as from the weight of the shot they fired and the rifling grooves in their barrels). The most popular field guns were the easily handled 3-inch wrought-iron Ordnance rifle and the 12-pounder bronze smoothbore Napoleon (named for Napoleon III, its designer). The smoothbore Napoleon, which could alternately do the work of a high-trajectory howitzer or a line-of-sight field gun, was the Civil War battlefield’s maid of all work. “Nothing surpasses… the impression of a battery of 12-pound smoothbores which approaches to within 400–600 paces of the enemy,” Robert E. Lee assured the Prussian military observer Justus Scheibert. “In such moments rifled artillery, the advantages of which in open country I fully appreciate, cannot replace the smoothbore.” By 1863, half of the artillery force of Civil War armies was composed of 12-pounder Napoleons.51

  The kinds of ammunition used varied as well, depending on the need of the moment. Most Civil War field batteries fired four basic kinds of shot. The artilleryman’s standby was solid shot, a solid iron ball, either wrought or cast iron, which relied on its weight and the speed of its impact to destroy a target. Solid shot had the terrifying capacity of “bounding like rubber balls” along a line of battle, and could “come right at the line with the sound of a huge circular saw ripping a log.” Civil War artillery also turned to shell, a hollow sphere or cone containing powder or other explodables ignited by a charge in the base of the cone, with the fuse cut to a predetermined length to ensure the shell enough flying time to reach its target before exploding and shredding anything around it with razor-sharp white-hot splinters. Case shot (or shrapnel, so named after its British inventor, Lt. Henry Shrapnel) was a shell filled with eighty musket balls and “a small charge of powder,” which “scattered scores of cast-iron bullets when it exploded.”52

  The most fearsome load in the artillery limber was canister, a tin cylinder packed with balls or slugs. Canister was a short-range item that could turn a cannon into a giant sawed-off shotgun. Used on masses of infantry at close ranges, it could be hideous in its effect. A Napoleon gun triple-shotted with three canister tins could blow 650 lead balls into an oncoming enemy unit, equivalent to the fire of an entire infantry brigade. A New York infantryman in 1864 watched, horrified, as a single Napoleon, packed to the muzzle with tins of canister, fragmented the attack of an entire Confederate infantry column:

  As soon as the enemy had moved his column out of the cover of the woods and was advancing along the road, the gun of the Twelfth New York battery was fired into the head of the column with a triple charge of canister. The road over which the enemy advanced was hard and smooth and the best possible for the effective use of canister, as the bullets which did not strike the enemy directly did so on the rebound. The column melted away under the fire, and when the smoke arose no trace of it appeared.53

  More often, however, artillery was used in the Civil War mostly to disorganize and disrupt attacking infantry formations, rather than actually to kill or maim individuals, and it served its purpose best by preventing enemy formations from getting close enough to do damage to one’s own infantry. “The principal object of artillery,” wrote the artillerists’ guru, John Gibbon, “is, to sustain the troops in attack and defense; to facilitate their movements and oppose the enemy’s; to destroy his forces as well as the obstacles which protect them; and to keep up the combat until an opportunity is offered for a decisive blow.” To that end, Civil War artillery, which at the opening of the war was parceled out battery by battery in piecemeal fashion to infantry brigades and divisions, increasingly came to be used in mass formations like those of Bonaparte’s grand battery at Waterloo or the French artillery at Solferino in 1859. Likewise, the ratio of artillery to infantry spiraled upward. In 1844, the British army stipulated a distribution of two
guns per 1,000 men, but by the middle of the Civil War the ratio in the Army of the Potomac had risen to four guns per 1,000 infantrymen.54

  The Union’s industrial resources gave it the technical edge in artillery all through the Civil War. However, the rural and agrarian structure of Southern society gave the Confederacy an equal edge in terms of cavalry. The Confederacy also possessed several great natural cavalry leaders: in the west, Nathan Bedford Forrest used his cavalry to burn and pillage Union supply lines with virtual impunity; in the east, J. E. B. Stuart, the twenty-eight-year-old commander of Lee’s cavalry, easily rode circles around McClellan’s clumsy Northern cavalrymen—on the Peninsula, he literally rode around McClellan’s entire army—and created an image of the Confederate cavalry as banjo-strumming knights-errant dressed in plumes and capes. The great difficulty with cavalry was that it was costly to maintain—the Union’s quartermaster general, Montgomery Meigs, had to keep up a supply of 35,000 horses to the Army of the Potomac for just the six months between May and October 1863 at a cost to the government of $144 to $185 a head—and the South was forced to restrict the size of its cavalry arm simply through its inability to provide mounts (much of the Confederate cavalry was actually mounted on horses owned by the troopers themselves). The average life expectancy of a horse in the Army of Northern Virginia was less than eight months, and every fifteen months a supply of 7,000 horses and 14,000 mules was required just to keep the army mobile.55

  If the combat training of Civil War volunteer infantry left a great deal to be desired, the training of Civil War volunteer cavalryman was even worse, and also because it, too, involved time and costs that neither army was willing to absorb. In the British army, cavalry training required at least 120 hours of riding drill, plus training in stable work, saddling, and packing. “The difficulty of converting raw men into soldiers is enhanced manifold when they are mounted,” complained Richard Taylor, who rose from commanding Harry Handerson’s 9th Louisiana to lead the Confederate Department of East Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and this seemed especially and painfully true when it came to dealing with Taylor’s own Confederate cavalry.