Battle Cry of Freedom

by James M. McPherson

  13. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 11, pt. 3, p. 266.

  14. Ibid., pt. 1, p. 61.

  Next day another of Lee's complicated plans for a concentric assault by seven divisions near the village of Glendale came to grief. Only Longstreet and Hill managed to get their men into action, fighting a fierce stand-up battle against parts of five Union divisions in late afternoon. The rebels gained a little ground and took a thousand prisoners but lost 3,500 killed and wounded, twice as many as the Yankees. With 25,000 men, Jackson made no contribution to the outcome except a negative one of failing to do his part. Approaching White Oak Swamp from the north, he sent a crew to rebuild the bridge over the creek. When Union artillery and sharpshooters prevented this, Jackson lay down and took a nap. Meanwhile his officers found fords practicable for infantry, but Jackson, seemingly in a trance, did nothing while Long-street's and Hill's men bled and died two miles to the south. Jackson's failure, in the words of one historian, was "complete, disastrous and unredeemable."15

  Yet Lee still hoped to redeem something from his attempt to destroy "those people" (his term for the enemy). Lee's temper on the morning of July 1 was frayed. If those people got away, he snapped to one unwary brigadier, it would happen "because I cannot have my orders carried out!"16 The Federals had taken up another defensive position—the strongest one yet—three miles south of Glendale, on Malvern Hill near the James River. One hundred and fifty feet high and flanked by deep ravines a mile apart, Malvern Hill would have to be attacked frontally and uphill across open fields. Four Union divisions and 100 guns covered this front with four additional divisions and 150 guns in reserve. Unless these troops were utterly demoralized, it seemed suicidal to attack them. But Lee perceived many apparent signs of demoralization. The route of Union retreat was littered with abandoned equipment and arms. Confederate quartermasters and ordnance officers had reaped a rich harvest of captured material—including 30,000 small arms and fifty cannon. The rebels had also captured 6,000 Yankees in the previous six days, and continued to pick up scores of stragglers on the morning of July 1. In the end it turned out that the Army of the Potomac, with a resilience in the face of adversity that became its hallmark, was not demoralized after all. But its commander was. McClellan wired Washington that he had been "overpowered" by "superior numbers" and that

  15. Dowdey, The Seven Days, 308.

  16. Freeman, Lee, II, 202.

  "I fear I shall be forced to abandon my material to save my men under cover of the gunboats."17 With his uncanny ability to read the opposing commander's mind, Lee sensed McClellan's unnerved state but mistakenly projected it upon the men in the ranks as well.

  In any event, Lee's frustration made him ready to grasp at any opportunity to strike "those people" once more. Longstreet—who had emerged as Lee's most reliable subordinate in this campaign—untypically shared this aggressive mood. On the morning of July 1 Longstreet found two elevated positions north of Malvern Hill from which he thought artillery might soften up Union defenses for an infantry assault. Lee ordered the artillery to concentrate on the two knolls. But staff work broke down again; only some of the cannoneers got the message, and their weak fire was soon silenced by Union batteries. Lee nevertheless ordered the assault to go forward. Confusion in the delivery of these orders meant that the attack was disjointed, with brigades advancing individually rather than together. This enabled Union artillery to pulverize nearly every attacking unit, allowing only a few enemy regiments to get close enough for infantry to cut them down. For perhaps the only time in the war, artillery fire caused more enemy casualties than rifle fire.18 D. H. Hill's division was one of the most severely mauled; Hill later wrote that the battle of Malvern Hill "was not war—it was murder."19 The 5,500 Confederates killed and wounded in this battle were more than double the Union total.

  Aware that the rebels had been hurt, some Union generals wanted to mount a counterattack next day. Even McClellan's protege Fitz-John Porter favored such a move. When McClellan instead ordered a continuation of the retreat to Harrison's Landing on the James, one of his most pugnacious brigadiers—Philip Kearny of New Jersey, who had lost an arm in the Mexican War—burst out to fellow officers: "Such an order can only be prompted by cowardice or treason. . . . We ought instead of retreating to follow up the enemy and take Richmond."20

  For his part Lee recognized the futility of any more attacks. Twenty thousand southerners—nearly a quarter of his army—had fallen dead and wounded during the previous week, twice the Union total. Rebels

  17. O.R., Ser. I, Vol. 11, pt. 3, pp. 280, 282.

  18. For the war as a whole, small-arms fire caused almost 90 percent of the casualties.

  19. Hill, "McClellan's Change of Base and Malvern Hill," Battles and Leaders, II, 394.

  20. Bruce Catton, Mr. Lincoln's Army (Garden City, N.Y., 1956), 149.

  and Yankees paused to lick their wounds. While the bluecoats had suffered only one tactical defeat in the Seven Days'—at Gaines' Mill—they had constantly retreated and the campaign had resulted in a strategic Confederate victory, with all that meant for morale in the respective armies and on the home fronts. Nonetheless, Lee was dissatisfied. "Our success has not been as great or as complete as I could have desired," he wrote. "Under ordinary circumstances the Federal Army should have been destroyed."21 Destroyed! This Napoleonic vision would continue to govern Lee's strategic thinking until that moment a year later when the vision was itself destroyed on the gentle slope of Cemetery Ridge near a small Pennsylvania town.

  In the immediate aftermath of the Seven Days', Lee took several steps to remedy the defects in his command structure revealed by the campaign. Because Jackson's divisions and several other brigades had joined Lee's force only on the eve of these battles, the Army of Northern Virginia had never before fought as a unit and Lee had not time to forge its chain of command into an extension of his will. To do so now he shuffled several officers, exiled the weaker division commanders to Texas and Arkansas, and promoted abler subordinates to their places. Because the problem of communicating directly with eight or nine division commanders had proven insuperable during the Seven Days', Lee reorganized the army into two corps (though they were not officially designated as such until later) under Longstreet and Jackson. No evidence exists that Lee reproached Jackson for his dismal performance during the Seven Days', though the assignment of the larger corps to Longstreet may have implied a rebuke. In any case, Jackson soon recovered from his stress fatigue and went on to justify the confidence expressed by Lee's giving him corps command.

  III

  The thirty thousand men killed and wounded in the Seven Days' equaled the number of casualties in all the battles in the western theater—including Shiloh—during the first half of 1862. The Seven Days' established a pattern for harder fighting and greater casualties in battles between the Army of Northern Virginia and Army of the Potomac than between any other armies. Most soldiers in the Army of the Potomac were from northeastern states, while most men in the western Union

  21. Dowdey, The Seven Days, 358.

  armies hailed from the Old Northwest. The western farm boys and out-doorsmen regarded themselves as tougher soldiers than the effete "paper-collar" soldiers from the Northeast. But in truth the "pasty-faced" clerks and mechanics of the East proved to be more immune to the diseases of camp life and more capable in combat of absorbing and inflicting punishment than western Union soldiers. For the war as a whole the death rate from disease was 43 percent higher among Union soldiers from states west of the Appalachians than among the effete easterners, while the latter experienced combat mortality rates 23 percent higher than the westerners. The number of combat deaths in the Army of the Potomac was greater than in all the other Union armies combined. Forty-one of the fifty Union regiments with the highest percentage of combat casualties fought in this army. In the South, forty of the fifty highest-casualty regiments served in the Army of Northern Virginia. Of all the army commanders on both sides, Lee had the highest casualty rate.22<
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  One reason for this was Lee's concept of the offensive-defensive, which he applied to tactics as well as to strategy. Lee probably deserves his reputation as the war's best tactician, but his success came at great cost. In every one of the Seven Days' battles the Confederates attacked and consequently lost a higher proportion of killed and wounded than the defenders. The same was true in several of Lee's subsequent battles. Even in 1864–65, when their backs were to the wall and they had barely strength enough to parry their adversary's heavier blows, the Army of Northern Virginia essayed several offensive counterstrokes. The incongruity between Lee's private character as a humane, courteous, reserved, kindly man, the very model of a Christian gentleman, and his daring, aggressive, but costly tactics as a general is one of the most striking contrasts in the history of the war.

  Several battles in the western theater, of course, also produced a ghastly harvest of death. One reason for the high casualties of Civil War battles was the disparity between traditional tactics and modern weapons. The

  22. Data compiled from William F. Fox, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War (Albany, 1889). Reliable data on disease and combat deaths by states for the Confederate army are not available. For army commanders, see the tables on pp. 18–23 of Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson, Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage (University, Ala., 1982). The casualty rate in Lee's army was 20 percent in its major battles and campaigns. By way of comparison, the figure for Ulysses S. Grant's troops was 16 percent.

  tactical legacy of eighteenth-century and Napoleonic warfare had emphasized close-order formations of soldiers trained to maneuver in concert and fire by volleys. To be sure, some of the citizen-soldiers of the American Revolution fought Indian-style from behind trees or rocks, and the half-trained levée en masse of the French Revolution advanced in loose order like "clouds of skirmishers." But they did so mainly because they lacked training and discipline; the ideal for Washington's Continentals and Napoleon's veterans as well as Frederick's Prussians and Wellington's redcoats remained the compact, cohesive columns and lines of automatons who moved and fired with machine-like efficiency.

  These tactics also stressed the offensive. Assault troops advanced with cadenced step, firing volleys on command and then double-timing the last few yards to pierce the enemy line with a bayonet charge. Napoleon used his artillery in conjunction with infantry assaults, moving the field guns forward with the foot soldiers to blast holes in enemy ranks and soften them up for the final charge. Americans used these tactics with great success in the Mexican War. West Point teaching stressed the tactical offensive. Most of the top Civil War officers had fought in Mexico and/or had attended West Point; from both experiences they had absorbed the message that the tactical offensive based on close-order infantry assaults supported by artillery won battles.23

  In Mexico this happened without high casualties because the basic infantry weapon was the single-shot muzzle-loading smoothbore musket. The maximum range of this weapon was about 250 yards; its effective range (the distance at which a good marksman could hit a target with any regularity) was about eighty yards on a still day. The close-order formation was therefore necessary to concentrate the firepower of these inaccurate weapons; artillery could accompany charging infantry because cannoneers were relatively safe from enemy musket fire until they came within a couple of hundred yards or less; bayonet charges

  23. The observations in the preceding and subsequent paragraphs are based on a general reading of military history and particularly on John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York, 1977); John K. Mahon, "Civil War Infantry Assault Tactics," Military Affairs, 25 (1961), 57-68; McWhiney and Jamieson, Attack and Die; and Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (Urbana, 1983). Hattaway and Jones argue unconvincingly that West Point graduates carried into the Civil War a stronger stress on the entrenched defensive than on the offensive. It seems clear, however, that this hard-learned lesson was taught mainly by the experience of the war itself.

  could succeed because double-timing infantry could cover the last eighty yards during the twenty-five seconds it took defending infantrymen to reload their muskets after firing a volley.

  Rifling a musket increased its range fourfold by imparting a spin to a conical bullet that enabled it literally to bore through the air. This fact had been known for centuries, but before the 1850s only special regiments or one or two companies per regiment were equipped with rifles. These companies were used as skirmishers—that is, they operated in front and on the flanks of the main body, advancing or withdrawing in loose order and shooting at will from long range at enemy targets of opportunity. Given the rifle's greater range and accuracy, why were not all infantrymen equipped with it? Because a bullet large enough to "take" the rifling was difficult to ram down the barrel. Riflemen sometimes had to pound the ramrod down with a mallet. After a rifle had been fired a few times a residue of powder built up in the grooves and had to be cleaned out before it could be fired again. Since rapid and reliable firing was essential in a battle, the rifle was not practicable for the mass of infantrymen.

  Until the 1850s, that is. Although several people contributed to the development of a practicable military rifle, the main credit belongs to French army Captain Claude E. Minié and to the American James H. Burton, an armorer at the Harper's Ferry Armory. In 1848 Minié perfected a bullet small enough to be easily rammed down a rifled barrel, with a wooden plug in the base of the bullet to expand it upon firing to take the rifling. Such bullets were expensive; Burton developed a cheaper and better bullet with a deep cavity in the base that filled with gas and expanded the rim upon firing. This was the famous "minié ball" of Civil War rifles. The superiority of the rifle was demonstrated by British and French soldiers who carried them in the Crimean War. As Secretary of War in 1855, Jefferson Davis converted the United States army to the . 58 caliber Springfield rifled musket. Along with the similar British Enfield rifle (caliber . 577, which would take the same bullet as the Springfield), the Springfield became the main infantry arm of the Civil War.

  Because they were single-shot weapons loaded from the muzzle, these rifles were still awkward to load. Even the most dextrous soldier could fire no more than three shots per minute. Several inventors had developed breechloading rifles by 1861, but with the paper-wrapped cartridges (containing bullet and powder) then in use, gas and sometimes flame escaped from the breech and made the weapon unreliable and even dangerous to the user. Progress in solving this problem made the single-shot Sharps carbine and rifle popular with the Union cavalry and sharpshooter units that managed to obtain them. The development of metal cartridges enabled the northern army to equip its cavalry and some infantry units with repeaters by 1863, of which the seven-shot Spencer carbine was most successful. These weapons had a smaller powder charge and therefore a shorter range than the paper-cartridged Springfield and Enfield, and were more prone to malfunction. The muzzle-loaders thus remained the principal infantry weapons throughout the war.

  Northern industry geared up to manufacture more than two million rifles during the war; unable to produce more than a fraction of this total, the South relied mainly on imports through the blockade and on capture of Union rifles. In 1861 neither side had many rifles, so most soldiers carried old smoothbores taken from storage in arsenals. During 1862 most Union regiments received new Springfields or Enfields, while many Confederate units still had to rely on smoothbores. This was one reason for the two-to-one excess of Confederate casualties in the Seven Days'. By 1863 nearly all infantrymen on both sides carried rifles.

  The transition from smoothbore to rifle had two main effects: it multiplied casualties; and it strengthened the tactical defensive. Officers trained and experienced in the old tactics were slow to recognize these changes. Time and again generals on both sides ordered close-order assaults in the traditional formation. With an effective range of three or four hundred yards, defenders firing rifle
s decimated these attacks. Artillery declined in importance as an offensive weapon, because its accuracy and the reliability of shells at long range were poor, and the guns could no longer advance with the infantry toward enemy lines, for marksmen could pick off the cannoneers and especially the horses at distances up to half a mile. Sharpshooters also singled out enemy officers, which helps to explain why officers and especially generals had higher casualty rates than privates. Officers on both sides soon began to stay off horseback when possible and to wear a private's uniform with only a sewn-on shoulder patch to designate their rank. The old-fashioned cavalry charge against infantry, already obsolescent, became obsolete in the face of rifles that could knock down horses long before their riders got within saber or pistol range. The Civil War hastened the evolution of dismounted cavalry tactics in which the horse was mainly a means of transportation rather than a weapon in its own right.

  As time went on experience taught soldiers new tactics adapted to the rifle. Infantry formations loosened up and became a sort of large-scale skirmish line in which men advanced by rushes, taking advantage of cover offered by the ground to reload before dashing forward another few yards, working in groups of two or three to load and shoot alternately in order to keep up a continuous rather than a volley fire. But officers had difficulty maintaining control over large units employing such tactics in that pre-radio age. This limited the employment of loose-order tactics and compelled the retention of close-order assaults in some instances to the end of the war.

  And while loose-order tactics occasionally succeeded in carrying enemy lines, they did not restore dominance to the tactical offensive, especially when defenders began digging trenches and throwing up breastworks at every position, as they did by 1863 and 1864. It became a rule of thumb that attacking forces must have a numerical superiority of at least three to one to succeed in carrying trenches defended by alert troops. Robbed by the rifle of some of its potency as an offensive weapon, the artillery functioned best on the defensive by firing at attacking infantry with grapeshot and canister (as at Malvern Hill) in the manner of a huge sawed-off shotgun. Despite the occasional success of head-on tactical assaults such as the Confederate victories at Gaines' Mill, Chancellorsville, and Chickamauga or Union triumphs at Missionary Ridge and Cedar Creek, the defense usually prevailed against frontal attacks. Even when an assault succeeded, it did so at high cost in killed and wounded. Steeped in romantic martial traditions, glorying in the "charge" and in "valor," southern soldiers in the Seven Days' suffered grievously from their assaults. Well might D. H. Hill reflect in later years on the bodies piled in front of Union lines at Gaines' Mill: "It was thought to be a great thing to charge a battery of artillery or an earthwork lined with infantry. . . . We were very lavish of blood in those days."24