Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction Allen Guelzo (novels to read .txt) 📖

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