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

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