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

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 distinctly 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