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

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