Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction (48 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.
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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 1,000 infantrymen.
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The Union’s industrial resources gave it the technical edge in artillery all through the Civil War. However, the rural and agrarian structure of Southern society gave the Confederacy an equal edge in terms of cavalry. The Confederacy also possessed
several great natural cavalry leaders: in the west, Nathan Bedford Forrest used his cavalry to burn and pillage Union supply lines with virtual impunity; in the east, J. E. B. Stuart, the twenty-eight-year-old commander of Lee’s cavalry, easily rode circles around McClellan’s clumsy Northern cavalrymen—on the Peninsula, he literally rode around McClellan’s entire army—and created an image of the Confederate cavalry as banjo-strumming knights-errant dressed in plumes and capes. The great difficulty with cavalry was that it was costly to maintain—the Union’s quartermaster general, Montgomery Meigs, had to keep up a supply of 35,000 horses to the Army of the Potomac for just the six months between May and October 1863 at a cost to the government of $144 to $185 a head—and the South was forced to restrict the size of its cavalry arm simply through its inability to provide mounts (much of the Confederate cavalry was actually mounted on horses owned by the troopers themselves). The average life expectancy of a horse in the Army of Northern Virginia was less than eight months, and every fifteen months a supply of 7,000 horses and 14,000 mules was required just to keep the army mobile.
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If the combat training of Civil War volunteer infantry left a great deal to be desired, the training of Civil War volunteer cavalryman was even worse, and also because it, too, involved time and costs that neither army was willing to absorb. In the British army, cavalry training required at least 120 hours of riding drill, plus training in stable work, saddling, and packing. “The difficulty of converting raw men into soldiers is enhanced manifold when they are mounted,” complained Richard Taylor, who rose from commanding Harry Handerson’s 9th Louisiana to lead the Confederate Department of East Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and this seemed especially and painfully true when it came to dealing with Taylor’s own Confederate cavalry.

Both man and horse require training, and facilities for rambling, with temptation to do so, are increased. There was but little time, and it may be said less disposition, to establish camps of instruction. Living on horseback, fearless, and dashing, the men of the South afforded the best possible material for cavalry. They had every quality but discipline, and resembled Prince Charming, whose manifold gifts, bestowed by her sisters, were rendered useless by the malignant fairy. Scores of them wandered about the country like locusts, and were only less destructive to their own people than the enemy. … Assuredly, our cavalry rendered much excellent service, especially when dismounted and fighting as infantry. Such able officers as Stuart, Hampton, and the younger Lees in the east, Forrest, Green, and Wheeler in the west, developed much
talent for war; but their achievement, however distinguished, fell far below the standard that would have been reached had not the want of discipline impaired their efforts and those of their men.

North Carolina governor Zebulon Vance grew so exasperated with the indiscipline of Confederate cavalry wandering through his state that he cried out in 1863: “If God Almighty had yet in store another plague worse than all others which he intended to have let loose on the Egyptians in case Pharaoh still hardened his heart, I am sure it must have been a regiment or so of half-armed, half-disciplined Confederate cavalry.”
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If the Civil War departs from the pattern of the Napoleonic wars at any major point, it is in its failure to use cavalry to achieve the kinds of decisive victories on the battlefield that the Napoleonic pattern had taught generals to expect. From the seventeenth century onward, cavalry had been taught to charge home with the sword or lance at the first sign of wavering on the part of enemy infantry. The sheer weight of an oncoming rush of horses and men could strike the final amount of terror needed to convince infantrymen to break and bolt. And when they did, the cavalry could cut them down and scatter them almost at its ease. This sort of cavalry—known as heavy cavalry, from the outsize weight and height of the horses and men chosen for the task—was expensive to equip and time-consuming to train, and one penny-pinching Congress after another had shown no interest in it. Moreover, in the uneven overgrowth of the American landscape, heavy cavalry had little room to develop the momentum needed for its climactic charges; and in the American West, where most of the army’s cavalry was deployed, its enemy were mounted Indians, who required lightness and speed to pursue.
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So, strictly speaking, the army did not even bother to create a cavalry arm until the 1850s; its few mounted units were organized and trained as dragoons and mounted rifles who would use their horses more as a means of transportation than for combat, and dismount in battle to fight on foot with their short-barrel carbines rather than sabers or lances. Cavalry units in the Civil War were also deployed in smaller ratios to infantry than in Europe, and concentrated almost exclusively on the traditional occupations of light cavalry, including scouting, raiding, and skirmishing. The introduction of the Spencer repeating carbine (the downsized version of the rifle issued for cavalry use) only accelerated this trend, making the classical
cavalry saber useless as a field weapon. “The only real use I ever heard of their being put to was to hold a piece of meat over a fire for frying,” snorted John Singleton Mosby, the most famous of the Confederacy’s mounted scouts. “I dragged one through the first year of the war, but when I became a commander, I discarded it.” Sabers came out of their scabbards only on the infrequent occasions when cavalry clashed headlong with cavalry; on the even rarer occasions when cavalrymen actually engaged enemy infantry, they dismounted and fought on foot with their carbines. Lt. Col. Arthur Fremantle, yet another British observer from the Guards brigade, had no opinion whatsoever of the legendary J. E. B. Stuart’s horsemen. Their battles “are miserable affairs” in which “neither party has any idea of serious charging with the sabre.” Instead, “they hesitate, halt, and commence a desultory fire with carbines and revolvers,” which hardly qualified them to “be called cavalry in the European sense of the word.”
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The volunteer who mastered the intricacies of his weapon and drill would leave his “camp of instruction” with the rest of his regiment and be shipped off to wherever the main armies might be at that moment. From that point on, the basic organizational unit, and the unit most soldiers used to identify themselves, was the regiment. Unlike the regimental system of the British army, the volunteer regiments of the Civil War had no previous history. They were the creations of 1861, having no existing traditions or institutions with which to shelter and socialize the new recruit, no already existing cadres of officers or non-commissioned officers, and no barracks or recruiting depots. It fell on the volunteers themselves to turn their regiments into either livable facsimiles of home life or freewheeling moral carousels. Some units, like the two regiments of Hiram Berdan’s United States Sharpshooters, prided themselves on living “like a band of brothers, imbued with the one feeling of patriotism in their voluntary enlistment for three years.” Others converted the long stretches of empty camp time into study halls, as did a young lieutenant in the Confederate Army, Basil Gildersleeve, who improved his command of “his English classics” and “his ancient classics.” In the 7th Ohio, the company recruited from the pious students of Charles Finney at Oberlin College made sure that “daily prayer meetings were established.” St. Clair A. Mulholland described the camp of his 116th Pennsylvania as a religious idyll where “seldom was an obscene word or an oath heard in the camp” and “meetings for prayer were of almost daily occurrence, and the groups of
men sitting on the ground or gathered on the hill side listening to the Gospel were strong reminders of the mounds of Galilee when the people sat upon the ground to hear the Savior teach.”
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In other regiments, the abrupt transition from domestic routine to the poorly structured life of an army camp meant crossing over a social line where the customary behavioral restraints might mean very little. Prostitution, drunkenness, gambling, and thievery were rife in both Federal and Confederate regiments. “Gen. Meagher got up this morning & drank about a quart of whiskey,” wrote a disgusted Theodore Gates in his diary in 1864, “& went to bed again & has been there all day drunk.” The 154th New York were “good companions” for the most part, “but at the same time there is much going on in camp that is not intended to improve the morals nor the manners or the mind.” Army life “seems adapted to make a man coarse & rough,” and “many a man does that here that he would be utterly ashamed to do at home and excuses himself by saying that others do it or that it is customary in the Army to do it.” Edward King Wightman found that “most of our common soldiers are scarcely above brutes by nature.”

The privates, of course, are not such people as you or any sensible man would choose, or perhaps I should say could endure, as associates. As a mass, they are ignorant, envious, mercenary, and disgustingly immoral and profane. Being as they are here free from the restraints of civil law, they give loose rein to all their vices and make a boast of them. In our whole regiment, I know no private who will not curse and swear and but few who will not, when circumstances favor, rob and steal or, as they more euphon[i]ously style the operations, “briz things.”
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