III
The thirty thousand men killed and wounded in the Seven Days' equaled the number of casualties in all the battles in the western theater—including Shiloh—during the first half of 1862. The Seven Days' established a pattern for harder fighting and greater casualties in battles between the Army of Northern Virginia and Army of the Potomac than between any other armies. Most soldiers in the Army of the Potomac were from northeastern states, while most men in the western Union
21. Dowdey, The Seven Days, 358.
armies hailed from the Old Northwest. The western farm boys and out-doorsmen regarded themselves as tougher soldiers than the effete "paper-collar" soldiers from the Northeast. But in truth the "pasty-faced" clerks and mechanics of the East proved to be more immune to the diseases of camp life and more capable in combat of absorbing and inflicting punishment than western Union soldiers. For the war as a whole the death rate from disease was 43 percent higher among Union soldiers from states west of the Appalachians than among the effete easterners, while the latter experienced combat mortality rates 23 percent higher than the westerners. The number of combat deaths in the Army of the Potomac was greater than in all the other Union armies combined. Forty-one of the fifty Union regiments with the highest percentage of combat casualties fought in this army. In the South, forty of the fifty highest-casualty regiments served in the Army of Northern Virginia. Of all the army commanders on both sides, Lee had the highest casualty rate.22
One reason for this was Lee's concept of the offensive-defensive, which he applied to tactics as well as to strategy. Lee probably deserves his reputation as the war's best tactician, but his success came at great cost. In every one of the Seven Days' battles the Confederates attacked and consequently lost a higher proportion of killed and wounded than the defenders. The same was true in several of Lee's subsequent battles. Even in 1864–65, when their backs were to the wall and they had barely strength enough to parry their adversary's heavier blows, the Army of Northern Virginia essayed several offensive counterstrokes. The incongruity between Lee's private character as a humane, courteous, reserved, kindly man, the very model of a Christian gentleman, and his daring, aggressive, but costly tactics as a general is one of the most striking contrasts in the history of the war.
Several battles in the western theater, of course, also produced a ghastly harvest of death. One reason for the high casualties of Civil War battles was the disparity between traditional tactics and modern weapons. The
22. Data compiled from William F. Fox, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War (Albany, 1889). Reliable data on disease and combat deaths by states for the Confederate army are not available. For army commanders, see the tables on pp. 18–23 of Grady McWhiney and Perry D. Jamieson, Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage (University, Ala., 1982). The casualty rate in Lee's army was 20 percent in its major battles and campaigns. By way of comparison, the figure for Ulysses S. Grant's troops was 16 percent.
tactical legacy of eighteenth-century and Napoleonic warfare had emphasized close-order formations of soldiers trained to maneuver in concert and fire by volleys. To be sure, some of the citizen-soldiers of the American Revolution fought Indian-style from behind trees or rocks, and the half-trained levée en masse of the French Revolution advanced in loose order like "clouds of skirmishers." But they did so mainly because they lacked training and discipline; the ideal for Washington's Continentals and Napoleon's veterans as well as Frederick's Prussians and Wellington's redcoats remained the compact, cohesive columns and lines of automatons who moved and fired with machine-like efficiency.
These tactics also stressed the offensive. Assault troops advanced with cadenced step, firing volleys on command and then double-timing the last few yards to pierce the enemy line with a bayonet charge. Napoleon used his artillery in conjunction with infantry assaults, moving the field guns forward with the foot soldiers to blast holes in enemy ranks and soften them up for the final charge. Americans used these tactics with great success in the Mexican War. West Point teaching stressed the tactical offensive. Most of the top Civil War officers had fought in Mexico and/or had attended West Point; from both experiences they had absorbed the message that the tactical offensive based on close-order infantry assaults supported by artillery won battles.23
In Mexico this happened without high casualties because the basic infantry weapon was the single-shot muzzle-loading smoothbore musket. The maximum range of this weapon was about 250 yards; its effective range (the distance at which a good marksman could hit a target with any regularity) was about eighty yards on a still day. The close-order formation was therefore necessary to concentrate the firepower of these inaccurate weapons; artillery could accompany charging infantry because cannoneers were relatively safe from enemy musket fire until they came within a couple of hundred yards or less; bayonet charges
23. The observations in the preceding and subsequent paragraphs are based on a general reading of military history and particularly on John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York, 1977); John K. Mahon, "Civil War Infantry Assault Tactics," Military Affairs, 25 (1961), 57-68; McWhiney and Jamieson, Attack and Die; and Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones, How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (Urbana, 1983). Hattaway and Jones argue unconvincingly that West Point graduates carried into the Civil War a stronger stress on the entrenched defensive than on the offensive. It seems clear, however, that this hard-learned lesson was taught mainly by the experience of the war itself.
could succeed because double-timing infantry could cover the last eighty yards during the twenty-five seconds it took defending infantrymen to reload their muskets after firing a volley.
Rifling a musket increased its range fourfold by imparting a spin to a conical bullet that enabled it literally to bore through the air. This fact had been known for centuries, but before the 1850s only special regiments or one or two companies per regiment were equipped with rifles. These companies were used as skirmishers—that is, they operated in front and on the flanks of the main body, advancing or withdrawing in loose order and shooting at will from long range at enemy targets of opportunity. Given the rifle's greater range and accuracy, why were not all infantrymen equipped with it? Because a bullet large enough to "take" the rifling was difficult to ram down the barrel. Riflemen sometimes had to pound the ramrod down with a mallet. After a rifle had been fired a few times a residue of powder built up in the grooves and had to be cleaned out before it could be fired again. Since rapid and reliable firing was essential in a battle, the rifle was not practicable for the mass of infantrymen.
Until the 1850s, that is. Although several people contributed to the development of a practicable military rifle, the main credit belongs to French army Captain Claude E. Minié and to the American James H. Burton, an armorer at the Harper's Ferry Armory. In 1848 Minié perfected a bullet small enough to be easily rammed down a rifled barrel, with a wooden plug in the base of the bullet to expand it upon firing to take the rifling. Such bullets were expensive; Burton developed a cheaper and better bullet with a deep cavity in the base that filled with gas and expanded the rim upon firing. This was the famous "minié ball" of Civil War rifles. The superiority of the rifle was demonstrated by British and French soldiers who carried them in the Crimean War. As Secretary of War in 1855, Jefferson Davis converted the United States army to the . 58 caliber Springfield rifled musket. Along with the similar British Enfield rifle (caliber . 577, which would take the same bullet as the Springfield), the Springfield became the main infantry arm of the Civil War.
Because they were single-shot weapons loaded from the muzzle, these rifles were still awkward to load. Even the most dextrous soldier could fire no more than three shots per minute. Several inventors had developed breechloading rifles by 1861, but with the paper-wrapped cartridges (containing bullet and powder) then in use, gas and sometimes flame escaped from the breech and made the weapon unreliable and even dangerous to the user. Progress in solving this problem made the single-shot Sharps carbine and rifle popular with the Union cavalry and sharpshooter units that managed to obtain them. The development of metal cartridges enabled the northern army to equip its cavalry and some infantry units with repeaters by 1863, of which the seven-shot Spencer carbine was most successful. These weapons had a smaller powder charge and therefore a shorter range than the paper-cartridged Springfield and Enfield, and were more prone to malfunction. The muzzle-loaders thus remained the principal infantry weapons throughout the war.
Northern industry geared up to manufacture more than two million rifles during the war; unable to produce more than a fraction of this total, the South relied mainly on imports through the blockade and on capture of Union rifles. In 1861 neither side had many rifles, so most soldiers carried old smoothbores taken from storage in arsenals. During 1862 most Union regiments received new Springfields or Enfields, while many Confederate units still had to rely on smoothbores. This was one reason for the two-to-one excess of Confederate casualties in the Seven Days'. By 1863 nearly all infantrymen on both sides carried rifles.
The transition from smoothbore to rifle had two main effects: it multiplied casualties; and it strengthened the tactical defensive. Officers trained and experienced in the old tactics were slow to recognize these changes. Time and again generals on both sides ordered close-order assaults in the traditional formation. With an effective range of three or four hundred yards, defenders firing rifles decimated these attacks. Artillery declined in importance as an offensive weapon, because its accuracy and the reliability of shells at long range were poor, and the guns could no longer advance with the infantry toward enemy lines, for marksmen could pick off the cannoneers and especially the horses at distances up to half a mile. Sharpshooters also singled out enemy officers, which helps to explain why officers and especially generals had higher casualty rates than privates. Officers on both sides soon began to stay off horseback when possible and to wear a private's uniform with only a sewn-on shoulder patch to designate their rank. The old-fashioned cavalry charge against infantry, already obsolescent, became obsolete in the face of rifles that could knock down horses long before their riders got within saber or pistol range. The Civil War hastened the evolution of dismounted cavalry tactics in which the horse was mainly a means of transportation rather than a weapon in its own right.
As time went on experience taught soldiers new tactics adapted to the rifle. Infantry formations loosened up and became a sort of large-scale skirmish line in which men advanced by rushes, taking advantage of cover offered by the ground to reload before dashing forward another few yards, working in groups of two or three to load and shoot alternately in order to keep up a continuous rather than a volley fire. But officers had difficulty maintaining control over large units employing such tactics in that pre-radio age. This limited the employment of loose-order tactics and compelled the retention of close-order assaults in some instances to the end of the war.
And while loose-order tactics occasionally succeeded in carrying enemy lines, they did not restore dominance to the tactical offensive, especially when defenders began digging trenches and throwing up breastworks at every position, as they did by 1863 and 1864. It became a rule of thumb that attacking forces must have a numerical superiority of at least three to one to succeed in carrying trenches defended by alert troops. Robbed by the rifle of some of its potency as an offensive weapon, the artillery functioned best on the defensive by firing at attacking infantry with grapeshot and canister (as at Malvern Hill) in the manner of a huge sawed-off shotgun. Despite the occasional success of head-on tactical assaults such as the Confederate victories at Gaines' Mill, Chancellorsville, and Chickamauga or Union triumphs at Missionary Ridge and Cedar Creek, the defense usually prevailed against frontal attacks. Even when an assault succeeded, it did so at high cost in killed and wounded. Steeped in romantic martial traditions, glorying in the "charge" and in "valor," southern soldiers in the Seven Days' suffered grievously from their assaults. Well might D. H. Hill reflect in later years on the bodies piled in front of Union lines at Gaines' Mill: "It was thought to be a great thing to charge a battery of artillery or an earthwork lined with infantry. . . . We were very lavish of blood in those days."24
During 1862 and 1863, Confederate armies went on the tactical offensive in six of the nine battles in which the killed and wounded of both sides together exceeded fifteen thousand. Although they won two of these six battles (Chancellorsville and Chickamauga) and achieved a strategic success in a third (the Seven Days'), their total casualties in these six contests exceeded Union casualties by 20,000 men (89,000 to 69,000). In the spring of 1864 the situation was reversed as Grant's men suffered nearly twice the casualties of Lee's army when the Yankees took the offensive from the Wilderness to Petersburg. The quest of both sides for victory through tactical assaults in the old manner proved a chimera
24. Hill, "Lee's Attacks North of the Chickahominy," Battles and Leaders, II, 352.
in the new age of the rifle. The tactical predominance of the defense helps explain why the Civil War was so long and bloody. The rifle and trench ruled Civil War battlefields as thoroughly as the machine-gun and trench ruled those of World War I.