Knowledge doesn’t mean a thing if you can’t take advantage of it. There were no radios or other modern means of communication.
Several years ago, I was at a “living history” site for July Fourth. They had a group of Civil War re-enactors with a cannon. The leader of the group said something that made a deep impression on me.
In his research, he came across a letter from an artilleryman to his family. He wrote that the only way he could tell when his cannon fired was by watching for the recoil.
Let that sink in–
The battlefield was so noisy that the firing of an individual cannon just a few feet away could not be heard over the general uproar.
How do you exercise command, control, and communication in such an environment?
No surprise by the 1700’s the era of fortifications was long gone. Cannon could destroy a wall with repeated hits no matter how thick. Castles and walled cities were obsolete. You see in 1700’s and 1800’s forts that the walls were behind a ramp of dirt to absorb cannon ball shots. No surprise if the same applied to quick temporary defenses - dig in. If you have time, dig a ditch or moat in front to impede frontal assault. As mentioned above, rifle fire was becoming far more accurate and longer range, so these were defenses against snipers as well as cannon.
Fun fact - Venice survived for centuries (a millennium) as an island city without a wall, by being in a lagoon too shallow -mostly - for big ships to attack. Any small craft trying to approach would be sitting ducks. Approach channel markers would be removed during war. It fell without a shot when Napoleon arrived, trailing new-fangled cannons with a three mile range. The city fathers realized he could pound the city into submission from shore with impunity, so they wisely surrendered without a fight.
Another fun fact about photography - apparently there is also no movie footage of actual WWI dogfights. Anything that appears to be footage is actually taken from Hollywood movie re-enactments of the 1920’s. (Wings?) Camera tech was not the greatest way back when. Glass sheets had to be prepared wet and exposed. It’s amazing we have any old photos at all from anywhere outside of studios.
If you have some spare time sometime, do look up what you can about Andersonville. The conditions were beyond horrific.
Slaves in the Caribbean from what I’ve read were lucky to live beyond two years until it became difficult to transport more with the British ban on the slave trade. Conditions on southern plantations were not good either - one explanation I read for the slave trade was that the cotton harvest was a burst of work, followed by 10 or 11 months of doing nothing. Also, someone on this board mentioned about cotton-pickin’ hands; picking cotton pricked the fingers so often, so badly, that they became very rough and heavily calloused. It was not a job that would appeal to hired labour, especially for only less than 2 months of the year - there’d be nobody still around the next year. I’m sure the plantation owners were not that generous with food for slaves when not much else was being done for 10 months. Minimal food, bouts of back-breaking labour, no medical care that cost money - no surprise most slaves wore out before 60.
they had the telegraph. I recall reading of a tethered balloon over a battlefield with a telegraph cable running down the tether, so that an observer overhead could send telegraph messages to a messenger at the bottom of the tether (assuming the battle didn’t move, but they didn’t much in those days). I think it was in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, which was only 5 years after the US Civil War.
You did what you could with trumpets & military bands, which were big back then. Also each commander & unit had their own flag & flagbearer* that they followed. Enemy snipers often concentrated on hitting the flagbearer, not just for morale reasons, but it actually could cause confusion in the opponents battlefield command & control. Of course, with the black powder they used, battlefields quickly became so smoky that soldiers sight might be as obscured as their hearing.
I believe the original reason for the British “Trooping the Color” ceremony was so that all the soldiers could learn to recognize the flags of their own unit & the fellow units, so they would know them on the battlefield. (Now it’s more for Pomp & Circumstance, and to impress & attract the tourists.)
Interesting that your German ancestor was imprisoned. My great grandfather was also captured in 1862 at 2nd Bull Run. But he was released, pointed north, and told that he had to stay out of the war for six months or be shot on sight (this info from a letter he wrote to his comrades). The person assigned to guard him turned out to be an acquaintance from before the war, so perhaps that was what kept him out of the prison camps.
This was not uncommon, especially for officers but also for enlisted.
There are several memoirs of the period describing the release of prisoners on parole if they gave up their arms (officers were commonly allowed to keep their sidearm and their horse) and swore not to engage in hostilities for a period of time ranging from 6 months to a year or more. This practice was often easier and faster than imprisonment, and considering they were fellow countrymen at one point, there was less personal animosity between the sides than one might think nowadays.
ETA: usually, though, a paroled soldier would get a piece of paper listing the stipulations to prove to their own side they couldn’t go back into the fight until/unless they were given a release via prisoner exchange.
Exapno Mapcase is it your position that the ability conduct aerial reconnaissance and surveillance during the Civil War matched or exceeded the ability to do the same during WWI?
Because we can sit here and talk about how the technologies available fifty years later had some sort of analog in the Civil War, but the point is the technology was more primitive, and not sufficient to allow the sort of maneuver warfare that eventually allowed military commanders to overcome static trench warfare. And for that matter, the technology still wasn’t there on the killing side to make maneuver warfare completely impractical (and so it wasn’t).
The implication is typically that military commanders pre- and early-WWI lacked the intellectual capacity to grasp that warfare had changed and their tactics needed to change too. My point is that technology, and by extension warfare, changed unevenly, so that it wasn’t just a matter of failures of intellect or imagination, but very real problems relating to the technology (or lack of technology) available to control a vast array of forces operating across a large area using a combined arms approach to overcome killing technology that especially favored the defender (ie: rifled weapons with greater range and accuracy, but needing a lot of time and a steady hand to reload, and later fixed machine guns).
Ditches have been used for defensive purposes since at least the Bronze Age, but they were given renewed emphasis during the Civil War. Given the accuracy of rifles, a relatively small number of dug-in soldiers could hold off an attacking force. Ditches were also used in the defense of Vicksburg and in Virginia.
I’ve never heard a criticism of the show. It seems to be universally well regarded.
The show itself says the “Rebel Yell” is unknown but later shows veterans who were there reenacting it on the 50th and 75th anniversaries. One person yelling is not the same effect as ten thousand. It is conceivable different yells were used in different times, places or by people. The linked yelling is similar to what was in the last episode.
Trench warfare goes back to the Bronze Age? I can see its use for riflemen. For protecting catapults and trebuchets. Less so for archers or tripping up horses and chariots. What was it used for so long ago?
I guess pictures did take a long time to develop. It surprises me people thought there would just be a one day skirmish.
Reverend Lovejoy was an early abolitionist. Perhaps some streets are named for him. I’m curious to know if the stated facts were accurate, but 40m have rated the series and I haven’t heard of them being questioned.
Foote seems like a character. Many of the generals seemed very bad or pretty good. But even the best ones made significant errors and many men seemed to have been wasted by attrition; obviously this lesson was not learned in WW1. Lee’s division of forces seems cleverer to me than anything Forrest did. However, Foote was talking to the Forrest family when he made the compliment which may have affected it. I think not, though, and Foote was clearly N expert.
Professional historians tend to be jealous of very successful popular projects. I read a few criticisms on line. Some say he took a soft line on some tough and divisive issues.
I have trouble balancing views like “there wasn’t much personal animosity” (as expressed in the series in an excellent Thomas Hardy poem, you could search for “nipperkin” to find it) with the camps. I can see food was short so people in Andersonville got 3 tbsps. of beans and little else. But the series says they were not allowed to build shelters and had to live in holes in the ground. No doubt there was overcrowding, but the conditions seem surprisingly harsh. Were other camps even comparable to the worst ones?
Not a comment on the authenticity of the filmed yelling, but from general reading, the Northerners frequently commented on the high, shrill, unearthly sound of the Rebel Yell, compared to the deeper sound Northern troops made (which they often characterized as “manly”).
Ancient trenches were usually for a different purpose. By the Renaissance, trenches began to be inhabited and used to shield soldiers from projectiles (massed musketry). But in earlier periods, troops would typically be behind a trench, not in it. The trench was intended to break up formations of foot soldiers and deter horsemen from charging home.
Part of the reason was each side’s inability to see things from the other’s perspective. Northerners assumed Secession was provoked by a few instigators and was not widely supported, thus the Confederate armies would have trouble recruiting. Southerners assumed Northern troops were all unhappy conscripted shopkeepers who lacked fighting qualities. Neither side was expecting serious opposition.
There’s still no reason to think there was just one yell shared by all the soldiers. They came from all over the southern states, territories, and the rest of the country too, I don’t believe any time was spent on teaching soldiers an official yell. I don’t think the accounts of surviving veterans 50 year or more later are going to be very enlightening.
The major criticism that I have heard is, basically, “too much Shelby Foote”. Apparently some people found his descriptions of Southern generals too positive.
He was a 45-year-old tailor who joined an outfit called the “Fifth German Rifles,” aka the 45th NY Volunteer Infantry. Actually, he was captured in his units first encounter with the enemy, while on picket duty at Annadale VA, just south of Washington, in December 1861 (not 1862). The commanding officer of the next regiment over complained in his report that a raiding party of Confederate Cavalry rode through the 45th’s lines without drawing a shot, captured some of his men, and then rode back out, again without the 45th shooting at them. He concluded: “Colonel Pinto reports a very free use of liquor in the pickets of the Forty-fifth New York Volunteers.” So my ancestor and 12 of his comrades were evidently captured while overdoing the schnapps while on guard duty.
He was first confined in Richmond, then moved to Salisbury Prison Camp in South Carolina near the end of December. He was released in a prisoner exchange in June, 1862. He was honorably discharged in April 1863 due to not being fit for duty since his release due to tuberculosis.
My Irish great great grandfather was in an advance party that accidentally ran into the whole Confederate Army as they raided Manassas Junction a day or two before the battle. They pretty much ran all the way back to Washington.
In the video, most of the examples were similar, a high shrill yell as typically described, but a few of the men gave some different lower yells. Based on this and the historical descriptions, I think it’s reasonable to think that the men were giving what was commonly referred to as the “rebel yell,” although I agree it may have differed from place to place and time to time.
A Confederate veteran, evidently inclined to colorful writing, described the attack on the Union troops at Jerusalem Plank Road outside of Petersburg in which my great great grandfather was captured like this:
So my g-g-grandfather probably experienced the “rebel yell” at first hand.
They weren’t. the Battle of Shiloh, at that time the bloodiest battle in American history, killed perhaps 3,500 men. The Battle of Waterloo, contested between about the same number of men half a century earlier, killed more. Gettysburg didn’t kill any more men than most similarly sized Napoleonic battles. Antietam didn’t kill any more men than Fontenoy. Battles in the ancient world were often far bloodier; Cannae may have killed seventy thousand men.
What resulted in so many men dying over the course of the war was simply that there were SO MANY battles - an unprecedented number in Western warfare (and so many men in the Army, so disease had its shot for longer and at more targets.) The United States in 1861 was the wealthiest nation that had ever existed in human history, and was technically and economically capable of fielding armies of unprecedented size, and to keep replenishing them, and have them smash into each other again and again. Their armies were consistently well equipped, armed, and provided with fresh men. Their had been bigger single battles before, but not big battles over and over and over, across multiple fronts fought by multiple armies.
Conversely, the area they were fighting over was gigantic and difficult to traverse; it was arguably the largest territory over which a single war between two belligerents had ever been fought, and much of it was wildnerness, so neither side was ever able to win a battle that just totally crushed the other and ended the war. Previously, battles like Hasting or Waterloo could end a war, or bring the end quite close; in the Civil War, even the crushing dual defeats of Gettysburg and Vicksburg didn’t stop the war, and it dragged on for two more years, battle after battle after battle.
The show states (IIRC) The US had a population of 31m in 1861. The North had 22m and something around 75-90% of factories and production. The South had 9m people including 4m slaves.
The show states American casualty rates were much higher than Vietnam or the World Wars. The old estimates of 350,000 Northern deaths and 280,000 Southern deaths were recently revised upwards by an additional twenty per cent. For example, 13,000 Iowans died - about 5000 in battle and 8000 of disease, including POWs. At some battles, casualty rates were said by the show to be 40% - and several such battles occurred closely together.
Still, no doubt other wars and battles in history had casualty rates approaching 100 per cent. And the absolute numbers, which RickJay uses, might well be higher in many other campaigns.
