Not sure why only ‘deaths’ are being counted. Casualties include but are not exclusively fatalities.
The casualty rate also includes wounded, captured, and missing. And disease and other causes. There were not ~630,000 fatalities. There were that many casualties.
Combined military casualties of the Civil War exceeded by absolute number those of WWII and WWI. By percentage of population, it was even worse. But again, these are not all fatalities but all casualty sources combined.
I generally agree with all of this. However, I find most people aren’t aware of the way inventors tried to use new technologies during the war, more or less successfully. Ballooning was in fact far more used than the gatling gun, which most people seem to think was a widely used innovation. Only a handful of private soldiers tried them out. The Army itself did not adopt them until 1866.
The Civil War was a mix of the utterly new and the obsolete. Unfortunately, the Army tended to stick with the obsolete until a few technologies were forced upon them. Even so, the war was won by the advanced technology, manufacturing, shipping, and logistics of the North, none of which the South could hope to match.
In fact, in 2012 a historian increased the death estimate to 750,000 from 630,000 offering widely-supported evidence numbers were underestimated. This includes deaths from disease.
Injured, including amputations, were said to number 1.5 million. According to the show, and “confirmed” with a quick Google, but certainly approximate.
The American Battlefield Trust reports the figure of 620,000 casualties collected soon after the war. Records were incomplete, but about 1 in 4 soldiers did not return home. About 1 in 13 had a limb amputated. The historian Hacker did an extensive survey of records and came up with a larger number in 2012 supposedly widely regarded by current experts as more accurate. By comparison, 400,000 Americans died in WW2, the second highest total.
Is it also true, given war amps, that the Covil War was the first to use landmines? The series briefly mentions this. But since it was on a small scale, some websites call them “precursors”. Anyone know more?
Right, and it’s worth noting that in one case, that of the Minie ball & rifled musket, they were introduced a mere 6 years (1855) prior to the start of the war. Hardly enough time to develop new doctrine and work out how these new longer-ranged and more accurate rifles might affect future wars, especially considering that the Army was small (~16,000 men), scattered across the West after the Mexican-American war and the subsequent territorial gains, and primarily fighting Indians, not other organized military forces.
And on top of that, the vast majority of regiments on both sides were state raised and equipped militia regiments that were not composed of professional soldiers or officers.
It’s not at all surprising that tactics were not ideal for fighting with the new weaponry at least at the beginning of the war.
Grant’s Overland Campaign by itself included four major battles - The Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg - each one very costly. The Wilderness had 17,000 casualties, and Spotsylvania 18,000. My g-g-grandfather’s regiment, the 2nd NY Heavy Artillery (fighting as infantry), consisting of about 1,500 men, was called to the front to replace the losses. In the 36 days he was at the front before being captured, his regiment lost 733 killed, wounded, or captures - nearly 50% in just over a month.
Minor nitpick:
The Springfield model 1840 Musket was flintlock and smooth bore. The change for the Model 1842 was the conversion from flintlock to caplock. The Minie ball was already under development in the 1840s (similar ideas had been tinkered with throughout the 1820s and 1830s), and most of the Model 1842 Muskets were built with intentionally thicker barrel walls than necessary with the anticipation that the barrels would end up being rifled at some point. Many Model 1842 barrels did end up getting rifled, though many did remain smooth bores. Off the top of my head I don’t know the percentages of each.
The Model 1842 was also still .69 caliber, the same as all of the muskets dating back to the French Charleville. With the switch to the Minie ball, .69 was just too much lead, so for the Model 1855, they dropped the caliber down to .58. They also introduced the Maynard Primer system, which worked so well that they never put it on another model of musket ever after that.
So while bump is correct in the sense that the Model 1855 was the first musket produced with a rifled barrel and intended to use the Minie ball, there were many Model 1842’s that were rifled before that.
The Model 1842s saw use in the Indian wars and the Mexican American War, but I don’t think too many rifled versions ended up making it out to the field by then. The Model 1855s were mostly used in the Indian Wars.
bump’s point is still valid. Rifled-muskets did not have much field experience by the start of the Civil War, and what experience commanders did have with it was mostly out west, which was a whole different type of ball game.
I read another interesting statistic this week. About one out of every four soldiers who fought in the American Civil War was involved in a surrender at some point (not counting the actual end of the war). Some surrendered as individuals but many were parts of units that surrendered. This is a much higher percentage that any other war Americans fought in.
Wasn’t the rebel yell something they sort of borrowed from Native Americans probably with a few tweaks to make it their own, I seem to remember reading that somewhere. Of course I’m sure various types of war cries have been around since as long as warfare itself.
The new rifled muskets and the occasional use of repeating carbines made the napoleaonic method of lining up in bright uniforms, exchanging a volley of very inaccurate fire then closing with bayonet not as feasible. Sure, they still did it, but defense went to trenches and fences quickly and they learned to charge at a run. Skimishers became important.
NBF wasnt all that unusual or brilliant. He was one of several CSA cavalry leaders that took the idea of long raids behind enemy lines and excelled at it. At raiding he was indeed, one of several of the best CSA leaders, maybe even the best. In actual battle- not so much. Foote was what we call a “Southern Apologist”, and his lionization of NBF is pretty over the top, poisons his otherwise solid writing. Neutral British writers are not so amazed at NBFs so called “genius”. :rolleyes: The Lionization of NBF came after the war, due to his being one of the founders of the KKK and a big believer in the “Lost Cause”. Lincoln learned very fast.
Disease and primitive medical care. The Union, at least, usually had anesthesia, but the germ theory and “Listerization” came just a bit too late. As to POWs- No such thing yet as the Geneva conventions, and of course it wasn’t really a "war’, but a civil rebellion. The North at least mostly *tried *to do fair by it’s treatment of CSA POWS.
All of you are at least partly missing the point.
Sure, they had telegraphs. Sure, they had signal flags. It may have be fairly quick and easy to get important information to the top generals.
But here’s the point: How did the generals get that information and orders to the colonels, majors, and captains? There were no radios; there were no battlefield telephones such as WW2 forces had; runners and orderlies were not immune from getting shot; there was NOTHING that was quick, easy, or completely reliable.
That’s a major reason for the high casualty rate, which in turn flows from the mismatch between tactics and weaponry. The men HAD to be bunched closely together, because that was the only halfway good way of passing information.
To direct artillery fire, you just need to see where the cannon hits, and signal the guy firing the cannon to correct.
Another reason that they bunched together was that anything else was suicidal in all previous wars for several hundred years or more.
This was a lesson that Washington’s men learned the hard way during the Revolutionary War. If they tried to spread out and hide behind trees and cover, the British would advance in a big line. When the entire line met one of Washington’s small groups, it was that small group against the entire freaking British army. The small group didn’t stand a chance. So the small group broke and ran. Then the line advanced to the next small group, and again, the small group broke and ran.
Washington got his backside kicked up and down the battlefields until he went into Valley Forge. In between starving to death and the general misery of Valley Forge, Washington got his men trained in proper army tactics and military discipline, as well as proper bayonet training. Only then could Washington’s men go toe to toe with the British.
If you told a Civil War general that his men would do better by spreading out and taking cover, he would have told you that spreading out and taking cover was an excellent way to lose the war. If you wanted to stop a line, you needed a line of your own. If you want to break through a line, you need to do a mass charge. These were lessons learned the hard way in previous wars, and Civil War generals weren’t too keen on repeating past mistakes. If it didn’t work for George Washington, why would you try it now? Don’t break ranks. Don’t spread out. Bunch up and stick together, or you die. That was the lesson of previous wars.
Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg looks foolish in hindsight, but that was what they knew worked. There had been some failures with mass charges like that, but a few failures could have just been from poor execution or something else specific to that battle. The military commanders did not have solid proof that the tactic no longer worked. So, Pickett bunched up his men and charged. In any previous war, Pickett’s charge would have worked. In the Civil War, it failed miserably, and a lot of men died.
Yes, that’s all true. But that was the one thing they had plenty of history to draw upon. All the earlier armies had exactly this problem. That’s why they had devised so many systems for getting information to where it needed to be.
The one that we haven’t mentioned, because it wasn’t technologically new, was runners. Every command station had a squad of soldiers, usually on horseback but sometimes on foot, who were sent off to convey information as soon as it came in fro the field or the telegraph or the signals or whatever. From above you would have seen a swarm of information in constant motion from node to node, much like a map of the internet. It was far slower, and more disposed to interruption or failure to get the message through, but it was something everybody knew and trusted. And it worked enough of the time to affect to the outcome of many battles.
Civil War artillery was not, for the most part, indirect fire. The gunners themselves could see where their cannons were hitting. You don’t need artillery spotters until you develop artillery that targets things you can’t see from the gun position. This was new for WWI, and largely didn’t exist during the Civil War. They mostly used 12-pound cannon with a range of about a mile that fired on a flat trajectory. There was some use of small howizters that lobbed explosive shells, but their range was no greater.
I’m still curious about the use of landmines in the war. Were they a primitive experiment, given they could hurt both sides? The series refers to one town that was taken and retaken 32 times.
Also need to point out - gunsmoke in a battle could be too thick to see much - especially with a huge line of people side by side. Standing near the next guy and wearing distinctive colours helped you to tell which way was which, where everyone else was headed, and who was your side or the other. When you are hiding in trenches and rolling around in the mud, bright colours are less important.
(Funny scene where the soldiers are approaching in “The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly”; by the colour of their uniforms they look Confederate, so the guy starts yelling confederate slogans. When the troops get close enough, the leader on horseback starts beating the grey dust out of his blue uniform)
The Civil War was not the first war where landmines were used.
The Chinese were using pressure-plate style landmines hundreds of years earlier.
In Europe, the earliest landmines I am aware of were basically a flintlock mechanism like what you would find on a rifle or pistol attached to a keg of powder along with a tripwire to trigger the flintlock. They could be deadly, but they had a tendency to fail to fire if left unattended for any period of time. You need nice clean steel to get a decent spark off of flint. Rusty steel ain’t gonna do it.
Naval mines had been first used in the U.S. in the Revolutionary War. They basically filled kegs with gunpowder and had a sparking mechanism that set off the keg if it hit a ship. They would float these downriver at the enemy and hope for the best. Mines improved a bit in the years leading up to the Civil War. They were called torpedoes back then instead of mines. The phrase “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” refers to a naval minefield, not modern style torpedoes.
Long before the Civil War, a man named Gabriel Rains, who would later become a Confederate General, had rigged up some explosive devices during the Seminole Wars in the 1840s. He probably got the idea from Europe, where Russians had done similar things starting in the 1820s. Under Rains’ command, his men made similar mines during the Civil War by taking artillery shells and attaching pressure caps to them.
There were others who basically took naval mines and rigged them up on land with tripwires and such so that they would explode when troops walked by.
You could make an argument that Civil War “torpedoes” are probably more properly called IEDs, given that they were cobbled together out of bits of other things and weren’t purpose built as landmines.