From what I’ve read, there were three battles (sieges, really) between rebels and federalistas in Naco. The first was in 1911, another in 1914, and the last in 1929. The aerial warfare, with American pilots/planes hired by the rebels, was only in the last one. (Airplanes were just not that common before WWI.) And there were several bombs that went astray to the Arizona side of the border. Picnickers observed all three conflicts from the relative safety of the north. Also it was not uncommon for deserters to flee to the AZ side.
I think you mean Cavalry.
As for uniforms, they weren’t always, well, uniform. The 2nd Wisconsin Infantry, for example, wore grey at least some of the time.
There were certainly skirmishers in the Napoleonic wars. And green-coat regiments using green-coat tactics.
Conversely, both sides were still trying to bring vast armies to close up during WWI.
It all seems much less clear-cut than you suggest.
This is absolutely correct. There were actually quite a few different “machine gun” type weapons in the Civil War. They were typically placed near bridges, mountain passes, and other choke points where military commanders felt that their tremendous expenditure of ammunition would not be wasted. It wasn’t until later guns like the Maxim Gun proved their worth that military commanders truly understood how these guns with high rates of fire could be used to great effect on the battlefield.
While the Gatling Gun is by far the most widely known, there was also the earlier Agar Gun (aka the Coffee Mill gun because of its shape). Abraham Lincoln was very impressed with a demonstration of the Agar Gun in 1861. and immediately ordered the army to purchase ten of them. About 60 or so were produced and were used during the war. The Confederates captured some of them at Harper’s Ferry, so they ended up being used by both sides.
The Agar Gun had a single barrel and tended to overheat as a result of this. The Gatling Gun solved this problem somewhat by using multiple barrels. While the Gatling Gun would see a lot of service after the Civil War, the Agar Gun would not, mostly because of overheating and jamming issues.
A modern reproduction of the Agar Gun:
Note that they are using shotgun primers instead of the original percussion caps, which makes the gun significantly more reliable.The earliest hand-cranked gun that I am aware of was the Puckle Gun, which was a revolving flintlock gun patented in 1718. The Confederates had a revolving cannon which they used at Petersburg that was kind of a similar idea. The Confederate revolving cannon, while innovative, did not contribute significantly to the battle.
An article from The Washington Post claims there is enormous criticism of this show, watched by 1 in 6 Americans. This is purportedly due to an unbalanced discussion of slavery. In essence, critics claim that too little time is spent discussing slaves and too much is spent with Shelby Foote ostensibly somewhat minimizing its role.
I don’t fully agree with these criticisms. Surely Foote is given too large a role. But the series, which I recently found excellent, includes a multi-faceted discussion and a fairly complete one. However false, there were many Confederate justifications for the war at the time, and not including or discussing them would be misleading. I disagree the series has “aged badly”. Which in no way minimizes contemporary issues or concerns - many of which are not the subject of the show. Your thoughts?
Yes, there were other justifications. But if a state listed seven reasons for secession, the first six would all be slavery. The seventh might be some sort of vague mumbling about tariff policy, without even specifying whether the state supported or opposed tariffs.
So the result was that it took a long time to set up a camera (which were large and elaborate horse-drawn set-ups) and a long time to expose the plate. It wasn’t like wartime photographers in the 20th century and later that could take a quick photo during the battle.
On the contrary, with the equipment constraints on photography in the 19th century, it was the wartime equivalent of still lifes: static images of the aftermath of battle (like Mathew Brady’s famous images).
[ETA: I actually thought this was a new thread initially, before I realized it’s been going for a while, so I modified my reply accordingly.]
True enough. But my recollection was that there was a fairly thorough discussion of slavery. Inevitably, there was also discussion of how the Confederates justified their actions. It seems reductionist (but not absurd) to argue on the basis of time given to a few people, or their degrees.
In fact, for me this series inspired a lot of further reading and knowledge of the issues. As in my OP, I was shocked to learn only 4% of slaves reached age 60, even if life expectancy was generally lower.
??? Lewis Caroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) was a contemporary photographer, and he describes setting up a camera, and it wasn’t horse drawn:
From his shoulder Hiawatha
Took the camera of rosewood,
Made of sliding, folding rosewood;
Neatly put it all together.
In its case it lay compactly,
Folded into nearly nothing;
But he opened out the hinges,
Pushed and pulled the joints and hinges,
Till it looked all squares and oblongs,
Like a complicated figure
In the Second Book of Euclid.
Not shocked after reading Roman history
Rome suffered from ‘bad air’ – malaria, and most of those slaves captured in war and sent to Rome only lived 2 or 3 years.
Just as America has a film tradition of subtly referencing the Civil war from the Southern side (Star Wars, The Last Samurai, Firefly etc), the English had an idea of Roman Empire that subtly matched and justified the English Empire. So for me, it was a bit of a shock to realize that the Roman Empire was a slave state and Roman Civilization existed by exploiting slaves in appalling conditions.
I often see 'Roman Slavery wasn’t that bad! You could buy your way free!" Not if you’re dead you can’t.
Horse-drawn wagon for the whole set-up, including plates and a darkroom. See here for details regarding the process Mathew Brady and Lewis Caroll used:
Mathew Brady took photos of Civil War battlefields, and used horse-drawn wagons.
P.S. Lewis Carroll’s poem ends this way:
So not a wagon in this case, but a porter and a barrow.
Often?
Carroll’s poetry tends to be a little more whimsical. I think Hiawatha was written by someone else.
Everything I can find online indicates Hiawatha’s Photographing was written by Lewis Carrol (pen name of Charles Dodgson) as a parody of Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. Carroll completed the poem in November 1857.
Guess I stand corrected. I can’t say I’ve read more than the two obvious works by Carroll (not including math puzzles). Part of the beauty of the Dope is the eclectic contributions. I appreciate you citing this.
And I appreciate @Melbourne bringing it up in the first place. I’d never actually heard of the poem before. Reading it brought a smile to my face.
Incidentally, if you look at the details of wet-plate collodion photography, it wasn’t just that the plates had to be developed within minutes. They also had to be prepared in the portable darkroom immediately before taking the photograph.
Casualty rates in terms of battle injuries and deaths weren’t THAT high. We tend to concentrate on the biggest battles, like Shiloh and Gettysburg, but in most battles, most guys walked away unscathed or lightly injured. At Antietam, where some 65,000 men clashed in a ferocious battle, about 4,000 died - an awful toll but a casualty rate of six or seven percent. Wildnerness, which involved a three day fight between well over 150,000 men, killed about the same number. Shiloh, involving 100,000 men over two days of the most horrific fighting, also killed about the same number. And that was sufficiently bad to scandalize newspapers throughout the country.
What resulted in so many men dying during the war, aside from disease, was that there were SO MANY battles. The American Civil War was fought on a scale - geographic, numerical, and industrial - that was gigantic to an unprecedented degree. The two sides sent truly immense numbers of men and material into war, fighting constantly, for four years.
If you look at wars not too long before it, battles were not only less numerous but often intensely decisive. Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo instantly ended his second run, just as battles like Austerlitz had brought him crushing victories over his enemies. War in Europe at that time was generally about brining one’s army in battle at a time and place of your choosing to eliminate the enemy in a single day. Austerlitz started at 8 AM and was over long before lunch.
Civil War battles dragged on, sometimes for days, and there was almost constant low level fighting or minor battles in many areas. During the Vicksburg campaign, after invading Mississippi, Grant’s forces fought a dozen named battle and any number of smaller skirmishes in a span of eight weeks. It was this sort of constant, never-ending grind of battle that killed so many men, a grind that would only get worse in future wars.
And it was just the first of a series of four major and several minor battles during Grant’s Overland Campaign that dragged on for six weeks.
The thing was, every previous Union commander, after taking such casualties, would stop and often retreat. Grant was willing to continue attacking Lee again and again and again, no matter how many men he lost. He finally realized that it was a war of attrition rather than of decisive battles. Even if Lee won an individual battle, he still lost men he couldn’t replace.
Grant’s armies inflicted more casualties than they took, and not by an insubstantial number, when you count prisoners.
Grant’s understanding of warfare went way past just “I can take casualties he can’t.” Grant got that the war was strategic, fought on a grand, continental scale. Lee didn’t quite get that, which, to be fair, most of their contemporaries also didn’t.