Regarding Pickett’s Charge in particular, there’s a school of thought that Lee had just suffered his first heart attack shortly before the Gettysburg campaign, and was operating at reduced mental acuity during the campaign. Certainly he was trying too hard to force a sudden end to the war, the desperate charge being the best but not the only example of his hurry. It’s possible a fresh awareness of his own mortality drove him to hurry out of concern he would die before accomplishing his goal.
Sounds like Lee apologetics trying to make excuses that their diety wasn’t always a perfect general.
Right after taking command and launching what would be known as the Seven Days battles, Lee found his drive stalled by an enormously strong Union position at Boatswain’s Swamp. The hill was covered with infantry supported by guns and protected from easy approach by the swamp itself. Lee ordered John Bell Hood to attack frontally (probably because he felt pressed for time). Hood’s men went straight at the center of this deathtrap, taking horrific casualties but punching through the line and driving the Union from the position. Hood spent the rest of the war trying to duplicate this feat against more experienced troops, at catastrophic cost to the Confederate cause; Lee was militarily smarter, but may have had Boatswain’s Swamp in the back of his mind when faced with the unsolvable problem of the immensely strong “fish hook” the Union held at Gettysburg. Possibly worried about his own impending death and anxious to relieve pressure on faraway Vicksburg, he gambled on lightning striking a second time.
This is done from work without references so there my be misstatements, my memory being what it is.
With regard to Union artillery on the third day at Gettysburg, there was a concentration of guns on Cemetery Hill, in fact in the civilian cemetery, that could fire East, North and West. That concentration of gun was not significantly degraded by the Confederate barrage proceeding the Pickett-Pettigrew attack and fire from those guns beat in the left flank of the attack. There was another concentration of guns along Cemetery Ridge well south of the Angle sited to confront any renewal of the Second Day’s attack which was also mostly undamaged by the Confederate barrage. These guns along with a single four gun battery on Little Round Top chewed up the right flank of the attack.
That left four batteries in the sector of the Angle. From North to South they were a US battery of 12 pounders at the West edge of Ziegler’s Grove, a Rhode Island battery at the South end of the stone wall running South from the Bryant farm (equipped with 12 pounders, I think), a US battery of rifled guns just inside the Angle and another, somewhat depleted, Rhode Island 12 pounder battery just South of the Corpse of Trees. In addition there was a single New York rifled battery between the battery South of the trees and the concentration of guns to the South.
By the time the infantry advanced both Rhode Island batteries had pulled out, one because it was out of ammunition and one because it had been so badly cut up that it could not fight any more. This second RI battery was replaced at the last minute by the NY battery from further to the South. The US battery in the Angle had been reduced to ineffectiveness but none-the-less heroically fought its remaining guns until overrun. The northern most battery in the sector, the US battery, was badly damaged during the barrage having lost its battery commander and being to a large extent crewed by drafted infantrymen, remained effective and had enough short range ammunition to badly hurt Pettigrew’s troops with canister fire as the assault closed on the Union position around the Bryant farm.
Thus the critical stretch along the stone wall was defended not by the four batteries posted there but by two batteries and the ineffective fragments of a third. Replacement batteries arrived but after the crises had passed. The result is that the center of the assault was largely free of effective artillery fire while the flanks were seriously injured by artillery fire from the Cemetery Hill and South gun concentrations and from Little Round Top. For the center it was an infantry fire fight. To that extent artillery support for the critical sector had been weakened the barrage had at least partially accomplished its objective.
R.E. Lee had been diagnosed with heart related problems in early 1863, and had been bed-ridden for much of April of the same year. He also being treated for dysentery (but who wasn’t).
*Confederate General Robert E. Lee, at age 56, was experiencing pain in his chest, back and arms in late March and early April of 1863. Several doctors diagnosed pericarditis. Pericarditis by definition, according to the Mayo Clinic, is “a swelling and irritation of the pericardium, the thin sac membrane that surrounds your heart.”
For General Lee, his doctors, Lafayette Guild and S. M. Bemiss, prescribed rest, gave him quinine and sent him into a private home near Fredericksburg, Virginia and away from the rebel camp. He was confined in bed for several weeks and was feverish. By April 16, he was back in camp, but still not feeling 100%.
Modern doctors hold the opinion that Lee suffered a heart attack. They say that doctors of the day were not familiar with angina.*
*Abstract
We believe that General Robert E. Lee had ischemic heart disease. It is our opinion that he sustained a heart attack in 1863 and that this illness had a major influence on the battle of Gettysburg. Lee experienced relatively good health from 1864 to 1867, but by 1869 he had exertional angina and by the spring of 1870 had intermittent rest angina. Although his symptoms were typical of angina, his physicians consistently diagnosed pericarditis, which we believe was erroneous. This misdiagnosis can be explained by the lack of familiarity of American physicians with angina during the 19th Century. It often was stated that the loss of the war broke the heart of Lee, but in view of our modern day understanding, it probably is more accurate to say that advancing coronary atherosclerosis was the culprit.*
The mis-match between weapons and tactics is a large part of the answer.
The rest is something that I learned from a reenactor – noise. Virtually nobody today realizes how incredibly LOUD a battlefield was. The troops had to be close together to hear each other, for orders and so forth.
This reenactor told about a reading a letter from a Civil War artilleryman. Now, we all know that a cannon is loud, even if we’ve never actually heard one. It can be heard for a considerable distance. But this soldier said that the battlefield was so noisy, that the only way he could tell when his cannon fired was by the recoil!
I seriously don’t think heart troubles make you arrogant to the point of misjudging your enemies defenses.
Lee just wasn’t all that hot on offense, he had some hits but some real blunders as well. Trying to hand-wave his errors as being cuased by medical problems still smacks of Confederate ancestor worship trying to make excuses.
There’s a reason why Drums were the primary instrument of drill and every other instrument was just musical window dressing.
Except maybe bagpipes. I think you could hear bagpipes over the Fat Man going off next door.
I’m a Lincoln man all the way.
Or 82%, like the 1st Minnesota on day 2 of Gettysburg.
[And no, we are not ever going to give back the 28th Virginia Battle Flag we captured there. It’s on display in our State Capitol, and you can come there to see it. In a January blizzard.]
I don’t know that 82% (such as the 1st Minn at Gettysburg or the 82% of the 1st Texas at Antietam) was really “acceptable” though; both units were effectively destroyed as a result. Another thing to consider is that units back then were pretty much all teeth, and no tail.
So a 30% casualty rate in an infantry brigade in the Civil War might correspond to a 10-15% rate nowadays, because most modern brigades aren’t entirely composed of fighting troops like they used to be. But 30% of the combat troops may still end up as casualties.
That kind of tactic is a relic of the Napoleonic wars, and Napoleon was pretty much deified by most tactical minds of Civil War era.
In Napoleon’s time doing just that wasn’t just not a terrible idea, it was the basis of many of his great victories. In Napoleons time if you could concentrate your forces and attack in small area of the enemy line en masse (and had sufficient organisation to keep formation and fill in gaps as they develop), you stood a great chance of overwhelming them with your superior numbers at that point of the line (even if overall they out number you). That is how Napoleon won a lot of his battles, but as plenty of commentators have point the advances in gun technology made this pretty much suicidal by the 1860s.
The whole idea behind Napoleonic-style warfare was to present an unbroken line to your enemy- that way your lines could fire forward and be secure from their sides and rear. If the enemy managed to get themselves on your flank (enfilading fire), this is pretty much the same concept as “crossing the T” in a naval battle- the enemy is firing down your entire line, and you can’t really fire and reply effectively, as your formation is aligned at a right angle to the enemy’s. So the ends of the lines tended to bend inward for one side or the other to avoid this situation.
The frontal charge was typically intended to be something that would break the enemy’s line- make a regiment retreat or flee, and throw their defense into disarray, and make them readjust. With that in mind, the best places for attacks of this kind were at gaps in the enemy’s line, or barring that, at places where they had open flat ground, so that there was little natural cover or elevation- that would negate any terrain benefits for the defenders.
In that sense, Pickett’s Charge was aimed at the right point in the Federal lines at Gettysburg- while not flat, it was open, and was considerably less challenging than Round Top at the southern end of the Union lines, or Cemetery Hill at the northern end.
But the tactic was fatally flawed by this point- very few frontal attacks like this succeeded, and when they did, it was mostly due to shock effect and elite troops rather than any fundamental soundness of the tactic as a whole. Cold Harbor, 1st Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania Court House are all testimony to the foolishness of the tactic.
In a sense, it was foreshadowing 1914, in that with the advances in infantry firepower from the rifled musket and Minie ball rendered the frontal charge obsolete, but nothing replaced it. With the even greater firepower and range of the bolt action repeaters firing smokeless powder cartridges and the horrific power of the machine gun and quick firing indirect artillery, it meant that even maneuver in the face of the enemy was a bad idea, so they dug in, and dug in deep come 1914, giving us battles like the various Ypres battles, the Somme, and Verdun.
The invention of the tank broke that stalemate that was first seen in the US Civil War, and opened fighting back up to maneuvering.
There’s a point to be made that these tactics worked during the Napoleonic era and they worked very well. The British used these types of tactics to kick George Washington’s butt all up and down the battlefield, until Washington went into Valley Forge and got his men trained in proper military discipline and proper bayonet fighting. When Washington started using the same type of tactics, and his men no longer broke and ran under pressure from a large scale charge, then Washington started winning. So the lesson of the last 150 to 200 years was that you had to use these types of tactics, or you would lose. And it wasn’t just tactics used by Napoleon and a bunch of folks over in Europe. With the Revolutionary War, it was tactics used by Americans on American soil.
For Generals in the Civil War, when they looked back on history, all of their training and experience and historical knowledge all pointed to the fact that these tactics worked. There had never been a major war in recent history where they hadn’t.
I think this helps to explain why the Civil War Generals were so reluctant to stop using these tactics, even though, as bump points out, previous battles had proven that these tactics could be rather disastrous on the new Civil War battlefield with the modern Civil War weapons and tactics being used.
If you are a General, and you’ve been taught through numerous historical examples that charges work to break lines, you are probably more inclined to think that someone did it wrong when you hear about the tactic’s failure at someplace like Spotsylvania, rather than think that the tactic itself has become flawed and no longer works.
One of the very limiting parts of Civil War battles was information: Where was everybody and how strong were they?
At Gettysburg, Lee got royally irked at Stuart taking his cavalry to go raiding when recon would have been more helpful.
Lee underestimated the strength of the Union forces. There had been near breakthroughs on the flanks the previous day. He thought a big charge might do it. Pickett and others (and hindsight) disagree. If he had been right, the charge would have worked.
Note that the overall status of the war was on Lee’s mind. The whole point of the campaign was to scare the North into negotiating a settlement. Lee knew that a continuation of the war was going to go badly. So, he was deliberately looking for one big, decisive battle. He went all in at Gettysburg. If Meade had countered appropriately after Pickett’s Charge, the AoNV would have been finished that week. But … he overestimated the strength of the foe.
Another major factor in the Civil War being so deadly was getting units to act when and where they were supposed to. Mass charges were one way to have at least some of your battle plan actually get implemented.
I want to disagree somewhat with other posters here.
In practice, Civil War tactics were not clearly Napoleonic. It’s absolutely true that almost all the trained generals came to it from that background - but the school of war in the Civil War was the war itself. Most of the trained officers had learned the Napoleonic methods - but they also fought in the Mexican War, and took those lessons in both good and bad ways. The Mexican War taught them to act aggressively, but also a great many practical lessons about using the land. And a rather large chunk of of the better generals either never studied tactics or never paid any attention to Napoleon.
Fairly early in the war, troops and generals learned how to fight from cover. It’s no secret that they learned the defensive. It is somewhat less well-known how they adapted to the offense - but adapt they did. During the war many new, effective tactics were developed. Soldiers used the ground for cover during advances, learned to maneuver and well as attack in the dark, and found new formations for attacking trenches. In fact, this was also how the trenches in WW1 were broken in the end. Tanks were not the major factor in the Allied victory; it was improved infantry tactics.
The real weakness was communication. In the Civil War, it was nearly impossible to properly scout the enemy lines and maneuver forces to take advantage of weaknesses. Armies groped around in the dark; even when incredible opportunities were present, taking advantage often came down the to aggressive generalship often derided by modern commentators.
I disagree; Lee was brilliant in offensive tactics. I mean, not about the other things; he really screwed up Gettysburg. He should never have accepted battle there, never have arranged his forces as he did, and never sent Pickett on that charge. But he was probably the single greatest tactician in the war. Not many generals can say they trounced larger, better-equipped armies in strong defensive positions.
I thank many of you for your answers. However, some of you misunderstood my OP. Still, it makes interesting reading.
I started to reply to most of the comments, but I stopped because most of the discussion seems to involve Pickett’s Charge specifically and/or the decision to try it. That isn’t what I asked.
I was asking about the general strategy of filling the holes in the advancing line, which seems to be the accepted method of how infantry charges were carried out during the Civil War. I used Pickett’s Charge as an example, but my question has nothing to do with that one moment in history. It was meant to be an example so folks would know what I was asking about.
Confederate and Union troops both used the “fill the gap” methodology, at least according to what I have read and seen in reenactments.
There are so many incorrect pieces of information in this thread, however most of it stems from the discussion of Pickett’s Charge, so I am not going to bother. I wish I would have not mentioned it. It changed the direction of this thread.
However, I’ll address a couple of specific comments…
This is exactly what Carlton McCartney says in his book. He paints a pretty good picture of what it was like for a foot soldier in the Army of NoVa during the Civil War. The endless marching led to a LOT of streamlining of equipment, and it was driven mostly by weight issues.
A bayonet was not used enough for guys to lug it around with them for months on end, only to use it to cook some strip of meat at meal time. The Confederate soldier did whatever he could to lighten the load. These are guys who started the war by bringing along everything they thought they would need to make their lives easier. But the reality of lugging everything on their backs caused them to make some pretty interesting decisions on what was and wasn’t necessary to carry.
For instance, most men didn’t even carry a change of clothes, and would wear the same underwear for months. They did this for a number of reasons; a fresh change of clothing took up space in their haversacks; they didn’t like carrying around something unless they were wearing it; they rarely had access to hot water, so clothes washing wasn’t a real option… Once they got a new change of underwear, they threw away the old. And they often took what they needed from the army they defeated in battle that day.
It is hard to put our 21st century minds around the life of a civil war foot soldier, but what McCartney wrote rings true. Soldiers were living day to day and moment to moment. So, they would throw away anything that they absolutely didn’t need that weighed them down. Every item was considered… Things like their overcoats, blankets, even canteens.
Bayonets were only used in close quarters, and most veteran soldiers chucked them for weight considerations. If you were close enough to stab the enemy with a bayonet, you were close enough to swing your rifle like a club and try to smack them in the skull.
Were they used? Yes. Were they on the end of every infantry man’s musket? No. Hollywood has made a lot of images reality for many people (including me).
This is what I was looking for. If it was a holdover from Napoleonic era strategy, ok… That makes more sense. I don’t know much about the major eras of warfare, but I do know that the US Civil War was considered the first “modern” war, where technological advances were happening at warp speed (compared to previous wars).
Noise was definitely an issue on the battlefield. Hence the use of drummer boys and bugles. But I am not exactly sure I see the connection between noise and the “fill the gaps” strategy. I think you are right when you say the “mismatch between weapons and tactics” holds a large part of the answer.
I think I need to read up on military history and what “Napoleonic” tactics actually were. Because whatever was taught in the military academies was what most of the leading generals of both armies were taught, and that is what they fell back on and used when they needed to.
I guess I have trouble wrapping my head around the concept of pouring men into the teeth of a number of cannon shooting grape shot, but because there was a time lag between shots (no automatic cannons), maybe there was a belief that there was a number of men that could overwhelm a cannon crew and win.
There seems to be some confusion here about Napoleon’s tactics. One major difference between his tactics and Wellington’s was that Napoleon believed in ‘shock and awe’. His attacking forces marched forward in a column, in an attempt to drive through enemy lines by sheer weight of numbers. A solid mass of blue, with drummers drumming and chanting “vive l’empereur”.
Wellington on the other hand deployed his troops in a line and ensured that there was a good reserve to bolster whichever section the enemy attacked.
Troops in a column get in each other’s way. Only the first couple of ranks can fire at the enemy and the dead bodies get in their way. The troops in a line can all fire their guns, and the British were faster at reloading, so the rate of fire was devastating.
Of course, these were tactics for infantry facing infantry. If cavalry was used, then the infantry formed a square which was pretty impregnable to the men on horseback. British soldiers practiced these set formations endlessly so they could still carry them out when they were deafened by the guns and blinded by the smoke.
Don’t forget that Napoleon lost.
There was another famous battle exactly 600 years ago today where the English, under Henry V, faced a vastly superior French army and defeated them at Azincourt. That time it was the longbow and sheer bloody determination that did the trick.
The fact is neither artillery or muskets (smooth bore not rifled) were as effective as later in the civil war era. Napoleon was actually pretty scathing of the effectiveness of muskets in particular. His tactics were based on concentrating a column of troops in a small area of the enemy line. The weapons of the time were not deadly enough stop the approaching column, and then the enemy troops in the vicinity of the column were outnumbered (by Napoleon’s crack troops who were heavily drilled in hand-to-hand combat). After that the column had broken through the enemy line and the troops on either side were could be outflanked.
I dont know why in Pickets charge:
- They didnt attack at night.
- They didnt spread out in looser formations.
- They didnt try running towards their objective. Why were they just walking?