- Because humans can’t see very well at night. Therefore they’d trip and fall, run into things, be unable to have their cannon shoot at the defenders, and most importantly get lost and end up in the wrong spot (maybe even attacking their own army, which happened fairly often).
- That would just mean that if they reached the Union lines, they’d be outnumbered by the defenders.
- Pick up a musket and a full Confederate infantry load, then go find a pasture (not a carefully groomed athletic field), and see how far you can run. Then look up how far Pickett had to go. Come back if you still have a question after that.
To expand a bit on Quercus’s answers:
1. They didnt attack at night.
That would have been a complete disaster. They had a hard enough time coordinating the movement of that many men during daylight hours when they could see. If they had tried that at night, it would have been complete chaos resulting in a horrible slaughter. Then again, the end result was a horrible slaughter anyway, so maybe you can make the argument that it wouldn’t have been much worse from Pickett’s perspective. The attack would have caused a lot less damage though.
2. They didnt spread out in looser formations.
The whole point of a mass charge like that was to overwhelm the enemy with the sheer number of attackers. This technique worked very well in earlier wars, but as has been noted upthread it hadn’t worked very well in the Civil War.
If they had spread out, then they would have lost the effectiveness of the attack and would have been slaughtered faster.
3. They didnt try running towards their objective. Why were they just walking?
I actually had a long discussion about this with a guy who was obviously a bit of a Civil War nut while we were standing at the area in Gettysburg where Pickett’s men had organized to begin their march. His argument was that the main reason for not running was that not everyone runs at the same speed, and if they had run across the field then their formations would have gone sloppy and the resulting attack would have been uncoordinated and ineffective. They needed to march in step to maintain their formations and their battlefield effectiveness. When you stand there and see how far they had to go and how they wanted to hit the Union line with a big massive punch, it makes sense, in a way.
It should also be noted that the British had kicked George Washington’s butt up and down the battlefield using tactics like this in the Revolutionary War. An unbroken advancing deep line like that was very effective back in the day, and prior to the Civil War it had been a great tactic to use to break a line.
Very interesting thread and some good discussions. If I may, i’ll add a few more.
In regards to the OP, ‘closing up ranks’ had been part of military tactics since probably the Ancient Sumerians and Egyptians (and let’s not start on how badly Movies and TV do pre-1800’s battles, I may even start a new thread on it). Partly this was for communication (as noted above, battles are LOUD), partly to bring overwhelming force at the targeted area, and also to keep the attack organized and ‘on-target’.
There was also (IMHO) a psychological reasoning; if a man (or small group) are suddenly separated from the larger group, the chances of them breaking and runnng are increased over being part of the ‘whole’ group. I doubt generals between 1800BC and 1860AD would put it that way, but keeping the group (be it regiment, brigade or division) together made it harder for te opposing force to break them.
Regarding charges in the Civil War, the number of ‘formal’ charges, like Pickett’s, were not as numerous as many would think. Normally forces would be brought into combat as a mass, move forward to engage, and pound away until one broke. Whereupon the winner would ‘charge’ forward, oftentimes running into enemy reinforcements and being broken in return.
Big, Movie-like charges only happened when the commander thought he had a major advantage or it was a ‘surprise’ attack, usually early in the morning (see Stone’s River/Murfeesboro) for an example). About the only two times I can recall a full-up “Charge” working was a Chickamauga (where a Union division had been moved out of line just as Longstreet’s men charged) and Chattanooga (where Thomas’s men went up Missionary Ridge and pretty much ‘psyched out’ the many less numerous defenders.
Otherwise, as mentioned above, charges were often bloody failures. A lot more often in the latter days of the war, as troops began to entrench and defenses became better.
IMHO as always. YMMV.
Dunno about Civil War charges, but during medieval charges, the attackers, when close enough, would gradually pick up speed to make contact at full speed.
The last thing you want to do is show up in a hand-to-hand fight already exhausted with your formation already disorganised.
True of course. But later in the war the size of the battles, and the massive casualties that had been inflicted on his armies over the course of the war (so his troops were more likely to be raw recruits than hardened well trained veterans), meant his tactics became much more conventional. Basically he reverted to the standard military MO of the day, which was to form a long line of troops advance on the enemy and try to kill them.
Along with the issue of not attacking at night - one item I read said the reason the Napoleonic era troops dressed in bright uniforms was gunsmoke. The constant volleys of old-style powder create so much smoke, it could become difficult to tell one side from another in the thick smoke. Anyone who’s tried wandering unfamiliar fields in fog will quickly realize that direction is easily lost. So like night attacks, an attack in smoke could quickly become lost and meander - hence, stay close in formation and walk in the direction the leading officer takes you, by following the people beside you.
What were your options? Hand grenades and rockets were extremely primitive and not terribly effective. There were JDAMs or cruise missiles or tanks. If you wanted to make contact with the enemy, there was only one way to do it. Sure, flanking was always preferable, but part of the reason for those big long lines was so the enemy couldn’t flank your position.
And to return again to the Napoleonic Era, this is exactly what happened. History is littered with men who threw their soldiers into a well-defended breach and watched them die in hundreds and thousands. You just had to hope you could send your men into contact faster than the enemy could load and fire. If seems crazy to us today, but when you don’t have helicopters or automatic weapons, there really weren’t that many options.
This isn’t actually true, and let me explain why.
The curriculum at West Point, which at the time was the only military academy in the United States, did not require any real training in tactics. Actually, it was a rock-solid engineering school more than anything else, and taught a variety of subjects outside the narrow focus of the military. While they did teach Napoleonic tactics, it was only in the sense of “this is how the most recent great general did it”. And not everyone who went through West Point necessarily learned much Napoleonic warfare. General Grant, for one, pretty much ignored the subject while he was in school, and he was far from unique (see below).
Jomini was an influence on some Civil War figures, and that gave Napoleon some weight - but this was far more about strategy than tactics. General Antione-Henry Jomini was one of Napoleon’s officers and wrote a well-read book of strategy celebrating Bonaparte, His principles tend towards the generic, but they are good as far as they go.
Jomini had a weird “geometric” idea of military conflict that Gen. Henry Halleck followed slavishly and Grant completely ignored. As it happens, Halleck accomplished nothing and Grant captured three Confederate armies. (Grant, for one, admitted he never read Jomini.) It should be noted, however, that Jomini also argued that war was inexact and could not be exactly planned out in the fashion of Halleck. Further, many of the best commanders on both sides never went to any military school and may have had no military experience at all. They were politicians or businessmen or some kind who learned on the field.
As I mentioned before, the biggest issue in the Civil War was that communications technology simply wasn’t yet ready for the sheer firepower and logistics weight of modern warfare. Apart from using semaphore or telegrams, your only real method o sending messages was to write a letter, hand it to a rider, and send him off. Or yell really loud and hope your friends can hear you. But that wasn’t really very different than before Napoleon.
Hence why I’ve said that tactics weren’t Napoleonic. Despite the length in the history books, The Civil War was not especially long by historical standards and fighting really took place only over four years. Fighting did not begin in earnest until a full year into the conflict and the while the last six months saw relatively little serious fighting. During this period, tactics were continuously if erratically improved. You only saw Napoleonic style massed attacks when things got do-or-die serious or one side had (or thought they had) a major advantage.
The Confederates did like to charge Union infantry when they could, but they almost always took advantage of terrain to cloak their movements and hit the Union flank. These tactics were made possible by aggressiveness of their commanders, high morale, and excellent scouting. Apart from that, you mostly saw was shoot stand-offs won by body count as much as by morale. This was distinctly un-Napoleonic. Bonaparte won battles mostly because he realized that guns were too inaccurate, such that bold maneuvers and melee would disrupt shooting formations. Between the Mexican-American War and the Civil War, that was no longer the case and generals largely realized that.
Napoleonic artillery was relatively small and mobile, so it tended to accompany troops right to the front and was an active part of infantry tactics. It was fairly long-range compared to muskets but inaccurate. Infantry could reliably take guns with the loss of few men.
By 1860, artillery had become an even longer-range weapon, but there was much more variety and an emphasis on heavier pieces. Unfortunately, the rifle now dominated. While still out-ranged, infantry had relatively improved their situation. Groups of infantry could now often shoot down artillery at ranges where they could reasonably find cover, or just endure and cut down the artilleryman before they could effectively retaliate. This made proper artillery placement much more vital. If they could put infantry under fire for a long strength (as in Pickett’s charge), they could break the ranks and scatter the enemy. if not, they might have no option but to pull back.
(There were hefty siege guns going back a long way in time but these weren’t especially important on the battlefield - until the Civil War, when rail transport made it far easier to move them to the front.)
The tl;dr version is that Napoleonic-era artillery could often be overwhelmed before they could do any damage if you rushed the guns. Civil War-era artillery could be shot to pieces at range