Sometimes I watch these documentaries/movies about the Civil War, and in their war scenes (if they are actually depicting them how they really fought), why is it that the troops are all in a line, shooting each other in plain view? Isn’t that sorta…stupid? 
Why wouldn’t they try hiding behind trees and shooting at each other?
That is how war was fought back then. It was considered cowardly to hide behind a tree.
Because the guns at the time were inaccurate. Massed volley fire ensured you hit something.
The civil war saw the end of fighting like that.
A warfare almost as bad was picked up.
Trench warfare.
thanks for the replies. 
In trench warfare (as I understand it), didn’t they haveat least some sort of cover, though? The trench itself?
It was the only way large groups of men could be directed by a central command without the use of radio communications. Shooting at the enemy from behind hedgerows and the like was dastardly and ungentlemanly. It was not the way a decent chap fights a war but rather the behaviour of what one would today call a terrorist.
Mostly they did use cover - at least the defenders did. As much as possible, the side defending a position would take advantage of trees, fences, farm walls, or whatever. If they had some time available, they would dig trenches and make spiked defenses out of tree trunks.
Sometimes attackers had to cross open country to get to the defending side. When this was done against a dug-in opponent - e.g. Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, or Grant’s assaults at Cold Harbor - the result was usually a disaster for the attackers.
As the war went on, the tactic of digging in became more and more prevalent, because it worked. The end result was the 10 months of trench warfare at Petersburg that terminated the war.
Wasn’t there another thread exactly the same as this one?
I’m afraid this is just silly. We’re talking about armies in the tens of thousands. You can’t command an army in a forest, you can’t supply an army through a forest, and there aren’t enough trees in the world to enable tens of thousands of soldiers to hide behind while they are also trying to drive another army off a battlefield. It had very little to do with cowardice and everything to do with common sense.
That’s not to say that soldiers didn’t try to hide behind trees when possible, but you have no conception of the volume of fire during a Civil War battle. Trees were literally cut down by bullets.
Grant pioneered trench warfare during the long campaign to drive Lee out of Virginia. He started entrenching as soon as he took over command in the east, but stumbled badly at Cold Harbor. By the end of the war he mastered the discipline. Read any account of the battle of Petersburg. The lines there went for 53 miles.
Generals did learn from experience in the war. And the weapons themselves changed, in that Gatling guns and higher-powered, more accurate rifles made standard charges too deadly to secure victories.
Metaphorically, the Civil War started in the 18th century and finished in the 20th.
Also, spread out, dismounted troops are going to get slaughtered by cavalry. The rate of fire was something like 3-5 shots a minute, which is plenty of time for a bunch of guys on horse to come shoot you, stab you, or just trample you.
Actually, Rogers Rangers adopted the technique of firing from concealed positions. They were not the first. Warfare changes over time. The explanations concerning communication ar valid as well as the discussions of the need for volley fire. But it should be kept in mind that what is considered stupid today is not really the best way to judge the past. Many people who spent lifetimes studying the issues gave their best suggestions based on the information and experience they had. It is not really fair to judge them based on information that they did not have.
Tried and true practice. Before the American Civil War, and the general issue of rifles to troops, most armies used single shot, smoothbore muskets. Yhe most efective use of firepower by such troops is the volley. The more troops concentrated into a volley, the more lead in the air. Basic tactics were, move up in a line, fire volleys, charge with fixed baonets to finish off the survivors.
During the Civil War, rifles changed this, with a smoothbore musket you simply pointed in the general direction of the enemy, their was no guarentee that you shot would hit anyone, let alone someone you had aimed at. Once rifles became general issue due to the invention of the minnie ball that changed. Soldiers could now pick their targets, and have a good chance of hitting them.
Many Civil War generals, on both side had not yet come to terms with the impact that these weapons would have on tactics. Most had been schooled in the tactics from the first days of their trains as officers some would adapt, some would not. Some, even Lee, would forget. Picketts charge is a good example, the idea that enough of thes men would make it through the storm of rifle and cannon fire to break the Union lines was a throughback to the smoothbore days.
Sweetums
To understand why troops lined up shoulder to shoulder and shot at each other, you need to understand how those tactics evolved.
Early firearms (hand cannons, matchlocks, etc) were horribly inaccurate and very slow to reload. In order that gunpowder troops have any effect on the battlefield, they needed to fire en masse, and they needed to be protected (mostly from cavalry charges) between volleys. Pikemen provided that protection. Eventually musket troops became their own pikes with the invention of the bayonette. But volley fire was still necessary for effectiveness until widespread use of rifled muskets (with the miniball in the Civil War - rifles had been in use for a century previous, but they were much slower to load than smoothbore muskets, and were only used by light, skirmishing troops, not by the main battle line), and close order bayonettes were still necessary for protection from cavalry until rapid fire repeating rifles came into widespread use (WWI). Until WWI, generally speaking the first side to have its infantry break formation lost the battle, as cavalry commanders would instantly charge broken formations to devastating effect.
Issues of command might have a little relevance, but the honour or lack thereof of hiding behind trees is a complete red herring. Use of available cover had been a mainstream practice for centuries. It just wasn’t practicable very often given the tactical demands of effectively deploying troops. However, witness Wellington’s famous “reverse slope” tactics, or even simple arrow slits in castle walls. There’s never really been much attention paid to honour in warfare. Winning has always been the driving motivation behind tactical development.
First of all, there was no notion at the time that hiding behind cover was “ungentlemanly.” They did everything they could to keep themselves alive.
To answer your question; no, it was not stupid.
You have to understand the difficulty facing an army in the field. Armies are big. REALLY big. A division of infantry in the Civil War was thousands of men. Organizing them and moving them around was an enormous task; just the practice of moving an army around, not even getting into the fighting, is something officers must study quite intently to be able to do.
Try to remember a day, when you were a kid, when your whole school was outside for some reason - a track and field day or some other activity. Remember how the teachers went apeshit trying to herd kids around? You get a thousand people together and they lose focus, there’s confusing and contradictory orders, people want to do different things. Multiply the difficulty your teachers had by a hundred. Controlling an army is harder.
When engaged in combat, the difficulty of moving an army around is a hundred times worse again. Imagine having to control a brigade of three thousand men, who occupy maybe a half a mile of battlefield, with shells going off all around you and bullets whizzing by, people screaming and bleeding and their heads coming off, some men panicked and some bloodthirsty, orders coming from your superior commanders demanding you do this and that and the other thing, and junior officers all looking at you and saying “So, what now, sir?” It’s not going to be easy.
Now: soldiers today have the enormous benefit of being able to use radios; the radio changed warfare as much as the rifle or the tank, although you never hear anyone talk about it. I cannot even begin to explain the importance of radios; without radios modern armies can become paralyzed. I have personally seen entire regiments of tanks and infantry grind to a halt because their radios were jammed and they were not adequately prepared to react to simple radio jamming.
But in 1863, no radios. Without radios, you can’t have an army dispersed over as wide an area as we disperse armies today. They could convey orders only by physically delivering them. The only real hope you have of controlling your men and getting them to do anything in concert is to keep them in closely grouped units. If you spread them out and put them in foxholes you have virtually no hope at all of regaining the ability to get them up and moving once combat has begun, so what do you do if the enemy flanks you? If an adjacent formation needs your support? If you want to counterattack? If the situation changes, you’re effectively screwed; your army is scattered all over the place and hopelessly out of touch. But by keeping them in grouped formations, you can get orders around to large groups of men to move them at once (and even then you’ll still get confused.)
Modern armies can spread their men out and still control them, in large part because modern armies have radio communications all the way down to the platoon and section level.
Furthermore, as GMRyujin points out, during the Civil War having massed fire was your best defense against cavalry. Today cavalry would not work because today, a section of eight infantrymen has more firepower than an entire company of Civil War infantry. A 2004-era NATO infantry section can spit out bullets like water from a hose; with 7 M-16s and one M-243 you can throw about four or five hundred bullets at an enemy in less than ten seconds, plus a few grenades thrown in for good measure. The same number of infantry in 1863 could fire, in ten seconds, about eight bullets. Maybe sixteen. Quite obviously, a platoon of cavalry could run down such an underpowered group of men, whereas if they charged men with 2004 weapons they would be chopped to hamburger.
Now on the other hand, if you kept a few HUNDRED Civil War soldiers together, they could throw hundreds of bullets at a cavalry charge and cut them down. There was safety in numbers. Cavalry were the tanks of pre-armored warfare; infatry tactics were, very wisely, designed to protect them from being attacked by cavalry in the open. Infantry spread out can be chopped apart by cavalry, and infantry will often panic and run if faced with a cavalry charge they can’t stop. You’d panic too; having a man on horseback charge you feels like being run down by a truck. But in a big group, you can stop a cavalry charge with massed fire and there’s a significant morale boost in having your buddies right next to you.
Furthermore, the low rate of fire not only meant that keeping men together could protect them with massed fire, but meant men grouped together were not in the same danger they would be today. If you put 1000 men shoulder to shoulder today on a battlefield they’d be mowed down by machine gun fire in a couple of seconds, or blown to smithereens by artillery; in the Civil War they weren’t facing the same sort of weaponry. There were no machine guns for most of the war, and the volume of artillery was usually not that great. The safety that numbers gave you often outweighed the disadvantages.
The same technological forces that put men in close proximity reduced the dangers of being in close proximity; as machine guns and semiautomatic rifles allowed men to spread themselves out they also forced them to spread themselves out. It works both ways.
And finally, they didn’t always do this. As other posters have pointed out, they weren’t idiots; they moved in standing formations when they needed to do so and took cover when they didn’t. People are generally very clever at not getting shot.
So Civil War troops tended to move in formations the way they did because
I should maybe add that it is true that it would have been very dishonourable for, say, a Lieutenant Colonel in Wellington’s army at Waterloo to have hidden behind a tree while his men stood on the ridge between La Haye Sainte and the Hougoumont taking French artillery fire. However, they didn’t stand in nice lines because it was honourable. This is getting cause and effect the wrong way round. It was honourable to stand coolly in formation under fire because that was the sort of thing that led to winning battles.
Thanks for the explanantions (especially RickJay).
Not hardly. The problem with staying behind a tree is that it is a defensive position. You can’t take a battlefield on the defense, you can only hold it.
Indeed. Don’t forget that modern infantry still attack in line. The lines may be much more spread out, the advance may be in a running crouch, and the troops may move under cover (one third advances, the other two thirds lie down and give covering fire), but it’s stil the same principle of massing fire and forcing a resolution.
The earlier thread on this topic (that also provided some good information) was War tactics–what are they good for? Absolutely nothing?
RickJay, I have seen the OP’s question depbated time and again at this board and that has to have been the best response I have yet seen. Thank you. I have generally understood why Civil War battles were fought the way they were, but have never been able to articulate those reasons as clearly as you have done.
–SSgtBaloo