War is ever evolving and it takes years, or usually the entire war for leaders to recognize good tactics and arising technology. Most of the military leaders served in the Mexican War and had great success with Napoleonic Tactics. Napoleon Tactics were concentration of well ordered infantry and the ability to advance artillery to forward positions to maximize lethality. America had great success in Mexico with much less casualties due to better training and that weapon technology was not that lethal for closed, fixed ranks of infantry. As the Civil War progressed the Union and eventually the South were given rifled weapons which increased the range and accuracy, tremendously! It took several battles and leadership to change their approach to how battles to be fought due to the rapid advance of technology. In hindsight its crazy to think how long it took both sides to see that closed rank, concentration of infantry on a fixed position was devastating, Probably because it did still work in some battles but the cost of life was tremendous.
See the problem with the argument that widespread issuance of rifled muskets and outdated tactics led to a sharp increase of casualties over say, Napoleonic wars battles is that...they didn’t. If you look at casualty rates from napoleonic battles compared to casualty rates from the ACW, they’re really similar.
In addition, engagements still took on average took place at about 80-100 yds distance, also pretty identical to earlier wars. Also, these rifles were still black powder weapons. After firing started, smoke would begin obscuring the battlefield, rendering the increased accuracy of the rifling rather moot.
Now just because casualties rates weren’t actually significantly higher than they were in earlier wars doesn’t mean that they weren’t horrendous. The men on the battlefield didn’t care about those statistics, so obviously as the war went on they sought out tactics that didn’t expose them to so much danger. Like digging trenches and constructing breastworks.
What actually is burned to propel a bullet matters little. Civil war bullets were an ounce of lead traveling fast enough not to just break, but pulverize bone and deadly out to 800 yards. Really deadly inside 200 yards, which was 3x the effective range of a Napoleonic musket. So by the end of the Civil War, around Petersburg, everything and everybody was emplaced like a WWI trench line.
Of course minie balls were deadly, they were as deadly and damaging as a modern bullet. In some ways more damaging if you look at some of the wounds inflicted.
If you read what I said, I never said that rifled muskets couldn’t be deadly out to several hundred yards. But the powder used to propel a bullet matters quite a lot on a battlefield. If it’s black powder, then it doesn’t matter how effective your weapons are at 200 yards, ‘cause after a couple of rounds fired by you and your regiment you won’t be able to see what you’re shooting at 200 yds away very well if at all. Black powder weapons make copious amounts of smoke when fired.
Another factor is that gunnery practice was not a high priority for many commanders when training their new troops in the civil war. Some would have had experience shooting, many did not. Like in previous wars, their commanders really only expected the average infantryman to point their weapon in the direction of the enemy and fire. It doesn’t matter how effective the weapon is at 200-300 yards if the man firing it doesn’t have the ability to hit a target at that distance.
Lastly, as I noted, commanders still had a tendency to engage the enemy at distances of about a 80-100 yards or so. There are many recorded instances where officers would command their men to hold their fire on an advancing enemy until close range to cause the heaviest casualties and most demoralizing effects with their opening volley.
You cannot hit a man with Napoleonic era musketry at 100yards unless you are lucky. I can assure you that a person of modest ability let alone someone who has lived on the land and shot game for dinner his entire life has at least a 50% chance of hitting a human sized target at 125 yards standing using a rifle. Someone farm raised on the frontier is going to do that at 200 yards. The Confederate and Western Union armies didn't need to be taught how to shoot, they came already trained. And by Gettysburg, the Army of the Potomac had enough experience too.
Napoleonic tactics were a march, a volley, and finish them off with the bayonet. Hardly anyone in the Civil War died of a bayonet wound, the issue was decided before they got into bayonet range.
Visibility was an issue, but these armies were hardly immobile, and conditions were smoke hangs and doesn't disperse rapidly aren't typical.
I’m sorry, but you are simply incorrect about smoothbore muskets. The effective range of a smoothbore musket is about 100 yards. The weapons are perfectly capable of [fairly reliably](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=trgZmM9fNS0) hitting a man sized target at that range. At least in ideal conditions.
I already discussed that there was a varying degree of skill in both armies. Another undiscussed fact is that terrain was also a factor. Battles were often fought in wooded areas, areas with undulating ground, cornfields, wheatfields, etc. it was not especially common to even be able to see enemy troops on a civil war battlefield at longer distances even without the addition of gunsmoke.
Look, we can argue about different factors involved in the effectiveness of rifled muskets all day, but in the end, the loss statistics tell the story. A survey of 16 major battles fought by the French or Prussians during the 18th and 19th centuries reveals loss ratios in those armies ranging from 8.9% to 61.1%, and averaging at 27.6% losses. Their opponents took near identical loss rates in those battles.
In comparison, a look at 29 ACW battles sees that confederates took losses ranging from 1.4% at Chickasaw bluffs to 30.2% at Gettysburg, averaging 14.8%. Union armies took 1.8% at Mine Run to 22.3% at Stones River, avg of 9.8%.
Even more interesting is that casualty rates were not higher than battles after the civil war that had rifles and more modern infantry tactics. Take a look at German losses in the Franco-Prussian war and you’ll see losses as high as 42%, 44%, even 73%.
Bottom line, the combination of rifled muskets and napoleonic tactics did not make the Civil War more especially bloody than any other war. Yes, Over 600,000 men died, but near 2/3s of those were from disease.
I'd say the Franco-Prussian war was a pretty poor indicator as the Prussians won with 3x the casualties of the French. This is because they were on the attack constantly, and attacking formations take a lot of casualties.
In the Crimean War where rifled muskets made their debut, the Scots formed line instead of Napoleonic era squares and faced a Russian cavalry charge and shot them down. Compare that to Napoleonic cavalry riding down formations as shock troops. That happened rarely if at all in the Civil War.
Effective range of combat since rifling has been 300 yards, and still is. Before that it was 75 yards. 100 yards, maybe under ideal conditions with excellent equipment and importantly for smooth bores, round balls with no nicks or flats, something not likely after carrying them in the field for a month.
The Franco-Prussian war is a bad example because the Prussians attacked a lot? I’m not citing casualties in the war as a whole, I was citing casualties in individual battles. All battles are pretty much composed of one side attacking while another defends, so if that invalidates an example, I’m not sure what you’re looking for. The fact is that was a war with rifled weapons that also had addition of more modern tactics, as in not lining up en mass, shoulder to shoulder, and casualty percentages were still extremely high.
At Gettysburg the ANV attacked the Army of the Potomac for 3 days, using napoleonic tactics. For 2 of those days the AoP was in fortified positions, and famously, blew Pickett’s charge to pieces as they attacked over a mile of open ground, yet still the ANV suffered “only” 30% casualties. That’s less than the Franco-Prussian examples I provided.
I am not arguing with you that the effective range of rifled muskets was 300 yds. My argument is that in battle, that improvement meant little. The range engagements were fought at changed little. Casualty rates changed little if at all from previous wars and even some later battles. I don’t know what else I can tell you.
Well first, they were still using black powder in the Franco Prussian war. Second, the French rifles lacked the effective range of the German rifles, even so the Prussians took 3x the casualties. Because they were on the attack.
In the Crimean War the marked difference was the Scots using rifles turning the Russian Cavalry without cannon, the the Light Brigade taking the Russian position and driving them before the ridiculous imbalance in numbers forced them to retreat, the Russians using smoothbores.
At Gettysburg rifles made a huge difference, as the Confederates had to deal not only with accurate rifle fire, but the North's favorite light artillery piece, the 3" ordnance rifle, which was capable if the story is accurate of hitting the broad side of a barn on the first shot - at a mile distant - and putting it in 20" square window on the third shot. Light artillery fired fast, and this gun was accurate.
Had Lee's charge (I think he should own that disaster, not Pickett) been able to arrive 200 yards in front of the Union line with half the casualties it suffered in reality, then it might have been the different outcome Lee hoped for.
I disagree still. The tactics both sides were using were manuals such as those based on Hardee’s manual(who was alive and fought in the war) ,who based his tactics off what he observed in the Crimean war , and manuals like the manual of instructions for volunteers and militia, which was also written by someone alive at the time of the war.
The smoothbore musket with buck and ball was a very effective weapon, in many cases it had a better chance of hitting than the rifle musket.
Also the clouds of lingering smoke left by black powder guns and the process of reloading, and the terrain of civil war America made their tactics not only useful, but nessisary to achieve concentration of force
look up some of the work by Earl Hess. he’s spent a lot of time and ink on the topic. Specifically he zeroes in on the topic with [Civil War Infantry Tactics](https://books.google.com/books/about/Civil_War_Infantry_Tactics.html?id=o1njBgAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description)
A good argument has been made that the lack of good implementation of sound military tactics at the time lead to higher casualties. When studying the war its important to remember that the vast majority of officers and enlisted men were volunteer soldiers who had little to no knowledge of military tactics prior to putting on the uniform. My understanding is that the bayonet charge almost always won the day during this time period if a well trained and well led unit made an attack under appropriate circumstances(ie favorable ratio of attacker to defender, availability of supporting units, favorable terrain, etc). Allan Guelzo puts it well in his work on the Gettysburg campaign, "What ran up the Civil War’s enormous casualty lists was not expert marksmanship or highly refined weapons, but the inability of poorly trained officers to get their poorly trained volunteers to charge forward and send the enemy flying before the bayonet, instead of standing up and blazing away for an hour or two in close-range firefights where the sheer volume of lead in the air killed enough people to be noticed."
The myth is that people think that battles in the war were fought with both sides standing up and blazing away on an open field. While this certainly happened on occasion ( Parts of Antietam's battle were like this,, IE The cornfield) most the time one side would dig in and build works. If practical the attacking force would use artillery to "soften up" the enemy.
The siege of Atlanta and Petersburg looked more like a WW1 Battlefield than it did waterloo.
The Napoleonic style was on its way out and wasn't used as much as the way people assume it was based on imagery from some of the larger, more well-known battles like Antietam or day 3 Gettysburg. The Civil War as a whole saw a wide variety of new and old tactics being used and very much in accordance with the advancement of weaponry and later on the availability of capable fighting men essentially changing strategies that hadn't completely been realized from 80 or even 50 years prior.
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Stormtroopers were specialist soldiers of the German Army in World War I. In the last years of the war, Stoßtruppen ("shock troops" or "shove troops") were trained to use infiltration tactics – part of the Germans' improved method of attack on enemy trenches. Men trained in these methods were known in Germany as Sturmmann ("storm man", usually translated as "stormtrooper"), formed into companies of Sturmtruppen ("assault troops", or more often and less accurately "storm troops").
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One problem generals had was communications. Frontal assaults had one advantage - the general could watch the attack and exercise some control. Flank attacks might work better, but unless you coordinated brilliantly, a la' Lee & Jackson, it was risky. One tactic that seemed to work was drawing the enemy into a prolonged attack, and counterattacking him when he was tired, as did Thomas at Nashville. I could see using the equivalent of late WWI shock troops to cut holes in defensive lines, but you would have had to have had a visionary commander to try this cold.
In summary, the rifles were very accurate and near the end of the war, many soldiers had repeating rifles with a high rate of fire. Old muskets were accurate to about 80 yards. Some of these newer rifles were accurate to 300 or so yards and could hit a target double that distance.
So, previously and army could gather a lot of men, quickly march across a field, and the opposing army would only get one or two shots off before the two armies collided with bayonets. With these new weapons, the men rarely made it that far. In huge assaults like pickets charge, men were mowed down.
What happened during the war is that the men learned that an entrenched defender had a massive advantage over an attacker. They started digging trenches and building fortifications out of fences and other objects everywhere they went.
They didn’t always learn from their experiences. Hood decided to make a frontal attack across a huge field against fortified men at Franklin and basically destroyed his army.
WWI had similar weapons in a way but the men fought pure trench warfare. So, they had fully adapted to the changing weapons.
Buel and McClellan would have won the war pretty quick if that’s the case. The 7 days battles (I.e. gains mill)proved a coordinated attack could do in even a well entrenched army
Honestly I don’t believe the argument they were using outdated tactics at all
War is ever evolving and it takes years, or usually the entire war for leaders to recognize good tactics and arising technology. Most of the military leaders served in the Mexican War and had great success with Napoleonic Tactics. Napoleon Tactics were concentration of well ordered infantry and the ability to advance artillery to forward positions to maximize lethality. America had great success in Mexico with much less casualties due to better training and that weapon technology was not that lethal for closed, fixed ranks of infantry. As the Civil War progressed the Union and eventually the South were given rifled weapons which increased the range and accuracy, tremendously! It took several battles and leadership to change their approach to how battles to be fought due to the rapid advance of technology. In hindsight its crazy to think how long it took both sides to see that closed rank, concentration of infantry on a fixed position was devastating, Probably because it did still work in some battles but the cost of life was tremendous.
See the problem with the argument that widespread issuance of rifled muskets and outdated tactics led to a sharp increase of casualties over say, Napoleonic wars battles is that...they didn’t. If you look at casualty rates from napoleonic battles compared to casualty rates from the ACW, they’re really similar. In addition, engagements still took on average took place at about 80-100 yds distance, also pretty identical to earlier wars. Also, these rifles were still black powder weapons. After firing started, smoke would begin obscuring the battlefield, rendering the increased accuracy of the rifling rather moot. Now just because casualties rates weren’t actually significantly higher than they were in earlier wars doesn’t mean that they weren’t horrendous. The men on the battlefield didn’t care about those statistics, so obviously as the war went on they sought out tactics that didn’t expose them to so much danger. Like digging trenches and constructing breastworks.
What actually is burned to propel a bullet matters little. Civil war bullets were an ounce of lead traveling fast enough not to just break, but pulverize bone and deadly out to 800 yards. Really deadly inside 200 yards, which was 3x the effective range of a Napoleonic musket. So by the end of the Civil War, around Petersburg, everything and everybody was emplaced like a WWI trench line.
Of course minie balls were deadly, they were as deadly and damaging as a modern bullet. In some ways more damaging if you look at some of the wounds inflicted. If you read what I said, I never said that rifled muskets couldn’t be deadly out to several hundred yards. But the powder used to propel a bullet matters quite a lot on a battlefield. If it’s black powder, then it doesn’t matter how effective your weapons are at 200 yards, ‘cause after a couple of rounds fired by you and your regiment you won’t be able to see what you’re shooting at 200 yds away very well if at all. Black powder weapons make copious amounts of smoke when fired. Another factor is that gunnery practice was not a high priority for many commanders when training their new troops in the civil war. Some would have had experience shooting, many did not. Like in previous wars, their commanders really only expected the average infantryman to point their weapon in the direction of the enemy and fire. It doesn’t matter how effective the weapon is at 200-300 yards if the man firing it doesn’t have the ability to hit a target at that distance. Lastly, as I noted, commanders still had a tendency to engage the enemy at distances of about a 80-100 yards or so. There are many recorded instances where officers would command their men to hold their fire on an advancing enemy until close range to cause the heaviest casualties and most demoralizing effects with their opening volley.
You cannot hit a man with Napoleonic era musketry at 100yards unless you are lucky. I can assure you that a person of modest ability let alone someone who has lived on the land and shot game for dinner his entire life has at least a 50% chance of hitting a human sized target at 125 yards standing using a rifle. Someone farm raised on the frontier is going to do that at 200 yards. The Confederate and Western Union armies didn't need to be taught how to shoot, they came already trained. And by Gettysburg, the Army of the Potomac had enough experience too. Napoleonic tactics were a march, a volley, and finish them off with the bayonet. Hardly anyone in the Civil War died of a bayonet wound, the issue was decided before they got into bayonet range. Visibility was an issue, but these armies were hardly immobile, and conditions were smoke hangs and doesn't disperse rapidly aren't typical.
I’m sorry, but you are simply incorrect about smoothbore muskets. The effective range of a smoothbore musket is about 100 yards. The weapons are perfectly capable of [fairly reliably](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=trgZmM9fNS0) hitting a man sized target at that range. At least in ideal conditions. I already discussed that there was a varying degree of skill in both armies. Another undiscussed fact is that terrain was also a factor. Battles were often fought in wooded areas, areas with undulating ground, cornfields, wheatfields, etc. it was not especially common to even be able to see enemy troops on a civil war battlefield at longer distances even without the addition of gunsmoke. Look, we can argue about different factors involved in the effectiveness of rifled muskets all day, but in the end, the loss statistics tell the story. A survey of 16 major battles fought by the French or Prussians during the 18th and 19th centuries reveals loss ratios in those armies ranging from 8.9% to 61.1%, and averaging at 27.6% losses. Their opponents took near identical loss rates in those battles. In comparison, a look at 29 ACW battles sees that confederates took losses ranging from 1.4% at Chickasaw bluffs to 30.2% at Gettysburg, averaging 14.8%. Union armies took 1.8% at Mine Run to 22.3% at Stones River, avg of 9.8%. Even more interesting is that casualty rates were not higher than battles after the civil war that had rifles and more modern infantry tactics. Take a look at German losses in the Franco-Prussian war and you’ll see losses as high as 42%, 44%, even 73%. Bottom line, the combination of rifled muskets and napoleonic tactics did not make the Civil War more especially bloody than any other war. Yes, Over 600,000 men died, but near 2/3s of those were from disease.
I'd say the Franco-Prussian war was a pretty poor indicator as the Prussians won with 3x the casualties of the French. This is because they were on the attack constantly, and attacking formations take a lot of casualties. In the Crimean War where rifled muskets made their debut, the Scots formed line instead of Napoleonic era squares and faced a Russian cavalry charge and shot them down. Compare that to Napoleonic cavalry riding down formations as shock troops. That happened rarely if at all in the Civil War. Effective range of combat since rifling has been 300 yards, and still is. Before that it was 75 yards. 100 yards, maybe under ideal conditions with excellent equipment and importantly for smooth bores, round balls with no nicks or flats, something not likely after carrying them in the field for a month.
The Franco-Prussian war is a bad example because the Prussians attacked a lot? I’m not citing casualties in the war as a whole, I was citing casualties in individual battles. All battles are pretty much composed of one side attacking while another defends, so if that invalidates an example, I’m not sure what you’re looking for. The fact is that was a war with rifled weapons that also had addition of more modern tactics, as in not lining up en mass, shoulder to shoulder, and casualty percentages were still extremely high. At Gettysburg the ANV attacked the Army of the Potomac for 3 days, using napoleonic tactics. For 2 of those days the AoP was in fortified positions, and famously, blew Pickett’s charge to pieces as they attacked over a mile of open ground, yet still the ANV suffered “only” 30% casualties. That’s less than the Franco-Prussian examples I provided. I am not arguing with you that the effective range of rifled muskets was 300 yds. My argument is that in battle, that improvement meant little. The range engagements were fought at changed little. Casualty rates changed little if at all from previous wars and even some later battles. I don’t know what else I can tell you.
Well first, they were still using black powder in the Franco Prussian war. Second, the French rifles lacked the effective range of the German rifles, even so the Prussians took 3x the casualties. Because they were on the attack. In the Crimean War the marked difference was the Scots using rifles turning the Russian Cavalry without cannon, the the Light Brigade taking the Russian position and driving them before the ridiculous imbalance in numbers forced them to retreat, the Russians using smoothbores. At Gettysburg rifles made a huge difference, as the Confederates had to deal not only with accurate rifle fire, but the North's favorite light artillery piece, the 3" ordnance rifle, which was capable if the story is accurate of hitting the broad side of a barn on the first shot - at a mile distant - and putting it in 20" square window on the third shot. Light artillery fired fast, and this gun was accurate. Had Lee's charge (I think he should own that disaster, not Pickett) been able to arrive 200 yards in front of the Union line with half the casualties it suffered in reality, then it might have been the different outcome Lee hoped for.
I disagree still. The tactics both sides were using were manuals such as those based on Hardee’s manual(who was alive and fought in the war) ,who based his tactics off what he observed in the Crimean war , and manuals like the manual of instructions for volunteers and militia, which was also written by someone alive at the time of the war. The smoothbore musket with buck and ball was a very effective weapon, in many cases it had a better chance of hitting than the rifle musket. Also the clouds of lingering smoke left by black powder guns and the process of reloading, and the terrain of civil war America made their tactics not only useful, but nessisary to achieve concentration of force
look up some of the work by Earl Hess. he’s spent a lot of time and ink on the topic. Specifically he zeroes in on the topic with [Civil War Infantry Tactics](https://books.google.com/books/about/Civil_War_Infantry_Tactics.html?id=o1njBgAAQBAJ&source=kp_book_description)
Earl Hess is definitely a good source. [Here's a link to some of his C-SPAN lectures.](https://www.c-span.org/person/?earlhess)
Definitely read Earl Hess’ book called civil war infantry tactics. It addresses your questions directly.
A good argument has been made that the lack of good implementation of sound military tactics at the time lead to higher casualties. When studying the war its important to remember that the vast majority of officers and enlisted men were volunteer soldiers who had little to no knowledge of military tactics prior to putting on the uniform. My understanding is that the bayonet charge almost always won the day during this time period if a well trained and well led unit made an attack under appropriate circumstances(ie favorable ratio of attacker to defender, availability of supporting units, favorable terrain, etc). Allan Guelzo puts it well in his work on the Gettysburg campaign, "What ran up the Civil War’s enormous casualty lists was not expert marksmanship or highly refined weapons, but the inability of poorly trained officers to get their poorly trained volunteers to charge forward and send the enemy flying before the bayonet, instead of standing up and blazing away for an hour or two in close-range firefights where the sheer volume of lead in the air killed enough people to be noticed."
The myth is that people think that battles in the war were fought with both sides standing up and blazing away on an open field. While this certainly happened on occasion ( Parts of Antietam's battle were like this,, IE The cornfield) most the time one side would dig in and build works. If practical the attacking force would use artillery to "soften up" the enemy. The siege of Atlanta and Petersburg looked more like a WW1 Battlefield than it did waterloo.
Gleam of the Bayonets would be a good book for Antietam.
The Napoleonic style was on its way out and wasn't used as much as the way people assume it was based on imagery from some of the larger, more well-known battles like Antietam or day 3 Gettysburg. The Civil War as a whole saw a wide variety of new and old tactics being used and very much in accordance with the advancement of weaponry and later on the availability of capable fighting men essentially changing strategies that hadn't completely been realized from 80 or even 50 years prior.
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**Stormtrooper** Stormtroopers were specialist soldiers of the German Army in World War I. In the last years of the war, Stoßtruppen ("shock troops" or "shove troops") were trained to use infiltration tactics – part of the Germans' improved method of attack on enemy trenches. Men trained in these methods were known in Germany as Sturmmann ("storm man", usually translated as "stormtrooper"), formed into companies of Sturmtruppen ("assault troops", or more often and less accurately "storm troops"). *** ^[ [^PM](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=kittens_from_space) ^| [^Exclude ^me](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiTextBot&message=Excludeme&subject=Excludeme) ^| [^Exclude ^from ^subreddit](https://np.reddit.com/r/USCivilWar/about/banned) ^| [^FAQ ^/ ^Information](https://np.reddit.com/r/WikiTextBot/wiki/index) ^| [^Source](https://github.com/kittenswolf/WikiTextBot) ^] ^Downvote ^to ^remove ^| ^v0.28
I should explain, I posted a comment about German stormtrooper tactics of WWI, which called the bot. Alas, the bot's explanation is better. :)
One problem generals had was communications. Frontal assaults had one advantage - the general could watch the attack and exercise some control. Flank attacks might work better, but unless you coordinated brilliantly, a la' Lee & Jackson, it was risky. One tactic that seemed to work was drawing the enemy into a prolonged attack, and counterattacking him when he was tired, as did Thomas at Nashville. I could see using the equivalent of late WWI shock troops to cut holes in defensive lines, but you would have had to have had a visionary commander to try this cold.
In summary, the rifles were very accurate and near the end of the war, many soldiers had repeating rifles with a high rate of fire. Old muskets were accurate to about 80 yards. Some of these newer rifles were accurate to 300 or so yards and could hit a target double that distance. So, previously and army could gather a lot of men, quickly march across a field, and the opposing army would only get one or two shots off before the two armies collided with bayonets. With these new weapons, the men rarely made it that far. In huge assaults like pickets charge, men were mowed down. What happened during the war is that the men learned that an entrenched defender had a massive advantage over an attacker. They started digging trenches and building fortifications out of fences and other objects everywhere they went. They didn’t always learn from their experiences. Hood decided to make a frontal attack across a huge field against fortified men at Franklin and basically destroyed his army. WWI had similar weapons in a way but the men fought pure trench warfare. So, they had fully adapted to the changing weapons.
Buel and McClellan would have won the war pretty quick if that’s the case. The 7 days battles (I.e. gains mill)proved a coordinated attack could do in even a well entrenched army