Originally aired on March 22, 1996 - In part 82 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson makes the case that the conflict, which was modern in so many aspects, had a more traditional nature.
#82 – The Last Traditional War
The contest of the 1860’s is often and aptly called the first of the modern wars. It was witness to the first genuine use of railroads, the telegraph, the machine gun, a tactical submarine, rifled weapons, conscription, use of organized black troops, staff work to a high level, to name but a few. For the first time in history, armies carried the war to civilians in order to break the enemy’s will to resist instead of merely defeating its armies in the field. Union generals such as Sherman and Sheridan were the prototypes of what is today called total war.
Despite such advances, an equally good case can be made that the Civil War was more traditional than it was modern – that the generals spent more time looking back to the Napoleonic wars fifty years earlier than they did to the might-becomes of World War I fifty years into the future.
Railroads did become a revolutionary breakthrough in military transportation during the 1860’s. Yet armies depended far more on animal-powered transport for the daily supply of arms, food, and medicines. As in the old days, campaigns slowed down in heavy rain and halted in wintertime because of what Bonaparte had designated as the “fifth column”: namely, mud.
Rifles appeared for the first time in the Civil War. They would change the character of war as no other single innovation had done up to that time. Still, for the first three-fourths of the war, most infantrymen on both sides used the old muzzle-loading musket. The most popular cannon in the Civil War was a minor 1845 update of a gun that had been in use for over a century.
In the all-important area of medical care, Civil War physicians knew pathetically little more than had their counterparts in the American Revolution. Amputation remained the standard procedure for a broken bone; bleeding a patient with pneumonia or other internal malady was a common treatment; that an organism too small to be seen by the naked eye could kill an otherwise healthy male adult was considered absurd.
Cavalry had traditionally been the eyes of the army. The chief if not sole function of mounted soldiers in 1861 was to obtain information on the size and movements of enemy forces while screening their own army from the gaze of enemy horsemen. That long-established custom persevered in the Civil War, but it served only as a base for such modernization as large all-cavalry forces engaging in battle, as well as a cavalry command galloping to a sector, dismounting, delivering an unexpected attack, and then dashing away to safety. That was the beginning of what is now termed “mounted infantry”.
The ties with the past in Civil War military history can be seen most disastrously in the way battles were fought. Infantry formed at least 75% of an army. The thinking among field commanders was still to mass as many men as possible in a compact formation and then send them across hundreds of yards of open expanse against the enemy’s position. Behind such tactics was the simple belief that while many soldiers would be killed and wounded in the head-on assault, enough men would survive to pierce the enemy’s line and win the field.
Not one commanding general in the 1860’s ever seems to have realized the futility of such bloody attacks. Thousands of soldiers dashed to their deaths in every major battle of the war; and at Shiloh, Malvern Hill, Second Manassas, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Murfreesboro, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Cold Harbor, Atlanta, and Petersburg, the casualty lists beggared belief and defied understanding.
The old and the new collided in the Civil War. It was a war of massed firepower putting an end to massed charges. It was a war of human gallantry against inhuman machine.
