Email this page to friends About the Author Born in Ohio and raised in Wisconsin, Steven Wilson has been fascinated by history since he was a child. One of his first books, a birthday present from his aunt, was THE CIVIL WAR by Bruce Catton. He was equally enthralled by motion pictures, working in his great-uncle's theater at the age of seven, hauling tins of un-popped popcorn to the concession counter. Buy Voyage of the Gray Wolves by Steven Wilson He's held a variety of jobs including tower clock repairman, factory worker, shoe salesman, stock boy, roofer, construction worker and now, museum curator. Wilson began writing novels in 1993, after a sketchy attempt to write short stories. His eclectic interests include motion picture history, movie soundtracks, 19th Century military history, and World War II. He works fulltime as a curator and museum consultant and writes part-time. He considers research as least as important as the writing, and plans to write some non-fiction works in the future. Website: http://www.huntersandthehunted.com/ E-Mail: readermail@HuntersAndTheHunted.Com

February 3, 2005

If the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan teach us nothing else, they teach us that technology is the soldier's best friend — and his worst enemy. It has always been so. In my role as a museum curator I examine the artifacts of another time, a unique people, and a war as complex and destructive as any fought before or since.

The United States army of 1861 was small and scattered over vast differences. At best it was comprised of sixteen thousand officers and men (and a third of the best officers would go south), who may have seen conflict during the Mexican War a decade or so before, or battled Native Americans in the west. But the Civil War was to be a different experience — something that few American soldiers had ever encountered before.

Unlike today's National Guard or reserve units, the militia and volunteer units of the mid-19th Century were under-trained, ill-armed, and generally social organizations. Oh, they drilled. Nothing makes the heart beat faster than being decked-out in a fine uniform, with the heavy pressure of a musket on your shoulder, while a fife and drum playing martial music fills your heart with purpose. They drilled in fields, on city streets, in halls — they drilled before crowds of strangers, loved ones, or they drilled because they felt the need to practice. Officers studiously poured over drill manuals so that they give the proper orders at the proper time in the proper manner. What would follow, according to the manual, was that the soldiers would respond in the proscribed fashion. It was all very neat and tidy.

But the training was for show and the manuals were outdated. Tactics had long been surpassed by technology so that the grand sight of massed blocks of soldiers moving resolutely against one another and then discharging their smoothbore muskets was obsolete. The precise, uniformly spaced companies, regiments, or battalions of soldiers, beautifully arrayed on the battlefield remained. But the smoothbore musket with an effective range of 100 yards (more-or-less) was now replaced with a rifled-musket with an effective range of 300 (more-or-less) yards. Technology watched as tactics long out of date were applied on what was then a modern battlefield. Eighty percent of the casualties on a Civil War battlefield came by way of the musket. Not every regiment had an Enfield, Springfield, or some other type of rifled musket. Some units went into battle with flintlocks so great was the demand and so little were the weaponry resources available to both the North and the South early in the war. The 6th Pennsylvania Cavalry, "Rush's Lancers," carried along with its carbines and pistol—lances. It was a quaint ideal, embracing the gallantry of other, gentler conflicts. The range of a lance, however, is considerably less than a rifle musket. By the same token a few lucky souls found themselves equipped with 14-shot Henry repeaters and a considerable number of Union infantry and cavalry had Spencer carbines or rifles. They didn't have the punch or distance of an Enfield or Springfield but with a 7-shot clip nestled snugly in the butt a single soldier could send a respectable number of bullets in the enemy's direction in a very short time.

And on the battlefield? Except for a few farsighted, combat-savvy officers who were sickened by the carnage and sought ways to creatively move troops across the battlefield, it was business as usual. Every general was guilty of ignoring technology's impact as if their control extended past their armies, and the terrain, and the heavens above and therefore by default included all that they surveyed. All that they surveyed — including a one-ounce conical-shaped .58 caliber bullet invented by a French artillery officer.

Sharpsburg (or Antietam depending on your viewpoint) was a battle between a general that would have made an excellent chief-of-staff and a general, who less than a year later, overestimated his army's reputation for invincibility. General George B. McClellan and General Robert E. Lee; men who's armies were engaged in a desperate 12-hour fight around a creek in Maryland. The bodies of 23,000 dead, wounded and missing soldiers littered the early autumn fields, many of them because general officers were convinced that élan would overcome the Enfield.

General Ambrose Burnside, inventor of a carbine and possessor of a set of magnificent side-whiskers, was instructed to take a bridge. Of course, this is Burnside of Fredericksburg; Burnside the incompetent who begged not to be given command of the Army of the Potomac because the command was beyond him, and was, and true to his word, proved unqualified. General Burnside — cross a creek, drive the enemy from the heights. There was a chance to outflank the enemy, a ford being just a short distance down stream (Union commanders had had 24 hours to reconnoiter and discover that fact beforehand), but Burnside decided to drive a stake of blue-coated soldiers straight into the enemy lines. So across the narrow bridge, in columns of four, the Union soldiers charged. In fairness to Burnside at this range and with such a massed target even a smoothbore would wreak havoc. But the lands and grooves of the rifled musket and the spinning trajectory of the Minie ball, and the three-shots a minute that a good Confederate soldier could get off, took its toll on the Union soldiers. Wool coats provide little protection against lead bullets.

Burnside's corps of 12,000 men attacked that stone bridge (now known as Burnside's Bridge in an ironic nod to the bungling commander), at 9:30 am. The 2nd Maryland and 6th New Hampshire lined up and lead the attack and ran straight into Hell. Their enemy was situated on a steep, wooded bluff, 100 feet high, overlooking the opposite end of the 125-foot long, 12-foot wide bridge. The 2nd and 20th Georgia Volunteer Infantry, 400 to 450 of them (accounts vary), had position. They were backed by artillery and supported by other regiments but these sharpshooters were the tip of the Confederate sword. From mid-morning to about 1:30 pm the Confederate's kept the Federals from crossing the bridge. It was no picnic for the Rebels either: "We fell back only because our ammunition was exhausted, but we suffered badly, eight cannon just 500 yards off were pouring, grape shot, shell, and canister into us and our artillery could not silence them," LT. Theodore T. Fogle, 2nd Georgia Infantry. Thank god for Union artillery.

But the Federals bore the brunt of the carnage because of a poorly planned attack and because the Confederate's could pour a withering fire into the blue ranks from one end of the bridge to another. True, firing downhill tends to lead a soldier to shoot high (ask the Loyalists at Kings Mountain about this), but these Georgia soldiers knew about shooting and their targets were well within range. And their targets were practically unavoidable. "Those of our troops," Lt. John W. Hudson of the 35th Massachusetts Infantry recalled, "not in the advance crossed somewhat upon those in front—and the whole column while on the bridge appeared like an irregular mob moving nervously, but at a snail's pace, toward the enemy." Some of the men were moving at a snail's pace because they were loading and firing, not an easy thing to do; or because they were stepping over the bodies of their fallen comrades; or as was reported about some Civil War battles, men sometimes advanced under hot fire as if they are facing a stiff wind, bent at the waist, walking resolutely.

Four and one-half hours of carnage in a very small space. Of course there was no where to deploy the standard line-of-battle, 2 ranks deep, so Burnside chose an abridged (no pun intended), version of the standard attack-in-column, one to ten or more companies wide and from 8 to 20 ranks deep. Burnside's corps did take the bridge and the heights beyond, but one wonders if it was because the Georgia troops were just happy to give them up and move on. The 51st New York and 51st Pennsylvania (the later winning a keg of whiskey from their colonel for their hard work) were the Union regiments who finally cracked that particular nut.

Other examples of massed infantry attacks against entrenched (or well-positioned), enemy infantry point out that not every such encounter ends in victory for the attacker. Burnside would go on to lead the Army of the Potomac and produce the infamous Mud March, and the debacle at Fredericksburg. General Robert E. Lee threw away a good many Rebel soldiers on the third day at Gettysburg. A long open field under a blazing July sun, Union artillery and infantry waiting across fields that offered no protection, and gallant flag-studded lines advancing at the walk. You were asking too much of them, Mose Robert.

Wars are organic events. Elements change, transform, emerge, disappear; somehow eluding lesser minds even if they are more than apparent to soldiers who can see, really see battlefield. There is an expression that says generals always fight the last war. Certainly during the Civil War many generals fought another century's war. Technology was different, even if tactics hadn't changed but the impact wasn't technology alone — it was the application of the weapons wrought by technology. It was an understanding of the possibilities of the new weapons presented generously to both Union and Confederate generals by the normally spiteful Mars. Regiments were hardly standardized in uniforms let alone weapons when the war first began, but as the conflict progressed and veterans emerged, that changed. Combat soldiers learned how to fight. Unfortunately for armies, lessons learned by generals are bought with the lives of their men.

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