Gettysburg: The Last Invasion (9 page)

Arnold’s “commonest sergeant” would not have thought those lines of battle so unwise. For a long time, it was customary for Civil War historians to speak of the rifle musket and rifled
artillery in awed tones, as though rifling were a prototype of the machine gun, or so novel that Civil War officers were unable to come to grips with its implications. The legendary
Bruce Catton summed this up about as well as anyone could when he wrote in 1953 that:

But by 1863, there was nothing novel about the improvements in accuracy and range produced by rifling. The
Minié rifle musket system (the brainchild of French weapons innovator
Claude-Etienne Minié) had actually made its debut in the Crimea in 1854 in the form of both the Minié rifle and its British-made counterpart, the Pattern 1853 Enfield rifle musket, and from there, the rifle musket become the weapon of choice for both the British infantry in the Indian Mutiny in 1857 and the French and
Austrian infantry in the
North Italian War in 1859. Two brigade commanders at Gettysburg, Cadmus Wilcox and
George Lamb Willard, had actually written pretty lucidly on the uses of the rifle musket before the war, and the practical lessons which Wilcox, Willard, and many others took out of the rifle’s debut in the 1850s were about its limitations as much as its advantages.
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Rifling bestowed greater range and accuracy on a musket, but it did so at the price of forming a trajectory for the bullet which “dropped” rather than went straight to a target. To hit a target thus required exact knowledge of the speed and distance of a target, something which in battle was rarely available. “A very good marksman, by placing his piece in the more careful manner, generally at a dead rest … and firing usually not more than once in five minutes,” might very well be able to “strike a half-dollar tolerably often,” wrote the future Confederate general
Raleigh Colston in 1858. But how often did such conditions prevail in battle? And if those targets got close enough that the rifleman had no time to reload, then the targets’ bayonets, not the rifle musket, would be what decided the encounter. Despite the oft-touted ability of the soldier to load and fire three aimed shots in a minute, in practice the rate of fire produced by muzzleloading rifle muskets by regiments in line of battle (just like its smoothbore counterpart) was actually closer to one every four and a half minutes. “Tacticians talk, no doubt, about firing four and five shots in a minute,” snorted one British officer, but these were “miserable puerilities, not worth discussing.” At Montebello, in northern Italy, the battle had been won by French infantry
bayonets
, not by long-range rifle musket fire or rifled artillery, and won so successfully that the Austrian Army thereafter cast off any hope of the rifle musket dominating battlefields. The British had learned much the same lesson in India in 1857.
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Whatever the gains bestowed by the technology of the rifle musket and rifled artillery, those improvements were only apparent under ideal conditions (which is to say, not in the middle of a firefight). “On the target-ground,” warned a British officer, it was possible to concentrate entirely on perfect shooting, and exclude “the least disturbance that may distract the attention.” But “how will it be in the ranks at volley-firing or file-firing” when men are “excited to the highest degree,
cannon-balls decimating the ranks, shells and bullets whistling their infernal tune overhead”? Under that kind of stress, “it will matter little; the soldier will simply raise his rifle to the horizontal, and fire without aiming.” Nor was the technology itself foolproof. The
black powder which continued in use as a propellant through the Civil War blanketed a battlefield in rolling clouds of
smoke. Soldiers on the firing lines quickly found “the smoke from their rifles hanging about them in clouds,” and it was not uncommon for officers to have to get down on all fours to peer under the smoke bank to confirm enemy troop positions. At Fredericksburg, artillery gun crews ran laps around their guns, waving their arms, in an effort to dispel the powder smoke from the guns’ discharge.
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No improvements in accuracy or range could trump blindness. The black powder itself quickly packed the rifle’s grooves with residue from firing, and the need to load the rifle by ramming home each charge from the muzzle with a ramrod, whose banging about nicked and chipped the muzzle at the very point where the bullet was expelled, further degraded the accuracy of the rifle in use.

Another limitation on the impact of rifled weapons in battle was field communications. In 1863, there could be only the most primitive synchronization of actions on different portions of a battlefield, because orders had to be delivered personally, through couriers or aides, a process which could require up to an hour between army headquarters and corps headquarters, another thirty minutes from corps to division, and another twenty from division to the fundamental unit of Civil War combat, the brigade. Once engaged in combat, the noise of battle was “absolutely impenetrable by the voice to any distance,” and “orders have to be so multiplied and repeated, that the genius of a Napoleon would get entangled on a day of battle.” Officers on the line of battle responded to situations by herding their men within earshot of drums, bugles, and their officers’ own voices rather than dispersing them; sometimes they were reduced to using the most basic visual signs, or the position of the regimental colors. Hence, in the context of nineteenth-century battle, the elbow-to-elbow line was still the best way to concentrate fire or coordinate movement, and the
bayonet remained, quite reasonably, the queen of the battlefield.
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But the ultimate limitation of the rifle revolution in the Civil War was the meager training imparted to volunteer soldiers by the volunteers’ officers, who
were often incapable of superintending much more than basic drill movements. “I found it far more difficult to make officers than soldiers,” wrote crusty
Edward Cross, especially when
officers in regiments like the 1st Minnesota “brought their books to the drill grounds and prompted themselves or corrected their errors by referring to the books.” Even the West Point–trained officers “who came to us, & who were invaluable to us, were very green,” admitted a Virginia cavalryman. Target practice and instruction in how to move to the attack under fire went by the boards. When one Illinois regiment lined up to target-shoot at a barrel 180 yards away, only 4 shots out of 160 tries hit the barrel. In the 5th Connecticut forty men firing at a barn fifteen feet high from only 100 yards’ distance managed to score a mere four hits, and only one below the height of a man. At First Bull Run,
William Buel Franklin was exasperated even by the Regulars of his 12th U.S. Infantry: “It is my firm belief that a great deal of the misfortune of the day at Bull Run is due to the fact that the troops knew very little of the principles and practice of firing … Ours was very bad, the rear files sometimes firing into and killing the front ones.”
William Izlar of the 1st South Carolina remembered a fierce exchange of
volleys at a distance of no more than 100 yards in which the chief casualties were “the needles and cones from the extreme top” of the pine trees all around them. He guessed that only one round in 500 ever hit anyone. A Federal captain watched in disbelief as his men fired off “at an angle of forty-five degrees,” hitting little or nothing, “and the instances of their firing into each other are by no means rare.” 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.
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But the technology of nineteenth-century warfare only accounts for the physical constraints placed on tactics at Gettysburg. The armies at Gettysburg were also restrained by a body of tactical doctrine with long roots back to the 1790s, and the great debate over the virtues of “column” and “line” in combat. It is a risky simplification to suggest that the line of battle was the
British
tactic—the “mode of attack peculiarly suited to British infantry.” But it was characteristic of British training to maximize the power of single-shot, muzzleloading firearms by spreading a unit (in the British case, the 250-to-350-man regiment) out into two or three lines which allowed the full play of musket fire along its front. It would be equally risky to suggest that the column was the
French
tactic, the massing of troops behind a narrow front that, like swinging a ram, could smash into, and disrupt, an enemy infantry formation and make it run for its life. But this was, in general, how matters
had played out in the Napoleonic Wars. The great virtue of a British line was its ability to deliver musket fire by volley and its relative invulnerability to artillery fire, since artillery rounds could not hurt more than a handful even in the event of a direct hit; the great defect of line was that it was very difficult to get it to move together or to move swiftly, especially over uneven ground.
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A French column, on the other hand, could move very fast and very easily, and develop tremendous forward momentum, which was a decided plus in reducing the amount of time an attacking force was exposed to enemy musket fire; the defect of column, however, was that it presented an enormously fat target to artillery, which could do hideous damage to a tightly packed column with just a few well-placed rounds.
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Column’s principal reliance was on the bayonet rather than volley fire, since most of a column’s body would have no clear field of fire; but a solid column, moving at collision speed and tipped with the menacing steel shanks of
bayonets, could spike through a terrified line like a javelin through cardboard. “The
bullet
will lose its way,” was the rule in the
Crimean War, “the
bayonet
, never!” Column was also flexible; attack columns could be formed of regimental columns stacked by company lines, or division columns stacked by brigade. The introduction of the rifle musket had comparatively little effect on either column or line as attack formations; if anything, the rifle encouraged an entirely separate formation, in the shape of clouds of open-order skirmishers which were thrown out like curtains in front of big infantry formations. They could use the rifle’s accuracy and distance to better effect at picking off enemy artillerymen and officers. “A battery can keep back or destroy masses of the enemy,” wrote one Maine artillery officer, but “it cannot successfully contend with a line of skirmishers. To resist them would be like shooting mosquitoes with musket balls.” It was artillery more than infantry that felt the sting of the rifle; artillery now had to be bracketed by supporting wings of infantry, or kept well to the rear to fire over the heads of infantry lines.

But good skirmishing required a higher level of training, and this, too, was something which the Civil War armies greatly lacked. In 1862, the
Confederate government authorized the creation of “sharpshooter” battalions to provide specialized skirmish details, and two entire regiments of
sharpshooters were raised for the
Army of the Potomac by
Hiram Berdan in 1862. But beyond these units, actual training in skirmish tactics remained painfully limited. “It is a melancholy fact that three out of four who entered the service” received no instruction in skirmishing, lamented
Francis Walker, the chief of staff to Winfield Hancock’s
2nd Corps. “Indeed, most regiments in the service had as little idea of skirmishing as an elephant.”
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And so the debate between column and line continued through the 1850s and beyond the Civil War. At the Alma in 1854, the
Russian infantry preferred
to fight in column, and they were amazed when Lord Raglan deployed his two British divisions into line of battle and moved to attack the heights behind the Alma River straight ahead in line. “We had never before seen troops fight in lines of two deep,” wrote a Polish officer (who ended up fighting in the Civil War, too), “nor did we think it possible for men to be found with sufficient firmness of morale to be able to attack in this apparently weak formation” and rout their enemy. The French, meanwhile, continued to fight in regimental columns, stacked two companies at a time, as did the allied German armies which invaded
France in 1870; at Solferino in 1859, the French emperor Napoleon III piled up columns three regiments deep, so that an attack column could be composed of as many as eighteen ranks of infantrymen, sometimes only a yard behind one another. All of this, Civil War generals had to read, mark, and digest.
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Where the Civil War battlefield differed most from European battlefields was the absence of cavalry. The most basic rule of nineteenth-century battle since Napoleon had been:

But for all of the romance attached to the U.S.
cavalry in the
Indian Wars of the later nineteenth century, most of the American military’s first century of existence minimized the use of cavalry (in the Revolution, Washington had used his cavalry contingents mostly for reconnaissance and raiding, when he used them at all). There were, in fact, no Regular cavalry units in the army until Congress authorized two regiments of dragoons in 1833 and 1836. Even though American cavalry officers were eventually sent to the French cavalry school at Saumur to learn the intricacies of cavalry tactics, the army never pushed development of its mounted arm to include a heavy cavalry regiment (for direct use against infantry) or lancers (to exploit the disintegration of enemy infantry formations already on the run).
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