Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (97 page)

could succeed because double-timing infantry could cover the last eighty yards during the twenty-five seconds it took defending infantrymen to reload their muskets after firing a volley.

Rifling a musket increased its range fourfold by imparting a spin to a conical bullet that enabled it literally to bore through the air. This fact had been known for centuries, but before the 1850s only special regiments or one or two companies per regiment were equipped with rifles. These companies were used as skirmishers—that is, they operated in front and on the flanks of the main body, advancing or withdrawing in loose order and shooting at will from long range at enemy targets of opportunity. Given the rifle's greater range and accuracy, why were not all infantrymen equipped with it? Because a bullet large enough to "take" the rifling was difficult to ram down the barrel. Riflemen sometimes had to pound the ramrod down with a mallet. After a rifle had been fired a few times a residue of powder built up in the grooves and had to be cleaned out before it could be fired again. Since rapid and reliable firing was essential in a battle, the rifle was not practicable for the mass of infantrymen.

Until the 1850s, that is. Although several people contributed to the development of a practicable military rifle, the main credit belongs to French army Captain Claude E. Minié and to the American James H. Burton, an armorer at the Harper's Ferry Armory. In 1848 Minié perfected a bullet small enough to be easily rammed down a rifled barrel, with a wooden plug in the base of the bullet to expand it upon firing to take the rifling. Such bullets were expensive; Burton developed a cheaper and better bullet with a deep cavity in the base that filled with gas and expanded the rim upon firing. This was the famous "minié ball" of Civil War rifles. The superiority of the rifle was demonstrated by British and French soldiers who carried them in the Crimean War. As Secretary of War in 1855, Jefferson Davis converted the United States army to the . 58 caliber Springfield rifled musket. Along with the similar British Enfield rifle (caliber . 577, which would take the same bullet as the Springfield), the Springfield became the main infantry arm of the Civil War.

Because they were single-shot weapons loaded from the muzzle, these rifles were still awkward to load. Even the most dextrous soldier could fire no more than three shots per minute. Several inventors had developed breechloading rifles by 1861, but with the paper-wrapped cartridges (containing bullet and powder) then in use, gas and sometimes flame escaped from the breech and made the weapon unreliable and even dangerous to the user. Progress in solving this problem made the single-shot Sharps carbine and rifle popular with the Union cavalry and sharpshooter units that managed to obtain them. The development of metal cartridges enabled the northern army to equip its cavalry and some infantry units with repeaters by 1863, of which the seven-shot Spencer carbine was most successful. These weapons had a smaller powder charge and therefore a shorter range than the paper-cartridged Springfield and Enfield, and were more prone to malfunction. The muzzle-loaders thus remained the principal infantry weapons throughout the war.

Northern industry geared up to manufacture more than two million rifles during the war; unable to produce more than a fraction of this total, the South relied mainly on imports through the blockade and on capture of Union rifles. In 1861 neither side had many rifles, so most soldiers carried old smoothbores taken from storage in arsenals. During 1862 most Union regiments received new Springfields or Enfields, while many Confederate units still had to rely on smoothbores. This was one reason for the two-to-one excess of Confederate casualties in the Seven Days'. By 1863 nearly all infantrymen on both sides carried rifles.

The transition from smoothbore to rifle had two main effects: it multiplied casualties; and it strengthened the tactical defensive. Officers trained and experienced in the old tactics were slow to recognize these changes. Time and again generals on both sides ordered close-order assaults in the traditional formation. With an effective range of three or four hundred yards, defenders firing rifles decimated these attacks. Artillery declined in importance as an offensive weapon, because its accuracy and the reliability of shells at long range were poor, and the guns could no longer advance with the infantry toward enemy lines, for marksmen could pick off the cannoneers and especially the horses at distances up to half a mile. Sharpshooters also singled out enemy officers, which helps to explain why officers and especially generals had higher casualty rates than privates. Officers on both sides soon began to stay off horseback when possible and to wear a private's uniform with only a sewn-on shoulder patch to designate their rank. The old-fashioned cavalry charge against infantry, already obsolescent, became obsolete in the face of rifles that could knock down horses long before their riders got within saber or pistol range. The Civil War hastened the evolution of dismounted cavalry tactics in which the horse was mainly a means of transportation rather than a weapon in its own right.

As time went on experience taught soldiers new tactics adapted to the rifle. Infantry formations loosened up and became a sort of large-scale skirmish line in which men advanced by rushes, taking advantage of cover offered by the ground to reload before dashing forward another few yards, working in groups of two or three to load and shoot alternately in order to keep up a continuous rather than a volley fire. But officers had difficulty maintaining control over large units employing such tactics in that pre-radio age. This limited the employment of loose-order tactics and compelled the retention of close-order assaults in some instances to the end of the war.

And while loose-order tactics occasionally succeeded in carrying enemy lines, they did not restore dominance to the tactical offensive, especially when defenders began digging trenches and throwing up breastworks at every position, as they did by 1863 and 1864. It became a rule of thumb that attacking forces must have a numerical superiority of at least three to one to succeed in carrying trenches defended by alert troops. Robbed by the rifle of some of its potency as an offensive weapon, the artillery functioned best on the defensive by firing at attacking infantry with grapeshot and canister (as at Malvern Hill) in the manner of a huge sawed-off shotgun. Despite the occasional success of head-on tactical assaults such as the Confederate victories at Gaines' Mill, Chancellorsville, and Chickamauga or Union triumphs at Missionary Ridge and Cedar Creek, the defense usually prevailed against frontal attacks. Even when an assault succeeded, it did so at high cost in killed and wounded. Steeped in romantic martial traditions, glorying in the "charge" and in "valor," southern soldiers in the Seven Days' suffered grievously from their assaults. Well might D. H. Hill reflect in later years on the bodies piled in front of Union lines at Gaines' Mill: "It was thought to be a great thing to charge a battery of artillery or an earthwork lined with infantry. . . . We were very lavish of blood in those days."
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During 1862 and 1863, Confederate armies went on the tactical offensive in six of the nine battles in which the killed and wounded of both sides together exceeded fifteen thousand. Although they won two of these six battles (Chancellorsville and Chickamauga) and achieved a strategic success in a third (the Seven Days'), their total casualties in these six contests exceeded Union casualties by 20,000 men (89,000 to 69,000). In the spring of 1864 the situation was reversed as Grant's men suffered nearly twice the casualties of Lee's army when the Yankees took the offensive from the Wilderness to Petersburg. The quest of both sides for victory through tactical assaults in the old manner proved a chimera

24
. Hill, "Lee's Attacks North of the Chickahominy,"
Battles and Leaders
, II, 352.

in the new age of the rifle. The tactical predominance of the defense helps explain why the Civil War was so long and bloody. The rifle and trench ruled Civil War battlefields as thoroughly as the machine-gun and trench ruled those of World War I.

IV

In the fog-enshrouded gloom at Malvern Hill on the morning of July 2, 1862, a Union cavalry officer looked over the field of the previous day's conflict. "Our ears had been filled with agonizing cries from thousands before the fog was lifted," he wrote two decades later with the sight still imprinted in his mind, "but now our eyes saw an appalling spectacle upon the slopes down to the woodlands half a mile away. Over five thousand dead and wounded men were on the ground . . . enough were alive and moving to give to the field a singular crawling effect."
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Soon the two armies agreed on a truce to bury the dead and succor the wounded. These tasks etched the horrors of war even more indelibly than the actual fighting. "The sights and smells that assailed us were simply indescribable," wrote a southern soldier on burial detail, "corpses swollen to twice their original size, some of them actually burst asunder with the pressure of foul gases. . . . The odors were nauseating and so deadly that in a short time we all sickened and were lying with our mouths close to the ground, most of us vomiting profusely." Writing home after another battle, a Yank described a field hospital established in farm buildings. "About the building you could see the Hogs belonging to the Farm eating [amputated] arms and other portions of the body."
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Many civilians on both sides, especially in the South, experienced these sights and smells of war directly as well as through soldiers' letters. Much of the fighting in May and June 1862 occurred almost on Richmond's doorstep. Many of the 21,000 wounded Confederates from Seven Pines and the Seven Days' were brought into the city. "We lived in one immense hospital, and breathed the vapors of the charnel house," wrote a Richmond woman.
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Churches, hotels, warehouses, shops, bams, even private homes were pressed into service as temporary hospitals. White women volunteered by the hundreds as nurses; slaves were mobilized as orderlies and gravediggers.

25
. William W. Averell, "With the Cavalry on the Peninsula,"
Battles and Leaders
, II, 432.

26
. Wiley,
Johnny Reb
, 75; Wiley,
Billy Yank
, 83.

27
. Emory M. Thomas,
The Confederate State of Richmond
(Austin, Tex., 1971), 100.

Like the Union army, the Confederates gave first aid and emergency treatment of wounded in field hospitals near or on the battlefield. The South was slow to establish general hospitals for the treatment and convalescence of the badly wounded and of soldiers with long-term illnesses. At first such hospitals were maintained primarily by local or private initiative. By late 1861 the Confederate Medical Department had taken over this function. The army established several general hospitals in Richmond, the principal one on an east-side hill, Chimborazo Hospital, which became the largest such facility in the world with 250 pavilion buildings each housing forty to sixty patients and 100 tents with space for eight to ten convalescents each. But only a fraction of these structures had been completed by June 1862, when thousands of wounded poured into the city and many died in the streets because there was nowhere else to put them. The shock of the Seven Days' and of subsequent battles in Virginia compelled the expansion and modernization of southern general hospitals.

This shock plus the vital example of women volunteers in Richmond and at Corinth, Mississippi, also forced a reversal of the Medical Department's initial hostility to female nurses.

On the eve of the Civil War Florence Nightingale was as much a heroine to American women as she was in England. Nightingale had revolutionized the inadequate British army medical services in the Crimea. She had also dignified nursing as a profession and in 1860 had established the world's first school of nursing at St. Thomas's Hospital in London. When war came to America, several southern white women volunteered their services as nurses or founded small hospitals for soldiers. One of the best such hospitals was established in Richmond by Sally Louisa Tompkins, whom Jefferson Davis eventually commissioned as a captain so that her infirmary could qualify as an army hospital.

These examples defied a prejudice against "refined ladies" working in military hospitals. It was permissible for white women to nurse the sick at home or even in the slave quarters, but they had no business in the masculine milieu of an army hospital which presented sights that no lady should see. Women should stay at home and make bandages, knit socks for soldiers, and comfort the menfolk when they returned from the rigors of battle. Despite the initial wartime prevalence of this view, numerous southern women of good families braved the frowns of father or brother to volunteer as nurses. One of them was twenty-seven-year old Kate Cumming of Mobile, who in April 1862 went to Corinth where Beauregard's battered army was trying to recover after Shiloh. "As to the plea of its being no place for a refined lady," Cumming wrote, "I wondered what Miss Nightingale and the hundreds of refined ladies of Great Britain who went to the Crimea, would say to that!"
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When Cumming arrived at a Corinth hotel that had been turned into a hospital, she blanched at the sight. "Nothing that I had ever heard or read had given me the faintest idea of the horrors witnessed here." But she and her sisters in mercy fought down the desire to run away, and went immediately to work. "I sat up all night, bathing the men's wounds, and giving them water," she wrote in her diary. "The men are lying all over the house, on their blankets, just as they were brought in from the battlefield. . . . The foul air from this mass of human beings at first made me giddy and sick, but I soon got over it. We have to walk, and when we give the men anything kneel, in blood and water; but we think nothing of it."
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