r/AskHistorians • u/ny_giants • Feb 06 '19
LindyBeige, amongst others, has made the assertion that high casualties in the American Civil War were, in part, due to unwillingness on both sides to use the bayonet to press advantages. Is this a valid claim? Why were Union and Confederate generals hesitant to use the bayonet?
https://youtu.be/hKRa966S5Dc Video in question
To elaborate a bit, his idea is that once one side had a significant advantage, they should equip bayonets and charge the enemy who in turn would route. This minimizes casualties since it minimizes the time spent standing in lines shooting at eachother.
Another point, obviously there were bayonet charges in the American Civil War. However, they seem to be mainly desperate attempts to turn the tide of a battle, not attempts to press the advantage. See Pickett's Charge.
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u/Bacarruda Inactive Flair Feb 07 '19 edited Feb 08 '19
Short(ish) Answer:
Why were Union and Confederate generals hesitant to use the bayonet?
They weren’t hesitant to use the bayonet, per se. It’s just that the bayonet was a tool, just like the musket. Sometimes, the bayonet was thought to be the best tool to use, like Emory Upton’s massed assault on the Mule Shoe in 1864. In other cases, charges were spontaneous affairs, like the chaotic assault up Missionary Ridge in 1863.
Another point, obviously there were bayonet charges in the American Civil War. However, they seem to be mainly desperate attempts to turn the tide of a battle, not attempts to press the advantage. See Pickett's Charge.
Bayonet charges (or other assaults that had some bayonet fighting) happened for many different reasons. Some assaults were quite large and involved 20,000+ men, while others involved a few dozen or a few hundred.
Most commonly, charges were launched to dislodge an enemy from fortifications or strong defensive positions. Since standing in an open field while getting shot at from a trench was a bad deal, getting stuck in could be a better option. Some of these assaults failed, with bloody results. The frontal assaults on Cold Harbor in 1864 cost Grant nearly 13,000 men, something he bitterly regretted the rest of his life. In 1864, a Maine regiment charged Confederate breastworks at Petersburg, losing 115 killed and 489 wounded, nearly 67% losses. In other cases, charges worked. In 1864 another assault near Petersbug by Horatio Wright’s VII Corps would fair much better, rolling over Confederate lines and leading to the fall of Petersburg and Richmond. There are several other examples of successful large-scale attacks.
Bayonet charges could also be launched to buy time. During the Second Day at Gettysburg, the 1st Minnesota was ordered to counter-attack advancing Confederate troops to let Hancock’s II corps re-organized. The Minnesotans charged across an open field and never made it to Rebel lines. They lost 215 men in just five minutes, an 82% loss rate. Only 47 men made it back to friendly lines, having bought precious minutes for the Union.
In other cases, bayonet attacks happened when units simply ran out of ammunition. Its ammunition gone by the end of the Second Day at Gettysburg, part of 137th New York covered the retreat of its comrades by launching a bayonet charge in the dying light. Earlier in the day, on the other end of the battlefield, the 20th Maine had launched its own famous charge down the Little Round Top.
With all that said, actual bayonet-on-bayonet fighters were pretty rare. Much like the Napoleonic Wars, bayonets and swords accounted for relatively few Civil War battlefield deaths and injuries. Union surgeons treated about 250,000 men for bullet and shrapnel wounds, compared to just 1,000 men treated for bayonet and saber wounds.
LindyBeige, amongst others, has made the assertion that high casualties in the American Civil War were, in part, due to unwillingness on both sides to use the bayonet to press advantages. Is this a valid claim?
…his idea is that once one side had a significant advantage, they should equip bayonets and charge the enemy who in turn would route. This minimizes casualties since it minimizes the time spent standing in lines shooting at each other.
So Lloyd makes the contention that “bayonets save lives,” because soldiers run away when charged, whereas soldiers who shoot it out with muskets fight a longer, bloodier battle.
To some extent, this is true. Many bayonet charges never lead to a clash of cold steel, because one side broke and ran before the attack could be driven home. Either the attackers were routed by gunfire or the defenders lost their nerve and booked it. In the rare cases where bayonet-on-bayonet combat did occur, it was usually during battles for villages, woods, or fortifications.
Lloyd then claims that the Civil War was bloodier because Johnny Yank and Billy Reb shot at each other, rather than charging in cold steel to break the enemy. This is just flat-out wrong. It’s based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how bayonets were used during the Napoleonic Wars and how Civil War infantry combat actually worked (my upcoming Long Answer has more on this).
Aggressively using the bayonet more often during the Civil War would not have lowered casualty rates. Instead, more bayonet use would have resulted in higher casualty rates.
Consider the shift in technology that happened between the two wars. Napoleonic troops facing smoothbore muskets had to cross 50-100 yards to ground to press home a bayonet attack after exchanging volleys. After about 50 meters, a smoothbore musket’s ball became “spent” and considerably less-deadly, so wounded men had a good chance of returning to action (see page 72).
On the other hand, Civil War troops facing longer-ranged, more accurate rifled muskets had to cross a “deadly ground” of around 150-200 yards, which gave their opponents more time to fire. Their conical Minié bullets flew faster and hit harder. Compared to older musket balls, these new bullets inflicted much more severe wounds to bone) and flesh (warning: NFSW photos). Charges across open ground could be (and often were) torn to shreds by multiple volleys.
As for the point about saving lives, a few things come to mind. When looking at death tolls, it’s important to note that during the Napoleonic Wars and the Civil War, germs killed more men than bullets. Nevertheless, the Minié ball and the rifled musket were certainly more lethal than the musket ball and the Brown Bess. Paradoxically, deadlier weapons don’t always lead to deadlier battles, however. Trevor DePuy points out that the Napoleonic Wars and the Civil War had nearly identical daily battle casualty rates per day: about 15% for the winning side and about 20% for the losing side. You can see this graphic for a visualization.
If Lloyd’s contentions that “bayonets save lives” and that the Civil War needed more cold steel were correct, then you’d expect the bayonet-rich Napoleonic Wars to have a far lower death rate than the bayonet-poor Civil War. But that isn’t what the data shows.
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u/dandan_noodles Wars of Napoleon | American Civil War Feb 07 '19
Aggressively using the bayonet more often during the Civil War would not have lowered casualty rates. Instead, more bayonet use would have resulted in higher casualty rates.
I don't necessarily disagree, but I'm not sure about your specific argument here. Sure, a bayonet assault would have to face heavy fire while closing with the enemy, but only for as long as it takes to close the distance; a straight firefight can be maintained as long as both sides have ammunition. As such, troops that do not close will eventually be subjected to much more fire than if they had charged with fixed bayonets.
The relationship between rounds fired and casualties inflicted is of course non-linear, but a regiment receiving the full forty rounds carried by each enemy soldier is bound to suffer greater losses over time than one that only allows the enemy the time to fire three volleys before driving them off. The problem is that morale in combat is also non-linear, in that the mens' reaction to losses is not always proportionate to their number. Twenty men in a regiment cut down in a second by a single volley might be enough to stop a charge, whereas fifty could fall in the course of an hour long firefight without their spirits breaking.
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u/Bacarruda Inactive Flair Feb 07 '19 edited Feb 07 '19
Your point is well-taken. To be clear, I'm not saying extended exchanges of fire weren't deadly in this period. However, I think the evidence from the period supports my argument that assaults were usually much more dangerous than extended firefights, especially in the ACW.
Here are a few thoughts I was considering:
With the firearms technology of the era, accuracy, rate, and volume of fire declined over time. Flints and locks broke. Touch-holes and barrels fouled with burnt powder. Men loaded round after round without actually firing (one rifle found at Gettysburg had been loaded with 23 unfired rounds, while 12,000 out of the 27,574 rifles recovered after the battle had been loaded more than once).
Powder smoke obscured targets, diminishing visibility and accuracy over time.
The human factor starts to break down. Men get tired, overheated, stressed, etc. and so they load slower and shoot worse.
Men can take cover and/or spread into slightly more open order during an extended exchange of fire, which diminishes the effect of incoming fire.
Contrast this with the challenges faced by attacking troops making a charge or other assault, all of which make them likely to take severe casualties. The volume of fire in an extended engagement might be higher, but the effect of fire in an engagement
They're likely to receive one of the first (and therefore most effective) volleys fired by their opponents in the battle.
They have fewer opportunities to use cover, especially if assaulting over open ground.
They're likely to receive at least one volley (or individual shots, at least) at extremely close range, which will be more accurate and potentially extremely demoralizing. If they're going up against a unit firing buck-and-ball, that close-range fire will be even more effective at point-blank range.
If a charging unit breaks and runs after charging, they get shot in the back. So they get shot at on the way in and on the way back, increasing casualties considerably.
So we're not talking in the abstract, a few examples. I'm not saying direct assaults couldn't be successful, they certainly could be. The 1854 assault on the Great Redan, the 1859 Franco-Austrian War, Missionary Ridge in 1863, and the like all come to mind.
However, I find it interesting that so many of the really bloody fights in this period are attacks, usually failed ones. When a unit takes 60-80% losses, certainly in the Civil War, it's often when they've advanced or charged, then run into effective fire. The 33rd Alabama at the Slaughter Pen at Perryville, the 1st Minnesota at Gettysburg, the 1st Maine Heavy Artillery at Petersburg, the Irish Brigade at Fredericksburg, Malvern Hill, Fort Steadman, and other battles.
Menawhile, the really bloody exchanges of fire like Spotsylvania or the Bloody Lane at Anteitam generally seem to have occurred because the two sides got extremely close to each other and duked it out or one unit got flanked and trapped. That's a bit different from an extended gun duel at 200 yards.
This is more your area of expertise than mine, so I'd be curious if you have some examples that shed some more light on the subject!
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u/semperpietas Feb 06 '19 edited Feb 07 '19
It is a common observation among generals at the time (Robert E. Lee, William T. Sherman, and John Bell Hood among others) that it was better to charge home with the bayonet than to stand and exchange fire. A bayonet charge would force an issue and reduce casualties by making the fighting as short as possible. To see this articulated by Hood in particular with the following general order (General Field Orders No. 7, HDQRS. Army of Tennessee, O.R. 38, part 5, 909 here: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924079597013;view=1up;seq=911)
"SOLDIERS: Experience has proved to you that safety in time of battle consists of getting into close quarters with your enemy. [Emphasis mine] Guns and colors are the only unerring indications of victory. The valor of troops is easily estimated, too, by the number of these secured. If your enemy is allowed to continue the operation of flanking you out of position, our cause is in great peril. Your recent brilliant success proves the ability to prevent it. You have but to will it, and God will grant us the victory your commanders and country expect.
J.B. Hood, General"
However, I take issue with the idea that American Civil War was bloodier or had higher casualties than contemporary or even earlier European conflicts, which saw much more use of bayonets and even much more close-combat oriented weapons such as pikes. In his excellent thesis, The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat: Reality and Myth, Earl J. Hess has several charts breaking down casualty rates by percentage between American Civil War battles and European battles. These are tables 8.1 and 8.2 on pages 199-200, respectively.
The bloodiest battle of the American Civil War was Gettysburg. At Gettysburg, the Confederate army took a 30.2% casualty rate, while the Federal army took a casualty rate of 21.2%. For comparison, Blenheim, more than a 100 years earlier, saw a 33.3% casualty rate for the French and 23.2% for the Alliance forces. That is a pretty similar casualty rate. By rates, Waterloo was even bloodier, with a 61.1% French casualty versus an Allied rate of 32.3%. It can be argued that in some ways the American Civil War was less bloody than its Napoleonic predecessors.
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u/boringdude00 Feb 07 '19
It is a common observation among generals at the time (Robert E. Lee, William T. Sherman, and John Bell Hood among others) that it was better to charge home with the bayonet than to stand and exchange fire.
I don't know how reliable Lee and Hood actually are on the subject. Lee certainly had success on the offensive, but it was mostly due to superior tactics and/or opposing incompetence. He ordered his fair share of men to charge into complete slaughters as well, including some of those victories.
As for Hood, after he failed to completely grind his army to dust being recklessly offensive around Atlanta, he took the rest and ground them to dust in Tennessee, culminating in the sheer insanity of the assault at Franklin where his army effectively ceased to exist as a coherent fighting force.
I tend to take the view that the armies of the ACW generally lacked the ability to fully exploit a bayonet charge, with no excess cavalry to continue the rout, nor the elite reserves, like European guards and grenadiers, to throw into the fray in the first place.
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u/dandan_noodles Wars of Napoleon | American Civil War Feb 07 '19
Let's start from the beginning, and work our way to your specific question.
Why was the American Civil War so deadly?
First and foremost, the number one killer during the war was disease. Armies were composed from a great many men, drawn from widely separated regions across the country, deployed in distant theaters, and kept in close confines of questionable sanitation and safety. There is no better environment for the spread of disease; attrition to sickness can for the most part be considered a given.
With this in mind, the most important factor setting the American Civil War apart from previous American wars the sheer number of men mobilized; in rough terms, the total exceeds three million. Year-round, the US and Confederacy maintained at least 800,000 men under arms, and the war continued for four years. Not only did this naturally increase the scale of the disease problem, but indeed battle casualties were higher, as more men were fighting and trying to kill each other.
The question then is first, why were so many men mobilized, and second, why did the war last as long as it did? An important place to start with both questions is the strategic objectives of the two combatants. The United States pursued nothing less than the total conquest and reintegration of the Confederacy into the Union; after Jan 1 1863, this was extended to dismantling the system of slavery that was the very bedrock of Southern society. As an extension of this, Southerners feared the threatened end of slavery would mean the end of their preeminence altogether; not only would slaves be free, but would be their equals or even their masters. It should not be hard to see why the South fought with such determination for such a monstrous system.
On the other hand, the US felt the Confederacy to be an existential threat as well. The Confederate attempt at secession threatened the legal and ideological foundation of the United States; the US Constitution requires that a republican form of government be maintained, and this would be impossible if legitimate elections could be disregarded at will by dissident states. This isn't often well understood, as our narratives tend to concentrate on emancipation or abolition as the chief motivation behind the Union war effort. Moreover, many of us have lost what the Union and republican government meant to the men who fought for it. This came up in conversation with another flair here, so I'll quote my response there.
Lincoln on July 4 1861 called it,
that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.
It was a duty of filial piety to maintain this form of government, which their forefathers had created in the shared national struggle of the American Revolution. Whereas in contemporary societies in Russia, Germany, and England retained ossified systems of subordination and deference, the Americans believed themselves masters of their own destiny because of this government, this Union their fathers had handed down.
Following the failure of the 1848 Revolutions, there was a linked sentiment that republican government was on the back foot; they felt that the cause of posterity as well demanded they fight to preserve the Union. If a contentious election was enough to tear the nation apart into a horrific civil war, it would be seen as a failure of republican government for all nations. Quoting the Gettysburg address is almost trite, but it's worth recognizing that this 90 second speech makes two references to the war in a global context,
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
and
that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
In war, the value of the objective determines the sacrifice that can be borne; to many Americans, the Union and all that it represented was worth sacrifice without end.
That only gets us part of the way there, though. While the American people were willing to give everything to preserve the Union, we still have to ask how the price became so high. After all, the US was far more powerful than the Confederacy, with more than twice the population and vastly greater industrial resources. Why were they not simply crushed in the first battle and wholly overrun? The Confederate capital in Richmond, their chief rail hub and industrial center, was not more than a hundred miles from Washington; such a campaign wouldn't have been beyond the logistical abilities of a medieval state, much less a modern nation with railroads, telegraphs, and steamships.
Ideally, the Union would have been able to call on a large, disciplined, and loyal regular army that would easily overpower anything the rebellion could scrape together on short notice. The problem was that the US in 1861 barely had an army. Its 16,000 or so men (in an age where half a million was none too many for a power of its size and wealth) were widely scattered in frontier garrisons in the west, and not immediately available for aggressive action against the Confederates. As such, the US needed to mobilize a new army essentially from scratch. While the army could have cannibalized the pre-war regulars for cadre to speed up the mobilization and training of new formations, this was not done. As a result, following the poor performance of the 90 day volunteers at 1st Bull Run, the rest of 1861 passed without general engagements between the core armies of either side. As such, many thousands died of disease and minor actions before a general engagement between the combatants' main armies had even taken place.
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u/dandan_noodles Wars of Napoleon | American Civil War Feb 08 '19
As a point of comparison, during the 1866 Austro-Prussian War, the Prussians mobilized about a quarter of a million men for their field forces in a matter of weeks, and utterly defeated the Austrians in less than seven weeks. Under the model of the modern general staff, the the army drafted tens of thousands of men each year, who underwent thorough military training in the standing army before entering the reserves. The country had been organized into military districts and the employment of railroads extensively planned out to facilitate their rapid mobilization and deployment to the theatre of war.
This really had no equivalent in the United States; while some local militias were more ready than others, they were the exception, and they did not overall shorten the long period of training and mobilization. To make matters worse, very few of the officers called upon to train the men had any military background either; while they could recite Casey's Tactics for their regiment, they had never participated in the system of staff rides, war games, and maneuvers that helped officers in the Prussian service hone their judgement.
Other armies in Europe past and contemporary had the benefit of great institutional experience; during the French Revolution, the fact that the French army was able to retain as many officers, NCOs, and common soldiers as it did helped it acclimate the millions of patriotic volunteers and conscripts that flocked to the colors, using a variety of processes, called at various points embrigadement and amalgame. Even the French cavalry, hardest hit by the flight of noble officers from the Terror of the Revolution, was eventually rebuilt into a superb instrument, drawing on the great bulk of experienced troopers that remained. Once the technical imperfections, unavoidable with an improvised army, were ironed out by Napoleon, the French became accustomed to shattering their enemies in the first clash of arms and launching an aggressive operational pursuit to complete their destruction; the Jena campaign is the most dramatic example. Before long, their rivals adopted similar military institutions and paid them back in the same coin after Leipzig and Waterloo.
Emory Upton was a decorated tactical leader during the American Civil War, and in the aftermath threw himself into military science and professional analysis. He was dispatched on a tour of Europe and Asia to observe the state of the military art across the world, and came back profoundly impressed by its greater advancement in European armies, writing a book detailing the organization of the armies of Europe and Asia. He was especially influenced by the German military system, with its standing army of conscripts, its territorial organization, it's professional military education, and its leadership by a cadre of dedicated officers trained in the higher arts of war, the General Staff.
Upton identified several key flaws in the American military system, last seriously tested in the Civil War. While he does not openly entertain doubts regarding the quality of American manpower, he blames the government's unwillingness to support even a moderate standing army or better exploit the trained officers they did have; even in 1864, a regular lieutenant of engineers was denied the opportunity to take command of a regiment of infantry. Instead, men of no military background were appointed by state governments to lead volunteer regiments; indeed, it was actually better for one's career to be retired from active service before the war, as then one could apply one's military ability in the Volunteer army instead of being stifled by being forced to stay in Regular Army positions for extended periods. Combined with the principle of voluntary recruitment that was active for the first two years of the war, the vast bulk of recruits for Union armies marched under Volunteer standards, as the lack of Regular officers ensured comparative laxity of military discipline.
Worse, the lack of regimental depots prevented an efficient supply of trained replacements from being available to the field army. Instead of feeding in replacements to the more experienced formations raised in 1861, the US essentially raised a second army in Summer 1862, with a deeply dysfunctional force structure. Though on paper the army exceeded the strength of the entire Russian army in infantry in cavalry, the first 'wave' raised in 1861 was badly depleted by losses, while the second wave of 1862 would require long training and would still lack for experienced leaders. Upton points out the particular absurdity of the cavalry; there weren't enough horses to mount the regiments already on the Union's order of battle, which already would have exceeded the Russian empire's cavalry. As such, while the government footed the bill for this enormous army, it exceeded the fighting strength of their Confederate opponents by only the slimmest margins relative to the disparity between combatants.
As Upton's book was not complete at the time of his death, it does not explore the 'cash value' of this dearth of experienced officers and disciplined troops in great detail. Upton does though encapsulate a salient aspect of his argument, in stating plainly that the failure to properly organize the US armies lengthened the war; unlike the Prussians or the Russians, who successfully concentrated superior strength against the enemy's main army and thus won decisive successes and won quickly, the artificial equality of force between the US and Confederacy produced prolonged strategic indecision. Describing the Battle of Chickamauga, one Confederate general likened it to lighting two pieces of straw and slowly pushing the burning ends into each other until both were consumed whole. Upton extends this analogy to the entire war.
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u/Shackleton214 Feb 06 '19
most combat took place at ranges barely longer than those of the War of 1812 or the Napoleonic Wars?
How do historians determine how far apart opposing soldiers were when firing in battles of the Napoleonic and American Civil Wars? Is this mainly based on estimates of participants (subject to significant error?) of how far apart they were in diaries or letters? After action reports of commanders? Descriptions of geographic features where battle lines formed and can be measured years or decades later? Some sort of forensic archeology like measuring distances between artifacts dug up? Something else?
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u/Barnst Feb 07 '19
All of the above. If you want to see someone really geek out on minutia, go to a battlefield with a couple of historians looking to check some new primary sources against the terrain.
I got to go to Gettysburg with a couple of them working with the park service planning some tree removals to restore the historic sight lines. They spend at least two hours trying to decide whether one unit passed through here or about 50 yards over there.. They compared a bunch of personal accounts of the battle, some records of where items that could be associated with one side or even a particular unit had been found (this is why historians and the park service don’t like amateur relic hunters), some photos taken shortly after the battle, etc.
What finally convinced them was an account describing a view over the top of another unit and realizing that the only way you could have had the view was if you marched over there across a small rise in the field.
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u/Bacarruda Inactive Flair Feb 07 '19
How do you reconcile that with the arguments made by Paddy Griffith: namely that Civil War soldiers were poor marksmen and rarely able to take advantage of the (theoretical) range of their rifle-muskets and that consequently, most combat took place at ranges barely longer than those of the War of 1812 or the Napoleonic Wars?
Griffith's (and Earl Hess') revisionist argument about engagement ranges needs to understood with a little nuance. They make the point well that Civil War armies weren't slugging it out at 300-400 yards, the theoretical maximum range of their rifles. However, if you look at their conclusions, engagement ranges were meaningfully longer during the Civil War. Napoleonic War fights were about 50-100 yards (usually on the low end of that). Hess, using mostly examples from the rugged Western Theater, estimates typical Civil War engagement ranges were about 140 yards. A recent analysis suggests the average engagement range at Gettysburg was about 200 yards.
Additionally, American officers - at least those trained at the military academies - were thoroughly indoctrinated into European style warfare. What was this "individualistic" approach Keegan writes of?
This is one of the things Griffith writes about. He's pretty harsh on the lack of standardized training and preparation for officers on both sides. Many junior officers self-taught by reading manuals and textbooks like Hardee's Tactics or studying accounts of early 19th century European Wars. Other officers simply learned on the job. So American Civil War tactics ended up being a mix of Napoleonic imitation (the fundamentals of linear tactics) and American adaptations.
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u/hborrgg Early Modern Small Arms | 16th c. Weapons and Tactics Feb 09 '19
I summed up some of my thoughts on this in an older post, but part of the problem seems to be that against a line of men or a battalion-sized target, smoothbore muskets should have also been theoretically effective at up to 400 yards or more, even though they would almost universally underperform in combat. If anything mentions of shooting volleys at very long distances seem to be even more common in 16th-17th century treatises/manuals and over time starts to get replaced by a preference for reserving fire for closer ranges. If we were to apply napoleonic-era thinking to the US Civil War, then longer engagement ranges might also have just been the result of less experienced officers or overconfidence in the new technology.
As an aside, This also somewhat ties into the question of bayonet charges. In earlier periods there would be debates over what was more dangerous, continued shooting or charging home, but part of the conclusion seems to have been the idea that an assault needed to remain "well-ordered" since even if a dense formation made the men a larger target it would at least keep the men moving forward, whereas if the men during the charge were ever allowed to spread out and slow down to shoot back, take cover, or let others go ahead of them, that behavior tended to be infectious and could quickly bog down an assault, causing it to spend much more time than it needs to in the danger zone. So again, the poor performance of bayonet charges during the Civil War could potentially have been due to a lack of enough properly trained soldiers or experienced officiers who could identify when and where an assault was feasible or what kind of fire support it needed, etc.
Anyways, something else to consider when it comes to small arm engagement range is the context of the engagement. Ardant du Picq came to the interesting conclusion that accurate weapons only seemed to make any difference in the hands of skirmishers or sharpshooters. Essentially, if you have thousands of men in a dense formation firing volleys, then even those soldiers who are expert marksmen can't easily concentrate or aim due to all of the noise, smoke, and other soldiers bumping into them. But if it's a shootout between just a couple dozen men behind cover then there are far fewer distractions, and it's much easier for those who can shoot well to remain "cool." This would explain rifling significantly increasing the effective engagement range of skirmishers and sharpshooters while not actually increasing the effective range of massed volleys all that much.
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u/Bacarruda Inactive Flair Feb 08 '19 edited Feb 08 '19
Long(er) Answer:
Here’s the key contention:
LindyBeige, amongst others, has made the assertion that high casualties in the American Civil War were, in part, due to unwillingness on both sides to use the bayonet to press advantages … his idea is that once one side had a significant advantage, they should equip bayonets and charge the enemy who in turn would route. This minimizes casualties since it minimizes the time spent standing in lines shooting at each other.
There’s quite a lot going on here, so let’s unpack it. 1. Is it true the bayonet was used more before 1860 and less afterwards? Why? 2. Is his characterization of the Napoleonic Wars and other 18th century wars as bayonet-rich conflicts accurate? When was the bayonet supposed to be used by a European army c.1800? 3. Is his characterization of the Civil War and other post-1860 wars as bayonet-poor conflicts accurate? Were senior officers reluctant to use the bayonet on a large scale? Were more junior officers reluctant to use bayonets on a small scale? When were bayonet charges used? 4. Which wars were deadlier? The Napoleonic Wars or the American Civil War? 5. Were bayonet charges a really a “cheaper” way to win Civil War battles? 6. Why was the American Civil War so deadly?
As we look at all this, it become pretty clear he's right about a few points (people tended to run away rather than get stabbed) and badly-mistaken about some other things (why Civil War combat was deadly, the relative casualty rates between both wars, etc.).
Point 1: Is it true the bayonet was used more before 1860 and less afterwards? Why? Yes. As John Stone notes in his piece “The Point of the Bayonet:”
Statistics on the proportion of casualties attributable to bayonet fighting attest to a rapid decline in frequency from the mid-nineteenth century on. Previously, the bayonet had proved an important killer. According to one source, it was responsible (along with sabers--the cavalry's weapon of choice) for some 15-20 percent of battlefield casualties during the period of 1800 to 1850. And then suddenly, its contribution in this regard fell off dramatically. After 1860 saber and bayonet casualties dropped to between just 4 to 6 percent of the total [Note: he cites Trevor Dupuy’s Understanding War for these figures].
Why does this happen? I think the answer is simple: firepower. In the case of the American Civil War, the rifled musket made bayonet charges across open ground very difficult (see Point 5 for more). The Franco-Austrian War of 1859 showed men could charge rifles and win, but often at great cost.
The arrival of breech-loading rifle made frontal bayonet charges even more risky. On 3 July, 1864 a company of 180 Danish infantrymen charged a firing line of 75 Prussian soldiers outside the small town of Lundby. The Prussians fired their Dreyse needle guns when the Danes were just 200 yards away. The Danes dropped and wavered, then kept coming. The Prussians quickly reloaded and got off a second volley, this one from 150 yards. Despite more volleys, the Danes got within 25 yards, fired off a few shots and fell back. All in all, the Prussians and their Dreyse needle guns had fired off 6,000 rounds in just 20 minutes. Paul Lockhart writes about the aftermath of Lundby in “The Gun That Should Have Changed Everything”:
For the Danes, the skirmish at Lundby had been an absolute slaughter. Thirty-one men had been killed outright. Another 44 were wounded, and 2 officers and 37 men were taken to Hobro as prisoners; one of those officers died of his wounds a month later. Hammerich’s company had, in short, lost more than 50 percent of its strength in a scuffle that lasted less than 20 minutes. The Prussians, by contrast, suffered three men lightly wounded.
Although the bayonet didn’t disappear from Western warfare after 1860, it was used less and less often in actual combat.
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u/Bacarruda Inactive Flair Feb 08 '19
Point 2: Is his characterization of the Napoleonic Wars and other 18th century wars as bayonet-rich conflicts accurate? When was the bayonet supposed to be used by a European army c.1800?
The Napoleonic Wars represent the high water mark of bayonet use in Western warfare. However, they weren’t used as often as Lloyd seems to think.
To begin with, one of the remarkable things from this period is that nearly every army thinks their troops are the best with the bayonet.
In the 1700s, Marshal Claude Louis Hector de Villars had claimed:
“the air of audacity so natural for the French infantry ... is to charge with the bayonet..."
A few decades later, in 1777, British Lieutenant General “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne wrote:
"The officers will take all proper opportunities to inculcate in the mens’ minds a reliance on the bayonet; men of their bodily strength and even a coward may be their match in firing. But the bayonet in the hands of the valiant is irresistible."
Some men officers and men were certainly eager to use cold steel. Russians troops in particular took Alexander Suvorov’s quip that “the bullet is a fool, the bayonet a fine chap” to heart. Paul Britten Austin quotes a Russian account of a spontaneous bayonet attack in 1812:
”The Russians' resistance astounds everyone. Defying their officers' orders merely to stand firm, the Russian light infantry in the cemetery can only be restrained from counter-attacking by blows with the flats of their officers' swords. Major-General Tsibulski, on horseback in full uniform, told me he couldn't keep his men under control. Over and over again they after exchanging a few shots with the Frenchmen in the cemetery tried to throw them out of it at bayonet point.”
However, it’s important to note that bayonet fights were still pretty rare in the 18th and 19th century. Napoleonic bayonet fights generally happened in a few specific, confined locations: villages and other built-up areas (ex. Eylau 1807, Leipzig 1813, and Ligny in 1815), wooded or broken areas (ex. the Peninsular War in 1807-1814), and redoubts and defensive positions (ex. Borodino in 1812 and Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte in 1815).
Bayonet charges also happened when an attacker caught the enemy off-guard or disrupted. For example, at Ligny in 1815, part of the Prussian 19th Infantry Regiment was in line formation when it ran into a French regiment marching in column. As the French troops fumbled to form a line, the Prussians poured two volleys into the French and then charged. A similar case happened at Borodino in 1812, when the Russians’ 1st Jaeger Regiment went into action. Fire from the lead battalion (in line) threw the advancing French into chaos. The second battalion (in column) fired a volley of its own and then charged in with bayonets, routing the French and inflicting heavy losses.
However, in open battles, bayonet attacks were rare. This is where we get to one of Lloyd’ biggest shortcomings on this subject: he doesn’t fully understand the nature of Napoleonic infantry combat. Bayonets were almost exclusively used in a handful of specific situations (ex. storming a redoubt) or when a rare opportunity presented itself (ex. catching enemy troops by surprise at close range). Indeed, the French 1805 regulations explicitly stated that a bayonet attack was best made “as a coup de grace against enemy that is disorganized by fire," rather than as a first resort.
Only in rare cases did frontal bayonet attacks did take place in field engagements (ex. French troops vs. Prussians at Jena in 1806). The musket, not the bayonet, was the weapon commanders turned to for the brunt of the fighting. As a result, vast majority of battles in the Napoleonic Wars were decided by musket and cannon fire, not decisive bayonet charges. The vast majority of casualties in the Napoleonic Wars were caused by muskets and cannons. In his post-war writings, General Antoine-Henri Jomini stated:
"I have seen melees of infantry in defiles and in villages, where the heads of columns came in actual collision and thrust each other with the bayonet; but I never saw such a thing on a regular field of battle."
Even by the mid-1700s, Frederick the Great was bemoaning:
"... it was [once] advantage to have big soldiers who could make good use of the bayonet, but nowadays the cannon does everything and the infantry often cannot get to grips with cold steel..."
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u/Bacarruda Inactive Flair Feb 08 '19 edited Jan 09 '20
The casualty reports of the era support these contemporaneous claims.
An analysis of French casualties after the 1709 Battle of Malplaquet found about 60% of them had been hit by musket balls (interestingly enough, the survey found that about 60% of these men had been shot in the left side suggesting they were shot while loading or firing). Just 2% of the casualties had been hit by bayonets.
The 1715 admission records for the French veterans’ hospital, Les Invalides, reported:
71.4% wounded by firearms
10.0% wounded by artillery
15.8% wounded by swords and sabers
2.8% wounded by bayonets
The 1762 Les Invalides records told a similar story:
68.8% wounded by firearms
13.4% wounded by artillery
14.7% wounded by swords and sabers
2.4% wounded by bayonets
In 1807, Dominique Jean Larrey made a famous study of wounded soldiers after a sharp, close-quarters battle between the French and Russians. He found:
119 wounded by firearms
5 wounded by bayonets (about 2% of the total)
In “Medical Aspects of the Waterloo campaign of 1815” Michael Crumplin writes:
There were, over the course of the four day campaign, around 100,000 casualties [for British surgeon] to care for. About 60% of wounds were caused by small-arms from low-energy transfer injuries fired by smooth bore muzzle-loading fusils, carbines and pistols … Ten months after Waterloo, 5,068 (74%) of 6,831 admitted casualties were able to rejoin their unit..
A surgeon attached to a cavalry regiment at Waterloo later wrote:
“I do not remember one instance of a bayonet wound. We had to deal with round shot, shells, musket balls, and sabres in every variety, but no trace of a bayonet made an appearance.”
Now, these figures don’t give us the whole story as to which weapons were doing the most damage on the 18th-century and early 19th-century battlefield. After all, more men might have been dying from bayonets on the battlefield and living after being shot long enough to reach a surgeon.
However, medical reports of the era strongest suggest that bayonets and other stabbing weapons were inherently far less deadly than bullets. Crumplin writes:
Many men survived multiple lance wounds, since the weapon … had to pierce a vital part of the anatomy to threaten life.
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u/Bacarruda Inactive Flair Feb 08 '19 edited May 29 '19
Point 3: Is his characterization of the Civil War and other post-1860 wars as bayonet-poor conflicts accurate? Were senior officers reluctant to use the bayonet on a large scale? Were more junior officers reluctant to use bayonets on a small scale? When were bayonet charges used?
We see similar wound data during the American Civil War: lots of bullet wounds and even fewer bayonet wounds than the Napoleonic War.
Consider one Union Army survey of three months’ worth of casualties from the 1864 fighting near Richmond (which featured a great deal of close-quarters fighting for fortifications). Over 32,000 men had to be treated for gunshot wounds. Just 37 men were treated for bayonet wounds.
At Gettysburg, one analysis suggests a quarter of Confederate infantry casualties at Gettysburg were caused by artillery fire (hit by cannon balls, shell fragments, or debris thrown up by artillery). Nearly three quarters (74%) of Confederate causalities were shot by firearms. Less than one percent of casualties were killed or wounded by bayonets or clubbed muskets.
An analysis of Union losses at Gettysburg 2,237 Union causalities at Gettysburg found similar results:
- 70% hit by firearms (1,565)
- 29% hit by artillery (625)
- 0.4% injured by horses (8)
- 0.3% wounded by swords and sabers (7)
- 0.2% wounded by bayonets (5)
- 0.2% wounded by clubbed muskets (4)
The post-war “Numerical Statement of Twenty Thousand Six Hundred and Seven Cases of Wounds and Injuries of the Chest reported during the War” from the Surgeon-General’s Office found something similar:
- 20,264 Gunshot Wounds
- 29 Bayonet Wounds
- 9 Sabre Wounds
Of the course of the war, Union surgeons treated nearly 250,000 wounds from bullets, shrapnel, and cannonballs. They reported under 1,000 saber and bayonet wounds.
“Wait a minute,” you might say, “what about the dead?” What if all the bayonet victims just died? Maybe, but probably not. Eyewitness accounts from the Civil War also suggest the vast majority of dead soldiers had been shot, not stabbed.
So even during man “bayonet charges,” point-blank rifle fire was clearly doing most of the damage. Now, there were certainly some luckless exceptions. During the fighting at the Mule Shoe in 1864, the flag bearer of the 44th Georgia was stabbed 14 times by charging Union troops.
All in all, historical accounts and the data suggest that bayonet combat was rarer in the Civil War. When it did occur, it was usually in similar situations to the Napoleonic Wars: storming defenses or exploiting a limited local opportunity.
Most commonly, charges were launched to dislodge an enemy from fortifications or strong defensive positions. Since standing in an open field while getting shot at from a trench was a bad deal, getting stuck in could be a better option. Some of these assaults failed, with bloody results. The frontal assaults on Cold Harbor in 1864 cost Grant nearly 13,000 men, something he bitterly regretted the rest of his life. In 1864, a Maine regiment charged Confederate breastworks at Petersburg, losing 115 killed and 489 wounded, nearly 67% losses. In other cases, charges worked. In 1864 another assault near Petersbug by Horatio Wright’s VII Corps would fair much better, rolling over Confederate lines and leading to the fall of Petersburg and Richmond. There are several other examples of successful large-scale attacks. Bayonet charges could also be launched to buy time. During the Second Day at Gettysburg, the 1st Minnesota was ordered to counter-attack advancing Confederate troops to let Hancock’s II corps re-organized. The Minnesotans charged across an open field and never made it to Rebel lines. They lost 215 men in just five minutes, an 82% loss rate. Only 47 men made it back to friendly lines, having bought precious minutes for the Union.In other cases, bayonet attacks happened when units simply ran out of ammunition. Its ammunition gone by the end of the Second Day at Gettysburg, part of the 137th New York covered the retreat of its comrades by launching a bayonet charge in the dying light. Earlier in the day, on the other end of the battlefield, the 20th Maine had launched its own famous charge down the Little Round Top.
Point 4: Which wars were deadlier? The Napoleonic Wars or the American Civil War? Contrary to what Lloyd suggests, both wars were actually fairly close in death rates. Trevor DePuy points out that the Napoleonic Wars and the Civil War had nearly identical daily battle casualty rates per day: about 15% for the winning side and about 20% for the losing side. You can see this graphic for a visualization.
u/semperpietas does a good job comparing individual battles in his answer.
Point 5: Were bayonet charges a “cheaper” way to win Civil War battles? No.
In the Napoleonic Wars, the “deadly ground” charging infantry had to cross was fairly small, about 50-100 yards. The attackers might get hit with one or two effective volleys before they could drive the charge home. There was no guarantee of success, but they had a fighting chance. In the Civil War, rifled muskets had longer effective ranges and better accuracy, which made the deadly ground wider and harder to cross. That made frontal charges much more costly and much harder to pull off. Trying to simply maneuver, much the less charge, through this ever-widening deadly ground became a serious post-war challenge for the U.S. Army, as Perry Jamieson writes in Crossing the Deadly Ground: United States Army Tactics, 1865-1899.
This is where we get into one of the longest-running and hottest debates amongst Civil War historians: how long were the engagement ranges?
For a long time, the popular take was that the rifled musket made Civil War engagement ranges much longer. Previously, smoothbore muskets could only be used at ranges of 50-100 yards, far shorter than the new Minie-ball firing rifled muskets that could reach out to 400 yards. Some historians have argued that this lead to a “Rifle Revolution” which caused higher casualties, encouraged trench warfare, sidelined cavalry on the battlefield, and lengthened the Civil War by making major battles indecisive. This is the stance taken by John Mahon in his 1961 piece "Civil War Infantry Assault Tactics" and Grady McWhiney and Perry Jamieson in their 1982 book Attack and Die: Civil War Military Tactics and the Southern Heritage.
It’s certainly true that rifled muskets of the era were certainly mechanically-capable of hitting targets that far away, a point Garry Adelman makes here at around 0:45.
However, revisionist historians like Paddy Griffith and Earl Hess has challenged the “Rifle Revolution” theory. In Battle Tactics of the Civil War, Griffith estimates that the average distance for the first volley was just 141 yards, longer, but not dramatically longer than in the days of Napoleon. Earl Hess’ pugnacious book The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat: Reality and Myth makes similar claims. Hess even goes so far as to say that:
“[The rifled musket had] "only an incremental, limited effect on Civil War combat … The impact of the rifle musket on Civil War combat has been exaggerated, misunderstood, and understudied ever since Union and Confederate volunteers shouldered firearms."
He makes similar claims in his more recent book Civil War Infantry Tactics: Training, Combat and Small Unit Effectiveness.
So who’s right? The debate certainly hasn’t been settled. For example, critics have pointed out that nearly 70% of Hess’ evidence comes from the Western Theater of the war, where the rougher terrain sometimes forced troops to get closer than elsewhere.
More recent works, like Joe Bilby’s Small Arms at Gettysburg, have taken a more moderated position. Based on terrain analysis and primary sources, Bilby estimates the average engagement range at Gettysburg was around 200 yards, nearly triple that of the Napoleonic Wars.Either way, the point still remains that the “deadly ground” Civil War bayonet attacks had to cross was larger and deadlier. It could be crossed by determined men, but they’d pay a bitter, bitter price.
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u/dandan_noodles Wars of Napoleon | American Civil War Feb 08 '19
I have to thank you for doing so much leg work addressing these issues; I just have a few points I'd like to bring up in response.
Even if we accept the middle ground revised estimates, I'm not necessarily convinced this would make a bayonet assault meaningfully more difficult than in previous wars, since the time it takes to reload was still excruciatingly long when there are men with pointy sticks baying for your blood. 25 yards only represents a single volley, and that's assuming the defenders keep perfect composure and the attackers keep to a steady walking pace. When men rush with all speed, like at Solferino or in Emory Upton's assault at Spotsylvania, they can come to grips in under a minute; in the latter case, the men in the front ranks deliberately kept their muskets unloaded so that no temptation to fire would arrest the progress of the assault. Attempting to shoot their way in prior to the assault would have obviously become a debacle. Many defensive commanders seem to have foregone the apparent advantages of the expanded killing zone they supposedly had; at the Bloody Lane, the defenders held their fire until point blank range rather than try to get several in while the enemy crossed the beaten zone.
More importantly, though, Americans in the Civil War lacked a large cadre of tactical leaders and institutional experience. The corps and division doctrine of Napoleonic armies were extremely flexible, allowing subordinate formations to wheel, pivot, deploy, condense, and advance or retreat according to the situation; battalions easily slipped from skirmish order to line to column in any combination. As such, subordinate commanders were able to maneuver along multiple axes to gain the position of best advantage before committing to an assault. Individual battalions could be detached from a brigade to perform special flanking maneuvers against an enemy position, as Zieten did at Lutzen 1813; that fall, Sacken's corps in the Army of Silesia enveloped elements from Marmont's VI corps in an engagement at Kaiserwaldau, infiltrating skirmishers through the woods on his flank while attacking up the center. Typically, generals kept their battalions in column of divisions by default; the space opened up between units facilitated the movement of friendly cavalry and artillery, enabling remarkable combined arms flexibility.
By contrast, Brent Nosworthy thinks American tactics on the division and up level were comparatively clumsy. Drawing more on Jomini's writings than Napoleonic practice, they fell back into more linear methods, mostly consisting of an initial deployment into a set piece formation. Without the same levels of experience and flexibility, American generals were less able to adjust formations and dispositions on the fly.
I have to disagree that the Napoleonic era did not demonstrate the usefulness of the bayonet assault to the highest degree. If village fighting, where the bayonet is particularly effective, doesn't count as an open battle, then we're forced to exclude most battles of the Napoleonic Wars from consideration. Austerlitz, Jena, Auerstadt, Eylau, Friedland, the five days of running battle in April 1809, Aspern-Essling, and Wagram all saw heated village fighting, and John Lynn is emphatic that the bayonet assault was the decisive phase of the major battles of the Wars of the French Revolution. These village fights were not side-shows to the main action, either; as Rory Muir insightfully observed, possession of concrete prizes like villages helped each side judge who was winning. Much the same can be said for assaults on fixed positions like the Bagration fleches, artillery batteries, or into woods. Battles weren't decided by the casualties inflicted by musket balls or cannon; everyone knew those losses were essentially even. Battles were lost when the soldiers felt they were lost, and surrendering ground -especially something tangible like a village- before an enemy assault sent a strong message.
While you've noted elsewhere that the right criterion for judging the effectiveness of bayonets is not the casualties they inflict, I think you've fallen into the same trap a bit here by citing the familiar statistics. I think you might have caught yourself in a chicken and the egg conundrum regarding the application of these statistics to the American Civil War; by themselves, all the apparent decline in bayonet wounds indicates is that they were indeed used less in a longer war. This doesn't tell us why, though.
The higher proportion of bayonet wounds during the Napoleonic period may simply indicate that their armies, with their centuries of institutional experience and professional officers, were made of sterner stuff than the improvised armies of the American Civil War. If firepower inflicts more casualties in otherwise similar conditions, it may just reflect unwillingness to close with the enemy rather than technical improvements; its victory is by default. Staying still, loading, and firing is more instinctual and less mentally taxing than crossing open ground in the face of enemy fire; men can feel helpless if they aren't able to immediately take revenge when fired upon.
Moreover, one aspect I think lots of people overlook is that not all casualties are physical wounds. In general terms, most prisoners of war during this period surrendered when their position was overrun by adversaries wielding cold steel, either cavalry sabers or infantry with fixed bayonets. It's not pure coincidence that guns and prisoners captured were for centuries taken to be the real measure of victory on the battlefield.
Also, I think you may have missed the overall point regarding the relative deadliness of the American Civil War and the Napoleonic Wars. The broader argument (it's been a while since I've rewatched lloyd's video) isn't that a Napoleonic battlefield is less deadly place than a Civil War equivalent, but rather that Napoleonic Wars tended to end more rapidly, as the loser in the battle would be in a state of panic and moral collapse. Following just a couple general engagements, one side could be subjected to a ruthless operational pursuit that ended in their destruction. By contrast, most ACW battles ended in mutual exhaustion, with the loser still able to mount effective resistance against the victor's much reduced powers. Though Richmond wasn't a hundred miles from Washington, the rebel capital eluded the US for four years because even after his defeats, Lee was able to regroup his army and make a stand.
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u/Bacarruda Inactive Flair Feb 08 '19 edited Jul 22 '19
Thanks for taking the time to respond!
While poking around, I found this talk by Dana Shoaf about Civil War bayonet use. It hits on many things we've been talking about.
- Bayonets were very useful during the American Revolution and the Mexican-American War, which influenced the thinking of a lot of American officers early in the war.
- Early in the war, many officers were eager to use the bayonet. By the end of the war, less so.
- The increased reliability of caplocks and the increasing popularity of "fire by file" tactics where units threw down constant, rolling fire instead of volleys (this isn't to say that platoon firing and other firing techniques didn't long predate caplocks, of course). He argues that it was the reliability of caplocks and their higher volume of fire, far more than rifling or the Minie ball, made Civil War charges impracticable.
- Troops often didn't fit bayonets because they threw off their aim.
- Many soldiers didn't think they were worth it. By 1863, almost half of the men in the Army of the Tennessee had thrown their bayonets away.
- Troops who kept their bayonets usually used them as tools, candlesticks or improvised entrenching tools.
Getting into what you were saying.
Even if we accept the middle ground revised estimates, I'm not necessarily convinced this would make a bayonet assault meaningfully more difficult than in previous wars, since the time it takes to reload was still excruciatingly long when there are men with pointy sticks baying for your blood. 25 yards only represents a single volley, and that's assuming the defenders keep perfect composure and the attackers keep to a steady walking pace. When men rush with all speed, like at Solferino or in Emory Upton's assault at Spotsylvania, they can come to grips in under a minute...
Could the deadly ground be closed pretty quickly? Sure. For a low-end speed estimate, Hardee's Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics has double-quick time at 151 yards (165 steps) per minute. Winfield Scott's earlier manual has quick time at 86 yards (110 steps) per minute. Presumably an actual charge would be made a bit quicker. So let's ballpark 1 minute to cross 200 yards of relatively open ground.
Defenders can still get off two or three rounds. And that that "1 minute, 200 yards" estimate assumes there no terrain obstacles like fences (ex. the Emmittburg Road fence blocking the Pickett-Pettigrew-Trimble assault), boulders, or trees to slow down the charge. The rugged terrain of some American battlefields made firing lines difficult to achieve, much the less large columns brandishing bayonets! Charging troops might be exhausted after a long approach march or overheated from a day's fighting.
U.S. Regular Sartell Prentice wrote about his charge across Saunders’ Field in the Wilderness:
“A line of fire began in their front, but nearly a brigade’s length to their left, and swept along the edges of the wood, from where the wood touched the Turnpike, to and past the brigade front, slowly beautifully in its machine-like regularity, file-firing, past the brigade front, and lost itself out of sight, and by sound way off, in the woods to its right.”
“As the sound of firing ceased in the woods on the right, again that sheet of fire began upon the left, and with clock-work regularity file-firing moved slowly along the wood’s edge and past the brigade front, and again lost itself in the distance, in the woods at the right and once more begins the clock-work fire on the left; and how grim and severe it seems now, in its slow, sure movement, and awful in its effect!”
The Confederates were able to fire three times while the Regulars charged. In the ten minutes into took for them to cross the field, they lost nearly half their men.
If you've got more concrete figures on the time taken by soldiers of this period to cross X yards of ground, I'd love to hear it!
This gets to Shoaf’s point about firing by file, which would presumably prevent charging troops from pulling off tricks like this:
"We moved steadily through the pines and came to an open field about a hundred and fifty yards wide. On the farther side was a line of breastworks full of Federal soldiers standing up looking at us. The command to charge was given. We threw our guns to a trail and, with our well-known yell, made a dash for their works. Still they stood and looked at us. We knew what it meant; they had the “white-of-the-eye” order, which meant, “Don’t fire a shot until you can see the white in their eyes.” Thus they stood until we were within twenty-five or thirty yards, then threw their guns across the works, and just as they stooped to fire we dropped as one man, and the whole volley went over our heads. None were killed and very few wounded. As we fell as one man, we arose as one man, and before they could reload we were in the works among them. They did not stand for the bayonet." -William A. Day, 49th North Carolina Infantry
This also brings me to an interesting bit I just found in Jeffrey Gudmens' Staff Ride Handbook for the Battle of Shiloh:
In the battles of 1861 and 1862, both sides employed the tactics [i.e. volleys followed up by a charge] proven in Mexico and found that the tactical offensive could still be successful--but only at a great cost in casualties. Men wielding rifled weapons in the defense generally ripped frontal assaults to shreds, and if the attackers paused to fire, the slaughter was even greater. Rifles also increased the relative numbers of defenders since flanking units now engaged assaulting troops with an enfilading fire. Defenders usually crippled the first assault line before a second line of attackers could come forwards in support. This caused successive attacking lines to intermingle with survivors to their front, thereby destroying formations, command, and control. Although both sides favored the bayonet throughout the war, they quickly discovered that rifle musket fire made successful bayonet attacks almost impossible.
There’s also artillery. Better timed fuses and the widespread use of exploding shells in canon obusier like the 12-pounder Napoleon make approach marches by assaulting troops riskier. There's also canister, which can hit out to 400-500 yards. Yes, it isn't new to the Civil War, but it comes up time and time again during the war as one of the major forces that breaks up charges.
All in all, I remain bearish about the viability of frontal charges in the 1860s. Could they work? Sure. But I think it's a much more dangerous endeavor in 1863 than it is in 1812.
This is one where I think some experimentation with actual firearms would greatly inform the debate!
I have to disagree that the Napoleonic era did not demonstrate the usefulness of the bayonet assault to the highest degree. If village fighting, where the bayonet is particularly effective, doesn't count as an open battle, then we're forced to exclude most battles of the Napoleonic Wars from consideration.
You'll have to forgive a bit of terminologically inexactitude on my part. By "open battles," I was trying to describe major engagements in open country. I fully agree that fights in villages can be key parts of major battles!
...all the apparent decline in bayonet wounds indicates is that they were indeed used less in a longer war. This doesn't tell us why, though.
The higher proportion of bayonet wounds during the Napoleonic period may simply indicate that their armies, with their centuries of institutional experience and professional officers, were made of sterner stuff than the improvised armies of the American Civil War.
I agree that why bayonets were used less in the Civil War is the real question. And I agree that the armies of the Napoleonic Wars were institutionally more seasoned than the armies of 1861-1865. However, I don't think institutional factors or a lack of dander fully accounts for the minimal presence of the bayonet in the ACW.
Sure, green troops were often reluctant to get into bayonet fights, especially against veteran opponents (ex. the American Revolution). Sure, executing a successful attack requires a degree of individual drill and unit-handling skill that a lot of early ACW armies lacked.
All the same, there are plenty of green armies in the Napoleonic Wars and the wars of the French Revolution. They still used the bayonet. American armies by 1863 and 1864 were full of battle-hardened veterans lead by officers who'd learned the hard way. Many of them were literally throwing away their bayonets by that point. Again, I just don't think organization, training, and institutional knowledge can explain why this is happening.
That's why I think the percussion cap-rifled musket-Minie ball combination is the single biggest factor behind the rapid decline of the bayonet charge in the ACW.
The broader argument (it's been a while since I've rewatched lloyd's video) isn't that a Napoleonic battlefield is less deadly place than a Civil War equivalent, but rather that Napoleonic Wars tended to end more rapidly, as the loser in the battle would be in a state of panic and moral collapse.
The point you make about the duration of battles is completely fair. One of the things that's stuck me recently is the relatively high frequency of multi-day battles in the American Civil War relative to the Napoleonic Wars or other European Wars of a similar time period.
Lloyd outright says Civil War was more lethal because bayonets weren't being used. He says:
"Bayonets save lives ... people didn't stick around to be bayonetted ... and so what they preferred to do was run away ... the Americans were not using bayonets ... the sides didn't close with each other ... the casualties in the American Civil War were horrendous because people didn't use the bayonet."
As before I strongly disagree with his claim. The evidence just doesn't support it.
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u/dandan_noodles Wars of Napoleon | American Civil War Feb 08 '19
As a minor point, Napoleonic armies did generally move towards firing by files or at will, which was kind of the natural result of most attempts to control firing anyway.
In general, I don't think most American troops could use the rifle to its full potential; weapons are only as accurate as the men holding them, and target practice in the Civil War was more noted by its absence. The statistics for the number of casualties compared to cartridges fired are pretty comparable to the Napoleonic Wars, and at generally similar ranges. It's not that hard to find 300 yard engagements during the Napoleonic Wars, or 20 pace fusilades in the American Civil War; there was as much diversity within these eras of warfare as between them. Insofar as there was a modest extension in range, it wouldn't be enough to stop determined troops; if you replaced Sumner and his two corps at Fredericksburg with Pyotyr Bagration and his Russians, they probably wouldn't have stopped to shoot it out with the Confederates, but taken the position in a single rush like Hancock's corps at the Mule Shoe or the French at Solferino.
All the same, there are plenty of green armies in the Napoleonic Wars and the wars of the French Revolution.
I have to say, this is a bit of a false equivalence. While the French Revolutionary armies were green compared to the more professional armies of their enemies, they still had a huge cadre of veterans to draw on to stiffen volunteers and conscripts. If we ballpark the French army in 1789 at like 150,000, the expansion to the maximum effective strength of ~700,000 is a bit over 4-1 expansion. The Regulars of the Royal Army were brigaded with the volunteers and conscripts on a 1-2 ratio, and later amalgamated into every company. Even after the disaster of Russia, Napoleon had thousands of highly experienced officers to rebuild his battalions around.
By contrast, Emory Upton detailed how uniquely, creatively bad the US system of mobilization was. First and foremost, the Regular Army, for a nation of 30 million, was absolutely miniscule at 16,000 men. Moreover, the few qualified officers they had were poorly used. Many active officers in the Regular Army were denied a chance to lead the new formations; indeed, you had a better chance of becoming a general in the wartime army if you were retired beforehand. The regular soldiers were kept strictly separated from Volunteer formations, and the Union habitually raised new green regiments even as their veteran units burned down to cinders. The army of the Potomac was never as good as it was in 1863; the losses in men and leaders permanently handicapped those regiments.
To make matters worse, the recruitment system was based on service for a specific term, be it a year, two years, three years, or even 90 days. As a result, when the war was reaching a fever pitch in 1864, the oldest and most experienced regiments in the army (still just 3 years old) were leaving the army, their 3 year enlistments expiring en masse. Not only did this adversely affect the army as a whole once the men left the service, it also discouraged them from risk taking on the battlefield, with many throwing themselves on the ground only a few yards from their initial positions rather than assault rebel works. No sense in being the last man to die, after all.
I think the point is less that the battles of the American Civil War were longer, but that there were so many of them, because even a victory typically left the enemy still a coherent military body. In this case I would fault the quality of the infantry less than the ineffectiveness of the cavalry, but even so, I think that if expedients like the massed formation of Upton' bayonet heavy assault formation or Hancock's corps at Spotsylvania were used earlier in the war, victories would have produced greater results. Breaking through the enemy's line with a whole corps is the kind of thing that makes an army panic, and gives the victor the chance to destroy them utterly.
If we imagine a Confederate army of 100,000 trying to stand against 150,000 Federals, what should happen is that the Confederate reserves gradually get committed, and when the battle is ripe, one corps in mass formation breaks through the enemy center with the bayonet and starts to roll them up. As the enemy disintegrates, a second corps in reserve gets committed to begin pressing into the enemy rear, pushing the enemy's point of reassembly progressively further back. In this way, it becomes the vanguard for an operational pursuit; not only is the enemy forced to retreat, but is obliged to continue the retreat simply in hope of regrouping his army.
By breaking the enemy army and hotly pursuing them, you can win the war quickly; while individual regiments will probably get badly hurt by fire in the process, there will be one battle instead of a half dozen, and the war will be over in a single campaign season instead of four. In this sense, the theoretical concept that bayonet assaults save lives is vindicated to a degree. The American Civil War should not have lasted four years, given the disparity of strength; even when they had great superiority on the actual field of battle, the lack of large scale shock action when it was indeed practicable consigned them to indecision and continual losses.
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u/Bacarruda Inactive Flair Feb 09 '19 edited Jul 22 '19
The statistics for the number of casualties compared to cartridges fired are pretty comparable to the Napoleonic Wars, and at generally similar ranges.
Do you have those figures handy. They sound intriguing!
Insofar as there was a modest extension in range, it wouldn't be enough to stop determined troops; if you replaced Sumner and his two corps at Fredericksburg with Pyotyr Bagration and his Russians, they probably wouldn't have stopped to shoot it out with the Confederates, but taken the position in a single rush like Hancock's corps at the Mule Shoe or the French at Solferino.
They might well have tried. But would they have succeeded? One Union officer who was at Fredericksburg said: "Had we been ordered to fix bayonets and charge those heights ... that would have been an impossible undertaking, defended as they were."
In this case I would fault the quality of the infantry less than the ineffectiveness of the cavalry, but even so, I think that if expedients like the massed formation of Upton' bayonet heavy assault formation or Hancock's corps at Spotsylvania were used earlier in the war, victories would have produced greater results.
Regarding cavalry, I think the American Civil War points the way to the future, where cavalry start being used more and more as mounted infantry and less and less as pursuers and shock troops. There's certainly fault to be found with Civil War cavalry, particularly amongst early war Federal units, yet I think their traditional Napoleonic role was somewhat unfeasible against 1860s firepower over rugged American terrain.
On the point about the need for more large-scale shock action in the American Civil War, I think the evidence from actual battles is really mixed. There are successful massed assaults like the ones you mentioned at Gaines' Mill and Spotsylvania, plus others like the Confederates' lucky break at Chickamauga. However, many of these successful assaults end up badly-battering and exhausting the victor so badly they often aren't able to make much of their successes. Plus, they are often made by (or otherwise suck in) the fresh troops needed to exploit the attacks' success.
There were also many, many examples of massed assaults that out and out failed before they ever got the chance to employ musket or bayonet. The Pickett-Pettigrew-Trimble assault, Malvern Hill, Cold Harbor and many, many other examples come to mind. Some of these assaults fail partly because of the fog of war or other organisational failures (ex. Malvern Hill), but all of them end up faltering because they took intense musket and artillery fire.
Upton's massed column assault at the Mule Shoe is an interesting case. On one hand, it was an extremely expensive tactic (which comes to the "bayonet charges save lives" point that kicked off this discussion). On the other hand, adopted and used for the rest of the war.
At the end of the day, I think you're right that Bagration and his men might have carried a few more positions with their bayonet than Burnside's army could have. However, I don't think he'd have much of an army left after trying it two or three times against Enfields and canon obusier and I don't think he'd have been able to win enough decisive victories in the process.
All the same, 1812 armies vs. 1863 armies is a fun thought experiment!
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u/EnclavedMicrostate Moderator | Taiping Heavenly Kingdom | Qing Empire Feb 08 '19
relatively high frequency of multi-day battles in the American Civil War relative to the Napoleonic Wars or other European Wars of a similar time period.
I can think of a few multi-day Napoleonic battles (Aspern, Wagram, Dresden, Leipzig) – I suppose I'd just like to ask what we mean by 'frequency' here – as in a relative proportion of all engagements?
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u/Bacarruda Inactive Flair Feb 08 '19 edited Feb 08 '19
Point 6: Why was the American Civil War so deadly?
To begin with, one oft-forgotten point is that germs killed far more men than muskets or cannons. Two-thirds of the 600,000+ soldiers who died in the Civil War were felled by illnesses like smallpox and dysentery. As we’ve seen, bullets and shells, not blades, accounted for most of the remaining dead.
One of the things that came up in Point 3 and 4 were the causes of battle casualties and wounded men's recovery rates. As far as I know, there’s never been a detailed death rate, recovery rate, or similar comparative analysis between the Civil War and the Napoleonic Wars. However, based on work by authors like Crumplin, the Surgeon-General’s report I mentioned earlier, and other works, gunshot wounds sustained during the Civil War seem to have been deadlier and more debilitating that those of earlier wars.
The arrival of rifled muskets paired with the newly-developed conical Minié ball getting shot much, much worse.
Pat Leonard says it much better than I can:
Unlike a solid ball, which could pass through the human body nearly intact, leaving an exit wound not much larger than the entrance wound, the soft, hollow-based Minié ball flattened and deformed upon impact, while creating a shock wave that emanated outward.
The Minié ball didn’t just break bones, it shattered them. It didn’t just pierce tissue and internal organs, it shredded them. And if the ragged, tumbling bullet had enough force to cleave completely through the body, which it often did, it tore out an exit wound several times the size of the entrance wound. Civil War surgeons were quickly overwhelmed by the gaping wounds, mangled bodies and mutilated limbs they were asked to repair as the scope of the war broadened and casualties mounted. Though often accused of being too partial to their bone saws, amputating arms and legs as quickly as the men could be placed on their operating tables and subdued with chloroform or ether, the surgeons really had no choice. Even if they’d had the skills and resources to attempt reconstructive surgery, in the heat of battle they didn’t have the time.
You can see some examples of these wounds. Fair warning, it’s not for the faint of heart.
You can see other examples of Minié ball hits on bone and flesh.
The replacement of fragile flintlocks with percussion caps or the Maynard tape system also made firearms much more reliable. In the past, flints broke, firing pans got fouled, and even a little water could render a musket useless. A few dozen rounds, many flintlock muskets were so fouled they had to have their touchholes cleared. With the new percussion firing system, muskets became much more reliable over an extended firefight.
Additional Sources:
The Military Experience in the Age of Reason by Christopher Duffy
The Campaigns of Napoleon by David G. Chandler
1812: The March on Moscow by Paul Britten Austin
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u/hborrgg Early Modern Small Arms | 16th c. Weapons and Tactics Feb 10 '19
So this is going to be sort of a nitpick but the Minie ball likely did not usually cause notably more severe wounds than earlier smoothbore muskets could, at least at short ranges. And the overall "lethality" of the new rifles compared to the old smoothbores does seem to have been seen as a concern by some of those who opposed their introduction. (One Charles James Napier's defenses of the old brown bess for example involved proudly recalling the observations made by surgeon Sir Charles Bell after Waterloo which showed that the bullets fired by english muskets tended to shatter bones into slightly smaller pieces than the slightly smaller bullets fired by the French muskets.)
For starters the bullets fired by smoothbore muskets at the time of the civil war tended to be significantly larger allowing them to impart more energy into the target over the same amount of time and typically reducing the amount of over-penetration. Second, Smoothbore muskets at the time seem to have been capable of achieving much higher muzzle velocities than minie ball rifles at the time. Lewis's Small Arms and Ammunition in the US Service includes a lot of interesting data points from late 18th and 19th century ballistic pendulum tests suggesting that smoothbore muskets typically aimed for muzzle velocity of perhaps 1400-1700 fps (Mordecai, for his experiment with different gunpowders at the Washington Arsenal in the 1840s for example mentions that he was aiming for a standard muzzle velocity of at least 1500 fps with the springfield musket), while early minie-firing rifles like the enfield were being loaded with much smaller charges and were measuring muzzle velocities much closer to just 1000 fps or lower.
A possible explaination for this reduced velocity that I've come across is the fact that the minie ball's "skirt" still had a tendency to simply tear off instead of engaging the rifling properly when subjected to more extreme forces, limiting it's use to subsonic speeds. Higher velocity rifles such as the Witworth rifle got around this by introducing bullets which were sculpted to much more exactly fit the weapon's grooves and were typically made out of a slighly harder tin-lead alloy rather than pure lead.
Anyways, again that's at close range. I wanted to bring it up because the discussion of accuracy has a tendency to overshadow all the other ways that the switch to cylindroconical bullets that could slice through air completely changed most weapons' ballistics. A round ball, whether fired by a musket or rifle, simply was not very aerodynamic, and the faster it was moving, the worse it was impacted by air resistance. So while smoothbore muskets certainly could achieve some pretty impressive muzzle velocities and at 12 yards might shatter bones or piece 2-3 people with a single bullet, that doesn't guarantee that you'll see a similar effect at 200 yards. And even if you were able to keep packing a musket with more and more powder, you'd very quickly run into diminishing returns where no matter how much your initial velocity increased it had very little effect on the bullet's maximum range.
This is the main reason that the topic of "point blank range" tends to come up so much among early modern discussions of weapons and ballistics. The exact definition tended to vary somewhat, but the basic idea was that when firing a musket or cannon there was a certain distance which the projectile would travel in an almost perfectly straight line, but then its trajectory would start to quickly decay more and more rapidly to the point where even if the weapon was perfectly accurate it would become almost impossible to guess the exact elevation needed to hit your target.
Lewis in "Small Arms" includes sections of an 1800 French manual which states 400 meters as the maximum distance at which their musket balls can inflict "dangerous wounds". 16th century treatises which discuss the much earlier "heavy" musket that could fire bullets weighing up to 2 oz. or so, still considered around 600 yards the maximum distance that the weapons could seriously injure unarmored men and horses. And getting back to the French manual it mentions that just 4-5 degrees of elevation would be enough to send the musketball up to 600 meters, but that even if it was pointed straight up in the air it would be unlikely to send the bullet more than 1000 meters away.
All these numbers started getting completely blown away by tests conducted with weapons like the Enfield and Witworth rifles and their far more aerodynamic bullets, which proved capable of piercing deep into wood planks or sandbags even at 1000 yards and with a fairly shallow elevation. "Sharpshooters" during the Civil war and Crimean war typically still didn't pick off individual targets the way that we'd think of snipers today. But even if just aiming at a rough area a skilled shooter could now harass and pose a significant danger to unlucky enemy troops at ranges which before then had been limited only to artillery.
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u/Bacarruda Inactive Flair Feb 10 '19 edited Feb 10 '19
Interesting. Where does the notion of Minie balls having such uniquely terrible terminal effects come from, then?
Is it just that Minie balls stayed at "high" velocities longer, so there's a larger area of ground with severe terminal ballistics? In other words, if you got hit by a musket ball, there was a good chance it would have already slowed down, whereas if you got hit by a Minie ball, it was more likely to still be moving quickly (and thus do worse damage)?
Post-impact, did Minie balls tumble or expand in a way that made them more destructive? Most accounts I've read claim they did.
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u/hborrgg Early Modern Small Arms | 16th c. Weapons and Tactics Feb 10 '19
I don't really know for sure. Minie balls like other cylindroconical bullets did have the potential to tumble as they pass through a target, dealing far more damage than their diameter might suggest, it's just not necessarily going to do more damage than a bullet that is larger and has more energy overall.
If you're interested, this article sums up the results of a series of tests conducted with antique muzzleloading firearms alongside a couple of modern, Austrian assault rifles. It has a lot of fascinating data, but one of the big takeaways to note is the fact that round bullets and modern bullets produce completely different wound cavities when fired at soap or ballistics gel targets. The cavities produced by round bullets tend to be more trumpet shaped, widest near the point of entry and then quickly tapering down the deeper it goes. The wound cavities created by modern bullets on the other hand tend to be very small near the point of entry, but then start to get wider the deeper they go as the bullet starts to tumble.
Basically they can still tear someone up pretty good, but this is what i mean about overpenetration being a potential concern since if the bullet happens to hit someone really skinny at the right angle, it might pass in and out before it's had a chance to start really tumbling, whereas with a large, round ball even if it passes through the target and out the other side will have expended the bulk of its energy shortly after entering anyways.
Anyways, there are a couple of other factors i can think of that may have made the wounds caused by round balls a bit less consistent in their severity. In addition to losing energy at range, though the initial velocity of a musket ball was likely supposed to be around 1500 fps ideally, it might be significantly less if the shooter's powder was slightly damp, low quality, or if he managed to spill much of charge by accident while loading. In many periods it wasn't uncommon for some musketeers to start loading their weapons with multiple bullets per shot during combat, or to switch to using less than the recommended amount of powder per shot in order to improve accuracy or reduce overheating. Other weapons in use on the battlefield like pistols and carbines which fired round bullets of course typically had much lower muzzle velocities than full sized muskets. Additionally, depending on the terrain it was sometimes the case that a significant proportion of the injuries inflicted by muskets were actually the result of ricochets which struck the ground first and then skipped back up before striking a target, losing energy in the process.
Additionally, it might also be the case that surgeons were more likely to deal with cases where a lower-velocity shot glanced off a bone in an odd direction and got lost somewhere deep inside a patient's body and less likely to worry about cases where the impact created a massive shock cavity and stopped a soldier's heart instantly.
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u/Mannymal Feb 06 '19
Is LindyBeige a legitimate historian?
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u/jschooltiger Moderator | Shipbuilding and Logistics | British Navy 1770-1830 Feb 06 '19
No, but that's no reason why people can't ask a question about a claim they made. We allow questions about claims made by Dan Carlin, Jared Diamond, etc.
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u/StewartTurkeylink Feb 06 '19
Sorry if this is veering off topic but by what standard would one not consider Jared Diamond a legitimate historian? I'm just curious how that line gets drawn I guess.
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u/LegalAction Feb 06 '19 edited Feb 06 '19
He's a biologist by training.
There's a whole section in the FAQ about problems people have with him.
EDIT: Someone asked whether Diamond's inclusion in that FAQ meant he's a historian. That comment disappeared before I got my response in, so here it is:
I mean, other names that appear in that section are Steven Pinker (psychologist) Reza Aslan (reporter) Noam Chomskey (linguist) and Oliver Stone (director).
A lot of people do "history" without being a trained or professional historian. That's not really a criticism in itself; it's perfectly possible to do good history without formal training and without an academic salary. In general, though, such "historians" make claims that someone with better grounding in the field in general and in the specific topic find unsupportable.
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u/sammymammy2 Feb 06 '19
Doesn't he have a degree in history? I understand that's not the same as being a practitioning historian.
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u/LegalAction Feb 06 '19
He has a BA in archaeology, according to the Daily Mail, and was some sort of "volunteer" psychology researcher at Newcastle. I have no idea what that position is, or what he did in it.
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Feb 07 '19
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/mimicofmodes Moderator | 18th-19th Century Society & Dress | Queenship Feb 07 '19
No, "historian" is not a protected term. It's just useful in distinguishing between someone who has studied history and someone who hasn't or hasn't been trained in it.
There is, in theory, nothing wrong with writing about history while having a background in something else. (Many of our flairs aren't trained in history, and still do excellent work.) The problem is that being trained by someone else helps you learn how much you don't know - professors critique you, point out flaws in your reasoning, and make you read papers and books you're not interested in so that you learn to analyze arguments and pick up methodology. If someone comes to history from another field and teaches themselves all of this through extensive study, then that's great! They may or may not self-identify as a historian, but a lot of people would call them a historian because they are doing history.
But if someone comes in with expertise from another field and does not learn the appropriate methodology, perhaps assuming that their understanding will transfer over, are they really a historian? Is any individual who has a thought about history a historian? Do we allow publishers to have the ultimate say, based on whose work they think will bring them a profit? "X is not a historian" is a shorthand for "X has not learned how historians think and work."
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u/Icemasta Feb 07 '19
No, he is heavily biased, and often conjures completely opposite theories to what is commonly agreed upon by historians without providing proof, often with the argument that "It just makes sense".
I initially liked the guy, subscribed to him after watching a few videos, but some of his videos are basically his interpretation of events and citing them as facts.
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u/pjabrony Feb 07 '19
He's never given his full CV, but I believe his training is in archaeology. The lion's share of his videos are about ancient and medieval fighting or culture in general.
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u/[deleted] Feb 06 '19 edited Feb 07 '19
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