The American Civil War is noted for the development of the humble infantryman's rifle, which was to play a prominent part in changing the culture and method of warfare in the American Civil War.

This article will examine the change of battlefield tactics due to the improvement of the rifle.

PAST TACTICS

Prior to the Civil War, military thinking was based on drill. This was the method which units used to operate and fight together efficiently. Black (writing on the wars of the eighteenth century) states:

The limited effectiveness of weapons of the period ensured the need, both for troops and warships, to come close to the enemy... The complicated loading drill for the weapons... required the conditioning of soldiers to repeat them under stress. The effect of the weapons depended on the standard of fire discipline.

In other words, a well-drilled unit would not only be efficient maneuvering on the battlefield, but would also be able to deliver well-directed fire toward the enemy.

This policy had worked well in the war with Mexico in 1846. The lessons that had been learned by the military had been that the tactical offensive, based on close-order infantry assaults supported by artillery, won battles [with low casualty rates.] (McPherson, 1988, page 473.)

DEVELOPMENTS

The Mexican War had been fought with smoothbore muskets with an effective range of eighty to one hundred yards (Young, 1981, pages 144-145). This meant armies had to move very close to each other to fire their weapons. "Bayonet charges could succeed because...[the running infantry could cover the last eighty yards during the twenty-five seconds [or longer] it took the defending infantrymen to reload their muskets after a volley." (McPherson, 1988, pages 473-474; Young, 1981, pages 144-145.)

All this was to change in the 1850's with the combination of the rifled musket and the recent invention of the Minie bullet. Prior to this, rifled muskets were difficult and slow to load. Fouling from the black powder would increase as the rifle was continually reloaded, eventually rendering the weapon inoperable. The improvement from the Minie Bullet was in its design. It was conical in shape and hollow at the base. When the rifle was fired, the explosion of the black powder would expand the base of the round to gain an exact fit to the rifling, thus ensuring an accurate fit of the round to the rifle (Wmdrow, 1985[b], page 10).

The effect of this was to increase the range of infantry rifles up to seven hundred and fifty yards (Young, 1981, pages 144-145), which meant the attacker was under fire for a greater period of time and consequently, casualties increased tenfold.

There was one additional development; the use of the percussion cap instead of flints. The advantage of the percussion cap was that it provided a direct spark to the powder charge in the barrel. This resulted in the weapon being less prone to misfires in damp and windy weather, and the use of the cap reduced the need to change the flint after thirty shots (Windrow, 1985[a], pages 12-13; Windrow, 1985[b], pages 10-1 1).

OUTCOME

The increased effectiveness of the rifle was not (in general) appreciated by the Civil War military commanders. An example of this comes from the second battle of Manassas in 1862, when General "Stonewall" Jackson had his eighteen thousand troops sheltered behind a railway embankment. He was opposed on this occasion by General Pope with fifty thousand men. Attacking from the open, Pope sent in the first wave of ten thousand men. They were cut down: the same happened to the subsequent waves. It is estimated that the southern troops opened fire at a distance of half a mile, giving the average infantryman a chance to fire at least ten shots per man. Northern casualties on that day were approximately fourteen thousand killed and wounded. (Dyer, 1985, page 77; Griffith, 1986, page 46; Windrow, 1985[b], pages 16-17.)

The northern generals were not the only ones to make such mistakes. A most celebrated example would be the on third day of Gettysburg, when General Lee sent General Pickett's division of fifteen thousand men over one mile of open ground to attack the northern center. General Pickett's division was eliminated as an effective fighting unit with casualties of sixty percent, though not all due to rifle fire (Eden, 1995, page 71; McPherson, 1988, pages 661-662).

It should be pointed out that despite technical developments, the rifle was still prone to problems, such as fouling from black powder. In addition, there was human error such as troops forgetting to remove their ramrods and firing them. Haythornthwaite (1975) states:

After Gettysburg, of more than 37,000 muskets salvaged, 24,000 were loaded, 18,000 of which had more than one cartridge in the barrel; one guns had twenty-three loads! From these remarkable figures, it has been calculated that thirty-five percent of the troops engaged at Gettysburg were ineffective as far as their firearms were concerned (page 199).

CONSEQUENCES

It could be argued that the effects of the rifle on battlefield tactics were not learned until the later stages in the war; for exarnple, during the siege of Petersburg and Richmond, 1864-1865. The effects of rifle fire demanded extensive use of trenches by both the defender and attacker, with the Union successes achieved by outflanking the position rather than direct frontal assault.

There were those Civil War generals who did appreciate the effect of the rifle and argued for a change of tactics to compensate for such, notably General Longstreet. In addition, it must be argued that there were those generals who were forced to fight as the situation demanded, regardless of the effects: for example, General Grant during the battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor during May and June of 1864. In these battles, Grant was forced to make direct infantry assaults resulting in high infantry casualties, to maintain pressure on Lee's forces with the objective not being terrain, but Lee's army (Dupuy & Dupuy, 1960, pages 313-331).

However, the effectiveness of the rifle lay in the casualty counts. Whereas statistics are not an effective measurement device, they can give an indication. According to Griffilth (1986), the effectiveness of the bayonet and other edged weapons may have been as little as 1.5 percent of all casualties. Artillery could cause between 10 to 50 percent of all casualties (Griffith, pages 41 and 27). This still leaves an estimation of 48.5 percent or more caused by rifle fire. Dyer (1985) is even more precise. He states "out of 144,000 American soldiers for whom the cause of death is known, 108,000 were killed by rifle bullets... 12,500 by shell fragments and 7,000 by swords or bayonets" (page 780).

CONCLUSION

Prior to the American Civil War, the American armies relied on drill and mass fire to achieve their tactical goals. During the war with Mexico in 1848, the success of infantry bayonet charges directed Arnerican military tactics at the start of the American Civil War.

The development of military rifles increased the mortality rates on the battlefields, and required a change in pre-war tactics. However, it was not until late in the war that this was fully understood by the generals.

The conclusion from statistics on battlefield casualties shows the effects of the rifle, which caused at least fifty percent of the casualties. According to Dyer (1985[b]), what this demonstrated was "troops under cover with rifles could stop much larger numbers of infantry attacking across open ground" (page 78).

Related Article

Importation of European Firearms During the Civil War

REFERENCES

Black, J. (1990). Eighteenth Century Europe 1700-1789. Hounds-Mills, England, Macmillan Educational.
Dupuy, R and Dupuy, T. (1960). The Compact History of the Civil War. New York, Warner.
Dyer, G. (1985). War. London, The Bodley Head.
Eden, S. (1995). Military Blunders. New York, Metro.
Griffith, P. (1986). Battle in the Civil War. Camberly, England.
Haythornthwaite, P. (1975). Uniforms of the American Civil War. Dorset, England, Blandford Press.
McPherson, J. (1988). Battle Cry of Freedom: The American Civil War. London, Penguin Books.
Windrow,M.(1985).[a] The British Redcoat of the Napoleonic Wars. Sydney, Franklin Watts.
Windrow, M. (1985).[b] The U.S. Civil War Rifleman. Sydney, Franklin Watts.
Young, P. (1981). The Fighting Man from Alexander the Great's Army to the Present Day. London, Orbis.

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