Battle Tactics of the Civil War, Paddy Griffiths, Yale University Press, 2001

This book aggravated me, and it took me awhile to realize why.  While Paddy Griffiths has unassailable credentials as a military historian (among other things, he lectures at Sandhurst) and has published extensively on the Napoleonic Wars, I found much of this book to consist of opinions and generalizations that seemed unsupported by the facts, both as he presented them, or as the careful student of the civil war will find in original sources.

It begins with the premise of the book.  The Civil War, Griffiths tells us, contrary to received wisdom, was not the first modern war but the last Napoleonic War.  This sounds intriguing, but what exactly does he mean, either by “modern” or “Napoleonic”?  During the centennial, when I like many other baby boomers played with plastic Civil War soldiers and read enough children’s books about the war to horrify the contemporary parent, “modern” meant like World War I – the civil war had railroads, wire entanglements (though admittedly not barbed), machine guns (though largely ineffective), ironclad ships, etc.  Today, in the postmodern  era of the Global War on Terror, with a greater appearance of conflict in the media than on the ground, this conception of “modern” seems quaint.  But Griffiths seems to have held on to it, if only as a straw man.  Griffiths’ conception of “Napoleonic” may prove equally stretched, as the term in fact applies to a whole era, but since he doesn’t really define it, it hardly matters.

In its details the book also seems to reflect a superficial reading of the Civil War, with analyses somewhat forced into service of the vague theme.  The best way to discuss this, I think, is to focus on the major conclusions:

“First there is the idea that the rifle musket revolutionised tactics.  This is demonstrably false...”

Part of this statement rests on Griffiths’ conclusion that the Enfields and Springfields of the 1860s were no more effective than the Brown Bess smoothbore of Wellington’s troops.  This is not a mere technical detail but fundamental.  The majority of troops in both wars – the vast majority in the Civil War – were infantry, so their armament governed what happened on the battlefield.  

To make his point, Griffiths compares the ranges at which fire was opened in an “admittedly somewhat random” sample of Civil War reports, to an assumed range of 200 yards for the Brown Bess.   This understates the deadly range of the rifle-musket and grossly overstates that of the Brown Bess.   For the latter, we can take Colonel Hanger’s comment in 1814 that “a soldier must be very unfortunate indeed who shall be wounded by a common musket at 150 yards provided his antagonist aims at him: and as to firing at a man at 200 yards with a common musket you may as well fire at the moon . . .”  

While a man might get killed by the Brown Bess at 200 yards, he might also get killed by a Springfield at 600.  In neither case does the opponent have to aim – the unaimed or mis-aimed balls of thousands of men firing will create a “killing zone” (to borrow a phrase from John Keegan), which is effectively where the actual battle takes place.  The rifle-musket’s killing zone is thus many times the size of the smoothbore’s.  With other key factors (such as the speed of men and horses, and the vulnerability of their flesh to lead) being equal, this in itself will effect a significant change.  Griffiths is correct in that the rifle musket by no means lived up to the expectations of some pre-war writers who saw artillery crews being picked off at ranges over 500 yards.  But there were also pre-war writers who thought that buck and ball was good enough – Griffiths may agree with them, but the soldiers, generals, and even Ordnance Department officials of the time did not.  By the time of the Mexican War the Brown Bess was outclassed by the better machined flintlocks of the American regulars; to assume its equivalence to percussion rifled weapons requires a blind eye and a half.

In fact, for every “snippet” describing fire at Brown Bess range, Griffiths might have found several describing the opposite, had he looked.  He could have started with “How They Fight” in G. A. Sala’s My Diary in America in the Midst of War.  Sala, who spoke to officers of the Army of the Potomac at Brandy Station in the winter of 1864, particularly notes the range at which troops opened fire:  

Indeed, the belligerents very seldom see each other, much less look “at the whites of their eyes.”  I asked an officer who had been all through the Potomac campaigns what the Confeds were like.  “Well,” he says, “I’ve seen plenty of them dead; but alive and in masses, all I can say is that they have a kind of warm dust colour.”

Griffiths is correct that artillery operated at cannister range despite the increased range of the rifle, but to do this he has to ignore the effect of the artillery’s own increase in mobility and lethality over the Napoleonic period.  This had become evident by the battle of Palo Alto and only increased from there, which surely played some role in their survivability.  

Griffiths claims that cavalry had decisive impact on the battlefield later in the war, but he seems to base this on Sheridan’s performances in the Valley and in the Appomattox Campaign, which, to say the least, did not present the typical wartime challenges of the mounted arm, if only because of the north’s preponderance of numbers and the south’s exhaustion in those two campaigns.  For the rest of the war he laments the absence of the mounted squadrons of a Murat and attributes this mainly to “doctrinal resistance” – to do otherwise might require him to rethink his conclusions about terrain and weapons – in particular the rifle musket.

Improved weaponry did not force the armies to dig fortifications, but fashion and book-learning did.

Field fortifications, including hasty entrenchments, begin to dominate the civil war battlefield in 1864.  They do not appear as major factors at either battle of Bull Run, or Shiloh, or Antietam, or Gettysburg, although troops did take advantage of available cover like sunken roads.  The impression I get from reading actual accounts of civil war battles by the soldiers that fought them – and from such other period accounts as Sala’s – is that soldiers began to dig in not as a result of increased study over the winter months, but because they were getting slaughtered in the open field.  

The idea that a mid- to late-war development resulted from a prewar academic bias beggars logic as well as history.

Shock tactics lay at the root of Hardee’s drill manual . . . Unfortunately, however, they were not properly disseminated . . .

Griffiths has a tendency to blame the officers and soldiers of the civil war for not being better at their jobs while at the same time not showing that he knows even as much as they.  Hardee’s drill manual is just that – a drill manual.  It shows how to move troops and how to employ, as effectively as possible, the available killing technology of the infantryman.  Since it was oriented toward the new rifle, it’s hard to say that shock was the main point.  

It’s odd that Griffiths would attribute this aim to Hardee when, in his earlier discussions, he criticizes the drill manuals for not  telling officers how to fight battles.  But the greater picture is not the province of drill manuals.  Advice on fighting battles comes in other handbooks, from Scott’s dictionary to Craighill’s guide.  Nor was dissemination an issue.  Whatever the strong or weak points of the manuals, every officer got one, and constant drill ensured that they read them.  

There must then be some other reason for the apparent indecision of battles...

At the end of the day, however, the indecisive outcome of so many Civil War battles must be put down to the individual personalities of the generals...

So this is the reason.  Despite a few aggressive generals (Griffiths includes Burnside in the pantheon with Lee, Jackson, and Hood), most preferred “a more tentative and sedate style of war.”  It seems odd that the many different personalities of Civil War generals would all contribute to the single outcome of a “tentative and sedate style.”  I think much of the problem might be solved for Griffiths if he could accept the fact that a rifle musket bullet could reach further and hit harder than that of a Brown Bess, and that this is hardly a matter of “style.”

In many respects the Civil War was comparable in scale to the European warfare of almost any four-year period of Napoleon’s career.

And in many respects, not.  A better conclusion comes I think from Brigadier-General Sir James E. Edmonds and W. Birkbeck Woods’  The Civil War in the United States: “The conquest of such a vast expanse of territory, held by a nation in arms, has no parallel in history.”

What Edmonds and Woods observed in 1905, and Griffiths failed to see in 1986, is that the Civil War saw sustained operations on a continental scale rather than individual armies marching, however far, to one or a few pitched battles that resolved the campaign.  Nothing in the Napoleonic era, for example, comes close to the sustained attrition of weeks on the Overland Campaign, with reinforcements and resupply constantly fed in by rail, followed directly by further months of trench warfare around Richmond and Petersburg.  With the possible exception of the siege of Paris in 1871, nothing approached that in European warfare until 1914.

Other examples of questionable conclusions occur throughout, but a full treatment of the defects of Griffiths’ book would require as many pages as the original.  He has the merit of addressing the features of the Civil War battlefield in detail, but the defect of seeing them solely in the light of an earlier conflict fought with more primitive technology.

In addition to specific problems with the work, I had some more general concerns.  The bibliography consists predominantly of secondary sources, so Griffiths in effect feeds us a distillation of various previous distillations.  Moreover, some of the primary sources – such as Company Aytch and Reluctant Rebel – have little useful information for a serious study of tactics (Watkins tends to make things up and Patrick avoided the battlefield as much as humanly possible).  

Griffiths’ analyses of tactical actions relies on a handful of regimental histories and similar works – this may have seemed adequate in 1986 when the book first came out, but not now when we have the entire War of the Rebellion available in searchable form online, as well as the cornucopia of original sources provided by Google Books.  Griffiths’ conclusions on the ranges of infantry fire, to take an example already cited, would in his own words require “a close analysis of OR,” which he has not attempted.  He repeatedly opens his chapters with quotes from The Red Badge of Courage, mistaking the after-the-fact affectation of literary realism for the real thing.  He writes an entire chapter on the use of cavalry in the war without mentioning Forrest and without examining Wilson, dismissing the latter’s Selma campaign as “a massive chevauchee;” to reach such conclusions he relies on one work (Starr’s The Union Cavalry in the Civil War – a secondary source) for twenty of his thirty-two footnotes.

On the whole, by calling the Civil War “the last of the Napoleonic Wars” while noting the absence of such Napoleonic features as massed cavalry charges, grand batteries, and decisive engagements on the order of Austerlitz and Waterloo, Griffiths seems to conclude that it was a Napoleonic War fought poorly.  That seems a shame, because such a perspective stands in the way of seeing the war for what it actually was – perhaps not “modern” in any sense meaningful to us now, but a conflict on its own right with its own unique contribution to the history of warfare.  

There’s much of interest in this book, but that has everything to do with the subject and little to do with the author’s superficial analysis of inadequate sources in support of a weak hypothesis.

I've not read Griffith but I've heard similar complaints about many of his off the cuff remarks. I'll not try and defend the guy but perhaps play a little devil's advocate.

-I've read a number of historians that feel as though "First Modern War" might be a bit presumptuous. Wire entanglements were an improvement on battlefield obstacles, but they were only improvements and not something stand-alone new. Breechloaders, repeaters, trenches, railroads, telegraph lines, rifled muskets and cannons, observation balloons, photography were all used in the Crimean War. Submersibles, mines, ironclads, had all been around for decades or even centuries. Americans weren't the first to use any of these things.

-Often, when modern historians think of Napoleonic warfare, they jump to 1804 and Napoleon I (short guy, hand in his shirt) when a contemporary writer after 1848 was more likely thinking of Louis Napoleon III (invented the Napoleon gun). This often causes some of the confusion.

-The rifled musket had the potential of being a much more deadly weapon than its smoothbore cousin, but generally the man holding the gun wasn't all that well trained. There are many, many, many documented cases of effective long-range shooting. Snipers taking out officers, skirmishers, and artillery crew and horses was an established tactic on both sides but the reality is that the average Johnny or Billy wasn't a crack shot. The problem, as I understand it, with the rifled musket firing a minie ball is that with the increased friction of a tight fit(caused by the expansion of the round, allowing the rifling to do its work) made for a slower muzzle velocity. This decreased velocity meant a less flat trajectory. With this rainbow-ached trajectory, a shooter now needs to be able to more accurately estimate distance and compensate for it. A minie ball tends to plunge more. This means that you've got to be very accurate, especially when you consider that the enemy formation provides a great big wide target, it is actually quite thin, typically only two guys deep. The analogy I like to think of is that if you give me the world's fastest sailing yacht, I still won't be able to race in the America's cup because I'm not good enough to handle it to its full potential. Poor training, low visibility, jostling from the troops around you, open sights, and uneven ground all conspired against marksmanship.

-Yeah, I got no defense for Griffith if he doesn't bring up how effective early Southern cavalry was and doesn't mention guys like N.B. Forrest. Neither will I try and understand his logic about fortification. Lee was using it early after he took command in the field. The Richmond papers called him the King of Spades. Lastly, a weak usage of sources is typically the sign of trade histories. That doesn't mean that they are necessarily bad, but it often shows a lack of ability to stand up to academic rigor.

Again, I'm not trying to defend the guy just give you something to think about with a few of his arguments.

We don't really disagree.  I think the whole "first modern war" label is now itself a historical artifact.  It might have had a certain resonance in the 1960's still, but warfare has changed a lot in the last few decades.  Yet that just makes it more of a straw man for Griffiths.

It's also definitely legit to challenge certain assumptions about the superiority of the rifle-musket, but Griffiths goes way too far.  Even if you limit the effective aimed range to 200 yards, it's still far more effective than a Brown Bess or its French equivalent.  

But the ability of the ball to travel and still cause damage can't be ignored.  If you look up "Arms, Small" in Scott's Military Dictionary you get some interesting ballistics tables.  They describe the effect of wind, penetration, and other characteristics of rifle-musket bullets, but also note:   "The elongated musket bullets do not cease to ricochet on level ground, at the distance of 1,000 yards."  So even if the fire is plunging and not directly hitting the target, the round ricocheting along the ground can take someone out. Aimed fire has seldom been decisive in battle; it's the size and intensity of the "killing zone" that matters.  For rifle-muskets, that zone was much, much deeper than for the Brown Bess.

Here's a fuller descrïption of the resulting type of combat, according to Sala, which expands on my earlier quote and again reflects a style of warfare altogether different from that of Napoleon I (as for the style of Napoleon III, he's basically contemporary with the Civil War):

"...One general has a notion that his adversary has massed large bodies of troops in a certain direction.  His big guns thunder for a while in that direction, and then he hurls huge masses of his own troops against where the enemy is supposed to be.
"They advance till they find the fire from the opposite but invisible side too hot for them.  Then they retreat, slowly or quickly, in good or bad order, as their pluck and stamina may be strong or feeble.  As the sound of their firing grows fainter, the opposite and still invisible foe advance.  The next day you read in the newspapers that the Federals drove the Confederates, or vice versa, three miles.  “Being driven” implies the idea of one man running away as fast as his legs can carry him from the hot pursuit of another man; for example, Horace Vernet’s woodcut of Napoleon scampering away at Toulon from and English sailor, who at last gives up the pursuit, but bestows on him a parting lunge with his bayonet, which wounds him in the thigh, conveys a substantial idea of “driving.”  But could any man, even with half a dozen pairs of air-pumps and as many pairs of bag-pipes for lungs, be “driven” three miles?  A centipede couldn’t do it:  Deerfoot would be winded at it; the steam leg would break down at it.  So is it with the colloquialism, “The enemy are whipped handsomely.”  The pugilistic gentlemen who keep the ring at prize fights manage to get a pretty good purchase with their gutta-percha whips, and a Cossack can reach far over the heads of a crowd with his sinuous lash; but it is difficult to realise the possibility of  “whipping” an enemy  whom you don’t see, and who is but just within rifle range.  It would be quite safe to say that, save in isolated skirmishes, the Federals and Confederates have not crossed bayonets, nor the officers used their swords, half a dozen times within the last four years.  Indeed, the belligerents very seldom see each other, much less look “at the whites of their eyes.”  I asked an officer who had been all through the Potomac campaigns what the Confeds were like.  “Well,” he says, “I’ve seen plenty of them dead; but alive and in masses, all I can say is that they have a kind of warm dust colour.”

I just read a book titled "The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat, reality and Myth" by Earl J. Hess. He pretty much came up with the same conclusions as Griffith. The pure fact of the matter is that while the new rifle muskets were quite accurate, the folks shooting them weren't. Lack of training and range estimation problems were the major issues when using the rifle muskets. According to Hess's findings, most combat took place at ranges of 50 to 150 yards. At those ranges a .69 cal. smooth bore is quite acceptable and may actually be more accurate, since they shoot flatter.  

Hess did say that the rifle muskets did increase the importance of skirmishing and introduced organized snipers on the battlefield. The Civil War "Sharpshooters" were indeed expert in estimating ranges. (Sniper is a post-War term.)

I don't argue about the accuracy of the individual soldier -- S.L.A. Marshall would not only agree, but add that there was a problem in his day in getting them to shoot at all.  I do argue that the fact that the bullet traveled further and hit harder made a huge difference in tactics.  There's a reason that civil war battles don't look very "Napoleonic" after the first year or so (if they did at all), and that has a lot to do with how far the metal flew.  By not acknowledging that, Griffiths is stuck trying to explain the difference between Wagram and Chickamauga as a matter of doctrine.  I suspect soldiers have more immediate influences.

Sitting here waiting on the next rendition of Mother Nature to arrive, it might be of passing interest to mention that no matter how sophisticated even the latest and greatest shoulder fired weapons are there is a limitation to aimed fire with open sights.  The limitation (275 - 300 yard) does not have any biases as far as weapons or eras in which those weapons were used.  Beyond 300 yards the sights are larger than the target.  

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Michael Schaffner wrote :  I suspect soldiers have more immediate influences.

Mike,

I think you hit the nail on the head here. The changes in defensive tactics took place because American soldiers were both smarter and less displined than their European counterparts. With a few exceptions, offensive tactics changed very little during the War. It was still Hi-Diddle-Diddle, straight up the middle, in linear massed formations. Franklin and Cold Harbor, being classic, late War, examples. There were some original thinkers, like Emory Upton and his attack by column, at the Mule Shoe, during Spotsylvania, but this was very much the exception to the rule.

The pure fact of the matter is the maxium effective range of any military rifle, with iron sights, is only about 300 yards. Anybody who has tried to hit the 300 meter pop-up target on a modern military rifle range knows exactly what I'm talking about. The man-sized target only appears to be about 1/8" tall at that range. Interestingly enough, In Hess's book, the longest range reported was 300 yards at Shiloh. The range of initial fire actually declined as the War went on. By 1864, the defenders were usually waiting until the attackers were between 30 and 100 yards away before opening fire, although there were exceptions.

Based on the Ordnance Department's accuracy experiments in February 1860, at the ranges reported, the .69 smooth bore musket was every bit as accurate as the .58 rifle.  

--Last edited by Bill on 2009-11-10 14:40:40 --

True, though I think you might really have meant to say "maximum accurate" range, rather than "maximum effective" range.  A ball will take someone out well beyond the range at which someone can reliably nail a bullseye.  A battalion of 300 men putting out 450 rounds a minute from minie rifles are the functional equivalent of a Maxim gun.  They don't have to be terribly accurate to create a killing zone a few hundred yards deep.  

For quite some time I heard "experts" talk about the accuracy of civil war sharpshooters at long range.  I always had my doubts, but really concluded they were all wet after reading two things.  The first was John Ratcliffe Chapman's "Advice to Young Marksmen" (1846), which gave a vivid picture of how artificial the set up was for any target shooting beyond 40 rods, and the second was, of all things, an article in "Field and Stream" in which three editors took turns potting away at a deer decoy with their weapon of choice at 300+ yards.  

If they were having trouble at that range, I thought, Sedgewick was almost certainly not shot by whoever thought they were aiming at him.

So accuracy wasn't the main difference from Napoleonic warfare.  Getting smacked by overs and riccochets from all over was something new.  And though the basic attack style remained a
matter of physically trying to close with the bayonet, it evolved from the Napoleonic close columns of companies tromping up to squares and lines, a la the Guard at Waterloo.  In the early war you have close columns of companies deploying to lines, firing, then (if they drove the enemy far enough back) reforming and repeating the process till they were stopped or won -- there was already a prejudice in favor of fire over melee.  By mid-war tactics seem to have further evolved to forming lines of battle as soon as troops got within long range -- I think Pickett's charge was executed as successive lines of battle (like Coggins shows in his book) rather than columns.  By late war, say '64, the lines of battle have themselves become extended into what Sherman called in his memoirs a heavy skirmish line.

Those are general tendencies, but I think it's fair to say that, apart from the overwhelming reliance on black powder, weapons had changed over the previous fifty years, and tactics had changed to match (Napoleon didn't use Hardee's).  Tactics changed even further during the war itself, which we can see in Morris's school of the battalion and first person accounts of single rank lines of battle.

So Griffiths picks a provocative thesis, which has the benefit of getting people to ask themselves what really did happen on the civil war battlefield.  But it's fundamentally dishonest because he cherry picks his accounts of battles and tries to explain away the obvious problems (e.g., why didn't American cavalry attack in massed squadrons with the saber and what was all that digging about anyway?) with really silly answers (um, doctrine and personality).

Lurking behind all this chatter on my part, though, are some really basic questions.  What weapon would I have rather carried into the fight -- a Brown Bess or a '61 Springfield?  And, given my choice, which set of tactics would I want my officers to have read?  My own answers to those questions reinforced my suspicions about Griffiths' analyses.

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Michael Schaffner wrote : Lurking behind all this chatter on my part, though, are some really basic questions.  What weapon would I have rather carried into the fight -- a Brown Bess or a '61 Springfield?  And, given my choice, which set of tactics would I want my officers to have read?  My own answers to those questions reinforced my suspicions about Griffiths' analyses.

Mike,

Based on both my experience in the modern Army and reading about the average ranges where firing was initiated during the Civil War, my first choice would have been a Spencer repeater. My second choice would have been a M-1842 smooth bore, firing Buck & Ball ammo.

"Maximum Effective Range" is a military term for the possiblity of having a snow ball's chance in hell of actually hitting what you're shooting at. Soldiers carry a finite amount of ammumition. It's not a good plan to waste it, firing at targets you can't hit.

From anything I've read, the Civil War soldiers usually held their fire until the the enemy was in reasonably close range. At that point, a volly would be fired for the maxium shock effect. The next order would be "Fire By File". After Mid-War, in most cases, the defense would be using some form of cover, from stone walls, to fixed earth works. It was said the Army of Northern Virginia could construct impregnable earth works in a day.

None of this isn't to say there was lots of lead flying around at extreme ranges. You had the Sharpshooters, who were aiming, and the guys in line, who weren't.    

Nothing to see here, citizens. Move along, move along now.



 

--Last edited by Private Glover on 2009-11-10 15:08:03 --

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Private Glover wrote : I don't mean to be a nit-picker but that was Emory Upton. I just finished reading a book about him this morning.

Mel,

My post has been corrected. Thanks for catching my mistake.  

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Bill wrote :   ...there was lots of lead flying around at extreme ranges.

This reference toward lots of lead flying reminded me of a practice used on occasions back some 39 years ago.  In Vietnam there was a tactic where the first section of two sections would put rifle and machine gun fire onto the enemy until they were suppressed behind whatever cover was available.  Upon on the command “Lift and shift” the section that had not been providing the suppressive fire on the enemy would maneuver so they could come in contact with them.  While this maneuvering was underway by the second section the first section would continue their firing, but in another direction.  The sound of the firing was sufficient to keep the enemy forces fixed behind their cover while they were being maneuvered against.  All of this was well and good until the same tactic was used against us.

The point being, the side with the highest volume of fire, aimed or not, seems to have an advantage--no matter in which era.  Once exposed to incoming hostile fire, the sound of it is something never forgotten and is definitely perceived as threatening.

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Curtis Makamson wrote :   The point being, the side with the highest volume of fire, aimed or not, seems to have an advantage--no matter in which era.  Once exposed to incoming hostile fire, the sound of it is something never forgotten and is definitely perceived as threatening.

Curtis,

There were some major differences in Civil War and Viet Nam Combat. A Civil War soldier would carry between 40 and 60 rounds, while the combat load in my unit was 396 rounds. (22 magazines with 18 rounds per magazine) Not to mention the thousands of rounds carried for the M-60's. That allowed for a lot more lead slinging.

I do agree about the importance of gaining fire superiority. That's why Civil War units waited until the enemy was in close range before firing a volley.

Funny, I'd bet the average ranges in Viet Nam were even shorter then the norm during the Civil War.

Bill, there are a lot of very dramatic accounts of units opening up at close range during the civil war, but there are also accounts that reinforce Sala's impression.  I get the impression that officers had to fight the men's desire to open up as soon as they could to keep the enemy as far away as possible.

But it's not something we can really prove either way until we do the more comprehensive "snippeting" that Griffiths admitted he hadn't done.  I do continue to think that the physical characteristics of the weapon made a difference, but maybe we should discuss the finer points of the argument over a beer the next time we see each other.  

Curtis, that does bring back memories.  I was just a young dependent during the Vietnam War, but I remember reading an army publication that discussed "low performance platoons."  These were units that, generally, just weren't firing enough.  The answer, it seemed, was to get people to open up without waiting for a specific target.  It struck me at the time how much like volley fire that seemed, at least conceptually.  It kind of reminded me of the 7 Years War.

On the other hand, I wouldn't say that made Vietnam the last war of the era of Frederick the Great