Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

in which the term is understood in the regular armies of Europe,” admitted John William Jones, a Southern Baptist chaplain, “we really had no discipline.” At his worst, the volunteer officer could be fully as ignorant and irresponsible as the men he was supposed to command. Thomas Hyde began the war as an officer by “drilling as much as possible by day and studying by candle light in the evenings.” Charles Wainwright was more exasperated at the officers the volunteers elected than at the volunteers themselves. “Their orders come out slow and drawling, then they wait patiently to see them obeyed in a laggard manner, instead of making the men jump to it sharp. …” This was because, as Wainwright realized, the officers had “raised their own men and known most of them in civil life.” A Northern missionary at Port Royal was shocked to see “officers and men… on terms of perfect equality socially” in the Union army. “… Off duty they drink together, go arm in arm about the town, call each other by the first name, in a way that startles an Eastern man.”30

Time and the Confederate and Federal governments eventually weeded out the worst of the incompetent officers. The Federal army imposed qualifying exams for commissioned officers after First Bull Run, and the Confederacy followed in 1862. The qualifying exams were woefully easy to pass, but even so, some were not able to do so. Dillon Bridges of the 13th Indiana Cavalry was examined by a three-man board after being elected captain of Company M in 1864 and failed to answer some of the most obvious of the thirty-nine questions on the exam:

Q. How are battalions placed?

A. Can’t tell. …

Q. Moving in column of fours and you wish to form platoons, what command?

A. Can’t tell. …

Q. What course would you pursue in sending or receiving a flag of truce?

A. I do not know. …

Q. Have you ever studied the tactics or Army regulations?

A. Not half an hour. All I have learned has been from observation.

Bridges was eventually prevailed upon to resign his captaincy. Company M’s second lieutenant, John A. Chapman, who confessed that he was “not capable of standing an examination,” was passed by the examining board after a few perfunctory questions about picket duty.31

Even if Dillon Bridges had studied “the tactics or Army regulations,” none of that might have made him a more effective officer. The prevailing tactics books—by Winfield Scott, William Hardee, and, after 1862, Silas Casey’s System of Infantry Tactics—were long on the technicalities of drill, such as basic weapons handling and movement in and out of formations, but painfully short on real instruction for combat. Given the inexperience of the average volunteer officer, the limitations of the tactics books, and the disposition of the handful of available regular army officers toward a war of fortification and maneuver, the result for the average soldier was that drill became his training for realities of actual battlefield fighting. One Ohio colonel, Jacob Ammen, recorded how he handled and instructed both his volunteer officers and men: “Daily drills—daily recitations in tactics—take the starch out of some, and others are learning fast. And now I superintend—select an officer to drill the others in the morning, one squad drill, company drill, and Battalion drill in the afternoon. … I drill the sergeants daily, in length of step, time and preserving distance.”

All of this was effective for bringing large and unwieldy bodies of men to the battlefield itself, but it generally turned out to be useless once the shooting started, especially as units lost cohesion and started to take casualties. When the 24th Michigan came under fire for the first time in December 1862, the regiment’s colonel could think of nothing better at that moment to steady his men than to put them through the manual of arms. “His sonorous orders: ‘Attention, battalion! Right dress! Front! Support arms…’ were heard over the field, and with all the precision of a parade, the orders were obeyed… while the air was torn with cannon balls and the very hills seemed to rock with the reverberations.” It made a grand sight, but it was also a telling testimony to the real inability most Civil War officers suffered in not knowing how to direct their men under the terrifying conditions of real combat. “Instead of practising the men in the simple flank and line movements used in battle, or at targets, or in estimating distances,” complained Union artilleryman Frank Wilkeson, “they were marched to and fro and made to perform displayful evolutions,” which would have been commendable if war had been a “competitive drill for a valuable, and maybe, sacred prize,” but which were worse than useless “in a rugged, wooded country where the clearings were surrounded by heavy forests… and where practice and practice and still more practice in estimating distances was required, if we were to fire accurately and effectively.”32

The most important result of this preoccupation with drill was that few units, either North or South, were actually prepared to carry an attack forward under fire. Captain Edward Hewett, a British observer from the Royal Engineers, was annoyed to find that “neither side can be manoeuvred under fire, and this is about the secret of the whole present American War.” The volunteers can “be brought under fire, and when there will stand well,” but they were too undertrained “either in morale or field movements to advance, change position or retire—The moment they have to manoeuvre, they get into confusion and break, this their own officers admit. …”

Their own officers did admit it. “It is astonishing how soon, and by what slight causes, regularity of formation and movement are lost in actual battle,” remembered David L. Thompson of the 9th New York. “Disintegration begins with the first shot. To the book-soldier all order seems destroyed, months of drill apparently going for nothing in a few minutes.” For one thing, the American terrain, with its thick woods and comparatively poor system of internal