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MACHINES OF WAR
by William Marvel
War tends to bring out the inventiveness of those whose countries
fight, and the American Civil War was no exception. Many of today's
sophisticated weapons and tools of war are the direct descendants of
inventions that saw their first successful employment in the Civil
War.
One of the earliest innovations employed by either side was the
observation balloon. Balloons had seen some limited use in Europe a
couple of generations earlier, but they had not caught on. As early as
the spring of 1861 Thaddeus S. C. Lowe convinced the Federal government
to test the potential of his hydrogen balloon, and on June 18 he
ascended from the grounds of the Smithsonian Institution and relayed his
observations to the ground by telegraph. The War Department hired him,
and by November his apparatus was operating on the Potomac River from
the deck of a coal barge towed by a steam tug. This was not the earliest
employment of such an aircraft carrier, though, for the U.S. steamer
Fanny carried a balloon within sight of Norfolk the previous August. The
Confederates also used a ship board balloon during the Seven Days'
campaign in 1862, watching Federal forces while Lowe's aeronauts
observed from the opposite side.
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SKETCH OF FEDERAL OBSERVATION BALLOON SCOUTING REBEL POSITIONS. (LC)
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The Civil War saw the introduction of land mines, hand grenades, and
battlefield telegraphs, but the most significant efforts went into the
production of firearms: the rifles that helped win this war changed the
face of warfare forever. President Lincoln sometimes tested new weapons
himself, and in the summer of 1861 he authorized two regiments of
sharpshooters armed with breechloading rifles: these could be fired much
more quickly than the muzzle-loading standbys, and shorter
breech-loaders proved especially useful for cavalry. Most of the
breech-loaders fired a metallic cartridge, which in turn allowed for the
development of repeating rifles.
The most popular repeater was the Spencer, which was fed through a
tubular magazine inserted in the stock. With a Spencer carbine, a
horseman could fire seven rounds as quickly as he could cock the hammer
and pull the trigger, and he could reload in less time than it took his
enemy to cram a charge down the barrel of a rifle. The less common
Henry, a lever-action rifle produced by the company that became
Winchester, could fire sixteen rounds without reloading.
In 1862 Richard Gatling produced a carriage-mounted gun with several
revolving barrels. Bullets were fed through a hopper atop the gun, and
as the gunner turned a handcrank the barrels moved into place like the
chambers of a revolver, The Gatling gun could fire 150 rounds a minute,
and the multiple barrels allowed a couple of seconds for each one to
cool before it was fired again. The same system was employed in the
miniguns of Vietnam renown.
The first periscope was patented in 1864. It was used by infantry
officers in their trenches, rather than by naval forces, but naval
warfare was likewise transformed by Civil War innovations. Most
obviously, the meeting of the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia sounded
the death knell of wooden warships. Both sides came to rely more on
ironclads thereafter, though Southern shipbuilders had to improvise
cumbersome rams from railroad iron by the waning months of the war. With
iron ships came other inventions, like the revolving turret, which
remains in use at sea today.
While impractical submarines had been used as early as the American
Revolution, the first ship sunk by one was the USS Housatonic, which
went to the bottom on February 17, 1864, off Charleston, With her went
the hand-propelled Confederate submarine Hunley, which had been
extemporized from two steam boilers. Sailors also learned to fear
underwater mines for the first time in history, and the ironclad Federal
gunboat Cairo became the first victim of one on December 12, 1862, in
the Yazoo River, near Vicksburg.
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THE FEDERAL BOMBARDMENT OF FORT PULASKI WITH LONG RANGE GUNS ENDED
FORTIFICATION ARCHITECTURE AS THE WORLD HAD KNOWN IT. (NPS)
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Some of the Civil War's technological developments were devoted to
the amelioration of war's effects. The first soldier to lose a limb in
battle—a Confederate wounded on June 3, 1861—used barrel
staves and some common hardware to fashion an ingenious artificial leg,
and he spent the rest of his life manufacturing prostheses based on his
original design. The first orthopedic hospital opened in New York City
on May 1, 1863, at least partly to respond to the sheer mass of human
wreckage from the battlefield. Perhaps with an idea of saving nearby
Fort Monroe in case it were attacked with incendiary shells, the
postmaster at Old Point Comfort, Virginia, invented the first fire
extinguisher in 1863.
Industrial development accelerated as a result of wartime demands.
The first Bessemer steel converter went into commercial production in
Michigan in 1864, and the first steel railroad track was laid in
Pennsylvania that same year. Heavy troop and freight traffic led to the
installation of the first railroad signal system between Philadelphia
and Trenton in 1863, The first oil pipeline was completed in 1863, and a
year later came oil tank cars.
After 1865, armies would not march abreast at an enemy, fire a
volley, and charge with the bayonet. Never again would the crews of
powerful ships enjoy complete security. In four brutal years,
technological development had advanced decades, and the war that changed
America changed the world.
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Indeed, by 1864 it was that determination to press on, despite
setbacks or dangers, that came to characterize the Union war effort,
thanks chiefly to Grant. In March Lincoln brought him to the East and
made him general-in-chief of all Union armies, charged to direct a
coordinated offensive from Virginia to the Mississippi and beyond. It
would be the first time that a single guiding hand exerted absolute
control over the several armies wearing the blue, and Lincoln now felt
convinced that in Grant he had the man with the right grip. If he could
keep all Confederates fully engaged on all fronts, no more
reinforcements could move from one army to another as happened at
Chickamauga. Moreover, in this way Grant could wear the Rebels down,
taking advantage of Union superiority in manpower, material, and
everything else. He was no butcher planning a war of attrition by
trading the lives of his men for those of the enemy in order to win. But
he knew what his predecessors had failed to grasp, that superiority was
worthless unless a commander used it again and again. There would be no
turning back from now on. Yes, he and his generals would suffer
setbacks, defeats even. But they would never again run back to
Washington after a bad battle. Win or lose, they would press on. It was
a strategy that even the valor and wit of the Confederates could not
withstand indefinitely.
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LIEUTENANT GENERAL ULYSSES S. GRANT (USAMHI)
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Grant assigned General Nathaniel P. Banks to lead a small army up the
Red River of Louisiana to occupy Confederates in the Trans-Mississippi.
Meanwhile, his most trusted subordinate, William T. Sherman, assumed
command of three armies combined into an army group, his task being to
drive south out of Chattanooga and strike through Georgia to the rail
center at Atlanta. That done, he could press on eastward across Georgia
to strike Savannah and then move up the coast against Charleston,
eventually ending up in North Carolina or even Virginia. His move would
carve the southeastern Confederacy in two and disrupt or destroy the
already shaky remaining Confederate rail and supply communications. As
for Grant, he would go east and move with Meade and the Army of the
Potomac, their goal being not Richmond this time but Lee's army itself.
With a small force commanded by General Franz Sigel moving at the same
time to take the Shenandoah Valley, there would be no place in the
Confederacy safe from the threat of invasion or Confederate soldier not
constantly committed to battle in his front.
Grant got a mixed bag of success and failure, but fortunately for the
Union, the failures came where they mattered rather little. Banks, like
Sigel, was a commander forced on by expedience. Both Lincoln and Davis
had to try to appease political factions within their domains by doling
out military commissions to men with no real experience or training at
warfare. Called "political generals," more often than not these men
proved woeful failures. Banks had been around since the beginning of the
war and was one of the commanders beaten by Stonewall Jackson in the
Shenandoah in 1862. Now he conducted an inept campaign up the Red River,
accompanied by thirteen ironclads and a number of other gunboat, and
with a total of around 40,000 troops at his disposal in three different
columns. Facing him, Confederate General E. Kirby Smith had perhaps
30,000 men, widely scattered over his vast Trans-Mississippi command.
Banks got as far as Alexandria to discover that low water on the Red
River would make it difficult for his fleet to continue. Nevertheless,
he pushed on, intending to follow the withdrawing Rebels to Shreveport.
But then the Southerners handed him a sharp setback at Sabine Cross
Roads on April 8. Banks retaliated with a small victory of his own the
next day at Pleasant Hill but then decided to give up his campaign and
retreat. By now the Red's depth had fallen further, and Captain Porter
found that he could not get his fleet back down the river along with
Banks's retiring army. Only ingenuity on the part of an engineer who
built artificial dams to raise the level temporarily allowed the fleet
to pass by. The campaign ended as a fiasco, and Banks himself finally
was relieved of command in May, a result almost worth the cost of a
failed expedition.
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MAJOR GENERAL NATHANEL P. BANKS (USAMHI)
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The same could have been said for Sigel, a prominent immigrant with a
large following in the German population of the North. He gained high
command because of his influence at enlisting other immigrants to the
cause, but he was trouble wherever he served. In May 1864 he led his
small army south into the Shenandoah hoping to ravage the valley called
the "bread basket of the Confederacy." He conducted an even more inept
campaign than Banks, however, moving too slowly, weakening his command
in the face of small Confederate feints, and finally arriving near New
Market, Virginia, with an army little more than half the size of what he
started with. His opponent, another political general who proved to be
the exception to the rule, was John C. Breckinridge, once vice president
of the United States, and a very capable commander. Putting together a
scratch force of Confederate volunteers partisans, home guards, and even
the students from the Virginia Military Institute, he met Sigel on May
15. Sigel foolishly split his army, with the result that though he
outnumbered Breckinridge by three to two or better, in the actual
fighting Breckinridge met him on even terms by using every man and boy
at his command, They fought all day in the rain, and in the end
Breckinridge sent Sigel fleeing back north in panic. Sigel, too, would
be replaced, and in June his successor, David Hunter, came back and this
time ravaged the Shenandoah.
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SKETCH BY CIVIL WAR ARTIST ALFRED WAUD OF WOUNDED SOLDIERS ESCAPING FROM
THE BURNING WOODS OF THE WILDERNESS. (LC)
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GENERAL EDMUND KIRBY SMITH (CWL)
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MAJOR GENERAL FRANZ SIGEL (USAMHI)
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Elsewhere in Virginia, however, the daily headlines told a different
story. On May 4 the 100,000-strong Army of the Potomac under Meade
crossed the Rappahannock once more and marched into the dense woods
where Hooker met defeat at Chancellorsville exactly a year before. But
this time these men were led by Meade and with him the even more
resolute Grant. During the next three days the heavy terrain called "the
Wilderness" hampered and baffled their attempts to get through, with Lee
and a mere 61,000 before them. Lee conducted a masterful defense and in
the end stopped Grant's progress.
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PERIOD DRAWING SHOWS THE CENTER OF THE UNION POSITION AT SPOTSYLVANIA
COURT HOUSE. (LC)
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BOMBSHELL EXPLODES DURING RATTLE AT COLD HARBOR, FROM A SKETCH MADE AT
THE TIME. (BL)
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But gone were the days when a repulse ended a campaign. Grant and
Meade decided on the night of May 7 that if they could not push through,
they would simply go around. And so the Yankees stepped back and shifted
to their left, hoping to get between Lee and his supply and
communications line to Richmond. Lee stayed with them and met the
Yankees next at Spotsylvania. During almost two weeks to follow, Grant
maneuvered and attacked again and again, and Lee countered him each
time. May 9 and 10 Grant hit Lee's left, then nearly pierced his center.
May 12 Grant attacked again along much of the line, and yet once more on
May 18, even as Lee extended his own line southward to meet Grant's next
expected try to get around him, Grant was undeterred. He just kept
shifting to his left and south and met Lee again for five days along the
North Anna River.
Grant was taking heavy casualties by now, but so was Lee, and with
every shift the Yankees got closer to Richmond. Lee was beginning to
realize that if he could not stop Grant's progress in the open field, he
would be forced eventually back into the defenses of Richmond itself.
Once Lee's army was there, unable to maneuver, Grant's numerical
superiority must inevitably allow him to surround the city and lay
siege. Once that happened, Lee warned Davis, it would be but a matter of
time.
Once more Grant failed to penetrate Lee's defenses, and on May 26 he
pulled back and moved southward to Totopotomoy Creek and then on to Cold
Harbor, Lee all the time in his front. Now Grant had moved, without
winning a battle, all the way to the eastern environs of Richmond. Lee
had to stop him at Cold Harbor, and stop him he did. On June 3, himself
frustrated by now at his inability to bring Lee to bay, Grant decided on
a tactic he had not tried before and that Lee's own experience at
Gettysburg suggested would not work. He ordered a massive frontal
assault against the right and center of the Confederate line, in a
movement that he would later confess he regretted. In less than an hour
of bitter fighting, he took 7,000 casualties without making a
sustainable breakthrough in the Rebel line, and in the end he ordered
the engagement broken off. Once more Lee had saved Richmond and his own
army.
Even after this terrible reverse, however, the Yankees stood their
ground. Stunned by the magnitude of the repulse and exhausted by their
month of campaigning and almost daily fighting, the bluecoats waited and
caught their breath. Then Grant pulled on Lee his greatest surprise of
the war. On June 15, without the Confederates knowing it, Grant's
engineers built a pontoon bridge across the James River below Richmond.
In eight hours his engineers created a 2,200-foot span, and soon
afterward, undetected by Lee, Grant pulled his army out of its position
at Cold Harbor and marched. it across the bridge. At once he drove
toward the vital rail and supply center at Petersburg, the back door to
Richmond barely twenty miles north. Only the fact that his exhausted
army could not move as it once did and the bumbling of his commanders on
the scene prevented Grant from taking Petersburg almost without
resistance.
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CAMP OF THE FIRST MASSACHUSETTS AND SECOND NEW YORK AT BELLE PLAIN ON
THE WAY TO PETERSBURG. (LC)
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GENERAL JUBAL EARLY (CWL)
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Lee hurriedly moved south when he realized what had happened and only
barely got into Petersburg's defenses before Grant struck again. He held
the Yankees at bay, but at the cost of what he had long feared. He could
move no more. Grant had him stuck in earthwork defenses that he could
not abandon without giving up Petersburg and Richmond itself. Lee's army
was exhausted. Almost half of it as casualties had been suffered in the
past weeks, and he had no replacements. Grant and Meade took over 50,000
casualties, and the soldiers who remained were bone weary and almost in
shock. But the Yankees could get more men, and now Grant accepted the
siege he had hoped to avert. From the end of June through the end of the
year and on into the spring of 1865 he gradually extended his lines,
pressing Lee ever closer. One by one he cut off the rail lines into
Richmond until only one remained, and from time to time he tried to end
the siege by breaking through, to no avail. But as Lee had said, time
now fought beside the Federals. The best he could do was to send General
Jubal Early and his corps on a daring raid through the Shenandoah and
into Maryland. Early actually got to the environs of Washington, where
President Lincoln came briefly under fire as he watched skirmishing
before Early was forced to retire. Later that summer Grant sent his
trusted henchman General Philip Sheridan to clean Early out of the
Valley, and in a series of battles in September and October Sheridan
essentially took Early out of the war, and with him the Shenandoah
itself. Meanwhile, out in the Trans-Mississippi, Confederates launched
their last major offensive of the war when General Sterling Price struck
north out of Arkansas in August and drove north into Missouri. He got
all the way to the Missouri River, near present-day Kansas City, before
Federal cavalry stopped him at Westport in the greatest battle fought in
that territory.
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MAJOR GENERAL PHILIP SHERIDAN (LC)
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GENERAL JOHN B. HOOD (CWL)
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By this time Grant's great lieutenant Sherman enjoyed much more
spectacular success out in the West and much more room for maneuver, in
part because he faced a much lesser foe than Lee. Davis had no choice
but to replace Bragg after the rout at Missionary Ridge, but he had no
other commanders to equal his great Virginian. Despite his distrust of
Joseph E. Johnston, Davis was persuaded to turn to him in the hope that
he could hold north Georgia and keep Sherman from knocking at the door
to Atlanta. He hoped in vain. When the campaign began on May 7 with
Sherman's advance south, Johnston set the pattern for the campaign to
follow. With a very favorable defensive position on Rocky Face Ridge
near Dalton, Georgia, he neglected to guard a crucial gap that Sherman
penetrated, forcing Johnston to withdraw to avoid having his army cut in
two. Johnston pulled back without accepting a serious engagement and
next took up a line several miles south near Resaca. Hereafter Sherman
would advance, feint in Johnston's front, and then threaten to move
around his left flank, and the Confederate would withdraw without a
fight. Johnston pulled back to Cassville, and then again to Allatoona
Pass, and so on. Only at Kenesaw Mountain, on June 27, did Johnston
actually make a genuine stand, and there Sherman suffered a severe
repulse when—like Grant at Cold Harbor—he abandoned his own
policy and ordered a frontal assault up the steep slope against strong
enemy defenses.
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SHERMAN'S SOLDIERS DESTROY RAILROAD TRACKS IN ATLANTA. (LC)
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He need not have bothered, perhaps, for Johnston soon pulled back
again to the Chattahoochee River, a wonderful natural line of defense
that Sherman feinted him out of without difficulty. By now Jefferson
Davis in Richmond was almost frantic. Not only was Johnston in almost
constant retreat without giving battle, but he would not tell the
president what he intended to do. Finally convinced that Johnston would
abandon Atlanta itself without a fight, Davis relieved him on July 17
with General John B. Hood. Hood at least was a fighter, but his audacity
sometimes outweighed his good sense. Pushed back into the defenses of
the city after a sharp engagement at Peachtree Creek, Hood bravely tried
to save Atlanta by turning from hunted to hunter. He moved out of his
defenses to attack on July 22. Despite able planning, the effort failed,
and Sherman now spread out to do to Atlanta what Grant even then was
doing to Petersburg. For over a month Sherman laid siege to the city,
all the while extending his lines until they nearly encircled Hood.
Finally the Confederates had no choice but to evacuate on September 1 to
avoid being completely surrounded, and Atlanta fell at last. It was an
enormous morale boost to the Union, which was wearied by the high losses
in Virginia and the stagnant siege at Petersburg. Sherman's victory
played no small part in helping Lincoln achieve reelection, and that, in
turn, helped ensure the eventual outcome of the war.
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"THE BATTLE OF NASHVILLE" PAINTED BY HOWARD PYLE IN 1907. (PHOTO BY GARY
MORTENSON, COURTESY OF MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY)
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SHERMAN'S PATH OF DESTRUCTION LED THROUGH SAVANNAH, GEORGIA. (LC)
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This was not to be the last heard from Hood, however. Later that
fall, in an effort to regain Tennessee and force Sherman to abandon
Georgia, the Confederate drove north through Georgia and all the way to
the center of the Volunteer State. Rather than be turned from his
mission to go on to the Atlantic, however, and knowing that Hood led a
weakened army, Sherman did not follow. Instead, he ordered several army
corps under Major General George H. Thomas to deal with Hood. By late
November Hood had reached Franklin, Tennessee, where he encountered
General John Schofield and unsuccessfully attacked in a battle that saw
five Confederate generals killed, including the "Stonewall of the West,"
Patrick R. Cleburne. Meanwhile, Thomas was in Nashville seeing to the
city's defenses and laboriously readying himself to move against Hood,
who now moved up within sight of the city and took up a position. Too
weak to attack and too stubborn to retire, Hood glared at Thomas for
days until the Yankee general finally made his move, an assault that
routed and all but erased Hood's organization. In tatters, his army
retreated back toward northern Mississippi, where Hood asked to be
relieved of command.
Meanwhile, leaving Thomas and Schofield to deal with Hood, Sherman
pressed on toward the sea on November 15. Thirty-six days later he
marched into Savannah, having cut yet another slice across the
Confederacy, and left a path of industrial and agricultural waste in his
wake. Now he perched on the Atlantic, ready to march northward to strike
Lee from the rear while Grant faced him at Petersburg. Unquestionably
the Confederacy was on its knees.
With almost four years of increasingly brutal warfare behind them,
North and South faced greater costs than the loss of cities and
hilltops. They were ravaging a whole generation of men. By the dawn of
1865 more than half a million men had died, 200,000 or more of them in
battle and the rest from disease. The wounded totaled well over a
million, and for any man injured in a vital organ, death was almost
inevitable. Yet sometimes the living would maintain that survival was
almost worse than death.
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CARVER HOSPITAL IN WASHINGTON, SEPTEMBER, 1864 (LC)
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Conditions in military hospitals on both sides could be appalling.
Medical and surgical knowledge had not progressed markedly for
generations. The only anesthesia available was opiates, chiefly
laudanum, that ran the risk of killing by an overdose or addiction if
taken over too long a period of recuperation, and chloroform, which
carried hazards of its own. Contrary to myth, almost all operations,
even in the hard-pressed South, were conducted with the patient under
some kind of sedative. Unfortunately, almost the only operation that
could be performed was bullet extraction. If the lead hit a bone in an
arm or leg, amputation almost always resulted, and then surgeons lost a
high percentage of patients from gangrene and other infections that
could set in afterward. Stonewall Jackson lost an arm as a result of his
mortal wound and was recovering from that nicely until pneumonia
attacked his weakened constitution. Thanks to utter ignorance about
asepsis and infection even minor wounds often led to death when treated
with contaminated instruments or handled by surgeons who went from
patient to patient without cleansing their hands, literally spreading
the infections they sought to prevent. Any form of internal surgery was
out of the question. Men with abdominal wounds were most often simply
left to heal or die on their own as the doctors turned their attention
to the less severe injuries that an amputation or some needle and thread
might help recover. For generations after the war, the empty sleeves and
trouser legs of aging veterans North and South paid mute testimony to
the ravages of bullets and surgery and the pain inflicted on mortal
flesh.
Disease proved to be an even greater killer. Except for those men who
had been city dwellers before the war, most of these men and boys had
never been exposed to large numbers of people before, and as a result
many never experienced even the minor childhood diseases like measles
and mumps, or the more severe scarlet fever and whooping cough. But in
camps with tens of thousands of men cramped together constantly, these
viruses raged through the regiments, and of course adults risk far
greater consequences from these diseases than children. Measles killed
almost as many as bullets in many units, and the surgeons were powerless
to help them.
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SANITARY COMMISSION TENT AT GETTYSBURG, PA (USAMHI)
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All that the doctors could do was try to make them comfortable. With
tens of thousands of casualties during and after the campaigns, some of
them taking years to recuperate, hospitals all across the nation bulged.
Cities like Nashville and Richmond, and even Washington, saw massive
tent cities arise on their outskirts. Inside the cities any available
warehouse or private dwelling could become a hospital, and on some
battlefields, as at Gettysburg, the wounded remained behind for months,
housed in tents as the doctors and nurses came to them. A host of
civilians volunteered to assist in relieving the suffering, and
charitable organizations such as the United States Sanitary Commission
raised funds to buy medicines and provide nurses. It seemed to many a
losing battle, a fight against unseen forces far more insidious than
mere cannon and bullets. Disease, infection, shock, and a host of other
enemies made no distinction between blue or gray. If a wound or the
measles did not kill the soldier, his other enemy could. From the time
of Fort Sumter, both sides dealt with the issue of prisoners of war,
never very adequately. No one at the outset envisioned the phenomenal
numbers of men who would be captured, whom the opposing side must
somehow care for. More than 150 prison camps operated during the
conflict, from small stations holding only a few hundred, to the massive
centers like Camp Sumter at Andersonville that housed almost 30,000. In
all during the war, at least 430,000 men, North and South, fell into
enemy hands, not counting the final surrenders. While about half of them
were paroled—released on their oath not to fight again—the
rest went to prisons that ranged from a simple city of tents in a field,
to old warehouses and factories, and even city jails.
Wherever a prisoner went, conditions were not good. In the North,
prison officials believed that a man in custody required less to eat
than an active soldier in the field. In the South the jailors simply did
not have enough to give them, and despite later claims that the
Confederacy deliberately starved Yankee prisoners, in fact the men ate
about as well as the Rebel soldiers themselves. Buildings were drafty,
often unheated and damp in winter, and hot in the summer. Confederates
kept at Johnson's Island on Lake Erie nearly froze to death. Yankees
kept at Camp Sumter and elsewhere suffered from fevers and malaria in
the heat and humidity. Occasionally prison guards did behave brutishly.
Occasionally fellow prisoners turned brutes themselves, bullying their
mates to claim precious food or fresh water. But mostly they all
suffered together. At Andersonville alone more than 12,000 perished, and
death rates ran almost as high in some Northern compounds like Fort
Delaware. At war's end many of the men released from these hell holes
looked more like skeletons than living humans, and the bitterness
engendered by prison suffering lasted longer than all of the other
animosities between Johnny Reb and Billy Yank.
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BURYING THE DEAD AT ANDERSONVILLE, 1864 (USAMHI)
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ELMIRA PRISON CAMP, ELMIRA, NY (LC)
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