v1.1.3 / chapter 92 of 93 / 01 sep 11 / greg goebel / public domain
* This chapter provides some background details of Civil War military organization, practices, and weapons.
* Civil War military unit organization can be a little confusing. The first distinction is between "regular" and "volunteer" military organizations. The regular organizations made up the professional military structure that had more or less existed before the war. They were small in number, so to conduct large-scale military operations, large numbers of volunteer organizations were incorporated into the armies of both sides.
The volunteer organizations were derived from state militias, though in many cases they were organized from scratch by the states and not actually rooted in pre-war militia organizations. Although they were subject to the normal military chain of command, state government officials had considerable say in their makeup and handling. For example, state governors could appoint as officers individuals with no military background whatsoever, even grant them the rank of general. The regular military did have powers over the volunteer organizations -- for example, volunteer officers could be rejected by the regular military boards, though the state could then appoint anybody else they liked; the tension between the regular military and the state governments went on through the war.
The basic infantry organization in the Civil War was the "regiment". Volunteers tended to be recruited as entire regiments from one locality. They were formally subdivided into smaller units. A volunteer regiment was generally composed of 10 "companies", each roughly of about 100 men. A company could be subdivided further into two "platoons", each platoon being subdivided into two "sections", and each section subdivided into two "squads".
For those not familiar with military rank, there are three traditional classes of military personnel:
At the regimental level, the top-ranking officer was the "colonel", followed by (in decreasing order of rank) "lieutenant-colonel", "major", "captain", "first lieutenant", and "second lieutenant". Incidentally, during the war many of the ranks awarded to officers during the conflict were by "brevet", meaning they were only valid "for the duration", with the officers reverting to their old lower rank once the war was over. The "non-coms" went from a "sergeant-major", down through "first sergeant", "sergeant", "corporal", in charge of the enlisted privates at the bottom of the heap.
A colonel normally commanded a regiment. He would have a staff of several subordinate officers, including a medical surgeon, and a sergeant-major who acted as the regiment's "head foreman". Companies were commanded by captains, who had a few lieutenants and a first sergeant to run things, with command filtering down through sergeants and corporals down to the privates.
However, in reciting these numbers and organizational details, most regiments were rarely above 50% of their rated strength, due to casualties from fighting or disease -- it is important to remember that disease accounted for at least twice as many casualties in the war as actual fighting. For similar reasons, it wasn't unusual for low-ranking officers like a major to command a regiment because the casualties among the officers, who were encouraged to be bold under fire to inspire their men, were so terrible. Since regiments were generally raised by the states, the strong inclination was to establish new regiments because they provided prestige and patronage for their organizers, and so there was no great pressure to provide replacements to existing regiments to allow them to maintain the numbers of troops in their ranks.
There were variations on organizational structures. Smaller volunteer organizations that contained a smaller number of companies, say four to eight, were organized as "battalions", and commanded by a major or lieutenant colonel. While prewar regular-Army regiments were, like the volunteer regiments, organized as 10 companies, regular regiments organized during the war were set up as two battalions and consisted of as many as 16 companies. In some places, particularly west of the Mississippi, military organizations were informal and never followed a rigid pattern.
* Despite the variations, the regiment was still the basic unit of both armies. Higher-level organizations were built up from regimental units. A "brigade" consisted of from 3 to 6 regiments and was commanded by the next rank up from colonel, a brigadier general or just "brigadier". Sometimes artillery detachments were attached to an infantry brigade.
A "division" consisted of from 2 to 6 brigades and was commanded by the next rank up, a major general -- that was effectively the highest rank available, and so a major general was generally simply called a "general" as opposed to a "brigadier". Southern divisions tended to have more brigades and be larger than Northern divisions.
A "corps" consisted of from 2 to 4 divisions. Above this were "armies", which basically defined the military command of a theater of operation. They could have a widely-varying number of corps. Grant was given the extraordinary rank of lieutenant general in 1864, the first Army officer to hold this rank since George Washington, to ensure authority over all the armies; after the war, in 1866 he became the first full general, with four stars. (The modern "five-star general" rank wouldn't be introduced until World War II.)
* Cavalry organizations were similar to infantry organizations, although a company was often called a "troop". They also had battalion and regimental organizations, with varying numbers of companies in each. Originally, the North simply attached cavalry regiments to infantry divisions, but the South developed brigade-size cavalry units, and eventually there were entire divisions and corps of cavalry, operating as mobile strike forces.
The basic unit of artillery organization was the battery, about the size of a company and commanded by a captain; it had from 4 to 6 guns. At the beginning of the war, batteries were attached to infantry brigades, but eventually they were organized as 3 or 4 batteries, confusingly called a battalion in the South and a brigade in the North, and even larger units were organized as an "artillery reserve" at the corps or army level to provide massed firepower. Certain Union "heavy artillery" units containing 10 batteries were organized for the defense of Washington. They were pressed into field service late in the war, being known simply as the "heavies", and fought mostly as infantry.
Both sides possessed regiments of engineers, who helped construct field fortifications, lay down pontoon bridges, build permanent bridges and so on. They would often perform such activities under fire. There were also special "sharpshooter" -- what we'd call "sniper" -- units on both sides. The sharpshooter units were usually no larger than companies, but the Federals organized two sharpshooter regiments.
Marching and drill were very important elements of army life. Where railroads weren't available, troops generally had to get around on footpower, and in battle it was important to maintain the coordination of regiments so they could fight properly. March and combat commands were given vocally, by drum, and by bugle.
* The naval forces of both sides contained a small marine contingent that was used in amphibious operations. There were about 3,000 US marines and only about 300 Confederate marines, and they were organized as companies, since they rarely operated as large units.
The prewar Navy had been so small that there were no formal ranks above that of captain. Senior Navy officers had simply been referred to as "commodore". The war established "commodore" as a true rank, and established as an interim senior rank (for fleet commanders) the title of "flag officer". Later in the war there would be the rank of rear admiral and then vice admiral, with David Farragut the first to hold those ranks. He would also, as mentioned, become the Navy's first full admiral in 1866.
Lower ranks ranged down from captain to "commander", then "lieutenant commander" (established during the war), "lieutenant", "master" (later to become "lieutenant junior grade"), and "ensign" (sometimes called a "passed midshipman"). Note that Navy captains and lieutenants were, and still are, of substantially higher rank than Army and Marine captains and lieutenants. Enlisteds consisted of various grades of "petty officers (NCOs)" and "seamen".
* The basic weapon of the Civil war was the muzzle-loading black-powder percussion rifle. The weapon was loaded through the muzzle through a complicated series of nine steps using a paper "cartridge" that contained the power, wad, and bullet. The soldier had to bite open the cartridge, dump its contents down the barrel in a specific order, and then ram them home with a ramrod.
The charge was ignited by a "percussion cap" that was inserted at the breech and struck by the hammer. Percussion caps were little metal primer cups, something like the caps in modern kid's capguns, loaded with fulminate of mercury, a sensitive explosive that detonated under mechanical shock. The percussion cap arrangement replaced the older "flintlock" scheme, in which a dash of powder in a pan was ignited by a flint on the hammer to fire off the charge. It took considerable skill to get results with flintlock weapons, partly because there was a delay between pulling the trigger and the actual discharge of the weapon that required a steady hand, and they were much more difficult to fire in wet weather.
The black power charge fired a bullet down a rifled barrel. The bullet, a "Minie ball", was not actually a ball, instead being a tapered cone of lead generally about a half-inch (12.7 millimeters) in diameter that was hollow at the base and expanded to fit into with the twisted grooves that "rifled" the barrel. This set the bullet to spinning, giving it much greater effective range than the old "smoothbore" musket, roughly comparable to a modern rifle. The heavy ball gave the weapon great stopping power.
In the days of flintlock musketry, the primary weapon was really the bayonet. A smoothbore flintlock musket had a limited range and was relatively troublesome to reload, so basically concentrations of men would fire a volley at close range and then close with the bayonet. The fact that this mindset persisted in the tactical manuals of the Civil War era had hideous consequences, the long range of the Civil War rifle having made bayonet charges suicidal. If the rate of fire of the muzzle-loaders had not been so low, the slaughter would have been even worse.
The use of black powder not only caused battlefields to be covered with choking smoke, but led to fouling of the rifles. After about ten shots, the weapon was so fouled it was almost impossible to reload, and kicked like a mule when fired. Nitrocellulose-based smokeless powders had been developed before the war, but for the time being they were hard to synthesize with safe and predictable properties and not really ready for use. They would not come into service until well after the war, and the US would be slow to adopt them.
Although a bewildering range of weapons was used by both sides, the most significant rifle of the Union was the Springfield rifle, manufactured by the Springfield Armory in Massachusetts and introduced in 1855. About a million were built in all, at a cost of about $13 each, with various improved models put into production up to and through the war. It was commonly used by Confederate troops, since it was often captured in large numbers, but the rebels also used British Enfield rifle, so similar to the Springfield that now it takes an expert to tell them apart.
The Springfield lingered in service for decades after the war, though many were converted to a single-shot breech-loader configuration firing metal cartridges by fit of a "trap-door" breech mechanism. Some even saw some action during World War II. An American adviser training Burmese tribesmen to fight the Japanese found the tribesmen were uncomfortable with Tommy guns, so the adviser sent a request stateside for pump shotguns, excellent weapons for close-quarters jungle warfare. The bureaucracy was puzzled by the request and asked for clarification; the adviser impatiently got sarcastic and asked for Springfield muzzle-loaders instead. He was sent them, still in their original shipping crates, and the tribesmen liked them very much, using them with good effect against the Japanese.
* Revolvers were also based on the paper-cartridge / percussion cap technology, which made them somewhat difficult to load. Revolvers typically had a lever under the barrel to ram the charge home in the cylinder. It was customary to carry two revolvers, or at least an additional loaded cylinder for one. They were generally "single-action" weapons, meaning the shooter had to cock back the hammer with the thumb before pulling the trigger.
Samuel Colt had done much to make the revolver a reality in the decades before the war, and the six-shot Colt "Army Model 60" revolver was the most widely used revolver in the conflict, with about 200,000 produced. Colt was a shrewd businessman and liked to give influential officials and officers ornamental engraved revolvers as a promotional gift. Colt also developed a "revolving rifle", but it proved impractical and was never used in large numbers. With the paper cartridge scheme, sometimes multiple cylinders might fire at the same time, which was troublesome with a revolver that was fired with one hand, but downright hazardous with a rifle where the shooter had his other hand holding on to the barrel.
Colt charged the US government $25 for one of his revolvers, and the relatively high price gave competitors an opening. Eli Remington introduced his "Army Model 44" revolver that was similar to the Colt, but was stronger and preferred by some officers and troops. He sold them for half the price of the Colt, and after some inertia the government realized that he was offering a good deal. Remington built about 125,000 revolvers for the US military during the war.
Another interesting revolver used during the war, if in much smaller numbers, was the hefty "LeMat", invented by Dr. LeMat of New Orleans, which could fire nine 0.42 caliber (10.7 millimeter) bullets and had an underslung barrel with a shotgun charge in it. The shotgun charge could be fired by flipping down a tab on the end of the hammer. The Confederacy acquired about 3,000 LeMats, and it was famously used by Jeb Stuart. Braxton Bragg also used it as his sidearm.
* Early in the war, cavalrymen were armed with revolvers and breechloading carbines, along with the traditional sabres. Breechloaders were used because it was difficult to reload a muzzle-loader from the saddle. The Sharps 0.52 caliber (13.2 millimeter) carbine was the best-known of these weapons, but Ambrose Burnside's 0.54 caliber (13.7 millimeter) carbine design was also popular.
The Sharps carbine used a prepacked cartridge, with powder attached to the bullet in a linen bag. The shooter did have to fit a percussion cartridge. The cartridge was a little troublesome, since smoldering remains from a fired cartridge could set off a new cartridge when the carbine was reloaded, and the breech mechanism was not perfect, tending to leak gas. Burnside's carbine used a brass cartridge, though the percussion cap still remained separate, with the cartridge featuring a rim around where the case mated with the bullet. It was loaded base-first into the open breech mechanism. The Burnside carbine was said to have a better seal than the Sharps carbine.
Later in the war, lever-action rifles using brass "rimfire" cartridges, with the percussion cap built as the base of the cartridge, came into use, allowing a high rate of fire and convenient loading. The primary repeating rifles included the Spencer carbine, which carried seven shots in a tube running through the stock, and the Henry rifle, which had the tube magazine under the barrel. The Henry was the ancestor of the Winchester rifle, one of the classic weapons of the Old West, and which is still in perfectly effective use in various forms today. Civil War soldiers liked to say of the Henry that "you could load it on Sunday and shoot all week".
The Henry was a more sophisticated and capable weapon than the Spencer, but it was also more complicated and difficult to manufacture. The Spencer was simpler and cheaper to make, and so it was the predominant repeating rifle in Union service. The Henry and Spencer were primitive repeater weapons by modern standards, a particular limitation being that their cartridges were loaded with black powder, which produced fouling. The repeaters were still a great step forward.
The US Army Department of Ordnance was very slow to adopt the repeaters. Firearms historians have generally been critical of the stodginess of the Department of Ordnance in the Civil War, but Ordnance officers did have reasons for their objections, particularly the logistical difficulties of providing the unique ammunition required by the repeaters, which complicated an already difficult supply situation. The belief that giving troops repeaters would encourage wastage of ammunition seems a little sillier from the modern point of view, but the same objections were raised when fully automatic weapons were introduced in the next century, and in fact there has been a tendency with modern automatic rifles to give up full-automatic capability in favor of a less wasteful "three-round burst" capability.
However, Christopher Spencer, designer of the Spencer carbine, got so frustrated dealing with the Ordnance Department that he arranged a personal demonstration for Lincoln in August 1863, with the President taking a few shots with it at the location where the Washington Memorial now stands. It must have been a welcome relaxation from his normal routine. Lincoln helped cut through the bureaucracy, but the repeaters were often purchased by soldiers themselves, either individually or in complete military units.
Repeaters were not used much by the Confederacy. While they were often captured, the South had no means of making the brass cartridges in quantity and could not capture enough ammunition to make repeaters a standard service weapon. Incidentally, although the Confederacy had a long list of logistical problems, the CSA rarely had difficulties in obtaining ball and powder. This was in large part due to the skills of the chief of ordnance, Brigadier General Josiah Gorgas, a Pennsylvanian who had gone South. Gorgas was an organizational genius and was able to perform miracles with minimal resources.
* Both sides carried swords and sabres, with infantry officers generally using a sword as a marker to rally their troops -- it wasn't really good for much else. Cavalry sabres were more effective, since it was possible to close with an enemy rapidly enough to make getting hit with a bullet less likely. As mentioned, Civil War rifles retained the bayonet, though it wasn't really an important weapon in the conflict; it remained handy for use as a tent peg or a candle holder. Soldiers often carried knives, but they were generally for utility use and not really intended as weapons.
Infantry sometimes used black-powder grenades. These were in the form of metal eggs with an impact detonator on one end and a set of paper fins on the other. Although "grenadiers" had been common on the open battlefield at the beginning of the century, improvements in firepower meant that the grenade was really only useful for close-quarters fighting, such as storming entrenchments or other fortifications.
* Artillery was gauged by either the size of shot fired, such as "6-pounder" or "12-pounder", or less frequently by muzzle size, such as "11 inch" and so on, with bore size generally used to describe large naval or siege guns. Artillery was either "smoothbore" or "rifled" and fired solid shot, explosive shell, or canister. Guns were made either of bronze or iron.
Solid shot was either traditional cannonballs or, for rifled guns, large conically-tipped projectiles. Explosive shell carried an explosive charge and could also carry "shrapnel", or small slugs for taking down enemy soldiers. Explosive shells could fitted with an impact (concussion) fuze or a timed fuze. The timed fuze was in the form of a cap with the number of seconds of delay marked on its top; a gunner punched a hole through the appropriate second marking, cutting the fuze inside the cap to its proper length. The fuzing schemes tended to be unreliable, and by modern standards such munitions were relatively ineffective. However, explosive shells could have devastating effect against certain types of targets, such as wooden ships. Explosive shells were also used as big grenades, being lit and rolled into trenches during assaults.
Canister was a tin can full of about 27 lead slugs that broke apart when fired, somewhat like a big shotgun shell. It was used for breaking up infantry charges, and it accounted for the majority of casualties inflicted by artillery in the war. There was also "grapeshot", which consisted of larger balls clustered around a steel rod. In general, shrapnel shell, canister, and grapeshot were referred to as "case shot".
A special solid shot was developed for fighting ironclads that was much like modern armor-piercing ammunition: a steel rod fired with a wooden plug, or "sabot" (pronounced "sah-bow"), that fell off when fired. It appears that this ammunition saw little or no combat use in the Civil War, though it does seem that a disk-shaped sabot was often strapped to the bottom of spherical shot to give the shot a better seal for firing. Really eccentric munitions included "chain shot", consisting of two balls connected by a chain, and "bar shot", which was two balls connected by a bar, with both types of ammunition for attacking sailing ships and destroying their rigging and whatever. Solid shot was also often heated red-hot in a stove during naval battles between wooden ships in hopes of setting an adversary on fire.
Field artillery guns, as opposed to heavy siege guns and mortars whose movement was a major engineering effort, were relatively lightweight weapons, such as the popular 12-pounder brass Napolean smoothbore and the relatively new cast-iron rifled guns. The rifled guns had farther range, but the smoothbores had the ability to bounce solid shot over the ground or over the tops of hills. Rifled guns simply buried their shot into the ground, while a bouncing cannonball could do quite a bit of damage and was much more dangerous than it looked: there was a story of an officer who tried to stop a rolling shot with his boot and had it rip his leg off.
The guns were mounted between two wooden wheels on a wooden carriage. The guns were tubes, open at the muzzle end and with a small tube for a "primer" on top of the other end; the tube was sealed with a leather cover when the weapon was not in use. There was generally a knob called a "cascabel" at the rear, used as a handle for adjusting the barrel or as a convenient place to attach ropes to help handle recoil. Sometimes a cascabel had a ring on it to secure ropes for helping tie the cannon down or pull it out of mud. There was usually a screw under the rear of the barrel to adjust the vertical travel of the gun, and a small blade sight on the top of the muzzle for quick aiming. When gunners were in a position to take their time and set up properly, they used a pendulum device called a "hausse" attached to the weapon to level it, and could fit a rear sight with a bubble level for precise aiming.
Guns were hitched up to a small two-wheeled cart called a "limber" to which a team of horses or mules was harnessed. The limber generally carried a small box of ammunition and other supplies. A "caisson" could be attached to the limber in place of a gun. This was another two-wheeled cart with a larger box on top for storing ammunition and the like. A spare wheel was generally attached to the back of the caisson.
In action, after firing, one of the gun crew would quickly wipe out the bore of the gun with a wet sponge attached to a pole. This would clean out residual powder and douse any sparks that might cause the gun to go off prematurely while being loaded. At the same time, another member of the gun crew would use a punch to clean out the vent used to set off the gun, and then extinguish any sparks with a little "finger glove" or "finger stall".
The other end of the sponging pole had a blunt rammer on its end. A bag or several bags of powder were put down the bore, followed by the projectile, and the rammer was used to ram the charge home. A hand pick was then rammed down the vent to puncture the powder bag beneath it, and a friction primer was inserted. The friction primer was a two-inch (5 centimeter) brass tube containing a phosphorus-based mixture that was ignited by friction; it wasn't all that different a notion from a big match. A lanyard rope attached to the top of the friction primer; yanking on the lanyard would pull an abrasive element out of the primer's top, igniting it and firing the gun.
After firing, another pole with a brush on one end and a screw or "worm" on the other end was used to remove burned pieces of cloth and the like, if were necessary. The cycle then began again. A gun was typically tended by a six-man crew; if properly drilled and operating under good conditions, a crew could achieve a rate of fire of two shots per minute.
Small howitzers and mortars were also used as field artillery. Howitzers -- short-barreled guns -- were generally designed to be broken down and carried by horse or mule for operations in mountains, where hauling a regular field piece was difficult or impossible. One of the best-known small mortars was the "Coehorn mortar", which could be hauled around by a team of four men and was used to toss shells into enemy fortifications during close-quarters fighting. One was used with terrible effect during the Battle of the Crater at Petersburg.
Large mortars were very bulky items, essentially huge iron pots, and were really only used as siege guns. Naval and fixed-fortification guns tended toward the very big as well, the most recognizable of such weapons being the big 15-inch (38 centimeter) Dahlgren guns. They were bottle-shaped to withstand the firing of large powder charges, and most other large guns were also thick at the rear in one way or another for the same reason.
* As far as warships go, they have been described in reasonable detail in the text and only need to be summarized here. Warships using pure sail were generally obsolete, though small sail-powered vessels were still in use if mostly in utility roles. The backbone of Union ocean-going naval power in the early days of the war were the big steam-and-sail screw sloops like Farragut's BROOKLYN, but the introduction of ironclads meant the days of these vessels were numbered as well.
Most Confederate ironclads followed a common pattern, using a wooden-hulled vessel on which a sloping metal shell or "casemate" was constructed, with guns firing out fixed ports. The Union monitors were much more the shape of the future, with their turrets and all-metal construction, though truly seaworthy monitors didn't become available until very late in the war.
The mainstays of Union blockade early on were small steam-and-sail screw gunboats and the "double-enders" -- paddle-wheel steamers that could go forward or backward and were well-suited to operations in shallow tidewater regions. Of course both sides pressed civilian vessels into service as warships, even using ferries and pleasure steamers in combat, and the Confederates obtained four fast, long-range steam-and-sail screw raiders like the ALABAMA from Britain.
As far as river warships went, they were all shallow-draft paddle-wheel steamers, most modified from civilian vessels, with some early "timberclads" like the TYLER covered with heavy oak beams while most, like the CARONDOLET, were armored with metal to a greater or lesser extent. Many of the small light-draft river-patrol vessels were thinly armored, enough to provide protection from rifle fire, and were called "tinclads". Late in the war, the Union developed some "river monitors" -- paddle-wheel ironclads with turrets.
Both sides had their unusual naval ideas, such as mortar boats, the rams used by both sides, and the Confederate DAVID and HUNLEY submersibles. The idea of using rams had seemed attractive before the war when steam power was becoming the norm and allowed vessels to perform such attacks, but the conflict showed the idea left something to be desired; naval gunfire was generally far more effective. The DAVID and other vessels along that line did point the way to the torpedo boats of the two World Wars.
* A number of new and unusual weapons were introduced in the Civil War, some of which were effective and some of which were not. Dr. Richard Gatling's "Gatling gun", a machine gun with rotating barrels that was cranked by hand, was evaluated by the Union Army late in the war, but did not go into general service during the conflict. This was not as short-sighted as it sounds, since black powder ammunition limited the amount of fire the Gatling gun could pour out without being cleaned. In addition, the Gatling gun was as big and heavy as an artillery piece, and there was a perfectly sensible belief that canister could do the same sort of job more efficiently.
The Gatling gun would become very successful after the war -- indeed, it is still in use in modern combat aircraft in a form that would be recognizable in most details to Dr. Gatling -- but the "volley guns" used in small numbers during the conflict were a dead end. These were basically rows of rifles mounted on a carriage that could be all fired at once. Reloading was a nuisance and in this case a light howitzer firing canister was almost certainly a better idea.
One more significant military innovations of the Civil War was the widespread use of mines, or "torpedoes", by the Confederacy, in both naval and land warfare. The idea of building an explosive booby trap was nothing new of course -- the Chinese were doing it before Europeans had even heard of gunpowder -- but the invention of electrical detonation and effective contact detonators made the idea much more useful, and the Confederacy was one of the first nations to use mines in an organized manner. Apparently the Union did use mines as well, but nowhere as enthusiastically.
One of the prime movers in Confederate mine development was Brigadier General Gabriel Rains of North Carolina, who had experimented with using land mines against Indian tribes as far back as 1840, and then developed fuzes for such devices. One was a tripwire fuze, using the same friction primer as used for artillery, while the other was a contact fuze, with a tube that was crushed by pressure to allow different chemicals to mix and set off the mine. There were also a few cases in which the Confederates planted mines that could be triggered by an electrical signal switched by an operator, an early example of what is now called a "command detonated" mine.
The Federals found mines very unsporting and tended to become extremely annoyed when they encountered them, often using Confederate prisoners to disarm land mines. Many Confederates didn't like the notion either, but Rains was persuasive in lobbying Richmond for their use, and became head of the Torpedo Bureau in 1864.
Confederate mines were not very reliable. Naval mines in particular had a high dud rate, since salt water quickly corroded their components, and of course black powder absorbs water and becomes ineffective. However, the mines did much to make the Yankees nervous and had a certain value in simple intimidation.
* Rations during the Civil War were far more informal than they are in any competent modern military service. The basic Union ration was "hardtack", which was a thick fist-sized cracker of baked flour and water that was packed in wax paper. It was said to actually be tasty when fresh, though one soldier wrote that he tried to feed it to a mule, and the mule refused to eat it -- the soldier commented that it showed the wisdom of the beast, adding that the rebellion could not have been defeated without its help.
Another Union staple was salt pork, as well as rations of sugar, salt, and particular coffee. A steady diet of that sort of thing was unhealthy and was recognized as unhealthy at the time, so when troops were in bivouac they received barrels of onions and potatoes, as well as stocks of other, more or less fresh, vegetables and fruits, and had stocks of cattle as "meat on the hoof". Of course, troops in the field often supplemented their formal rations with whatever they could obtain from the local farmers, sometimes by purchase, much more often by theft. Whiskey rations were also provided, with regimental commanders exercising discretion on their use.
The Union War Department organized supplies to the army. The process was inefficient and sometimes corrupt, and the supply of salt pork is said to have been the basis for the modern term of "pork barrel politics". The War Department did arrange inspections to ensure quality, but it was always a troublesome business.
Rations were generally handed down to regiments where they were dealt with as the regiments saw fit. Sometimes cooking duties were assigned to troops who seemed competent at it. As the Union Army attracted contrabands as camp followers, some of the ex-slaves who had the knack for food preparation were hired on as cooks.
There were also "sutlers" who followed Union armies in wagons loaded down with delicacies and useful items not supplied by the military, selling them at a large markup to the soldiers. While the difficulties of supplying such items to an army in the field certainly required a markup and such things were likely unavailable otherwise, sutlers were still often resented as parasites.
Confederate troops were in general supplied more poorly than their Union equivalents, and food was the worst problem. Although the South was an agricultural economy and could in principle produce plenty of food, manpower was drained from farming to serve in the front lines, and more significantly the transport infrastructure was inadequate, making it difficult to get food to the troops even when it was available. The Confederate chief of commissary, Lucius B. Northrop, was one of the most criticized men in the South. The job was thankless and impossible to begin with, but Northrop had a sour and quarrelsome disposition that made him a target for abuse, with Jefferson Davis's refusal to replace him making Northrop even more despised.
In any case, the staples of rebel troops were cornmeal, which was generally cooked in grease, dried bacon, and molasses as available. Raiding a Federal supply depot was generally an occasion for celebration, one of the motivations for Confederate troops to fight and win, and capturing a sutler's wagon was a real treat. When both sides were in camp not far from each other, there was a certain amount of fraternization and trading of staples. Confederate troops did have access to tobacco, which was often traded for Federal coffee or sugar.
* Had the Civil War been conducted with modern medical technology and practices, the number of casualties would have been a fraction of what they actually were. Even ignoring modern equipment like medical evacuation helicopters and field surgical units, medical practice in the 1860s was staggeringly primitive, not that much more advanced than it had been for centuries past.
The doctors of the time had no understanding of the pathogen theory of disease, and concepts of the importance of good sanitation were weak, though not nonexistent. General Sherman was strict in enforcing good sanitation in his camps, making sure that proper latrines were used and set up in places where they could not contaminate the water supply. However, a hospital, even a good one in the rear, could be the worst place for a wounded soldier to be, since they exposed the soldier to a wide range of pathogens. Soldiers were perfectly aware of the limitations of contemporary medicine, the general perception being that "if they enemy couldn't kill you, the doctors would."
Surgeons could set bones and perform amputations. Amputations were particularly common, because a Minie ball tended to make such a messy bone-shattering wound. Losing an arm was common, since a soldier hiding behind a tree and trying to ram a fresh round down the barrel of a muzzle loader tended to stick his elbow out.
Many of the medicines were ineffective and some were dangerous. There was a lunatic belief in the value of purgatives, for example, and US Surgeon General William A. Hammond, in charge of the Medical Bureau, demonstrated good sense when he banned calomel and tartar emetics in 1863. Fortunately there were a handful of very useful drugs, including opiates for painkilling and quinine for malaria. Surgeons had chloroform to anesthetize patients for surgery; the Civil War movie stereotype of soldiers screaming as their limbs are cut off appears to be something of an exaggeration. Hammond also organized two drug factories, one in Philadelphia and the other in Astoria, New York, to produce drugs for the Union Army.
The Medical Bureau was backed up by a semi-civilian voluntary organization called the "Sanitary Commission", organized in 1861 and initially led by a Unitarian minister named Henry Bellows. However, the real driving force behind the Sanitary Commission was its secretary, Frederick Law Olmstead, who had designed Central Park in New York City. The Medical Bureau had originally treated the Sanitary Commission with bureaucratic indifference, but as the civilian organization became more influential it gradually exerted more control over the bureau through lobbying with Congress. The Sanitary Commission was treated with much more respect, and in fact it became a powerful organization in its own right: indeed, it had been the Sanitary Commission that had lobbied to put Hammond in charge of the Medical Bureau, sweeping aside the old sleepy fossils that had been running the organization from prewar days. The Medical Bureau and the Sanitary Commission ended up working hand in glove.
* Communications during the war were handled by couriers, flag semaphores, and particularly telegraphs. Semaphores used a flagman with a flag in each hand, with the relative positions of the flags used to spell out letters of the alphabet. The scheme was simple but surprisingly effective.
Telegraphs used rubber-coated wire connections, with the key and ticker powered by batteries. The Union was very efficient at stringing up long-distance telegraph connections and getting them operational. The rebels liked to tap Yankee telegraph lines to intercept communications, and so a cipher system was developed. The Union cipher scheme involved scrambling entire words in various patterns of word rearrangements, with particular patterns used at different times as determined by a cipher book, and hiding revealing words such as the names of places or generals with a small set of codewords, also listed in the cipher book.
The cipher book was updated periodically in case one fell into Confederate hands, and its distribution was carefully controlled. Grant had to threaten a cipher clerk with disciplinary action when the clerk refused to turn over a cipher book to a colonel on Grant's staff. Grant then had to intervene on the clerk's behalf when the clerk's superiors in the Signal Corps threatened disciplinary action against him in turn -- the matter having become an exercise in the old military game of "no good deed goes unpunished".
The Union "route cipher", as it was called, was very effective in concealing Federal communications from the rebels. The Confederacy never had much resources to spare for codebreaking and could not crack Yankee messages. In fact, the Confederates were so desperate to crack Union ciphers that it is said they were sometimes printed in Southern newspapers along with a plea to ask readers to try to crack them; nobody ever succeeded in doing so. In contrast, Confederate armies used a wide range of cipher schemes, many of them simple and generally easy for Union codebreakers to crack.
The same scarcity of resources applied to Confederate telegraphy. In many cases they simply stole Yankee telegraph lines, coiling them up and carting them off for their own use, but this was more an admission of poverty than any cleverness. The Federals could easily replace their lines, while the rebels had to scrounge for what they could get.
* There is a saying that amateurs talk strategy, generals talk logistics, and the logistical apparatus of both sides evolved through the war, often beginning with haphazard arrangements that eventually evolved upward.
The Union's logistical apparatus was much more impressive than that of the Confederacy, since the Union had vastly more resources. Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs of the Union Army was a brilliant organizer and introduced many innovations. One was a new lightweight tent, the "dog tent", which would lead to the classic "pup tent", and he also ordered uniforms in a set of graduated specifications, which would lead to the modern concept of clothing "sizes". Confederate Quartermaster General Abraham Myers was not in the same league, and absolutely did not have access to the same resources.
One example of the Union Army's logistical superiority was the magnificent railroad support service, which demonstrated the North's extreme competence at the mechanical arts. Union work crews could lay down rail lines and bridges with astonishing speed, and repair them even more quickly. Union railroad officials were also extremely competent at organizing the logistics of transferring large amounts of material and large numbers of men from place to place. The South never had a rail network closely comparable to that of the North, and had only a fraction of the railroad expertise available to the Union.
The railroads were fed by huge supply depots where all the material of war could be accumulated. One of the more spectacular examples was the rear-area apparatus for handling horses and mules, with huge "remount depots" where the animals could be stockpiled, cared for, trained, and sent forward to line units. By midwar, the Union had established six remount depots, the largest being Giesboro Point, in Virginia across the Potomac from Washington. It covered 625 acres (252 hectares), almost a square mile, and could tend up to 30,000 horses and mules at a time. There were huge corrals where a thousand animals could be kept.
* Both sides resorted to paper currency to fund their war efforts. Paper currency had been used on a limited basis by some American banks before the war, but the idea was somewhat disreputable. The pressure of war brought it back to the surface. The original idea behind paper currency was to provide a token that was in theory redeemable in hard currency at a later time. The Union exercised good discipline over printing money and the scheme proved workable if not perfect, but the Confederacy printed so much that it eventually became worthless, the process being helped by Union counterfeiting of Confederate currency.
Interestingly, people hoarded change in the North and it became scarce, and so people took to using stamps in its place. They were troublesome as currency because of their sticky backs, and so a special stamp called "postal currency" with no stickum was introduced for this purpose in 1863, followed by small banknotes in sums from 3 to 50 cents. The Federal greenbacks remain in use to the present day, though the small-change bills died out in 1876. Private bank notes died out in 1865 when a Federal law was passed that slapped a 10% tax on them, rendering them ridiculous.
* Prisoner exchanges took place both informally and formally in a somewhat inconsistent fashion through the war. The Civil War also had the arrangement of a "parole", which amounted to simply releasing a prisoner after he had taken an oath not to take up arms or serve in military noncombatant roles until he had been formally exchanged. Parolees were sometimes kept in "parole camps" and sometimes sent home. This sounds like an arrangement that would lead to cheating and it did, but usually in the sense that a soldier, once paroled, had a legitimate excuse for not returning to military duty and was not likely to do so; apparently being beaten once was enough for most men. However, as mentioned blatant abuses of the system and the Confederate refusal to treat black Union soldiers as legitimate prisoners of war ultimately led to the scheme's collapse in 1864, though it was revived for a few months before the end of the war when the Confederates agreed to Union terms.
* One interesting minor detail is that the flag generally recognized as the rebel flag, the now-controversial "Stars & Bars", with star-studded bars arranged in an "X", is not the flag of the Confederacy. The original Confederate national flag was a tricolor of three stripes, red white red, with an inset blue square in the upper left corner, with stars (eventually 13) arranged in a circle to represent the states of the Confederacy.
The Stars & Bars was the Confederate Army's flag. The original Confederate national flag was too much like the Federal flag and caused confusion in battle. A variation on the battle flag was adopted by the Confederate Navy, and eventually the Confederacy adopted a variation of the battle flag as its national banner.
* An even more minor detail, one that would almost certainly go past most non-native English speakers and even many who are native English speakers, is the term "penny dreadful", referred to in a few places in this document. These were cheap short novels sold in drugstores for boys for a penny; they were notoriously melodramatic and badly written, hence the term "dreadful". Although they are mostly associated with the Wild West era in the post-Civil War US, they were apparently around before the war as well. They are something of collector's items in the modern day.
