The American Civil War

"The American Civil War ushered in a new era in land warfare. In this war, mass armies first experienced widespread impact of industrial technology, while American armies first encountered both the consequences of this new technology and the belated development of the mass army in America. In addition, the American armies had to adapt industrial technology and mass armies to the particular ideological, social, and geographical realities of mid-nineteenth-century America. In their parts and the interaction, these challenges were frequently new to warfare, and generally new to American armies. The response of Civil War soldiers and field commanders shaped tactical and strategic organization into new forms; and these forms made the Civil War arguably the first modern war.

Early modern warfare was transformed most conspicuously by the technology of the Industrial Revolution. The rifled musket, the weapon that first challenged traditional tactical forms (from the Napoleonic tradition), made its full impact felt for the first time during the Civil War. This devastating increase in firepower doomed the open frontal assault and ushered in the entrenched battlefield. The infantryman's muzzle-loading rifled musket, combined on defense with traditional smoothbore artillery, drove infantry, artillery, and cavalry alike from the open field of battle. The new firepower reduced artillery to the defense and forced cavalry to fight dismounted beside the infantry, while cavalry, as a mobile force with the superior firepower of the repeating carbine, sought new roles in the attack and defense of communications, as well as in reconnaissance.

Offensive infantry tactics, largely in response to the rifled musket, developed in two directions: on the one hand, the extension of the skirmish order was reminiscent of the extended skirmish order of Guibert and the French Revolutionary armies; on the other hand, there was the novel development of assaults by rushes, with the spade accompanying the rifle. The classical line and column of Empire and Restoration doctrine faded. As the rifled musket forced the Civil War soldier to dig in on the offense as well as on the defense, scenes of trench warfare anticipated the Great War.

Industrial technology also affected the command and control of mass armies. The electric telegraph established its presence in battle, as did an advanced system of visual signals using the telegraphic alphabet. Gas-filled observations balloons were used.

Civil War armies were the first to use the railroad to move and supply troops in the field; the industrial technology of railroads and steam-powered water transportation, combined with the technological anomaly of animal-drawn field transportation and supply, shaped the logistics of land maneuver through World War II.

Ideological factors new to combat also played a role in Sherman's 1864-65 campaign. His strategy of total war against the will of the enemy's population, and against the territory, resources, and communications needed to support the enemy's armies, was not new. But war waged against the enemy's will fought by citizen armies in the ideological context of mid-nineteenth-century nationalism was new both the American armies and to warfare. By contrast, Napoleon's armies had sought where possible to avoid war against the enemy's population. But this was feasible only when that population avoided war with the invading army.

By the mid-nineteenth century, nationalism and civil war bred new rules for warfare. Sherman's concept and practice of total war first fulfilled the prognosis of the German theorist Karl von Clausewitz, who, prior to his death in 1831, had predicted that the growing emotional nature of war, fought with nationalistic citizen armies, increasingly would intensify conflict with civilian populations. Though Clausewitz's ideas did not shape military thought beyond the