C. Militia continued its decline. Budget had remained constant since 1830s. Militia forces all but moribund.

1. However, volunteer companies remained very much alive.

2. Southern "military enlightenment" in 1830s through 1850s.

a. e.g., Virginia Military Institute, est. 1839; the Citadel (1842).

b. By eve of Civil War, every Southern state except Texas and Florida had a military college.

III. The Frontier

A. Native American warfare

B. Mormon War, 1857.

C. Conclusion--Army still pre-occupied with small unit missions.

IV. Technological Change

A. Railroads.

1. Began in late 1820s; railroad boom in 1840s and 1850s. By 1860, had become the country's first billion-dollar industry.

2. Military officers who left Army frequently became involved in railroading (as well as other business enterprises).

a. e.g., McClellan, chief engineer of Illinois Central Railroad; later president of the Ohio and Mississippi Railroad.

(1) Made $10,000/yr. in 1860--vs. $4,060 for R.E. Lee.

3. Railroads came to run on a hierarchical bureaucratic model--similar to and perhaps influenced by military organization. (Robert L. O'Connell thinks so; Alfred Chandler not. Edward Hagerman sits on fence.)

4. Military implications--already beginning to affect warfare even before Civil War. E.g., French concentration prior to Solferino in 1859.

5. American officers did few studies of impact of railroad on war, but the use of railroads was obvious to practically everyone.

B. Rifled Musket

1. How did the rifled musket technology work? The rifle takes its name from grooves in the barrel that make the bullet spin while in flight. This spinning action makes the bullet go straight--like a baseball pitcher's fast ball. By contrast, a smoothbore musket (of the sort used in the War of Independence and all other American conflicts before the Civil War) had no grooves--no "rifling." A bullet fired from a smoothbore musket was like a knuckleball in baseball--it would go generally toward the target, but it might veer off in any direction. Even a very good marksman could seldom hit his target at ranges greater than a hundred yards.

2. Given the advantages of a rifled musket, you might think that armies would have preferred them to smoothbores. But for a long time this was not true. That was because, while rifles had been around for centuries and were often used to hunt game, they had a big drawback from a soldier's point of view. They took a long time to load. With muskets, you load the gun by placing the bullet down the end of the gun--the muzzle. With a smoothbore you could just pour in some powder and drop the bullet after. That took very little time. With a rifled musket, however, you had to pound the bullet down the barrel with a mallet and a long pole. That was necessary so that you could mash the bullet--which was made of soft lead--a bit so that it would fit the rifled grooves. Unless it did, you couldn't get the desired spinning effect when the bullet was fired.

3. All that pounding took time. And while you were pounding, an enemy armed with a smoothbore musket could close the range and shoot you first. That's why armies mainly used smoothbores. Only special troops used rifles.

4. The fact that armies used smoothbore muskets explains what otherwise seems stupid: the shoulder-to-shoulder tactics employed in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Basically, with a smoothbore musket an individual soldier couldn't hit the broadside of a barn. But a group of soldiers, standing next to each other in a line as long as the barn, could hit the barn. Or another group of soldiers. So the idea was to march within fairly close range of the enemy, fire one volley to throw the enemy's ranks in disarray, and then charge home with the bayonet. These were called "shock tactics."

5. Civil War armies used such tactics. However, a few years before the war, a French army captain named Minié had invented a way to load a rifled musket as easily as a smmothbore. Modestly, he named his new bullet the "Minié ball," which Civil War soldiers corrupted into "minnie ball." The Minié ball could be dropped right down the barrel. But one end was hollow. When the rifle was fired, the expanding gas made by the gunpowder widened the sides of this hollow end in a small fraction of a second. The sides of the hollow end touched the rifling, creating the spinning effect required for good accuracy, and instead of hitting a target at a maximum of 100 yards, a good marksman could now hit a target at four times that range or better.

6. This obviously made the battlefield a far more dangerous place, since soldiers could now be killed at 400 yards or more. When a group of soldiers charged the enemy, therefore, they were under fire for a much longer period of time before they could actually reach the enemy's position. "Shock tactics" no longer worked so well. Civil War battles became slugging matches in which the two sides had to shoot it out with each other, and it was very bloody.

V. Military Thought

A. Influenced intellectual environment of future Civil War commanders. HOWEVER--it is important not to overestimate this aspect of things.

B. Baron Antoine Henri Jomini

1. Swiss military theorist; one of two major interpreters of Napoleon.

a. Actually, his theories are more reminiscent of the tactics and strategy of Frederick the Great.

b. All West Point graduates had (in theory) absorbed his ideas from the courses of Dennis Hart Mahan.

c. Halleck's Elements of Military Art and Science (1846) was a thinly-disguised rewrite of Jomini's work.

2. Jomini's ideas had a geometric cast to them and were hardly original:

a. concentration; attack enemy communications while protecting one's own; attack weakness with strength, etc.

b. Interior lines; possession of strategic points.

3. It would be wrong to overestimate Jomini's influence on Civil War commanders. Few studied him seriously. Novelist Michael Shaara placed these words in the mouth of Longstreet: "[T]here's no strategy to this bloody war. What it is is old Napoleon and a hell of a lot of chivalry." An extreme characterization but often close to the mark.

a. Few references to Jomini or formal strategic theory in Civil War correspondence.

b. Successful Civil War commanders often regarded their strategy as a matter of applied common sense.

C. Delafield Commission (1855-1859)

1. technicist emphasis--missed the big picture.

a. e.g., picked up on Russian leggings; missed conscription. Completely overlooked emerging Prussian general staff system.

D. Hardee's Tactics.

1. Inadequately digested the impact of the rifled musket.

VI. Conclusion

A.On eve of Civil War, the Army was utterly unprepared for the ordeal of total war.

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