in the course of the us civil war how did tactics change open study

In the course of the US Civil War, how did tactics change? A. Battles at sea were more decisive than those on land. Defensive trench warfare became more common. Massed groups of soldiers charged the enemy. More of the responsibility was borne by the cavalry.

Full Answer

How did the tactics of the Civil War change over time?

Honestly, not a whole lot changed on the fundamental, tactical level; it was their ability to execute the tactics that changed. The basic forces at play -infantry with muzzleloading blackpowder muskets and bayonets, direct firing field artillery, cavalry armed with carbines, pistols and sabres- were the same in 1865 as in 1709.

How effective were American tactics in the Mexican-American War?

American troops took the tactical offensive in most Mexican War battles with great success, and they suffered fairly light losses. Unfortunately, similar tactics proved to be obsolete in the Civil War because of a major technological innovation fielded in the 1850s - the rifle-musket.

Why did trench warfare become more common during the Civil War?

It started due to the differences between the slave and the free states in terms of power of the government to not allow having slaves in places which were not declared states yet. Defensive trench warfare became more common was the tactic chnge during the civil war.

Did official doctrine prior to the Civil War recognize the rifle-musket?

Official tactical doctrine prior to the beginning of the Civil War did not clearly recognize the potential of the new rifle-musket, Prior to 1855, the most influential tactical guide was General Winfield Scott's three-volume work, Infantry Tactics (1835), based on French tactical models of the Napoleonic Wars.

What changed the course of the Civil War?

The election of President Abraham Lincoln in 1860 triggered the secession of most slave-holding states and propelled the country into civil war. Four years of tragic bloodshed resulted in over 700,000 deaths and forever changed the course of our nation.

What was an important tactic during the Civil War?

The strategy for the United States was to surround the territory of the South in the Anaconda Plan, blockading the Atlantic Ocean and controlling the Mississippi, to keep goods from going into or out of the South and forcing them to surrender.

How did grant change the course of the war?

Grant transformed the way the American Civil War was fought. By shifting to a strategy of “baseless” campaigning he freed himself from supply lines, increasing his ability to maneuver. He devastated the lands he went through, embittering the Confederates against him. Historically, it was not a new strategy.

How was the strategy of total war used during the Civil War?

Grant burned and sacked smaller towns in order to destroy the South's economic basis—the plantations. This strategy was intended to demoralize the Confederates and destroy their infrastructure so that neither the soldiers nor the civilians had the supplies to mobilize for the war effort.

How did military tactics change during the Civil War?

But there was one technology, deployed in limited numbers during the Civil War, that changed all of this. Repeating rifles could fire anywhere from six to 15 rounds without reloading, allowing them to hit rates of fire of 15 or more per minute. Like rifled muskets, they were typically accurate to 400 yards or more.

What military weapons and tactics were used during the Civil War?

During the war, a variety of weapons were used on both sides. These weapons include edged weapons such as knives, swords, and bayonets, firearms such as rifled muskets, breech-loaders and repeating weapons, various artillery such as field guns and siege guns and new weapons such as the early grenade and landmine.

What tactics did Grant use?

Accordingly, he adopted an aggressive strategy that relied on corralling the enemy by cutting its forces off from the territory needed to maneuver, the resources needed to fight, and one another. And then, after mustering the largest force possible, Grant attacked to destroy or capture the enemy armies.

What tactic did General Grant use to force the surrender of Vicksburg?

Grant simply waited for the soldiers and the citizens of Vicksburg to exhaust their resources and their will to resist. eral Grant, who demanded unconditional surrender. What also happened in July 1863 that overshadowed the Union victory at Vicksburg?

What was Grant's strategy to defeat Lee?

Although Lee's army inflicted a war-high 240,000 casualties on its opponents, about 117,000 of those occurred in 1864 and 1865 when Lee was on the defensive and Grant's war strategy engaged in a deliberate war of adhesion (achieving attrition and exhaustion) against the army Lee had fatally depleted in 1862 and 1863.

What was the Union's total war strategy?

This strategy, known as the Anaconda Plan, would eliminate the possibility of Confederate help from abroad. Control the Mississippi River. The river was the South's major inland waterway. Also, Northern control of the rivers would separate Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas from the other Confederate states.

How did the total war strategy contribute to the end of the war?

It boosted morale and revitalized the Confederacy's fighting spirit. It caused Southern generals to adopt their own total war strategy. It resulted in the South's immediate surrender and the end of the war. It crippled the Confederate war effort in the wake of the destruction.

Who came up with the total war strategy during the Civil War?

The most deadly conflicts have been fought on ideological grounds in revolutions and civil and religious wars. The modern concept of total war can be traced to the writings of the 19th-century Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, who denied that wars could be fought by laws.

Why did soldiers stop digging trenches?

Soldiers stopped forming lines and exchanging volleys, and they started digging trenches to better withstand modern rifle and artillery fire. Of course, entrenchment had been a part of siege warfare for about 500 years, as besiegers dug ever closer to the walls of their targeted fort or town.

How much of the army was used in skirmishes?

Use of skirmishers increased. At the start of the war basically 20% of a units strength were sent forward as skirmishers. By the end of the war it was typically near 50%. The skirmishers basically operated as the “suppressing” fire. They would try to disrupt the enemy’s line and prevent it from offering a solid resistance to the enemy.

Can artillery be unlimber?

Artillery could no longer unlimber inside cannister range , while still remaining outside musket range, and blast a hole in the enemy’s line. Artillery was farced back to long-range preparatory fire.

What did the West Point army commanders learn?

The professional education the army commanders had received at West Point had taught them that staff work did not require superfluous specialized training, and that any officer could undertake the associated tasks himself. This shortage of trained staff officers was a major disadvantage during operations. In addition to the McClellan example above, Lee cannibalized his own staff (twelve men, remember) to perform reconnaissance missions at the Battle of Gettysburg, which left him without aides at various points in the battle.

What was the most useful training for the men and lower level officers?

With desperate shortages of trained (to say nothing of skilled) commanders, and the near total absence of trained staffs, the most useful training the men and lower level officers got was experience on the battlefield, the most brutal of all teachers. It is also a capricious teacher; the men learn until they are killed, and because the Union generally didn't slot new recruits into existing units, instead raising new ones from scratch, these men had to learn from the beginning. Without replacements, veteran units that had fought in dozens of battles were just ground down into nothingness.

What was the same in 1865 as in 1709?

The basic forces at play -infantry with muzzleloading blackpowder muskets and bayonets, direct firing field artillery, cavalry armed with carbines, pistols and sabres- were the same in 1865 as in 1709. It still took twenty or thirty seconds to reload after every shot, men still only carried sixty rounds, troops still ran when faced with a bayonet charge, most soldiers had little hope of hitting anything past a hundred yards, muskets and artillery still threw out thick clouds of smoke with every shot, leaving soldiers deaf and blind, and everyone knew from the beginning that it was good to have field fortifications and bad for your enemy to have them. Joe Johnston dug a trench line in Northern Virginia after First Bull Run, McClellan dug his way all the way up the York James Peninsula, and even after four years of bloodshed, commanders on both sides still formed their men up in dense columns to frontally assault these fortifications, because sometimes that's just what you have to do.

How many officers are in the army?

Modern armies have large staffs to manage the vast resources they consume in action; a Corps headquarters in the modern U.S. Army has about 300 officers and men in various sections and command posts. In the Napoleonic Wars, each of Napoleon's marshals had a staff of thirty men to assist them in running their corps. Robert E. Lee, commanding 75,000 men in the Army of Northern Virginia, had a grand total of one adjutant, one military secretary, five aides, and five clerks at his headquarters. When McClellan found a complete copy of Lee's campaign plan in 1862, before he could make any use of it, he had to figure out if it was part of a deception effort by the Confederates, weigh it against other intelligence reports, make sure it was still current, and identify and counter risks. He did this without any assistance from his staff, and could only develop plans, guide his subordinates, and issue orders after they were completed.

How much food do you need to command a trooper?

Naturally, this was a problem. Commanding fifty troopers is one thing, but armies of tens of thousands require, for instance, a million pounds of food and forage a day. Up to a million rifle cartridges for every day of combat. Thousands of artillery rounds, replacement parts for rifles, cannons, wagons. Men wear out their shoes marching 20 miles a day; those have to be replaced. They need good maps; you can't send 90,000 men into battle down the same road, or the men at the back of the marching column won't even know there's a battle at the front. You have to split the army into multiple columns, have them take multiple paths in the same direction, but they have to all converge at a common point in case one of them runs into the enemy. And then there's the whole alchemy of military intelligence, so you know where you might run into the enemy.

What was the quality of the Union soldiers in the Civil War?

The quality of the Union soldier is believed to have peaked in 1863; most of the men there were veterans, and importantly, volunteers. The data shows that in the Civil War, the most battle casualties and fewest desertions came from volunteer units. This came after perhaps a quarter million casualties in 1862. After Gettysburg, and especially through 1864, an increasing number of Union troops were conscripts. During U.S. Grant's Overland campaign in 1864, losses were so high, he transferred artillerymen out of the forts around Washington, gave them crash infantry training, and put them on the firing line; their skill and morale left much to be desired. Beyond that, many of the regiments fighting in that campaign had been raised for three year terms in 1861, and would be leaving soon; this led to an unwillingness to take risks, undermining combat performance.

Did the Army have any professional officers?

Naturally, neither side had enough professional officers to control these armies with much skill. The professional officers they did have were graduates of West Point, which was fundamentally an engineering college; the best scoring cadets commissioned into the Corps of Engineers, followed by Artillery and Infantry, with Cavalry in dead last. Controlling large bodies of troops -divisions and corps, field armies, tens of thousands of men- was not part of their professional universe. One of Lee's corps commanders, Richard S. Ewell, mentioned that in the Army, "he had learned all about commanding fifty U.S. Dragoons, and had forgotten everything else."

What were the tactical lessons learned during the Civil War?

Because these battles were so small, almost all the tactical lessons learned during the war focused at the regimental, battery, and squadron levels. Future Civil War leaders had learned very little about brigade, division, and corps maneuver in Mexico, yet these units were the basic fighting elements of both armies in 1861-65.

What were the major influences on American military thinking at the beginning of the Civil War?

The Napoleonic Wars and the Mexican War were the major influences on American military thinking at the beginning of the Civil War. The campaigns of Napoleon and Wellington provided ample lessons in battle strategy, weapons employment, and logistics, while American tactical doctrine reflected the lessons learned in Mexico (1846-48).

What was the first manual for the rifle and light infantry?

Hardee’s work contained few signifYcant revisions of Scott's manual. His major innovation was to increase the speed of the advance to a "double-quick time" of 165 steps (l51 yards) per minute. If, as suggested, Hardee introduced his manual as a response to the rifle-musket, then he failed to appreciate the weapon’s impact on combined arms tactics and the essential shift the rifle-musket made in favor of the defense. Hardee’s "Tactics" was the standard infantry manual used by both sides at the outbreak of war in 1861.

What was the cavalry manual based on?

The cavalry’s manual, published in 1841, was based on French sources that focused on close-order offensive tactics. It favored the traditional cavalry attack in two ranks of horsemen armed with sabers or lances. The manual took no notice of the rifle-musket's potential, nor did it give much attention to dismounted operations.

How far did the regiment advance in the Civil War?

After identifying the enemy’s position, a regiment advanced in closely ordered lines to within 100 yards. There, it delivered a devastating volley, followed by a charge with bayonets. Both sides used this basic tactic in the first battles of the Civil War.

When did the Army start using rifle muskets?

This new weapon greatly increased the infantry’s range and accuracy and loaded as fast as a musket. The U.S. Army adopted a version of the rifle-musket in 1855, and by the beginning of the Civil War, rifle-muskets were available in moderate numbers.

Who was the leader of the tactical doctrine of the Civil War?

Official tactical doctrine prior to the beginning of the Civil War did not clearly recognize the potential of the new rifle-musket, Prior to 1855, the most influential tactical guide was General Winfield Scott 's three-volume work, Infantry Tactics (1835), based on French tactical models of the Napoleonic Wars.