>hastily thrown together army that is also bigger than anything anyone this side of the Atlantic has ever led in battle>most of the soldiers don't even know how to aim and fire>most of them are also 90 day regiments who will be going home shortly>no officers have ever led anything above a company or regiment>commanding general whose prior military experience was a staff not a line officer>almost no cavalry>onward to Richmond, hopefully before our 90 day guys' enlistments expireWhat could possibly go wrong? XD
>>18250161man, early in the war Lincoln had some really unrealistic ideas of what it took to lead or prepare an army>Feb 1862>orders all Union armies to attack on Washington's Birthday>the order is simply ignoredin the following two years campaigning in Virginia began in May while 1862 had an unbelievably wet winter and spring due to the effects of a volcanic eruption in East Africa the previous fall. all the way through May it rained buckets. trying to campaign in Virginia in February especially with that super wet winter just wasn't happening.
>>18250161Like most regulars, McDowell didn't appreciate that volunteer troops couldn't do what regular soldiers did. In fact Robert E. Lee made the same mistake as well in his first battle.
The Confederates weren't any better in training, equipment, or experience--it's quite amazing they performed as well as they did at 1st Bull Run.
>>18250185if you think about it, they had Johnston, Beauregard, Jackson, Longstreet, Ewell, Stuart, AP Hill, Kirby-Smith, Early, and more while the Union army had few high ranking officers who did anything important later in the war aside from Sherman and (lol) Burnside.
>>18250173I'm not sure how useful regular army troops would have been here. None had any experience fighting a real war or army, just Indians and some were new recruits. Admittedly they would have training and discipline the volunteers lacked. On that score William Franklin noted in his report of 1st Bull Run that the Union firing discipline in the battle was terrible with soldiers often firing up into the air or even into their comrades in front of them, and he added that the Confederates by far had superior firing discipline.
>>18250185Confederate states had large and well-trained militia incase of slave revolts
>>18250185you're joking right? they got most of the pre-war US army and martial cultures that spent the last century fighting indians. At least on the officer level, if it were as bad as you say the south would have no reasonable expectation of victory with their smaller numbers, they thought they could defeat the north with skill.
>>18250185at Shiloh it was the same. nobody on the Union side had expected them to fight as hard as they did.
>>18250185they also had a lot more cavalry while McDowell had one measly battalion. he tried using infantry for reconnaissance but it didn't really work.
Joe Johnston was supposed to be held in the Shenandoah Valley by Robert Patterson, but Patterson was a senile fuck who'd served in the War of 1812 and Johnston got away from him to join Beauregard.
>>18250161> most of the soldiers don't even know how to aim and fire
>>18250208The war with Mexico was only 13 years back, surely a bunch of careerists would have been around for that
>>18250699The regular officers who served in the Civil War were all junior lieutenants or captains in Mexico. They had pretty much only led company-sized formations. Nobody had so much as led a brigade and McDowell's army at 1st Bull Run was over twice as big as Scott's army in Mexico.
Brigade sizes in both armies were also extremely irregular.
Aside from the Mexican War, the Regular Army was a few thousand troops led by War of 1812 veterans, chasing Indians or manning coastal fortifications. Many West Point graduates got fed up and chose civilian life, often taking their engineering skills to the booming railroads and other industries. Now divide that manpower and experience in half and try to build armies with state volunteer regiments, weapons shortages and no logistics. It’s no wonder there were only a few major battles, confused amateur hour brawls, in the first year of the war.
>>18250810The regular army by 1860 was entirely situated west of the Mississippi and it was in scattered company and battalion sized formations since it was tradition to only assemble them into brigades and regiments during wartime. This was also a problem during the Civil War, when a campaign ended generals like Halleck loved scattering their troops and putting them on constabulary duty.
>>18250810>weapons shortagesthe most common infantry arm in the first year of the war was the .69 smoothbore musket and that was what most soldiers at 1st Bull Run were carrying. some of them had the M1841 Mississippi rifle, but nobody had imported European guns at Bull Run yet and the .58 M1855 rifle was only carried by regular army troops.
>>18250810promotion was extremely slow in the peacetime army, it always is in any era (Eisenhower in 1941 was 51 years old and still only a lieutenant colonel) but even moreso in the antebellum US Army when there was no mandatory retirement age for officers.
>>18250836I want to also add that (and anyone who's been in the military knows this to be true) all promotions above the rank of major are political and nobody gets them without connections somewhere. Grant had his sponsor in Elisha Washburne and Sherman's brother was a Senator.
>>18250829as for artillery, various guns but the Confederates mainly had 6 pound field guns. this weapon was a pea shooter really more for horse artillery than anything; even in the Napoleonic era it would have been a small cannon; the standard French field gun of that time was an 8 pounder and the British had 9 pounders.
>>18250702McDowell tried to compensate by assigning regular army colonels to brigade command, perhaps unsurprisingly Sherman was the only Union brigade commander who performed better than average and actually tried to use his outfit as a brigade instead of sending regiments into action piecemeal.
>>18250860The Secesh grabbed a lot of heavy coastal artillery as the war kicked off. Iirc 1100 cannon from the Gosport Navy Yard. A lot of stuff got moved to their western river fortifications early on when their rail network was still intact.
if you go down the list of Union brigade and division commanders at 1st Bull Run, most of them were pretty much jokes.>Schneck>Keyes>Heintzelman>Hunter>McDowell himself>Franklin>Burnsidethese guys all had lolcow careers later in the war. only Burnside ended up sticking around a long time and holding important commands and not because he was any better of a general than Hunter or Keyes. Sherman was the only actual talent of that sorry lot.
>>18250829the M1861 Springfield rifle was a modification of the M1855 rifle that removed the cumbersome tape primer and replaced it with conventional percussion caps. none of those were yet available when 1st Bull Run was fought and the first handful didn't ship until the fall months. also Wade Hampton's Hampton Legion had P53 Enfield rifles as Hampton was rich and equipped the outfit out of his own pocket. they were the only outfit at 1st Bull Run to have Enfields which otherwise didn't start being imported until a few months later.outside that, yes everyone else at the battle had .69 muskets or Mississippi rifles.
>>18250877The equipment from the Harpers Ferry armory was put on rail cars and transported to Richmond.
McDowell's battle plan almost worked, he just wasn't expecting Confederate reinforcements to show up out of nowhere and hit his flank.
>>18250702he had 35k dudes. as for the Confederates, Beauregard had between 20k and 22k dudes and Johnston about 10k (his official report gives 8,334 men but adding up the reported strengths of his brigades gives us 10k which suggests he was lowballing it some).
>>18250911Stonewall Jackson also snatched some locomotives from the Baltimore and Ohio, dragging them along a dirt road until they reached a line in Confederate held territory.
>>18250710Sherman's brigade had about 3,200 men however the size of it was never actually recorded and this figure was derived from sources/estimates of the regimental strengths in the brigade. Other sources state that Sherman had one of the biggest brigades in the army which was likely why McDowell chose it to spearhead the attack.
>>18250958Considering the large size of most brigades at 1st Bull Run the casualty count was pretty low, only 4,600 men killed/wounded/missing for the entire battle (shocking at the time but trivial compared to later battles). That can be easily explained by totally untrained troops armed mostly with inaccurate smoothbore muskets.
>>18250984Napoleonic battles had enormous casualty counts with smoothbore musket-armed troops. It was more like totally green troops had no clue how to aim and fire. Another thing to consider is that the Confederates at Bull Run were mostly fighting on the defense, they just stood in place and fired and weren't doing as much attacking and maneuvering as the Union troops.
>>18251005also Napoleonic armies were huge, most of the time bigger than the largest ACW armies. at Jena the Prussians lost a staggering 41,000 men. for comparison Gettysburg was the single bloodiest ACW battle and combined losses for both armies were about 46,000.
>>18251017The Battle of Leipzig alone caused 110,000 casualties. Not until WW1 would a battle of that scale be fought again.
>>18251017accurate. European wars involved great armies and tremendous casualty counts but it was new in American experience. the casualty totals in ACW battles were sometimes bigger than entire armies in the Revolutionary War. the only experience the vast majority of Americans alive in 1861 had with war was the Mexican conflict and it was small scale for comparison.
>>18251109Napoleonic armies were huge and professionally trained with professional staff. They also did not fight in the hostile terrain of North America with a lot of poorly mapped out woods and swamps. Further, after two decades of fighting everyone was highly experienced with war by the latter stages of the Napoleonic conflicts.
>>18251119Sickness killed or disabled more men in the ACW than bullets. The Navy was well in advance of the Army in terms of hygiene, medical care, and diet. Most generals didn't know about the advances being made in Europe at that time, even before germ theory was a thing, in keeping servicemen clean and healthy. It couldn't be overlooked that the biggest cause of death in the Mexican War and Crimea was disease.
>>18251005The smoothbore musket had the potential to be more deadly than the Minie ball as it had a higher velocity and would create a shock wave when it hit tissue while the Minie ball didn't damage anything outside the bullet track. If you got shot in the torso with a smoothbore ball at close range (under 100 yards) it was near-certain death while a Minie ball might be survival if it didn't hit a vital organ or major artery.Where the Minie ball was worse was what it did to arms and legs since it would shatter bone while a round ball would usually just deflect off them. So being hit in the arm or leg with a Minie ball usually always damaged the bone beyond repair and it had to be amputated.
the big problem in the Civil War was the Lincoln administration being unable to decide whether to conquer the entire Confederacy or just strategically valuable points. as a result they launched a lot of pointless attacks on coastal targets or in the Trans Mississippi that didn't affect the outcome of the war; Grant said so in his memoirs, that his main aim for the 1864 campaigns was to disable the two principle Confederate armies and everything in between Georgia and Virginia. the rest didn't matter.in WW2 the Allies only went after important targets. Japan controlled a vast stretch of East Asia and the Pacific most of which the US simply ignored and Germany on V-E Day still had entire intact armies in Czechoslovakia and Scandinavia all of which were ignored because those were of no importance.
>>18251125I would have to go with the change in technology first (rifled guns and artillery), then outdated tactics and then the total lack of an adequate medical system (medical personnel, facilities, training, supplies and logistics). Napoleon was a student of war and kept changing his tactics as the wars went on and the quality of his solders changed. His battles were fought within 75 yards of the enemy, unlike the ACW where the rifled musket allowed you to start killing at 500 yards.
>>18251183>His battles were fought within 75 yards of the enemythe smoothbore musket had a longer effective range than that. the British army traditionally did close range firing as they had the philosophy of "wait until you see the whites of the enemy's eyes" but continental European armies tended to fire at longer ranges. we just happen to know British military tactics of the musket era a little more than eg. Austrian ones due to the lack of a language barrier.
>>18251125One reason for the horrendous losses in Napoleonic battles was how armies could not easily disengage from fighting. The Grand Armee also lost far more men in Russia from disease and exposure than combat.
>>18251119the public wanted easy, decisive and cheap victories to happen as soon as possible. They wanted Richmond easily taken after a battle at Yorktown with less than 500 friendly casualties, that kind of thing - the newspapers seem to have created and reinforced a meme in 1861-2 that the enemy would simply give up. Grant admitted that he thought so too, right up until Shiloh after which he realized in fact the Confederacy wasn't going down without one hell of a fight.
>>18251119Indeed it was. Europeans in the 1860s had plenty of experience with large-scale warfare going back to Louis XIV's time. They were desperate to prevent a recurrence of the wars that devastated the continent from the Nine Years War to the Napoleonic Wars. Neither the North or South in the ACW knew what they were getting into, arguably it was not until the first really big battles between April-June 1862 that everyone knew what all-out war was like.
a good general had all of the following>personal bravery>coolness under pressure>being smart enough to manage an army>understanding what your enemy wants to do and what your bosses want>administrative ability--Hooker and McClellan had that but missed out on the other aspects of being a good general>aggression--Lee, Jackson, Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan always thought about how they could beat up their opponent while Buell and McClellan were more worried about how the enemy could beat them up>being able to work with politicians>admitting that something you tried failed and to try something else, which Grant had to do in the Vicksburg campaign many times>not getting tunnel vision (Bragg's main fault)>luck
>>18251267Someone (Clausewitz?) said all war is inseparable from politics, yet Buell and McClellan lived in the delusion that politics could be totally avoided.
>>18251125>They also did not fight in the hostile terrain of North America with a lot of poorly mapped out woods and swampsAntietam, Bull Run, and Gettysburg were the only major ACW battles fought in open fields and farmland comparable to the terrain of Europe.
>>18251198Napoleon post-Austerlitz became a far less imaginative general and was more inclined to head-on attacks, however some of that was due to the declining quality of his armies, which arguably peaked in 1805-07, and they just couldn't do complex maneuvering as well as the armies he led in earlier days.
>>18251309The Eastern theater had more open terrain but the West was a whole 'nother animal. It's impressive how thinly populated and how much empty space the United States west of the Appalachians still had in the 1860s.
>>182512021st Bull Run definitely had low casualties compared to the later war, although nearly half of both sides' armies were not actually engaged in the battle. Otherwise Civil War battles compared closely to Napoleonic battles for casualties proportionate to the total amount of troops on the field, remembering that Napoleonic armies were huge compared to most Civil War armies.
>>18251465Union losses at Gettysburg were 23,000 men. Confederate losses are generally believed to be about the same but some estimates put them as high as 28,000.
>>18251267In maneuvering a pre-20th century army, a general had to account for weather, roads, animal and wagon transportation, and many other factors. It would be a tremendous amount of data to have to compute and so you see why relatively few ACW generals had the mental skill set needed for army command.
>>18250161Poor McDowell, he was really a staff officer who never had the right skill set for field command. Also his own soldiers hated him and spread rumors about his huge appetite, that his custom sun hat was a signal for the enemy to recognize, etc. In short he was really about as inept as Burnside but without Burnside's lovable bumbler personality to overlook it.
>>18251503McDowell would have been a fine staff officer. He was certainly more competent than many political generals.But he was consistently unlucky, didn't know how to delegate, and something about his personality made him a hard person to like, especially to the rank & file. The man made an army hate him by designing his own hat! His testimony in the Porter court martial is also rather shameful.he doesn't have surviving personal letters either so his personality and motivations aren't that well understood.
>>18251528he knew he wasn't qualified for this job, knew his army was pathetically untrained, but the public pressure to do something was immense--unlike in Europe where kings and nobles made policy, in America the newspapers made policy and they demanded action now. many also thought the war was no worse than a street riot that could be dispersed when some militia units showed up.
>>18251503He never got to command veteran troops, the soldiers he had at both Bull Run battles were totally green.
>>18251533untrue btw the Pennsylvania Reserves fought in the Seven Days and his other 2 divisions while green were properly trained and equipped
>>18250696Patterson really shouldn't have had the command, his troops were also 90 day regiments who were going home soon and had gotten checked at Falling Waters. His subordinates were timid and probably because he was almost 70 years old didn't have the willpower to override them.McDowell's army were also exhausted by marching around in blazing hot Virginia midsummer weather and not yet being conditioned to army life. Three of the Confederate brigades (Bee, Bartow, and Evans) were completely wrecked and two had their commanders killed and for a time Jackson was fighting alone. The Union brigades aside from Burnside's weren't really beaten up to the point of not being able to fight for the rest of the day. Then Johnston's reinforcements came and flanked the Union attackers.
I don't think anyone was winning a battle with the subordinates McDowell had to work with>Heintzelman>Hunter>Tyler>MilesNone of these guys did anything noteworthy later in the war and two weren't even good enough to be called incompetent. The brigade commanders were also all over the place.
>>18251531it's really amazing how XIX century people just thought war would be like a Currier & Ives lithograph and had no idea what actually happens in one
>>18251590I'd think Europeans had a more realistic idea of war; the Napoleonic Wars were a long time ago by the 1860s but there were still a good enough amount of old people around who could remember them and there had been the recent Crimean and Sardinian Wars. Americans, yes, had never fought anything more than a bush war in essence.OTOH Europeans did go into WW1 thinking it would be a costume party as they themselves had not seen a major conflict in decades.
>>18250161see his sword? that's actually an Austrian cavalry sabre, not a regulation US Army one. he must have gotten it prewar when he was serving as an attache in Europe.
>>18251585Dixon Miles had been a pretty solid regular officer in Mexico and in the Indian wars but his ACW performance was beyond pathetic and then he died embarrassingly at Harpers Ferry. Oh well, he was almost 60 anyway so he was really past his prime.
>>18251645some historians speculate that he was fragged. it is known that his troops hated him so much that nobody even wanted to carry him to a field hospital. it was the largest surrender of a US Army outfit until WW2.
>Confederates evacuate the Manassas entrenchments 3/8/62 and burn supplies they couldn't carry with them including 350k pounds of meat>during the early stages of the Peninsula campaign they abandon Norfolk and Williamsburg two more food depots>after that the ANV was perpetually short of food, as Jubal Early put it>out west, the Union capture of Nashville in Feb. 1862 had more food in it>Jefferson Davis resists converting cotton fields into food production because he doesn't feel he should be telling planters what to grow>in late 1864 a large shipment of meat brought in via blockade runners rotted in a warehouse or got stolenGood jerb, guys.
>>18251695The Army of Tennessee was starving while they were besieging the Yankees at Chattanooga, even with a railroad line and all the resources of Georgia that Sherman feasted on a year later at their backs. Bragg was such a demoralizer for his men but that really broke them.
>>18251794that had more to do with the fact that Georgia's food supply was mostly being shipped to the ANV
>>18251800that was important to the 1864 campaigns incidentally. Georgia, the Carolinas, and the Shenandoah Valley were the main sources of food and fodder for the ANV so Grant wanted to get rid of those to starve Lee into surrender.
>>18251794AoT got their consumables mostly from Mississippi and Alabama. Their logistics were always iffy as they moved around a lot more than ANV and didn't have a stable supply base, so it's somewhat surprising they were kept adequately supplied over the war.
>>18251824Originally they were supposed to get supplies from Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and Kentucky but the Confederacy lost territory in the West early on so there went most of the AOT's food and fodder.
>>18251844The southern third of GA, MS, and AL had plenty of food but not the railroads needed to get it to where it needed to go.
The West was a huge area with loads of room to maneuver while Virginia didn't have much space for comparison so Lee could hold off the Union armies much easier than the AOT could hold off Union armies in the west.
>>18251854Also once Vicksburg fell the Confederacy was cut off from the food supplies present in Arkansas and Texas.
>>18251824>>18251854There was a big gap in the rail network east/west across central Alabama. Once the Memphis and Charleston was cut in 1862 the only east west connection was a circuitous route through Mobile that Bragg used during the Perryville campaign.
A crippling mistake Richmond made in the West was their Quixotic quest to conquer Kentucky and tons of time and resources were wasted on that.
>>18251904The Confederate invasions north (in KY, MD, and PA) were raids and no more than that. They might obtain food but they had no way to replenish their ammo up there; whatever they took with them was all they had until they got back into safe Confederate territory. After Gettysburg the ANV's artillery ammo was nearly exhausted. They inevitably had to go back south; even food would cease to be available in wintertime and the Confederate armies also had no winter clothing so they couldn't stay north of the Mason-Dixon line after October.
>>18251904They thought Kentucky and Missouri would flock to the stars and bars if they just showed up but those states always leaned at least 60/40 Union. Lincoln had a similar obsession with the Unionists of East Tennessee.
>>18251916never forget that the ANV abducted free blacks in Pennsylvania to take south into slavery
>Up in Caledonia, Early's troops laid irreverant hands on an ironworks owned by Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, one of Congress's most diehard Radical Republicans. The foreman of the ironworks begged Early for mercy, protesting that the mill had been operating at a loss and to burn it would do nothing but put several dozen people out of work. "That's not how Yankees do business," he replied. The ironworks was set alight and the Confederate troops departed from the town.[3]
The Civil War is fascinating in both the degree of inexperience and ineptitude the combatants had at the start, and in how they somehow managed to shape up into actual competent professional military forces as good as any other in the world in just 4 years.
>>18251928I wonder about all the indecencies the captured black women had to endure with no one to tell their story. I mean, in the South rape of a slave wasn't even recognized as a crime, at least not of your own slaves (it was a misdemeanor offense to rape somebody else's slaves)
>>18251954Virginia specifically did not legally recognize free blacks. If a slaveowner granted a slave emancipation, he had to leave the state. How much this was actually enforced is unclear.
>>18251959Never knew that, thats pretty interesting.. I wonder why that is? Maybe they thought they would cause trouble with those still enslaved?
