The American Civil War Era

This is the era in which the tactics of the Napoleonic Era are going to meet higher technology counters - like rifles that are more accurate and have a higher rate of fire, and artillery that is more accurate and does more damage. The old generals will think that they can still do war the way Napoleon did it. They will, but it will cause extremely high casualties.

This is also the era in which armies will be transported by railroad, and thus will be larger and move faster.

Its a full scale dress rehearsal for the trench warfare of World World I.

April 12, 1861 – April 9, 1865. American Civil War.

At the start of the war, the US Federal government will find that, though it has more manpower and industrial resources to call on, many of its brightest West Point graduates have joined the Confederacy. The Federal government will be plagued with amateur generals who are really posturing politicians. It will take awhile for President Lincoln to find the creme that will eventually rise to the top.

The Confederacy, short on men and material, will have the best generals early on. These generals, unlike their Union counter parts who are mimicking Napoleon, have already figured out that the technology of war now favors the defense rather than the offense. They will be strategically offensive, but tactically defensive. I.e., they will boldly move towards the Union armies, but once they spot one, they will immediately move their men to the most defensible nearby terrain and buckle down to the defensive. Their Union enemies, slavishly following Napoleon, will conduct mass infantry charges on well defended positions. The casualties will be so high that they will break and run. The Confederates will then go over to the offensive and chase them to hell and gone.

The documentary on the Civil War is of course, Ken Burn's. This one is not it.

Tactics of the Civil War.

July 21, 1861. First Battle of Bull Run.
Movie: Gods And Generals.

At first, neither side in the civil war could believe that the war was going to be a large, long, and bloody mess. So "cabinet war" thinking was directing the strategy. Bull Run was on the path from Washington D.C. to Richmond, Virgina, capital of the Confederacy. Northern newspaper editors like Horace Greeley where clamoring for the Federal army to go "on to Richmond!" I.e., to win a symbolic "cabinet war" victory by capturing the enemy nation's capital.

The Confederacy's much better generals knew how to turn that back. And they turned back many other such ill-conceived attacks. All the Confederates had to do was keep the Confederacy in existence long enough for the other nations of the world to finally recognize it and offer treaties to it. President Lincoln was in a race against time to subdue an an army which was well versed in the defensive with an army that was ill prepared for taking high casualties.

September 17, 1862. Battle of Antietam. Movie: Glory. Opening scene. Documentary.

April 17 to May 2, 1863. Grierson's Raid. A diversionary raid to cover Ulysses S. Grant's main attack on Vicksburg, Mississippi. The fictionalized version is John Ford's The Horse Soldiers.

April 30 (1863-04-30) – May 6, 1863. Battle of Chancellorsville.

Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage seems to be based on this battle. Trailer for the Audie Murphy movie. Clip from Gods and Generals.

July 1 (1863-07-01)–3, 1863 The Battle of Gettysburg.

Musical montage from the movie, "Gettysburg."

Gen. Buford's Devil to Pay Speech: Tribute to Buford (fully audible.) Clip from Gettysburg (low sound).

What's significant about this speech is that it proves Sun Tzu's dictum that the longer you fight with an enemy, the more likely it will be that he will learn how you fight and develop counters for what you do. Here a lower level commander has figured out that Robert E. Lee is strategically offensive but tactically defensive. On the first day of Gettysburg, Buford's 1st Cavalry Division will fight hard and long to keep Lee's army from getting the good defensive ground of the battlefield, and will do so until the rest of the Union army arrives. The top commanders will arrive later and benefit from his initial assessment of the battlefield.

17 February 1864. The CSS Hunley sinks the USS Housatonic in Charleston Harbor. The age of submarine warfare is begun. An inaccurate, disrespectful and defamatory animated cartoon, that none the less shows how the Hunley was operated and what it did. Movie, The Hunley (Donald Sutherland as Gen. Pierre G.T. Beauregard, and Armand Assante). A radio controlled model of the Hunley.

November-December 1864. Sherman's March to the Sea. (the Savannah Campaign). The burning of Atlanta kicks off the Savannah Campaign. Movie: "Gone with the Wind."

Gen Ulysses S. Grant, and Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman figure out that the only way to finally and fully defeat the Confederacy was to destroy its ability to put an army into the field by destroying its means of production. This is total war in which the civilian sector is just as much a target as the military sector. It will take an entire nation to subdue another entire nation.

The Gatling gun. An early machine gun.

Through out the American Civil War, Prussia will have sent observers. They will take back to Prussia what they have learned, and especially about the use of railroads to mobilize and transport troops. This will come in handy for the later Franco-Prussian War.

The central question of the Andersonville Trial. This trial set the presidents for the Nuremburg Tribunal that would be held after World War II. It established the principal that a suborndinate officer must not obey the unlawful orders of a superior officer.

1853–1856 The Crimean War.

20 September 1854. The Battle of Alma. Film depiction.

25 October 1854. The Battle of Balaclava The infamous Charge of the Light Brigade. Would you believe that it's really really important to ask "do you mean our left flank or his left flank?"


19 July 1870 – 10 May 1871. The Franco-Prussian War. One documentary. One montage. Another. Clip from a documentary movie. The Prussians will use what they learned about railroads in the American Civil War to great advantage in their mobilization. The French will treat their early machine guns as a secret weapon. The superior Prussian artillery will quickly take them out.

After the Prussians win this war, they will crown Germany's first kaiser in the hall of mirrors in Versailles. This calculated insult to the French be yet another factor in the tensions that will later lead to World War I.


July 1, 1898. The Rough Riders Charge up San Juan Hill. Clip 1 and Clip 2 from "Rough Riders" with Tom Berenger playing Colonel (later to become President) Theodore Roosvelt. Also at this battle was one First Lt. "Black Jack" Pershing, who would later command American forces in Europe during WW I.


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