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At the start of the war, the entire United States Army consisted of 16,367 men of all branches, with infantry representing the vast majority of this total. [2] Some of these infantrymen had seen considerable combat experience in the Mexican–American War, as well as in the West in various encounters, including the Utah War and several campaigns against Indians.
The traditional interpretation of Civil War tactics is that they were horribly outdated in the face of new revolutionary technology, namely the widespread use of the rifled musket. Where before the smoothbore musket had an effective range of 100 yards and longer-ranged rifles were specialist weapons, now most soldiers had a weapon with an ...
In 1855 at the behest of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, Hardee published Rifle and Light Infantry Tactics for the Exercise and Manoeuvres of Troops When Acting as Light Infantry or Riflemen, popularly known as Hardee's Tactics, which became the best-known drill manual of the Civil War. [5]
Losses were far higher than during the war with Mexico, which saw roughly 13,000 American deaths, including fewer than two thousand killed in battle, between 1846 and 1848. One reason for the high number of battle deaths in the civil war was the continued use of tactics similar to those of the Napoleonic Wars, such as charging.
Sheridan leads the charge at Five Forks (Frederick Phisterer, 1912). The American Civil War saw extensive use of horse-mounted soldiers on both sides of the conflict. They were vital to both the Union Army and Confederate Army for conducting reconnaissance missions to locate the enemy and determine their strength and movement, and for screening friendly units from being discovered by the enemy ...
The concept of a 'people's war,' first described by Clausewitz in his classic treatise On War, was the closest example of a mass guerrilla movement in the 19th century.In general during the American Civil War, this type of irregular warfare was conducted in the hinterland of the border states (Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, and northwestern Virginia / West Virginia).
The Confederate Heartland Offensive (August 14 – October 10, 1862), also known as the Kentucky Campaign, was an American Civil War campaign conducted by the Confederate States Army in Tennessee and Kentucky where Generals Braxton Bragg and Edmund Kirby Smith tried to draw neutral Kentucky into the Confederacy by outflanking Union troops under Major General Don Carlos Buell.
The "hard war" doctrine in Civil War historiography first appeared in quotes from Sherman's correspondence, specifically during the interim ten days between his March to the Sea and Carolinas campaign. He first distinguished between "this war" and "European wars in particular": Union soldiers were "not only fighting hostile armies, but a ...