Was combat and strategy in the ACW closer to those of the Napoleonic Wars or WW1?

IDK, I that implies a level of calculation which you don't really get in the heat of battle. Generally feelings about not wanting to let down yourself/your comrades are more important. (Actually, that would suggest a possible explanation: USCW soldiers were generally sent into battle without a huge amount of training, so maybe they didn't have time to develop the levels of esprit de corps necessary to charge a line of enemy riflemen?) Plus, it would imply that units which are/were drawn disproportionately from wealthier social strata (e.g., cavalry, guards units) ought to be less willing to close with their enemies, which I don't think seems to be the case.

While I can't speak for all troops everywhere at all times, there are two basic aspects to the matter: why the soldier joined up in the first place (patriotism, conscription, financial reward, escaping intolerable situation elsewhere, a sense of adventure, many possible reasons); and why that soldiers stays put in the line of fire when the elephant comes along, and the soldier has not merely seen the elephant, but damn near gets trampled underfoot by a flock of the blooming things.

The discussion is basically covering the second aspect. In modern forces, there is one over-riding reason why soldiers stay to do their job. It's because you don't want to let your mates down. Lots of people talk about patriotism and adventure and a sense of duty and all the rest of it, and they're talking hogwash. It's your mates with you that are key.

We can go back to WW2, and we see the same. MacDonald Fraser describes it better than I can in Quartered Safe Out Here. We can go back to WW1, and we see similar views being expressed in letters home; apart from wanting to come home safe (and the constant, never-ending complaints about bad food), one gets an over-riding sense of connection between the soldier and his immediate squad.

The further back one goes, the harder it is to know for sure, but such evidence seems to suggest that it holds true. Rifleman Harris in the Peninsular Campaign talks of comradeship as being a stiffening virtue.

For the specific case of the ACW, my understanding is that a lot of units were drawn from very close geographical areas, and the members of a unit might very well be neighbours in civilian life. They already know each other, and are half way to forming that bond of mutual trust (only half-way, because it's only when the elephant is rampaging around that you know for sure).

How that affects operational decisions is a separate issue. One sticks by your squad, but whether that means marching together into an inferno of fire and shot, or doing an impression of moles and burrowing deep when a twig snaps two miles away, or, in the immortal words of Kipling: "Take open order, sit tight, and pray for support like a soldier" will depend on what you've been taught.

Again, in the specific example of the ACW, pretty much everyone was learning as they went along. The forces that fought at First Bull Run were not much like the forces that fought at Gettysburg, or carried out the March Through Georgia. It's not really appropriate to talk about the soldiers of the ACW as though they were of the same quality from start to finish. The forces at First Bull Run could probably have been beaten by a couple of well-disciplined European regimental mascots (OK, maybe I exaggerate), while the mid- and late-war Union Western armies seem to have been pretty competent compared with any other force anywhere in the world at the same time.
 
I have been using the 600,000 figure myself based on my reading, with the Confederacy running at 300,000 men until the last year of the war when it fell to about 200,000 (and then plummeted further still)

The most exact figure I have ever come across is for February 1865:

Union Army ... 630,924 Present for duty (338,536 Absentees)
Confederate Army ... 160,198 Present for duty (194,494 Absentees!)
From The American Civil War By Professor Brian Holden Reid, Kings College, London (psc).

Admittedly about all we can draw from this is that the South was completely f*cked, and that the war should have been over before March.
 
Keep in mind that this post is going to be a bit scattered.

In Bruce Cattons The Civil War PG 417-419 (this is in reference to after the Gettysburg battle) " Out of more then thirty-seven thousand muskets which had been left on the field, nearly a third were loaded with more then one cartridge. In the excitement of battle, men for-got to fix percussion caps, sometimes even forgot to pull the trigger, and reloaded automatically without realizing that they have not fired."
"Veterans were free to admit that in this as in all other battles there had been a great deal of wild, ineffective shooting. Whole regiments at times fired volleys with the line of musket pointing vaguely toward the sky at an angle from the vertical of no more then forty-five degrees."
"An Ohio solider in the XII corps reflected that in the Culp's Hill fighting on the morning of July the third, every man in the corps had fired 250 rounds, and he mused that the mystery exists how any Rebels escaped.

It wasn't until around the end of 1863 to the start of 1864 that target practice starting being a main thing within the Union Army. The Confederates never really had target practice as a standard as they lacked the shot and powder to do so. I believe the requirements for target practice was ten shots every week. I really don't want to try and dig through this big book to try and find the passage but I want to say that is what I remember reading.

I also remember reading that Sharpshooters at the start of the war would normally have only been issued regular infantry rifles which they detested (can't imagine why) and many would go with their own personal rifles, some of which would weigh up to 30 pounds or so. Colt had originally had an arms contract to supply these men with specially made arms but for whatever reason it didn't go through (I don't have the book that this is from on-hand). It wasn't until near the end of 1861 that Lincoln made the Sharps rifle standard for all sharpshooter units. The amount of sharpshooters in any given regiment was normally only one or two men however. The Confederates never had a stand-alone sharpshooter regiment (the weapon they preferred was the British Whitworth rifle by the way).

As time went on you would have instances of groups of men on both sides that would outright refuse to follow orders, or in a case of being told to attack a line, would stand up from their position, fire an ineffective volley, then go back down into their entrenchment. Whenever a new regiment would be linked with a new one under command, the veterans would normally dislike the newcomers and the rookies (otherwise known as doughboys) would feel like they don’t belong. Quoted by a rookie of the 24th Michigan when joining with veterans of the Iron Brigade "here we were, one regiment, with nearly as many men present for duty, armed and equipped, as were present in all four of the veteran regiments across the parade… it was somehow just then the fault of these boys from Michigan, and a just ground for shame to them, that they brought 900 to the field instead of the veterans 250. “

In the ACW, you saw massed artillery fire on a daily basis, not so much in the Napoleonic Wars. You saw battles that would last for weeks or months, again, something that you didn't see during the NPW. You didn't see it in the ACW either until the latter stages of the war itself. You can split it into two sections if you will. With 1861-1862 being the years of the old strategy and tech, 1863 as a transitional year, and 1864-1865 as the year of more WW1 style tactics, least on the eastern campaign. Massive naval guns used as "regular" artillery, mortars, development of trench sappers and some of the techniques to try and still fight in a trench society.
 
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The most exact figure I have ever come across is for February 1865:

Union Army ... 630,924 Present for duty (338,536 Absentees)
Confederate Army ... 160,198 Present for duty (194,494 Absentees!)
From The American Civil War By Professor Brian Holden Reid, Kings College, London (psc).

Admittedly about all we can draw from this is that the South was completely f*cked, and that the war should have been over before March.

weather had something to say about that
 
In Bruce Cattons The Civil War PG 417-419 (this is in reference to after the Gettysburg battle) " Out of more then thirty-seven thousand muskets which had been left on the field, nearly a third were loaded with more then one cartridge. In the excitement of battle, men for-got to fix percussion caps, sometimes even forgot to pull the trigger, and reloaded automatically without realizing that they have not fired."

After the three-day Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, the victorious Federals retrieved 27,500 rifles from the battlefield, most if not all dropped by the wounded and killed. Nearly half of them were found to hold two unfired rounds in their barrels. Between three and ten loads crammed the breeches of another 6,000. And one rifle was filled almost to the muzzle with twenty-three cartridges.
From William C Davis:The Civil War, Smithmark 1996, p496

The Confederates never really had target practice as a standard as they lacked the shot and powder to do so

I've read somewhere that that CSA shortage was percussion caps, rather than powder.
 

Saphroneth

Banned
After the three-day Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, the victorious Federals retrieved 27,500 rifles from the battlefield, most if not all dropped by the wounded and killed. Nearly half of them were found to hold two unfired rounds in their barrels. Between three and ten loads crammed the breeches of another 6,000. And one rifle was filled almost to the muzzle with twenty-three cartridges.From William C Davis:The Civil War, Smithmark 1996, p496
Perhaps the discrepancy is that Shinsu's cite mentions muskets and yours rifles - there were certainly rifle-muskets and smoothbore muskets both at Gettysburg.


I've read somewhere that that CSA shortage was percussion caps, rather than powder.
They were not too bad for powder, yes - they had the good caves in Virginia for saltpetre and also set up manure beds, which work better in warm (southern) climates.
AIUI the Federal government captured a lot of saltpetre from the Confederacy because some large beds matured pretty much at the end of the war, thus providing the US with a good gunpowder supply for a few years.
 
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