Why were casualties so high during the American Civil War?

The American civil war was the first major conflict of the industrial age. It was thus influenced by the advent of mechanisation and the development of modern weaponry in a way that had hitherto been unimaginable. In keeping with the cliché that Generals and commanders are adapted to fighting the “last war”, there was a tactical – perhaps even strategic – lag in adapting to the deadly influence of modernity. For all that Generals such as Robert E. Lee and others are admired for their qualities as leaders and individuals, there was undoubtedly a reluctance to abandon obsolete tactics that were not just merely ineffective – but actively harmful to the side employing them. This was one key area where – initially at least – contemporary thought had not yet acclimatised to the realities of industrialisation. The other lag was in medical treatment. Modern arms scourged unimaginable numbers of men, yet treatment remained at a primitive level – further worsened by the sheer numbers of men involved. All these reasons and others are contributory factors as to why casualties were so high during the civil war.

The influence of new technology and industrialisation is an obvious starting point. In Napoleon’s day the flintlock musket was the standard infantry firearm, with an effective range of at most 100 yards (Fuller; 1961, 99). By the time of the war with Mexico of 1846 ‘smoothbore’ single-shot muskets had a maximum range of 250 yards, then, during the Crimean war, British and French troops carried a rifle that bore the fruits of development by French army Captain Claude Minie, and American Harper’s Ferry armourer James H. Burton. This “Minie ball” bullet, used in the famous American Springfield and British Lee-Enfield rifles, had an effective range of three to four hundred yards – a development that put defenders at a massive advantage vis-à-vis those on offence (McPherson; 1988, 475).

In relation to the war aims and tactics of the belligerents, this technological breakthrough inevitably led to dramatically increasing casualties. The Unions political imperative meant offence was a necessary strategy in order to put down the rebellion, defence and inertia a la McClellan was both at odds with this imperative and public opinion. Similarly, in the Confederacy although political realities were very different, and in part incongruous with a heavy reliance on strategic offence, the rebels – despite their position as the defensive side – needed to carry the war to the north if they were to stand any chance of European diplomatic recognition. Although Confederate generals remained for the most part unaffected by the noise of public opinion (Donald; 1962, 48-49), they were products of a military tradition at West Point that placed a high premium on a tactical offence in close-order infantry – something that had been highly successful for the United States army in the war with Mexico, (Mahon; 1961, 57-68), but sat ill with the advent and mass usage of rifles in combat in the years proceeding that conflict.

This intellectual tradition – within the context of civil war conflict, was more a curse than a blessing. Time and time again, whether it was Burnside’s Union charge at Fredericksburg in December 1862, or Meade’s disastrous Rebel charge at Gettysburg on the 3rd of July 1863, or even the relatively unconventional Grant at Cold Harbour on the 3rd of June 1864 (Fuller; 104) – Generals showed the traditions of yesteryear to be both ineffectual against organised defences with vastly improved firepower, and a hard habit to kick, something that undoubtedly furthered the grim toll of death and injury during the war.

Though the likes of Lee were traditionalists in the sense that they believed in a strictly professional, military sphere of activity, untainted by political and public pressure, this did not make them immune to the pervasive romanticism of the martial southern spirit, a spirit that gloried above all else in the “valour of the charge” (Luvaas; 1959, 476). It is notable that of all army commanders, Union and Confederate, Lee had the highest casualty rates – something directly attributable to his emphasis on an “offensive defence” (McPherson; 472). This would not be the first, or last, example of southern headiness getting detached from realities on the ground. But it was nonetheless a delusion that was shared – in part through necessity – by the commanders of the north, and a further incentive towards obsolete tactics that only served to increase the dead and dying.

A caveat to criticism must however be added in one important respect: that of battlefield communications. Dense, regimented units were to an extent a function of pre-radio age battles (ibid; 476), with commanders finding large units tricky to lead in the heat of battle – something accentuated by the large numbers of previous-amateurs and conscripted men involved in battle (Luvaas; 63-64). Men dispersed over a large area were even more of a challenge, something that tended to reinforce the traditional approach to attack – in concentrated groups. That this offered a huge target to well-armed defenders was in part a function of historical timing; technology had served to increase the defenders lot, but not as yet provided attackers with a suitable organisational medium. Under a century later the German Blitzkrieg would master the synthesis between communication and offence in a deadly effective manner. Even during the First World War, communications had modernised to the extent that coordination along the hundreds of miles of western front was possible – making such mass attacks as at the Somme possible. Communications were not, however, suitable for dispersed attacks in the 19th century – another factor that contributed to the high rate of casualties.

It must be emphasised that although military discipline was – particularly at the start of the war – shambolic by today’s standards (Donald; 1960, 83-85), the glue that held units together was the same martial spirit and courage that inspired commanders. Linderman noting that discipline “was best where it was most required – in battle”, and that “it was the pursuit of courage and the flight from cowardice that upheld the discipline essential to the cohesiveness of civil war armies” (Linderman; 1987, 29). It may seem a moot point, but this widespread militarism – in part institutionalised by culture and values, by definition increased the number of men on the battlefield willing to risk their lives – and indeed losing them, from the very first day of the war. This was largely a product of intense nationalism of the type Europe experienced at the outbreak of the First World War, swelling army sizes and thus transforming warfare from almost an art form conducted by relatively small groups of professionals, into a mass vocation involving the collective effort of a large percentage of the male populace. The introduction of conscription only served to accentuate this factor: “hitherto soldiers had been costly, now they were cheap; battles had been avoided, now they were sought, and however heavy the losses they could rapidly be made good by the muster roll” (Fuller; 35). It is a simple truth – an increase in the number of armed belligerents in war will inevitable lead to an increase in casualties.

At an ideological level the French revolution had in part recast the roles of individuals within society; emphasising that to serve as a soldier was to be more, not less of a citizen (Keegan; 1993, 357). Clausewitz noting “the whole weight of the people” being thrown behind a hitherto unimaginable effort, and Foch commenting on those “destined to throw into the fight all the resources of the nation; they were to set themselves the goal, not a dynastic interest, not of the conquest or possession of a province, but the defence or propagation of physical ideas” (Fuller; 34), this point being particularly relevant to the civil war. ‘Total war’ is a misnomer given the horrors of the 20th century – what is true is the civil war’s place as the first modern war, involving the collective efforts – and suffering – of the citizenry on behalf of political ideals. For both sides, there could be no compromise. This predominantly evident in casualty figures for south, where an estimated 4% of southern people, black, white, civilian, and soldier, died as a result of the conflict, either through battle or disease, disease often propagated in civilians – particularly in the later stages of the war – by malnutrition. The figure of 4% exceeded the human cost of as a percentage of any country in World War I and was only outstripped in the Second World War by the region between the Rhine and the Volga (McPherson; 1996, 66) – a staggering fact that only serves to demonstrate the nexus between mass effort and mass casualties on all fronts.

The clash between modernity and antiquity is a recurrent theme throughout the civil war – free labour versus slavery, modern weaponries incongruity with the tactics of old, and industrialisations pre-eminence over agrarianism. Industrialisation is perhaps a sin quo non-factor in explaining the root cause of mass casualties. At the start of the war, northern industry geared up to produce two million rifles, something the south could not hope to match – and partly responsible for the two to one ratio of Confederate to Union causalities during the Seven Days battles (McPherson; 1988, 475). Technology was the cause, but improved manufacturing capabilities – be they in northern factories, or European ones who exported en masse to the Confederacy by 1863 (ibid, americancivilwar.org) – were the enablers of mass slaughter.

Any discussion about civil war casualties would not be complete without a reference to the impact of disease on casualty figures. By the end of the war in 1865, Union battlefield fatalities numbered 110,000. Twice as many – 224,580 – died of disease, a ratio in all likelihood shared by the Confederates. So rampant was disease and illness in the civil war that historian Paul Steiner has called it “natural biological warfare” (Linderman; 115). It was an aft repeated maxim of the civil war soldier that it was easier to die in combat than go to the hospital (ibid; 130), where awaited unfortunate casualties nurses with little training, medicals science “with little to offer” and doctors “inferior as healers to the nurse volunteers” (ibid; 28-29). The concept of a lag between technological advances and tactical awareness has been discussed already – what also existed, with vastly more lethal consequences, was a serious lag between advances in medical science and treatment to offset the ravages of improved firearms.

The relentless pace of the conflict, and the jingoism and mass enlistments that greeted the outbreak of war did not help the situation. One investigation into Union army enlistment procedures in 1861 concluded that up to 25% of recruits should have been rejected for medical reasons (McPherson; 1988, 326), a fact vividly illustrated by the testimony of a soldier in the Union army by the name of Stevens, commenting on the 77th New York’s campaign in the Virginia peninsula: “at times one might sit in the door of his tent and see as many as six or seven funeral parties bearing comrades to their resting places”. In that campaign, the New York regiment had started in November 1861 with 1000 men – standard regiment size. By June 1862, after a harsh winter and with the heat of summer kicking in, all that was left were 250 men (Linderman; 115), this before the regiment even went into combat.

Compared with past conflicts deaths from disease in the civil war were however, proportionately not as conspicuous – Britain experienced a men killed in battle to deaths from disease ratio of 1 to 8 in the Napoleonic wars and 1 to 4 in the Crimea (McPherson; 1988, 487) To take the most recent war circa 1861 – the Crimean war – which had involved a total of roughly 1,860,000 combatants, disease took a higher proportional toll, but the higher total number of soldiers in the civil war – just over 3.8 million – insured a significantly higher number of men died as a result of disease: 372,000 in the civil war compared to about 244,000 in the Crimea (wikipedia.org). Once again the sheer number of participants in the conflict insured much higher casualty figures than there otherwise would have been – obscuring the truth that compared to these European wars, and the United States last war with Mexico (civilwarhome.com/medicinehistory.htm), mortality rates from disease and injury were proportionately declining.

The scale of the war accentuated death and illness not just on the battlefield and in the boot camp, but on the home front as well. This of acute relevance to the south, primarily in the later stages of the war when Union advances had restricted land area suitable for food production, and where priority usage of transportation links such as railroads was given to military traffic (McPherson; 1988, 619). Death and disease amongst refugees, fleeing the war zones of the south, is another factor that McPherson rightly notes as being of importance when tallying up the true costs of the war – some estimates putting them as high as 50,000 (ibid; 619-620).

In part this was motivated by the pervasive southern fear of ‘Billy Yank’ and the terror that he may bring – a fear aptly demonstrated by Sherman’s march. Once again this demonstrated how a war between peoples and ideas conflated civilians and military, in contrast to the dynastic wars of old in Europe (Teschke; 2002, 6-18) – though mercifully for the south, genocide was not a factor in Sherman’s or any other Union commanders marches. The affect, however, was in part similar. Through systematic targeting of southern livestock, communications, and resources, Sherman did indeed make Georgia and the Carolinas “howl”, and prove that regrettably from a moral standpoint, modern warfare of peoples and nationalism inevitably meant war against peoples – with the associated rise in civilian deaths.

The level of casualties exhibited by the American civil war can be seen as results of all of the above factors – and more philosophically as part of the development of war throughout history. As already mentioned, war has evolved over time. First from being primarily a tool of monarchical, gentrified interests, then, post French revolution a clash of peoples and national interests. The 20th century saw ideology as the catalyst to war – something that allied to the natural evolution of weaponry served to bring war to its destructive zenith: a la 1939-45. With each advance brings more chaos and suffering, and further conflation between combatants and non-combatants – in the nuclear age beyond recognition. The civil war – though not an ideological clash in the way many of the wars of the post-1918 period were – marks an epoch in combining industrialisation, mass participation and idealism – with all the casualties that that implies.

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Bibliography

David Herbert Donald; ‘Why the North Won’, Collier Books, 1962

Major-General J.F.C. Fuller; ‘The conduct of war 1789-1961’, Methuen & Co, ltd, 1961

John Keegan; ‘A History of Warfare’, Hutchinson London, 1993

Gerald F. Linderman; ‘Embattled Courage’, The Free Press, 1987

Jay Luvaas; ‘The military legacy of the civil war’, University of Chicago Press, 1959

John K. Mahon; ‘Civil War Infantry Assault Tactics’, Military Affairs 25, 1961

James M. McPherson; ‘Battle cry of Freedom’, Penguin, 1988

James M. McPherson; ‘Drawn with the Sword’, Oxford University Press, 1996

Benno Teschke; ‘Theorizing the Westphalia System of States: International Relations from Absolutism to Capitalism’, European Journal of International Relations, 2002

www.civilwarhome.com

www.wikipedia.org