Military Tactics in the US Civil War

Traditional Infantry Tactics

• At the outset of the war, basic battlefield strategy called for artillery fire, followed by massed formations of infantry to direct one or two volleys of musket fire against an enemy formation, then an advance over open ground to break up the formations with a bayonet charge. Confederate General Robert E. Lee and Union Army commander George McClellan used these tactics at the Battle of Antietam in 1862, resulting in more than 23,000 casualties. Three months later, Union General Ambrose Burnside sent wave after wave of his troops against General Lee's dug-in Confederates at Fredericksburg, resulting in 13,000 Union casualties to the Confederates' 5,000.
  
  

The Frontal Assault

• Accurate, large-caliber weapons used in battle caused massive combat casualties.Photos.com/Photos.com/Getty Images
  
  Unfortunately for the soldiers of both armies, advances in weaponry had outpaced the development of proper military tactics to employ them in combat. Military commanders were slow to adapt to the new realities of war. Despite staggering losses, commanders on both sides frequently ordered frontal assaults against fortified enemy positions. Perhaps most famously, nearly all of Confederate General George Pickett's division was wiped out on July 3, 1863 at Gettysburg. A powerful artillery barrage, followed by a massive infantry charge of 12,000 men, failed to dislodge federal troops located on high ground behind stone fencing.
  
  

Battle Fortifications

• During the final two years of the Civil War, armies increasingly used fortifications to protect themselves from artillery and musket fire. Soldiers constructed barricades using felled trees, rocks and dirt. Later, troops dug expansive networks of trenches and faced each other for long periods of stalemate -- foreshadowing the tactics of World War I. This occurred most notably at the siege of Petersburg, Virginia, where armies under Generals Lee and Ulysses S. Grant faced each other in trenches, tunnels and earthen breastworks for nine months.
  
  

Making War on Civilians

• A significant new tactic that emerged in the Civil War was the deliberate targeting of civilian populations by the military. Federal armies under the command of General Philip Sheridan stripped Virginia's Shenandoah Valley of its crops and livestock to starve the local population. General William Tecumseh Sherman made his infamous "March to the Sea" through the center of the Confederacy, burning and looting civilian property and towns in a terror campaign designed to break the will of the South to continue the fight.