Did the Southern men fight better than the Northern men?

Not by itself, but when coupled with the generally poor leadership the Union had in the East early in the war versus the tactical geniuses of Jackson and Lee it becomes clear why the Union had higher casualties. I think most of the rank and file on both sides were hard fighters and both deserve our respect.
But that's not really how it works out, at least not if you look at the calculation numbers. For example:


Seven Days - Confederates attacking, Confederates more numerous, higher Confederate casualties
Second Bull Run - Union and Confederates both attacking at different times, Union more numerous, higher Union casualties
Antietam - Union attacking, Union more numerous, higher Confederate casualties
Fredericksburg - Union attacking, Union more numerous, higher Union casualties
Chancellorsville - Confederates attacking, Union more numerous, higher Union casualties


If you look at CEVs, then the Confederates consistently outperform the Union except for McClellan's battles.
 
What wrong lesson? I know very little about Solferino aside from its role in the formation of the Red Cross.

The capsule version.

The Austrians were in the process of rearming with the Muster 1854 System Lorenz rifles and rifle muskets, which were significantly superior to Napoleon III's shoulder weapons at longer ranges. But, Napoleon correctly deduced that the Austrian's rifle training was woefully incomplete due to the rearming and that they probably didn't yet understand and been trained for range estimation and the corresponding sight alignments of their System Lorenz weapons. If the French could run through mid-range areas under the trajectory of Austrian rifle fire before the Austrians could adjust fire and close with the Austrians they could win the last hundred meters with short range fire and a bayonet assault delivered with élan. Hence Napoleon’s Zouave and Chasseur units were trained to advance at the pas de course of 180 paces per minute, and close at the pas gymnastique of 250 paces a minute, which halved their time of exposure in the danger space. As French troops advanced at this speed, with determination to finish the fight with cold steel, maintenance of traditional closed column and line formations was impossible, and French attacks resembled formless swarms by the time they reached k.k. Army lines. French troops carried the day through élan - the spirit of the bayonet - with truly hideous casualties, particularly in officers [hence the formation of the Red Cross]. But, it worked when it really shouldn't have. Having been beaten, the Austrians deemphasized rifle training and essentially adopted the French tactical concept - as Stosstaktik - of the bayonet assault. Having trained to convince their troops of the invinceability of the bayonet assault, the Austrians used Stosstaktk against Denmark in 1864 and Prussia in 1866. Against Prussia they threw away the range and accuracy advantage offered by the Muster 1854 weapons and went up against the much more rapid firing needle gun at close range.

Most fire fights of the American Civil War were conducted at very close range - 150 yards or less - because the troops lacked the rifle training to fight at longer range, but also lacked the training and will to close and finish with the bayonet. Hence you have reports of units standing and slugging it out with musketry at 50-100 yards until they ran out of ammunition.

Regards,
Don Dixon
 
The weird thing is if you actually try to pick the moment in time when the bayonet charge became obsolete as a method of war, because it's actually outlasted a lot of far more "modern" techniques.
 
The capsule version.

The Austrians were in the process of rearming with the Muster 1854 System Lorenz rifles and rifle muskets, which were significantly superior to Napoleon III's shoulder weapons at longer ranges. But, Napoleon correctly deduced that the Austrian's rifle training was woefully incomplete due to the rearming and that they probably didn't yet understand and been trained for range estimation and the corresponding sight alignments of their System Lorenz weapons. If the French could run through mid-range areas under the trajectory of Austrian rifle fire before the Austrians could adjust fire and close with the Austrians they could win the last hundred meters with short range fire and a bayonet assault delivered with élan. Hence Napoleon’s Zouave and Chasseur units were trained to advance at the pas de course of 180 paces per minute, and close at the pas gymnastique of 250 paces a minute, which halved their time of exposure in the danger space. As French troops advanced at this speed, with determination to finish the fight with cold steel, maintenance of traditional closed column and line formations was impossible, and French attacks resembled formless swarms by the time they reached k.k. Army lines. French troops carried the day through élan - the spirit of the bayonet - with truly hideous casualties, particularly in officers [hence the formation of the Red Cross]. But, it worked when it really shouldn't have. Having been beaten, the Austrians deemphasized rifle training and essentially adopted the French tactical concept - as Stosstaktik - of the bayonet assault. Having trained to convince their troops of the invinceability of the bayonet assault, the Austrians used Stosstaktk against Denmark in 1864 and Prussia in 1866. Against Prussia they threw away the range and accuracy advantage offered by the Muster 1854 weapons and went up against the much more rapid firing needle gun at close range.

Most fire fights of the American Civil War were conducted at very close range - 150 yards or less - because the troops lacked the rifle training to fight at longer range, but also lacked the training and will to close and finish with the bayonet. Hence you have reports of units standing and slugging it out with musketry at 50-100 yards until they ran out of ammunition.

Regards,
Don Dixon
Its not hard to see how under American conditions that would lead to ad hoc improvisation by the soldiers on both sides. Heavy vegetation, small creeks and springs that had cut grooves into a ridge side, boulders and tree stumps, even undulations in the lay of the land, could give an attacker cover for most of the approach, partially neutralizing the increasing accuracy of the rifles as soldiers became more experienced.
It would help explain why the Confederates did so well at both Chancellorsville and The Wilderness, cover neutralized range.
It could explain why the Confederates at Gettysburg made some progress at both ends of the US position, but incurred unacceptable losses in attacking the center of the US line.
 
@Don Dixon 's post suggests that many of these Civil War attacks failed not because they had too much mass, but because they did not have enough mass to create the energy needed to carry the attack home. Some of the column attacks did achieve that mass and succeeded.
 
There's a reason we use the term "momentum" - its speed times mass. More of either increases the chance of an attack succeeding.
 
And the odds increased if darkness or cover allowed the starting point to be closer to the objective.
That's a bit more difficult, because it was just as possible for an attack to get stalled by close terrain or completely lost in darkness. The British in this period had a bit of a party trick of a night approach march and a dawn assault (which they could do because of extremely well drilled troops) but I know at least one occasion at Spotsylvania where if an attack had been launched on the word of the guide the Union 2nd Corps would have launched an assault on the Union 9th Corps... (The recce with that guide got completely lost and ended up bumping into 9th Corps.)
 
@Don Dixon 's post suggests that many of these Civil War attacks failed not because they had too much mass, but because they did not have enough mass to create the energy needed to carry the attack home. Some of the column attacks did achieve that mass and succeeded.
 
@cavalry_historian Can you give any details about Federals changing their tactics to mirror those of the CSA. When or in what way for instance. I ask because I had heard that before but no particulars were available.

John
I did not say that the Federals changed their tactics to mirror those of the CSA (Upton's Tactics was clearly a change as pointed out by others). I reported that the CSA soldiers were observed to be "different" as reported by De Forest, a Federal officer who was there. Clearly the soldiers themselves were found to abandon linear tactics in the heat of battle and "go to ground" when things got hot. This was noted to be a characteristic of veteran v raw units with the veterans taking cover.

Generally, a regiment stayed together for the duration of the war and fought without replacements until its numbers were so exhausted by death, disease, or disability that it was no longer practical for it to continue to exist. It was thought that the relative stability of the same men eating and living together for the duration of their enlistments fostered cooperation, raised morale, and sustained each soldier's courage under fire. While this system produced units composed of battle-hardened veterans, a lengthy conflict sometimes resulted in widespread mourning among the families of a single town as its young men were continually exposed to the carnage of battle. Newly raised regiments with muster rolls filled with recruits lacked the hard-won experience of veteran units and were more likely to break and run when hard pressed. Veterans quickly learned to hold their ground on defense, but they were more likely to "go to ground" or take advantage of available cover during a charge. A federal officer bemoaned the policy. "It is a pity that our new levies cannot be clapped into the old organizations. . . . They would be something like veterans in a fortnight; whereas it will take six months to bring them to the same point under their own raw officers and sergeants."


Croushore, James H., ed. A Volunteer's Adventure, by Captain John W. De Forest. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949. 77-78.

I honestly don't know why this particular aspect of the war is not common knowledge.
 
I did not say that the Federals changed their tactics to mirror those of the CSA (Upton's Tactics was clearly a change as pointed out by others). I reported that the CSA soldiers were observed to be "different" as reported by De Forest, a Federal officer who was there. Clearly the soldiers themselves were found to abandon linear tactics in the heat of battle and "go to ground" when things got hot. This was noted to be a characteristic of veteran v raw units with the veterans taking cover.

Generally, a regiment stayed together for the duration of the war and fought without replacements until its numbers were so exhausted by death, disease, or disability that it was no longer practical for it to continue to exist. It was thought that the relative stability of the same men eating and living together for the duration of their enlistments fostered cooperation, raised morale, and sustained each soldier's courage under fire. While this system produced units composed of battle-hardened veterans, a lengthy conflict sometimes resulted in widespread mourning among the families of a single town as its young men were continually exposed to the carnage of battle. Newly raised regiments with muster rolls filled with recruits lacked the hard-won experience of veteran units and were more likely to break and run when hard pressed. Veterans quickly learned to hold their ground on defense, but they were more likely to "go to ground" or take advantage of available cover during a charge. A federal officer bemoaned the policy. "It is a pity that our new levies cannot be clapped into the old organizations. . . . They would be something like veterans in a fortnight; whereas it will take six months to bring them to the same point under their own raw officers and sergeants."


Croushore, James H., ed. A Volunteer's Adventure, by Captain John W. De Forest. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949. 77-78.

I honestly don't know why this particular aspect of the war is not common knowledge.
Sadly because training, recruitment and logistics are not the sexy subjects in popular military science.

For those wanting a good, detailed and free examination of the issue from the Union perspective chapter II of this document The Personnel Replacement System in The United States Army is a good start, though it was published in 1954 and thus does not benefit from subsequent scholarship.

Edit: because I cannot spell though it seems
 
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I do know that McClellan was practically pleading for it to be done (filling up old regiments with new recruits), especially in the period after Antietam. This might be influenced by the fact that at that battle you had these incredibly green regiments (some of whom had had functionally zero training) being thrown into the fighting as formed units, rather than funnelling replacements into existing units.

I suspect part of the problem here is the very Federal and decentralized system involved. It wasn't "The US has got 10,000 new recruits from Pennsylvania", it's "Pennsylvania has established ten new regiments" and people join those regiments as individual decisions.


I suspect that if you hadn't had the shutdown of Union recruiting in early 1862 then there could have been some sort of depot system developed (i.e. troops going through basic back in their home states without being committed to any given regiment, or even with being committed to a regiment but before joining them, and then they actually go to join the regiments and bulk them out there).
 
Generally, a regiment stayed together for the duration of the war and fought without replacements until its numbers were so exhausted by death, disease, or disability that it was no longer practical for it to continue to exist. It was thought that the relative stability of the same men eating and living together for the duration of their enlistments fostered cooperation, raised morale, and sustained each soldier's courage under fire.

In some respects I'm very old school. I think one of the greatest mistakes the modern U.S. Army made was disestablishing the regimental system. Soldiers generally don't fight for God, motherhood, and apple pie. They fight for their friends, or at least their comrades. The experienced soldiers train up the recruits. Through extension there was a support system at the regimental base with the colonel's lady tending to the regiment's women and children. Now there has generally been an almost 100% turn-over in a unit within three or four years. You're the 1st of the 42nd, be proud. Right.

When I was a kid I chatted with the pipe major of the Black Watch. If I remember correctly, he was the eighth generation of his family to have served in the regiment and the sixth generation to be pipe major. The Black Watch was the family business.

I do know that McClellan was practically pleading for it to be done (filling up old regiments with new recruits), especially in the period after Antietam. This might be influenced by the fact that at that battle you had these incredibly green regiments (some of whom had had functionally zero training) being thrown into the fighting as formed units, rather than funnelling replacements into existing units.

I suspect part of the problem here is the very Federal and decentralized system involved. It wasn't "The US has got 10,000 new recruits from Pennsylvania", it's "Pennsylvania has established ten new regiments" and people join those regiments as individual decisions.

I suspect that if you hadn't had the shutdown of Union recruiting in early 1862 then there could have been some sort of depot system developed (i.e. troops going through basic back in their home states without being committed to any given regiment, or even with being committed to a regiment but before joining them, and then they actually go to join the regiments and bulk them out there).

You can't ignore the political realities at the state level. Creating new regiments gave the governors patronage in the form of officer appointments. If some of the officers were incompetent and the troops took greater casualties because they were green rather than being feed into the system as replacements, that was incidental to the political benefits achieved through the appointments and wasn't readily obvious to observers at home, who were just seeing raw casualty lists without an understanding of why the lists were so high. When the officers bled out one just had more appointments to make.

There is a problem in feeding recruits into established units, however. The old guard have been steadily loosing their friends. Many of them are reluctant to form relationships with the newcomers because they know from experience that many of the replacements are going to become casualties. New recruits and replacements experience disproportionate casualties until they learn enough of the ropes to stand a chance of survival.

But, one has the same macro level problem with units and officers. We didn't fight one 10-year war in Vietnam, or 10 one-year wars as unit strength was rolled over almost 100% every year. Since field command was limited to 6-month tours due to ticket punching, we fought 20 6-month wars with a constant rotation of new officers having to learn their jobs. Purely aside from fighting a war of attrition against an Asian enemy, it would have been difficult to have done it much more stupidly.

Regards,
Don Dixon
 
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It's definitely not a problem with a single easy solution, but there's definite possibility in a modified form of the way the British handled it.

Here's my "fantasy" way of assigning troops, which I think is at least manageable:

When recruitment is reopened in July 1862 (or possibly earlier, depending on whenever it's realized the army is not staying at establishment strength), recruitment takes place in companies.
Those companies are formed in the same way as companies had been formed before, meaning that everything up to the Captain level takes place as normal, and the men are given basic training in large camps (as ad-hoc provisional battalions).
Meanwhile (you have several weeks to do this given how long recruiting and basic training takes) depleted organizations from the same states are identified and companies provisionally assigned to those regiments to bolster them up to not less than six hundred men PFD (which isn't full-strength but it's a lot better than many regiments were in, say, the Maryland campaign). Any excess of this gets converted into full new regiments.


The benefit of this is that you're joining in complete organizational companies, of men who've done basic training in large camps (and who as such will have at least some idea of how to march), but the drill book works off equalized tactical companies. So when the men start training with their new regiment the tactical companies will need to be equalized first, which mixes in the "new men" and the veterans together.



The alternative, and less nice but still workable, option is to mix new and old troops at the brigade level; that is, keep the new regiments as new regiments, but make sure that the brigades have been mixed together. This worked wonders at Waterloo.
 
It's definitely not a problem with a single easy solution, but there's definite possibility in a modified form of the way the British handled it.

Here's my "fantasy" way of assigning troops, which I think is at least manageable:

When recruitment is reopened in July 1862 (or possibly earlier, depending on whenever it's realized the army is not staying at establishment strength), recruitment takes place in companies.
Those companies are formed in the same way as companies had been formed before, meaning that everything up to the Captain level takes place as normal, and the men are given basic training in large camps (as ad-hoc provisional battalions).
Meanwhile (you have several weeks to do this given how long recruiting and basic training takes) depleted organizations from the same states are identified and companies provisionally assigned to those regiments to bolster them up to not less than six hundred men PFD (which isn't full-strength but it's a lot better than many regiments were in, say, the Maryland campaign). Any excess of this gets converted into full new regiments.


The benefit of this is that you're joining in complete organizational companies, of men who've done basic training in large camps (and who as such will have at least some idea of how to march), but the drill book works off equalized tactical companies. So when the men start training with their new regiment the tactical companies will need to be equalized first, which mixes in the "new men" and the veterans together.



The alternative, and less nice but still workable, option is to mix new and old troops at the brigade level; that is, keep the new regiments as new regiments, but make sure that the brigades have been mixed together. This worked wonders at Waterloo.

I don't disagree with your concept. But, the reality is that there was no basic training in the Civil War. Under Federal regulation troops could not be armed and uniformed until they were mustered into service. After they were mustered they were almost immediately shipped out from the camps where they had been assembled awaiting muster. IF they were lucky they went into camp in some rear area, like the fortifications around Washington, and got whatever on-the-job training their officers, who generally were also learning their jobs, were capable of giving them. Many went almost directly into combat, in many instances never having fired their weapons at a target or having fired their weapons at all. The Army learned a variety of lessons from the Civil War. That there needed to be some level of structured basic training as units were formed up was one of them.
 
I don't disagree with your concept. But, the reality is that there was no basic training in the Civil War. Under Federal regulation troops could not be armed and uniformed until they were mustered into service. After they were mustered they were almost immediately shipped out from the camps where they had been assembled awaiting muster. IF they were lucky they went into camp in some rear area, like the fortifications around Washington, and got whatever on-the-job training their officers, who generally were also learning their jobs, were capable of giving them. Many went almost directly into combat, in many instances never having fired their weapons at a target or having fired their weapons at all. The Army learned a variety of lessons from the Civil War. That there needed to be some level of structured basic training as units were formed up was one of them.
Which is why regiments found it valuable to have an officer who had been present in the US/Mexican war, or who had done some Indian fighting, once they realized there was going to be real fighting and a risk of death and defeat.
 
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Which is the reason to muster them in as companies and form them into regiments later, yes.

I sometimes wonder how much worse the US army in the mid-ACW would have been had it not been for the month or so of intensive training after Antietam.
 
Which is why regiments found it valuable to have an officer who had been present in the US/Mexican war, who had done some Indian fighting, once the realized there was going to be real fighting a risk of death and defeat.
Not nearly enough of those to go around, of course...
 
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