TOCWOC - A Civil War Blog

Pat Hirtle was the winner of TOCWOC’s recent After Action Report contest. His winning entry will be featured in this series of blog entries over the next few weeks.

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THE ENQUIRY

Johnny Reb II is the only set of miniatures rules that I have played extensively. The rather elaborate account below is the result of a meeting engagement that I played out last year. I should point out that I don’t play JR as a “true” miniatures game, as I have neither the time nor the patience to paint hundreds of little lead men. Instead, I play with counters (matching the base sizes in the rules), with top-view drawings that I did in PhotoShop:

This allows me to print out and deploy a corps in less time than it takes to paint a single stand of miniatures. The map is similarly 2D, creating in effect a hexless boardgame. I’ve been doing this for twenty years now, and find it much more practical and flexible than using real miniatures and 3D terrain.

What I expected to be a well-balanced meeting engagement ended almost as soon as it began, as a result of some truly incredible die rolls - devastatingly good for the Confederates, and catastrophically bad for the Union (including several automatic routs).

This lopsided outcome got me to thinking. Of course as a player I can quite correctly point to the dice as the source of the Union’s misfortune, but my historical counterparts were not allowed this defense. What would have happened to such an unlucky brigadier in the real world of 1862? I decided to conduct an Enquiry to find out.

(Note: Generals Grant and Sherman are of course historical characters, as is Sherman’s adjutant J.H. Hammond. Everyone else is made up, and so are the units involved. I picked random numbers for the regiments, so I hope no Civil War buffs will be offended if I’ve placed their favourite regiment in the wrong theater for July 18th, 1862.)

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James E. McGhee. Guide to Missouri Confederate Units, 1861-1865. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas PRess. (April 14, 2008). 240 pages., notes, index. ISBN: 978-1557288707 $34.95 (Hardcover w/DJ).

I received my copy of James McGhee’s Guide to Missouri Confederates not to long ago. Rather than do my usual book review, I’m going to try something different with this one soon. Look for a comparison of the book with Stewart Sifakis’ Missouri (et al) volume of Compendium of the Confederate Armies in the coming weeks. Until then, here’s the publisher’s information on the book from the University of Arkansas Press web site:

Guide to Missouri Confederate Units, 1861–1865
James E. McGhee

First-ever history of the Show Me State’s Confederate units

“This is an impressive reference work. It provides a detailed and extraordinarily accurate historical sketch of every Confederate army unit raised in Missouri.”
—Daniel Sutherland, University of Arkansas

“This well organized and authoritative reference work reflects years of painstaking research, verification of details, and extremely careful editing. It will prove highly useful to a variety of readers and scholars and Civil War enthusiasts interested in the many roles played by Missouri troops in the southern war effort.”
—T. Michael Parrish, Baylor University

Tracing the origins and history of Missouri Confederate units that served during the Civil War is nearly as difficult as comprehending the diverse politics that produced them. Deeply torn by the issues that caused the conflict, some Missourians chose sides enthusiastically, others reluctantly, while a number had to choose out of sheer necessity, for fence straddling held no sway in the state after the fighting began. The several thousand that sided with the Confederacy formed a variety of military organizations, some earning reputations for hard fighting exceeded by few other states, North or South. Unfortunately, the records of Missouri’s Confederate units have not been adequately preserved—officially or otherwise—until now.
James E. McGhee is a highly respected and widely published authority on the Civil War in Missouri; the scope of this book is startling, the depth of detail gratifying, its reliability undeniable, and the unit narratives highly readable. McGhee presents accounts of the sixty-nine artillery, cavalry, and infantry units in the state, as well as their precedent units and those that failed to complete their organization. Relying heavily on primary sources, such as rosters, official reports, order books, letters, diaries, and memoirs, he weaves diverse materials into concise narratives of each of Missouri’s Confederate organizations. He lists the field-grade officers for battalions and regiments, companies and company commanders, and places of origin for each company when known. In addition to listing all the commanding officers in each unit, he includes a bibliography germane to the unit, while a supplemental bibliography provides the other sources used in preparing this unique and comprehensive resource.

James E. McGhee is a retired lawyer from the Missouri Department of Labor and now devotes himself to the study of the Civil War. He has written and edited a number of books focusing on the war in his home state, including Missouri Confederates. He lives in Jefferson City, Missouri.

April 2008
6 x 9, 240 pages, 22 photographs, index
$34.95 (s) cloth
ISBN 978-1-55728-870-7 | 1-55728-870-4

Special thanks to Tom Lavoie at the University of Arkansas Press.

Joseph Bilby’s Small Arms at Gettysburg is much more than just a look at the hardware used in America’s greatest battle. Bilby is unusual in having not only the hands-on skills as a long-time black powder shooter (as well as being a columnist for Civil War News) but the eye of a tactical historian as well. The fact that he writes well is a nice bonus also—rather than being an arms catalog the book is crisply written using combat anecdotes mixed with sound small unit analysis. It’s not just a look at Gettysburg but a much broader commentary on the use and adoption of various types of weapons during the entire war. In terms of weapons technology, Gettysburg was a watershed event since it was the first really large-scale battle in which almost all infantrymen carried the rifle-musket (less than one in ten was armed with a smoothbore). Thus the battle is worth studying for that reason alone, and I’d recommend it to anyone who’s trying to form an opinion about the ongoing controversy about the relative effectiveness of the rifle musket vs. the smoothbore. “Here we learn,” says the web promo, “that the smoothbore musket. although beloved by some who carried it, sang its swan song, the rifle-musket came into its own, and the repeating rifle, although tactically mishandled, gave promise a glimpse of future promise.”

The book is divided into sections by weapons: breechloading carbines, which features an extended discussion of John Buford’s cavalry delaying action on July 1; three sections on the rifle-musket; then one section each on the smoothbore musket; the repeating rifle; sharpshooters; and six guns and sabers, a chapter on cavalry weapons. The three chapters on the rifle-musket (so called because it duplicated the length of the existing smoothbore fusil) comprise a mini-history of the subject, and Bilby notes that it was ironic that this new technology verged on obsolescence in 1863 (it would retired in favor of the breechloader in 1866). Bilby’s method is to research the history of each type of weapon, consulting both contemporary and period sources for information. What makes him unusual is that he then goes out and actually shoots the weapons (or replicas) to confirm what he read. Few authors (including myself) have actually gone out and compared the accuracy of a smoothbore musket and a rifle at a hundred yards and beyond. Granted, it’s hard to duplicate the combat “pucker factor,” but it does give you a better idea than comparing figures from a book. He confirms that a smoothbore reliably can hit a man-sized target a hundred yards and a large formation at two hundred, pretty much echoing period British figures. Using “buck and ball” (one .69 cal. ball and 3 buckshot), the smoothbore was deadly at close range and was preferred by some units like the Irish brigade. One Union colonel, George Willard, even proposed in 1863 that the army go back to smoothbores because it was a superior weapon (there was no indication that anyone took him seriously and he died at Gettysburg). Bilby concludes:

Loaded with buck and ball … it was not the hopelessly ineffectual arm it has often been characterized as. Smoothbore fire delivered on large-unit formations was certainly accurate enough to cause significant casualties at distances up to 200 yards, the range at which most Gettysburg combat was initiated. … The musket’s most significant shortcoming would be on the skirmish line, where accuracy at individual targets was required, and it could not compete with the more accurate rifle-musket, especially in the hands of Confederate soldiers detailed to special sharpshooter battalions who used their arms effectively at the ranges they were capable of.

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Russel H. Beatie. Army of the Potomac, Volume 3: McClellan’s First Campaign March 1862-May 1862. New York: Savas Beatie LLC; First Edition (2007). 723 pp., 36 maps, notes, index. ISBN: 1-932714-25-1 $45.00 (Hardcover w/DJ).

Note: I’m getting around to viewing this one a little late. I thought I’d give readers some links to other reviews as well, trying to represent both the pro and con viewpoints:

1. Drew Wagenhoffer

2. Dimitri Rotov has not only a short review but quite a few other posts and an interview with the author as well.

3. Stephen Graham

4. “Liberty and Union”

5. David Kelly

With this preliminary note out of the way, let’s move on to the review.

Was George McClellan the ridiculously cautious but extremely organized general he is caricatured as? Or is there much more to the oft-maligned Little Mac? In Army of the Potomac, Volume 3: McClellan’s First Campaign March 1862-May 1862, author Russel H. “Cap” Beatie continues his discussion of the that very topic. McClellan’s many difficulties during the early portion of the Peninsula Campaign constitute the main theme of the book. Beatie argues McClellan had to face an uncooperative government who appointed leaders and took away troops without his advice, an uncooperative navy who was unwilling to help capture Yorktown, inept Corps commanders at in the upper echelons of his command structure, and even nature, when constant rainfall and poor roads slowed his advance up the Peninsula to a crawl. Beatie believes McClellan would have benefited greatly by making Lincoln an ally. Throughout it all, McClellan struggled to make his campaign a success on his own.

By March 1862 McClellan’s careful nurturing of the Army of the Potomac was paying dividends. Large numbers of troops were trained and ready for use against the Confederates. The question became “when and how are these troops going to be used”, and McClellan was constantly criticized for not moving forward. Eventually, his plan was to ship his Army of the Potomac by boat to the Urbanna peninsula to outflank the Confederate Army and occupy a position closer to the Confederate capital in Richmond. However, Joseph Johnston’s cautious nature caused him to fall back to the Rappahannock River line on March 9, 1862, rendering McClellan’s plan obsolete. Still not wanting to fight an “overland” campaign, McClellan decided to land his men even further south on the Yorktown Peninsula, and the movement was initiated on March 17, 1862.

McClellan moved slowly up the Peninsula in late March and early April, finally settling in for the “Siege” of Yorktown on April 5, 1862. It was not technically a siege in the true sense of the word as the Confederates were able to leave at any time. Still, McClellan did heavily rely on siege operations, bringing in heavy artillery and starting to dig parallels to try to force the Confederates away. On May 4, 1862, just as McClellan’s Battery #1 was getting ready to launch a full scale bombardment, Johnston’s Army retreated under cover of darkness. The Confederates fought a rearguard action at Williamsburg on May 5 before falling back westward to positions behind the Chickahominy River.

While this early phase of the Peninsula Campaign was underway, Stonewall Jackson was not quiet in the Shenandoah Valley. He had suddenly and unexpectedly reversed course during a retreat from Winchester and struck James Shields’ Union division (commanded by Nathan Kimball in the field) at the Battle of Kernstown on March 23, 1862. Although Jackson had underestimated the strength of the Union forces and was beaten in the fight, he won a strategic victory. Lincoln grew concerned with the threat Jackson posed to Washington, D.C. and began funneling as many troops as possible to the Shenandoah Valley or to positions between Jackson and the capital. A good portion of these troops, including Irvin McDowell’s entire I Corps, were taken from McClellan’s Army of the Potomac.

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First of all, happy Mother’s Day to everyone out there! I just wanted to write a short note about the old blog posts from American Civil War Gaming and Reading. As you may recall, posts from mid-June 2006 to February 2007 (the end of that Civil War blog’s run) did not transfer over to the new TOCWOC civil war blog correctly. I have been working diligently to go through and transfer each and every post from the old blog to TOCWOC. I’ve managed to finish June-September 2006. If you want to see some of what has been added, I encourage you to look at the archives for June, July, August, and September 2006 located on the left sidebar. There are quite a few posts from my series looking at Eric Jacobson’s for Cause and for Country, Fred Ray was very active during this period, and there are also many of my book reviews out there as well. The work will continue slowly, and I hope to have all of the posts from my old Civil War blog up within a month or two. Lastly, I’ve used my .htaccess file to redirect the links to some of the old posts and archives at American Civil War Gaming & Reading to redirect to the proper areas here at TOCWOC. It’s not a simple process, and I doubt it will ever be completely finished, but if you find old links to ACWG&R take you to a 404 file not found error page here, by all means report them and I’ll do my best to update the redirect code.

• Michigan Civil War Blog covers a great movie from Hollywood’s Golden Age. John Wayne battles “Cantrell” and his raiders when they come calling on Lawrence, Kansas. Can John Wayne win this one too?

• The Akron (OH) Beacon Journal asks the question, “Whatever Happened to The Last Full Measure?”
  

• What Civil War battles make the common knowledge list?

• Using The Killer Angels in the classroom at The Edge of the American West

• Walker County, GA is busy planning for the 145th Anniversary of the Battle of Chickamauga

• Doubtful Muse follows up her earlier post with the book review she promised

• A “Skyship” Model from the American Civil War

• Bloggers seem to be picking up the cause of the Electric Map at Gettysburg

• Free access to The American Civil War Research Database has been extended to the end of June 2008

• Too bad my high school didn’t offer this type of academic competition…

• Historical fiction vs. Historical non-fiction: which would you choose?

• The first miniature wargame’s rules designer? H.G. Wells, author of The War of the Worlds.

• The story of a Civil War veteran from Jamaica Plain

After having reservations similar to Harry Smeltzer’s, I finally decided to resubscribe to Civil War History, a journal published by The Kent State University Press, just recently. I was rewarded with the March 2008 issue pictured at left, which has only one article focusing on the usual race and gender topics seemingly overwhelmingly favored by this publication. The one tangentially race-related article also happens to be interesting to me based on its subject city of Alton, Illinois. I live about 35 miles from Alton and I’m very familiar with the area. The second article is entitled Measures of War: A Quantitative Examination of the Civil War’s Destructiveness in the Confederacy. This topic would have been interesting to me regardless, but it is especially so now given my recent read of Mark Grimsley’s The Hard Hand of War. The last article is South of the Border: Ulysses S. Grant and the French Intervention, a topic I know very little about but which I eagerly look forward to reading. I hope this move away from exclusively race and gender articles continues with each new issue.

Fellow blogger Dale Cox recently announced the release of his book The Battle of Massard Prairie: The 1864 Confederate Attacks on Fort Smith, Arkansas. I immediately ordered my copy and it arrived late last week. Cox had the book published by William Cox, presumably a relative. It is is available at Dale’s web site, http://www.exploresouthernhistory.com/. Despite the small size of this fight, Cox has included eight maps and numerous pictures in the book, a welcome addition any publisher would be wise to follow. The Battle of Massard Prairie weighs in at 113 pages, with 90 of those being the actual text and the rest composed of several appendices, a bibliography, and an index. Interestingly, my copy has a slightly different title than the one featured in the picture accompanying this blog entry. Dale, if you read this, perhaps you could comment on this. In any event, if you are a fan of the Civil War in the Trans-Mississippi, this looks like a solid addition to your library.

I found several emails from Bill Adams, who is kind enough to provide me with a lot of information about black powder period arms. As for the higher muzzle velocity for the smoothbore musket, he points out three factors:

1. Many musket cartridges came with a paper patch, which helped sealing somewhat
2. The round ball upset when fired, elongating to fill the bore to some extent. This did bad things for accuracy, however.
3. The blow-by reduced recoil, allowing more powder for weight of ball. This had to be reduced considerably for the Minie rifles to keep recoil bearable.

Bill adds:

While these figures are rounded off, consider that a 100 grain charge behind a 474 grain .680″ round musket ball gives 4.74 grains of bullet weight for every grain of powder. 60 grains of powder behind a .575″ 500 grain rifle bullet gives 8.3 grs of bullet weight for each grain of powder. The musket has nearly twice the propellant to bullet ratio as does the rifle. Now, if we increase the rifle charge to 100 grs and use a .575 ball at apr 272 grs, we would have 2.72 grs of bullet for each grain of powder, and bump the velocity way up. Shoveling a 750 gr hollow based bullet into a rifled .69 smoothbore and having to drop the charge to 80 grs to curtail severe recoil, gives us 9.38 grs of bullet weight for each gr of powder & the velocity will drop to possibly half that of the smoothbore with a round ball. The trajectory will increase, but so will the effective range.

Different rifling systems caused more or less drag, depending, and this seems to have been one reason for the progressive depth grooves (i.e. shallower toward the muzzle) on some rifles. Bill also suggests tha some muzzle loaders may have had m.v.’s of close to 2000 fps. Tolerances of CW-era guns were often quite loose, both for barrel diameter and ammunition sizing, because the soft lead bullets could compensate for a lot of variation.

The only man to get around this conundrum was Joseph Whitworth. I have mentioned Sir Joe’s rifles in a previous post that I see Brett has reposted on this blog. Sir Joe used a mechanically-fitted bullet, that is the hexagonal bullet fit tightly in the hexagonal bore, closely enough to prevent blow-by. Thus, with the same powder charge, he got all the benefits of rifling with the velocity of a smoothbore. The only drawback was that the tight tolerances were expensive to manufacture and more prone to fouling. Since it did not have to expand to grab the rifling, Whitworth could use a hard bullet rather a soft lead one, which gave better long range performance.

Nevertheless, this was not the last word on the subject. Two other Brits, Metford and Halford, were exploring the same terrain. They concluded that it was feasible to use a hard alloy bullet with extremely shallow grooves, providing the sizing was consistent and the bullet had a hollow in the base. This reduced drag and allowed the bullet to travel as fast as the Whitworth.

Bill says: “Halford showed up at a 1000 and 1100 yard match at the Cambridge University Long Range Club in June 1865 with a Metford rifle with five .004″ deep grooves and was ridiculed by everyone there as having a ’smoothbore.’ Halford won the two-day match, being four points ahead of the nearest competitor.” Compare this with the Enfield grooves which were .013″ deep. It proved to be the wave of the future, and the Whitworth gradually lost ground to the new rifling systems of Metford and Henry (not the US repeater), and had been pretty much supplanted by the 1870s. Compared to the Whitworth, the new rifling systems were easier and cheaper to manufacture and less prone to stripping or fouling. With the adoption of the breech-loader and better manufacturing facilities, the hard bullet/shallow groove combination became universal, as it pretty much is today. Around the turn of the century armies adopted smokeless powder, which bumped m.v.’s to 25-2800 fps, and the pointed “spitzer” bullet to make the modern rifle as we know it today.

UPDATE: If you’d like to learn more about William Ellis Metford and his rifles, read this article in the 1901 Dictionary of National Biography. The adoption of the hard alloy bullet did have one interesting corollary—a reduction in stopping power. The previous soft lead bullets (such as those used in the ACW) tended to expand when they hit, transferring a lot of energy to the target. The alloy bullets didn’t, leading to the introduction of the “Dum Dum” bullet, subsequently banned. For a much longer contemporary (1902) look at the Lee-Metford rifle, bullets and their effectiveness, see this article in Blackwood’s.

UPDATE 2: I should have mentioned that the Whitworth used two types of bullet. The “standard” hard alloy hexagonal bullet and a soft lead cylindrical bullet. Each rifle (at least the ones used here) came with a bullet mold that cast a round bullet, this in case the factory swaged ones were not available. When fired, the round bullet “upset” to the form of the bore, becoming a hex. It had different flight characteristics and the sight was marked “H” on one side and “C” on the other so the rifleman could adjust correctly. Relic hunters tell me that the cylindrical rounds are far more common.

The Euroarms site has photos of Whitworth and Henry replica rifles. The Henry (no relation to the American repeater) used rifling designed by Alexander Henry and managed to equal the performance of the Whitworth with a conventional design. These were highly regarded match rifles and some may have been used over here.

UPDATE 3: A very good primer on ballistics “for dummies” in Rifle Shooter magazine. All the basics plus arcane terms like sectional density and ballistic coefficient, written in a readable manner.

The 19th Century saw the most rapid improvement in the rifle of any comparable period in history. At the beginning of the century the exemplar of the standard arm was the smooth bore .75 cal. Brown Bess musket, and by the end we have the modern .30 cal. bolt action, box magazine repeater using smokeless powder (not to mention the Maxim gun).

The Brown Bess had the longest service life of any service arm. The design went back to the 1720s and it served in the Seven Years War, the American Revolution, and the Napoleonic wars. Even then, the Duke of Wellington was loth to give it up for the rifle musket. Converted to percussion, some remained in service in parts of the Empire until the late 1850s.

Eventually the British Army did get around to adopting the rifle, but there was a great deal of variation in the types of rifling and intense debate on which was best. The Volunteers, a sort of self-armed, self organized militia, were a great laboratory for this, since they (at least until 1862) furnished their own weapons and also shot a great deal in long range target matches. You can click on the image for a closer look, but the first two are standard 3 and 5 groove barrels. The third is the oval bore Lancaster that I mentioned earlier. The last is also interesting, as it is similar to the Whitworth and modern “polygonal” rifling designs.

Almost all these designs used a soft lead bullet of .57-.58 caliber and very deep grooves. At the moment of firing the bullet “upset” and had its skirt forced into the grooves, which made it spin. This did cause quite a bit of friction, however, which slowed the bullet down considerably. It surprised me to learn that the initial velocity of the smooth bore musket was considerably higher than that of the rifle, 13-1500 fps as opposed to 850-900 for the rifle. Of course the round ball of the smooth bore slowed down much faster than the cylindrical bullet of the rifle musket, but over short distances it did have a a flatter trajectory. The rifle, OTOH, had a looping “rainbow” trajectory that made long distance shooting difficult. Get the range wrong and the bullet would pass considerably over your target’s head or hit well in front of him. Thus the core of most mid-century marksmanship programs was distance estimation, since it was impossible to hit anything accurately without knowing it.

Here’s an illustration of the problem—a .45-70 black powder round compared to a modern .308/7.62 NATO round. Note that it’s not really a “rainbow” trajectory. The round drops sharply at the end of its ride as its energy falls off and air resistance increases.

In the next few nights I hope to review Joe Bilby’s new book on the small arms of Gettysburg and further explore some of these topics.