TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog

Fold3 is offering free access to its records for the Memorial Day weekend. Especially if you’re still in lockdown this is an excellent chance to access Civil War records, including an extensive collection of service records.

Names and nomenclature do make a difference in military topics. You’d like to be as accurate as possible, and I think it’s important to use the terminology current at the time unless you specify you’re using something contemporary.

I’ll use two examples that have caused a lot of confusion—musketoon and the rifle-musket.

The difference between a musket and a rifle is simple—the rifle has barrel grooves to give the bullet a spin (and is much more accurate as a result), while musket barrels are smooth. A musketoon is just a shortened musket, usually meant for artillery or cavalry use. The US Army fielded such a weapon in the 1840s and 50s-the 1847 Springfield Musketoon, which was simply a shortened version of the 1842 Musket, a smooth-bored .69 caliber weapon that was at time the standard infantry arm. It was decidedly unpopular with the troops. If you’d like more details, there is a lengthy article here.

What about shorter rifles? Since they were rifled, they were generally referred to as short rifles or carbines. Some were just shortened versions of the standard long infantry arm, others were purpose made. The Enfield rifle, for example, came in three versions—the Pattern 1853 Rifle-Musket (39” barrel, three barrel bands), the Pattern 56, 58, 60 Short Rifle (there were several models with minor variations, all had a 33” barrel and two barrel bands), and the Pattern 61 Carbine (24” barrel, two barrel bands). British Army publications of the time refer to them this way, and there is no mention of the term “musketoon.” Here in the US during the Civil War the carbines usually went to the cavalry while the two-band short rifle was a favorite of Confederate sharpshooters. A small number of the older 1847 Musketoons saw use in the war, and some of those, like a few of the 1842 Muskets, received rifling later in their service life.

So where did the term Musketoon creep in to apply to a rifled carbine? Apparently with the venerable Parker Hale company, now out of business, who reportedly advertised their reproduction 24” Enfield carbine as such. You can find the term today on the present Davide Pedersoli web site to describe the shortest Enfield repro, but they call the similar Cook and Brother arm a carbine. Some authors have even applied the term musketoon to the Enfield Short Rifle.

Accuracy, then, would dictate the we call the shortest rifles (and we are talking about the ones with barrel lengths around 20-24 inches) carbines, and the intermediate length rifle (around 33 inches) a short rifle.

This leaves us with the rifle-musket, another term that causes confusion. Given the above definitions, how can one arm be both rifle and musket? And what about a rifled musket?

Infantry in the 1860s fought in a line of battle, which consisted of two ranks standing with the rear rank slightly offset. The rear rank men pointed their guns past the front rank men. Their guns had to project enough past the faces of the front rank men so as not to place the muzzle blast in their faces, which meant a barrel length of about forty inches or so. The US and British armies both used smooth-bore muskets during the first half of the 19th Century, but began to switch to rifled arms in the 1850s. They called the new guns rifle muskets in order to clarify that they were the same length as the muskets they replaced i.e. suitable for the line of battle. The Model 1842 Springfield Musket, the Springfield Model 1861/63 Rifle-Musket, and the Enfield P.53 Rifle-Musket all fall into this category.

What about a Rifled Musket? Isn’t that yet another contradiction in terms? Having accepted the superiority of rifled arms, the US Army retroactively rifled a number of the 1842 Muskets and the 1847 Musketoons. These .69 caliber weapons were still classified as muskets but since they had been rifled (the recoil was wicked) they were renamed rifled muskets to differentiate them from the unrifled versions.

All this terminology went away at the end of the war, along with the smoothbore musket. However, some vestiges remain. Standard army combat cartridges are still referred to as “ball” ammunition, even though the Army has not used a round ball since the 1860s, and a general court martial can still for certain crimes sentence you to be “shot to death with musketry.”

It has become somewhat of a cottage industry to try to identify who shot various prominent figures like generals Sedgwick and Reynolds. The other say I ran across this postwar newspaper article dealing with the shooting of General Winfield Hancock at Gettysburg.

The article credits Sergeant William Wood of Company H, 56th Virginia (Kemper’s brigade, I believe) for taking out Hancock. Although he didn’t kill Hancock, he did take him out of the battle, and complications from the wound eventually forced Hancock to give up command the next year.

After what seems like forever I’m back home and trying to get back to a normal life, including posting on TOCWOC. For now, however, I’ll just leave a couple of links of interest to keep everyone entertained while we’re all under “house arrest.”

An excellent documentary on the 1864 battle of Olustee in Florida.

A two-part BBC series on the battle of Waterloo narrated by actor Sean Bean. Bean played Richard Sharpe in the Sharpe’s Rifles series on BBC a few years ago, which was set in the Napoleonic Wars, and which featured a segment about Waterloo. It’s an excellent program that looks at the men, the weapons, and the tactics of the battle.

Waterloo happened less than fifty years before the outbreak of the American Civil War, and was still fresh on the minds of military men.

Norder, Steve. Lincoln Takes Command: The Campaign to Seize Norfolk and the Destruction of the CSS Virginia. (Savas Beatie: December 2019). 336 pages, 36 illustrations, 2 maps.  ISBN: 978-1-61121-457-4. $32.95 (Hardcover)

What if I told you Abraham Lincoln, barely over a year into his first term and while McClellan’s Peninsula Campaign was raging, decided to take over a joint operation to capture Norfolk, Virginia and ultimately shared the credit for the destruction of the famous CSS Virginia?  Have you ever heard of that one?  Honestly, I hadn’t either, until now.  Steve Norder closely studies one week in May 1862 at Hampton Roads which, the author argues, gave Lincoln the confidence he needed to successfully prosecute the war.

After giving a brief introduction prior to May 1862, the author covers the time period of May 5-12, 1862, generally one day per chapter.  Norfolk and neighboring Portsmouth across the Elizabeth River were important for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the Gosport Navy Yard.  By capturing these places, the North could wipe out a key Confederate ship building location and gain another base at the mouth of the James River, fully cutting off Richmond and Petersburg from the sea.

President Lincoln arrived at Fort Monroe on May 6, 1862.  He personally believed Norfolk and Portsmouth were vulnerable, but Major General McClellan was busy waging his Peninsula Campaign, the Battle of Williamsburg having ended just the day before. Lincoln decided to take matters into his own hands over the next few days. Despite the ever present threat of the CSS Virginia, Lincoln ordered offensive action including bombardment of Confederate shore batteries.  Personally scouting landing beaches, Lincoln took a direct role in what ultimately became a bloodless occupation.

An ”Aftermath” chapter covers the “blockade” of Portsmouth and Norfolk, one with many twists and turns and also one which lasted an astonishingly long time.  It wasn’t officially ended until half way through the Siege of Petersburg! Norder’s “Dramatis Personae” appendix gives a concise summary of the players in this week long affair, and a ship list does the same for the wooden and iron vessels which participated.

For such a small time frame, the author was diligent in collecting sources.  I counted no less than 33 newspapers cited, as well as a solid array of archival sources.  Letters written by Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase to his daughter provided detail not mined before.  The maps in this one were surprisingly sparse, given that this is a Savas Beatie book.  That said, in this particular case, general overview maps were enough to understand the action, given what ultimately happened.

I would recommend this book to those interested in combined arms operations during the Civil War, fans of lesser known actions occurring at the same time as “main events,” and those looking to fill gaps in their knowledge.  Although the author’s claim that this week’s actions sustained Lincoln’s belief in his ability to wage war might be overstated and overemphasized, this does not detract from the story.

A copy of this book was provided gratis for the purposes of this review.

For a limited time (until April 15th) Fold3 is making its Civil War records available for free. So if you need to research an ancestor’s military record, now’s the time. It does require you to register, however.

Smith, Timothy B. The Real Horse Soldiers: Benjamin Grierson’s Epic 1863 Civil War Raid Through Mississippi. (Savas Beatie: October 2018). 336 pages, 36 illustrations, 12 maps, notes, bibliography, index.  ISBN: 978-1-61121-428-4. $32.95 (Cloth)

Timothy B. Smith’s latest work on the Civil War in the Western Theater, The Real Horse Soldiers: Benjamin Grierson’s Epic 1863 Civil War Raid Through Mississippi, tackles the larger than life Benjamin Grierson raid through Mississippi in April and May 1863. Made famous by the John Wayne film The Horse Soldiers, Grierson’s Raid so occupied Confederate commander John Pemberton that he completely lost track of what Ulysses S. Grant was doing on the Louisiana side of the Mississippi River. Ultimately, though Grierson’s Raid was not the only deception Grant threw at Pemberton in this time frame, it was the most spectacular in its damage, endurance, and ultimately its contribution to Grant’s Vicksburg victory.

Author Timothy B. Smith long ago became a personal favorite author of mine.  He has worked in the National Park service system and currently teaches at the University of Tennessee – Martin.  I prize my copy of his book Champion Hill: Decisive Battle for Vicksburg, which was my first exposure to his work. Over the past decade plus, Smith has been steadily working on the famous battles of Grant’s Army of the Tennessee, including multiple books on Shiloh, Vicksburg and the first National Military Parks from the Civil War, as well as single books on Forts Henry and Donelson, the Battle AND the earlier Siege of Corinth, among other topics.

Over the years, Grierson’s Raid has evolved into a legend, with distorted or exaggerated facts.  Dee Brown (of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee fame) wrote a book in 1954 called Grierson’s Raid which, per author Smith, took “liberty with the facts and sources…in a manner no academic historian would allow.” In fact, Smith intentionally kept himself from reading Brown’s novel prior to finishing this book so as not to contaminate the primary sources in his own mind.  Novelist Harold Sinclair penned The Horse Soldiers in 1956, where he used “the historic raid as its basis, but…made up conversations and events.”  Shortly after Sinclair’s novel, the 1959 John Wayne / William Holden film of the same name came out. There have been other books as well, including a popular history paperback by Tom Laliki as well as an entry in the Osprey raid series (#12).  Not too many years ago I reviewed a book on TOCWOC called Fiction as Fact: The Horse Soldiers & Popular Memory by Neil Longley York, published by Kent State University Press. In that 2001 book, York calls Dee Brown’s book the best non-fiction account of Grierson’s Raid.  Thanks to Tim Smith’s new book, this is now an inaccurate statement.

Grierson’s Raid occurred from April 17-May 2, 1863, starting at La Grange, Tennessee midway between Memphis and Corinth, and ending at Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  Grierson had three regiments, the 6th and 7th Illinois and the 2nd Iowa.  Generals Hurlbut and William Sooy Smith, along with Grant and Grierson, were involved in the pre-raid discussions.  In fact, Tim Smith writes, Grant’s plan all along was to distract Confederate commander John Pemberton with feints and raids of this nature to distract from almost missed the raid, only returning from a leave of absence hours before it was to begin.

On April 17, 1863, Grierson led 1,700 cavalrymen from his Illinois and Iowa regiments forward out of La Grange.  Their main objective was Newton’s Station on the Southern Railroad of Mississippi.  This railroad ran west and supplied Vicksburg through Jackson, Mississippi, so it was an important point for the Confederates to defend.  Moving fast, using scouts disguised as Confederates, and sending portions of his command on large and small feints, Grierson managed to reach Newton’s Station on April 24, 1863.  To Confederate observers, he had appeared like a lightning bolt out of nowhere.

From that point until the end of the raid on May 2, 1863, the narrative changed to one of pursuit. John Pemberton’s dispatches show he was overwhelmingly focused on catching Grierson’s raiders while ignoring most everything else.  Pemberton’s lack of cavalry, along with other cavalry raids launched further north in Alabama and Tennessee, meant Pemberton was mostly chasing Grierson with infantry.  With a ton of good luck, good scouts, and good leadership, Grierson successfully led his men south through the entire state of Mississippi and ended up in Union held Baton Rouge.  Grant wrote that Grierson had “ripped the heart out of the State of Mississippi.”

In his overage of the results, Tim Smith writes that the actual physical damage wasn’t all that great at Newton’s Station, though other country bridges Grierson had destroyed remained unrepaired until after the war.  The real result, writes Smith, was that Grierson so completely occupied Pemberton and the Confederates that it helped Grant to successfully cross the Mississippi River south of Vicksburg and embark on the successful end stages of the Vicksburg Campaign.

The maps were very good in the book, something ESSENTIAL for a book on a cavalry raid.  You literally cannot have enough maps in a book of this type.  Very few get it right.  Tim Smith did a very good job here.  The text tied to the maps well, and I rarely (though there were a few instances) found myself wondering where the map was for what was being described.

Smith also goes into great detail on the how the plan evolved over time, who was involved, and who should get the credit for its conception.  I won’t spoil the author’s conclusion, but two men stand out as deserving the most praise.

A lovely feature at the end of the book covered what happened to the raiders and their pursuers after the Civil War, with an obvious focus on Grierson.

Despite many books being written on Grierson’s Cavalry Raid through Mississippi in 1863, Timothy Smith’s new book The Real Horse Soldiers: Benjamin Grierson’s Epic 1863 Civil War Raid Through Mississippi finally presents the facts without unnecessary exaggerations.  The truth, as Smith is quick to point out, is more than fascinating enough. Obvious readers will be those interested in the Western Theater in general, in Grant’s Army of the Tennessee (a Smith specialty), the Vicksburg Campaign, and cavalry operations during the war. If you want to read about the single greatest cavalry raid of the entire Civil War, you want this book.  It is one more feather in the cap of Tim Smith, whose cap is getting fairly full of feathers at this point.

This book was provided gratis for the purposes of this review.