TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog

Most students of Civil War weapons have heard of the Austrian Lorenz rifle. Sometimes called the “Austrian Enfield,” it ranked third in numbers issued to troops on both sides during the conflict, and was the second most common imported rifle after the British Enfield. The biggest users seem to have been the Army of Tennessee […]

[Read more →]

I’ve been reading a series of book on tactics from both the Napoleonic and Revolutionary wars as a background for my ongoing study of Civil War tactics. Part of this is to try to determine, as British military pundit Paddy Griffith had it, if the American Civil War was another Napoleonic war. How much, if […]

[Read more →]

American Civil War units often copied their European counterparts. The best known were the flashy zouaves, but there were others as well, such as the chasseurs. The name means “hunter” in French, and they were light infantry, the functional equivalent of the German Jägers. Chasseurs came in both infantry (chasseurs à pied) and cavalry (chasseurs […]

[Read more →]