TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog

I have finished Earl Hess’s The Rifle Musket in the Civil War and will posting a review by and by, but before I do that I’d like to address one of his points, that of the role of the artillery. Hess and several other historians (e.g. Mark Grimsley, Gregg Biggs, etc.) have adopted the thesis […]

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In his seminal book Battle Tactics of the Civil War, author Paddy Griffith talks about the value of what he calls “tactical snippets”—excerpts from letters, reports, books, etc. that show something of the tactics in use at the time. Whereas he confined himself mainly to the line of battle, I prefer the skirmish line. Here’s […]

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In an earlier post we looked at the “rainbow” trajectory of the rifle-musket, caused by its relatively low muzzle velocity. This feature made range estimation absolutely critical, and required some knowledge of the “dangerous space.” One manual of the day warned that if a riflemen fired an Enfield at a target at 570 yards with […]

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