What They Didn't Teach You About the Civil War

Instant coffee was invented during the Civil War for use by Union troops, who hated it; holding races between lice was a popular pastime for both Johnny Reb and Billy Yank; 13% of the Confederate Army deserted during the conflict. These are three of the hundreds of bits of knowledge that Mike Wright makes available in his informative and entertaining What They Didn't Teach You About the Civil War, which focuses on the lives and ways of ordinary soldiers and of those they left behind.

CHAPTER ONE
 
 
 
Fort Sumter: The First Shot
 
I shall await the first shot, and if you do not batter us to pieces, we shall be starved out in a few days.
—Maj. Robert Anderson, U.S.A.
April 11, 1861
 
They were the gangs that couldn’t shoot straight, both the Union and Confederate armies. We should be glad they couldn’t; they did enough damage as it was. Imagine how bloody it would have been if they could have shot straight.
 
In 1862, George McClellan and the Union Army of the Potomac slogged their way up the rain-clogged Virginia peninsula, chasing a Confederate army slowly retreating toward Richmond. A regiment from Mississippi stumbled onto a unit from Georgia, each side thinking the other was the enemy. They opened fire—Mississippi Rebels blasting away at Georgia Confederates. Since neither group could shoot straight, the only casualty was a horse.
 
Ulysses S. Grant once complained that his Northern troops were so green, so poorly trained, most of them couldn’t load their muskets. Many who did know how to load them didn’t know how to shoot them. Or maybe they tried to fire them but either the poorly made muskets didn’t work or the powder wouldn’t fire. Maybe the soldiers just thought they fired their rifles, but the battle raged around them so loudly they couldn’t hear whether they did or not. In any case, a lot of times, nothing happened. This worried the Union army brass, so after the three-day Battle of Gettysburg, they checked weapons left on the field. They found at least thirty-seven thousand discarded rifles. Sometimes the troops ran off without firing their rifles; sometimes their muskets misfired. Twenty-four thousand weapons were still loaded. Many of the weapons left behind—eighteen thousand—were loaded with not one, but at least two minié balls. Six thousand had a lot more, as many as ten unfired cartridges rammed down their barrels. The others were improperly loaded, sometimes backward, the lead bullet facing the rear of the weapon. If loaded backward, or loaded with more than one cartridge, the rifle would not fire. One poor soldier had managed to stuff nearly two dozen minié balls down his rifle, and then probably wondered why it didn’t fire. He was lucky the damn thing didn’t blow up in his face.
 
Troops on both sides were not only poorly trained; in the case of the South, they usually were poorly armed. The tactics they used were left over from the Napoleonic wars, but the weapons weren’t. Whether it was Johnny Reb or Billy Yank, the technique was the same: march side by side, row after pitiful row, until you were about seventy-five to one hundred yards from the enemy. Then you’d fire point-blank at the other side.
 
Modern rifles often are automatic weapons, firing multiples of small-caliber projectiles. In the Civil War, soldiers faced hordes of weapons that resembled high-caliber, low-velocity shotguns whose bullets often broke bones rather than simply going in and out of the unlucky victim’s body. This was a primary reason for so many amputations during the war, and a primary reason for so many one-legged, one-armed veterans in the years that followed. The mangled and maimed individuals seen at reunions or limping down Main Streets North and South were the ones who, against all odds, managed to survive.
 
Most of these shotgunlike weapons were muzzle loaders, which was a reason Civil War soldiers often looked so dirty. Loading their weapons called for troops to bite off one end of a paper cartridge packed with powder and ball, then ram the cartridge down the rifle barrel. When they bit off the end of the cartridge, some of the black powder plastered itself over their faces. The dirtier a soldier’s face, maybe, the more rounds he fired off.
 
Often, Southern troops forgot to bite the end off the cartridge, which meant they couldn’t fire their weapons. Why this was a problem for Southern troops, we don’t know, especially since the Rebels generally were more accustomed to firearms.
 
Maybe it was the excitement of war or fear at “seeing the elephant,” a phrase used to mean “seeing combat for the first time.” The phrase has a legend all its own. Since most people of the mid-nineteenth century had never seen such an animal, to “see the elephant” originally meant to see something unusual or large. Most of the men and women who fought during the Civil War had never been in battle, had never witnessed anything so large, had never seen an elephant. They put the words and meaning together.
 
A second version of the phrase says it goes back to 217 B.C., during the Second Punic War, when Hannibal of Carthage invaded Italy by crossing the Alps. Hannibal used elephants the way modern armies use tanks and, in the battle, beat a vastly superior Roman army with this new invention. For most of the Roman troops, it was the first time they had “seen the elephant.”
 
Weapons in hand, soldiers on both sides of America’s Civil War frequently aimed (if you can call it that) at a 45-degree angle, meaning that even if their weapons did fire, they probably missed the enemy. Twentieth-century Civil War reenactors often do the same thing, and initially it appears ludicrous—mock soldiers firing into the air. While it looks ridiculous, and we’re not sure the reenactors are aware how correct they are, what they’re doing today apparently is what their ancestors did more than a hundred years ago. Occasionally, art really does imitate life, and it all works out for the best.
 
Neither side had enough weapons to go around when the shooting match started. When Abraham Lincoln called for volunteers to put down the rebellion, many of the weapons the Union had on hand were the old “Brown Bess” variety, not much different from the type used by both sides in the American Revolution. Of the estimated 275,000 weapons the Union army owned at the start of the war, only about 22,000 were rifles, the rest were smoothbore muskets.
 
Almost half—47 percent—of Union soldiers were farmers or farm workers. Sixty-one percent of Confederate soldiers were farmers or planters and, therefore, more likely to be familiar with rifles and shotguns. This may account for the South’s initial success in the war.
 
For troops on both sides, being away from home was a new experience. America’s Civil War was a great and grand adventure for the three million–plus men and women who took part in it.
 
War trains soldiers for other wars, and sometimes that’s the main reason they’re fought. The Black Hawk War, the Seminole Wars, and the Mexican War all were training grounds for America’s Civil War. All saw men fight side by side with future enemies.
 
By the 1830s, almost all American Indians, including the so-called five “civilized nations”—Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole—had been forcibly removed from the eastern part of the United States, approximately eighty-five thousand in all. Black Hawk, chief of the Sauk and Fox, tried to retain his ancestral tribal seat at the mouth of the Rock River in Illinois, near what would later be one of the worst Civil War prisons on either side, Rock Island, in the northwest corner of the state.
 
In 1832, a regular army officer just seven years out of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point signed up a lanky young lawyer from Illinois to command a militia unit in the Black Hawk War. Abraham Lincoln was in Springfield, Illinois, when he heard the call to arms. He borrowed a friend’s horse and went off to war. He more or less went off to war. Lincoln’s militia unit elected him captain, an event that apparently surprised him. They marched off, slogged through the rain, then—like soldiers before and since—they waited around. Finally, Lincoln’s militia unit was put under a regular army regiment headed by Capt. Zachary Taylor. They marched again and stole anything they could find near to hand—food, clothing, you name it. Lincoln’s men once got hold of some whiskey and went on a rampage. As their officer, Lincoln was in charge, so to punish him, he was made to walk around all day carrying a wooden sword for all to see.
 
Apparently, Lincoln never saw combat. In the meantime, Chief Black Hawk was chased into Wisconsin and captured by someone else.
 
The regular army officer who recruited Lincoln was Robert Anderson, Their paths crossed again nearly three decades later when Lincoln lived in the White House in Washington and Maj. Robert Anderson commanded the Federal garrison at Fort Sumter, South Carolina. One was killed by a single bullet to the head; the other survived unscratched despite four years of combat and hundreds of rounds of artillery fire aimed his way.