How did the Confederate officers utilize weapons and tactics to defeat better-equipped and better-organized Union forces?
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North Cooper
The Civil War, in many aspects, represents a collage of battlefield tactics ranging from the line formations of the Revolutionary War and cavalry charges of the Napoleonic Era to the trench warfare of WWI and a new fast-paced guerilla combat that would most closely represent tactics of squad warfare in our modern times. Due to this apparent plethora of different combat styles, the Civil War saw a plethora of officers whom each vested faith and interest in entirely different approaches on the battlefield. As John Hamlin depicts in his article, “Civil War Tactics in Perspective,” “The Civil War was not particularly modern tactically, but it was not fought using the tactics of Napoleon I either. Regardless of the reasons - technology, tactics, terrain, command and control problems - or more likely a mixture of all these things - circumstances tended toward making Civil War combat less decisive than Napoleonic combat (Hamlin).” Unlike the Napoleonic Wars, most Civil War battles had little impact on whether one side won or lost and were instead only tests of each other’s fortitude, and the tactics represent this in ways. While this system of contrasting tactics sounds like it may have been helpful (and, in some cases, it was), for the most part, it resulted in unnecessary bloodshed on both sides. On my website, I will be discussing these tactics in depth along with the weapons and officers that made these tactics effective on the battlefield (Hamlin).
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