American History Hit - 5 Key Weapons of the Civil War

Episode Date: July 31, 2025

How did new weapons shape the Civil War? Why were the muskets so deadly? What on earth were the Ironclads all about? Don explores five key weapons of the civil war with a favourite guest, Cecily Zander from the University of Wyoming, author of "The Army Under Fire".Edited by Tim Arstall, produced by Freddy Chick. The Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It is March 1862 in eastern Virginia. A Civil War naval battle is underway in the James River,

unlike anything the world had ever witnessed in war. Two iron-clad vessels pounded away at each other. One, the hulking CSS Virginia, formerly the Merrimack, rising from the water like a barn roof sheathed in black iron. The other, the Union's surreal-looking USS monitor, low slung in the water, a round turret revolving, a stovepipe hat riding atop a 179-foot-long floating pancake. This epic clash, pitched and determined, ends in what is basically a draw, with so much artillery fire bouncing off the ship's sides of armor. But years later, Herman Melville wrote a poem about this iconic event, accounting for the change in battle tactics and tone.

deadlier, closer, calm, mid-storm. No passion, all went by crank, pivot and screw, and calculations of caloric. The ringing of those plates on plates still ringeth round the world. The clangor of the blacksmith's fray, the Anvil Dinn, resounds this message from the fates. Melvo, like so many others in America and throughout the world, saw a new kind of war being fought at Hampton Roads, one based on soulless mechanization, in which the frail human learned to serve a new master, a war of such brutality, now fought with a passion for mechanization and manufacturing. Good day, it's Don Wildman. Hope you're doing well here in the midst of summer.

Thanks as always for taking time to listen to this episode of American History Hit. Grateful you're here. The American Civil War, 1861 to 65, is often called the first truly modern military conflict. By the mid-19th century, industrial advances had brought new scale and lethal precision to the battlefield. Mass production, rapid transportation, long-range communication, mechanization, all were reshaping American life. And in wartime, these forces converged with devastating effect. No longer just a clash of soldiers and their weapons, this was total war, powered by factories, railroads, and the rising force of industrial economy. And in that regard, the North held

the decisive advantage. Today, we're diving into five key weapons of the Civil War that fundamentally changed how battles were fought. Joining us is Cecily Xander, assistant professor at Texas Woman's University, senior fellow at the Center for Presidential History, and author of The Army Under Fire, the Politics of Anti-Militarism in the Civil War era. Cessaly is one of our favorite guests. To be sure, check out her episodes on President Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant's Civil War years, and could the South have won the Civil War? War, all part of our series on Confederates. Cecily, hello.

Nice to see you again. We can't get enough of you here. Well, thanks, Don. I'm happy to be here. People often say, and I think a bit cavalierly, oh, the North won because of its factories. But the truth is, of course, far more nuanced. Let's start with a general criterion. What makes a weapon good or important in the history of war?

It's more than how well it kills, right? Sure. I think so. Though that is unfortunately a large part of it. and the Civil War, these weapons were more lethal than they'd ever been before. We can talk about why. There's technological advancements. I think that's a big part of it. Humanoids are sort of dizzingly, worryingly good at developing more and more deadly weapons. It's sort of been our thing. You know, I think it was said that it took two weeks from the time

the Wright brothers flew their plane for someone to think, hey, we should put guns on one of those. And so we're just very good as a species at developing weapons. But I also think, how well did they support logistics. The Civil War is a war that is one on logistics. It's one on the back of that. So it's not simply killing. It's all the sort of things that surround a war. So how do you gather information? How do you move men and supplies quickly? And how do you make sure that everybody gets going where they need to be going? Those are all sort of things that weapons can provide as well. How much were people thinking at the outset of the Civil War about this industrial capacity? I mean, we just go there right away nowadays, is looking in hindsight. But were they aware of this at the beginning of the Civil War?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, the Confederates in the States that secede in the 11 seceded States, the first thing that they try to secure is all of the arsenals in those places. Because the South knows it's going to be way behind in its production capacity. There were not nearly enough factories in the South. They were going to have to build them from the ground up or convert what already existed to be producing wartime materials. They didn't have as many miles of railroad track. They were simply behind. And so they were trying to, trying to basically seize everything they could. They were looking outside of the United States for weapons.

We're going to talk about that in a little bit. In the north, I think they were pretty excited. They had the production capacity, and they could shift pretty quickly to producing these weapons. But they also still needed to innovate and develop because they discovered pretty quickly that there were some problems with some of the weapons they went into the war with that needed to be remedied. But they had the skills, the capacity to do it. And a lot of this has to do with the strategy of taking the war to the same. I mean, as long as it's happening down there, all the industries are fine up north and on and on it goes. Okay, item number one, here we go.

The Springfield Rifled Musket, 1861. What was it? Why was it important? I suppose the word rifled has a lot to do with it. It does, yeah. This was a weapon that had sort of come online in the 1840s. So it had kind of made its debut in an earlier pattern in the U.S.-Mexico War. It was actually often referred to as a Mississippi rifle because it had been made famous by a unit of Mississippians commanded by Jefferson,

Davis in the war with Mexico. So sometimes it was also called the Jeff Davis rifle, quite ironically, because it was the primary weapon of the Union armies during the Civil War. And it was a rifled musket. And so what that means is, if we think back to the American Revolution, you and I could stand at either side of the football field at the University of Wyoming, where I'm going to start teaching in August, and I could fire a Revolutionary War musket at you, and you would be in no danger of your life. In fact, that little musket ball would probably fall out of the air, somewhere around the 20-yard line, and we'd both go on with our days quite happily. If I was standing down there with a Springfield musket, you might want to be a little more worried,

because that thing could go about 200 yards quite accurately because of that rifling and because of the new kind of bullet that the Civil War introduced to the world, the mini-ball, which was a French design, has three little grooves in the base of it. Those little grooves in this soft lead bullet, when the black powder charge goes off, the lead expands, this little cone. It catches the rifling and the velocity and speed with which it exits the gun, make it much more accurate and as a result much more deadly. And it flies a lot further. And that was a problem too because the American Civil Wars really fought on the basis of Napoleonic tactics.

The Napoleonic Wars were fought with those fairly lame little non-rifled musket rifles. And so soldiers were a lot closer together than they should have been for guns that were firing more than twice as far as they had ever done. We all laugh from looking back on the red coats lined up and how they were just walking out onto the battlefield. But that was the strategy. It was like the firing was so inaccurate that you had to sort of mask people together to get any kind of chance of hitting people. 90% of battlefield casualties in the Civil War are caused by small arms. I think people think of it as much more artillery, you know, casualties from artillery, but indeed it's still guns that are doing it. The Springfield Rifled Musket was standard issue for the Union Army, more than a million produced.

in the Warriors, then you start to see industrial capacity right there. Interestingly and importantly done with interchangeable parts, right? Yeah, so they developed this method where you didn't have to have super refined parts. You could sort of plug and play on these muskets, which made them easy to repair in the field, a little bit more modifiable, which soldiers liked. And that way, you know, when they jammed, which they did, you could pick up one and basically get the parts you needed to fix it. I'm thinking of a museum displays that I've seen just so many of these bullets, found, you know, just piles and piles of them.

And the lead is critical because it's a really soft metal. And so what it would do is it would fly through the air. It started in this little cone shape. But by the time it made impact, it would flatten out. And that's what caused bones to shatter in these grievous wounds. And because the lead didn't maintain its conical shape, there were very few pass-through bullet wounds. And so what surgeons were left with was bullets just stuck in bodies. And we talk about the Civil War, the first modern war, the first kind of post-industrial.

war in all ways except medical. Medicine was about 10 years behind the war. And about 10 years after the war, right, we get germ theory, we get an understanding that you shouldn't probably stick your grubby fingers in this guy and then walk over here and stick them at this guy. But in the Civil War, they didn't quite have that yet. And the kinds of medical interventions they were providing, about 175,000 gunshot wounds were listed as treated by the Union Army. It had to be, you know, dozens and dozens, maybe hundreds more that were just not reported. But, I mean, really, really deadly because of that lead bullet, because of how soft it was. It was still a very laborious practice to load one of these things, wasn't it? Yeah. And the best guys could maybe get off three shots a

minute, but that was your very, very best. But you have to put in a powder charge. You have to stick in your bullet. You have to do your ramrod down. You pull back the cock. You know, and that's the expression, don't go off half cocked. They have to click. that you have to pull back. And if you don't pull it back all the way, you're not going to fire. You're going to be in trouble. And so it does take a while. During the war, they do start to develop what are called breech-loading weapons. They're primarily used by the cavalry. So these are guns that break in half. You put the bullet in from the middle. It's a much quicker process. Soldiers like those, they're better on horseback, because on horseback to finagle a four-and-a-half-foot-tall, eight-pound musket wasn't going to work.

So you needed a smaller, shorter, more maneuverable gun. of this was, I guess this was all R&D being done by the industries who were looking to sell a lot of weapons. But it was American base or were these advances coming from Europe? Both. A lot of American firms wanted to get in on this. And so Abraham Lincoln constantly had people showing up at the White House saying, here's a gun I made. Do you want to fire it? And he had to be like, I'm not sure. I trust you, but I guess. And so Lincoln would actually personally test a lot of these weapons and say, yeah, let's put those into production. Let's give them a contract for 200,000 units, what have you. The U.S. really did try to keep it internal. But there were Belgian muskets.

The Union Army ended up with lots of Enfields as well, which we'll talk about in a second. But they weren't as reliant on external sources for their weapons because, again, they had that capacity to make their own. The Enfield rifle, you've brought it up. 1853, that's invented and it's a British product. And therefore, the musket of choice for the Confederate Army, right? Yep, absolutely. What was the difference? You know, not too terribly much. The Enfield's a little heavier. People said it was a better gun. The United States, I think, would have liked to get a lot of endfields if it could have at the beginning of the war. I think the Springfield proves over the course of the war that it's a slightly better musket. But the Enfield is great when it is developed and put into production really for initially in the UK, the Crimean War. This was its kind of debut. It got a lot of play there. And so the Confederates knew it well. And they wanted this musket. It's again a right. rifled musket, same principle, same idea. The problem was most of them were made in England.

And so in order for the Confederates to get them, they had to run them through that pesky union blockade. But they did end up getting nearly a million of them, I think, 700,000 or so over the course of the war. And, you know, it worked well for them, though the dust settles at the end of the war. You know, you'll hear sort of a quiet but fairly consistent refrain on the Confederate side that that was another reason they never stood a chance, even though the endfield was what they wanted and what they went with. I don't understand why didn't they stand a chance because of the end field? Because the spring fields were better by the end of the war.

Oh, I see. They were sort of saying, you know, we also fought with inferior rifles, even though the end fields were very good and widely acknowledged to be among the best of the sort of arms that you could get. But I guess a difference in the interchangeable parts, the efficiency of owning these weapons in the field affected the armies as well. The training that soldiers would receive, I mean, nowadays, of course, we have boot camp. That doesn't happen like that at the time. Basically, recruits were being sent out there shooting for the first time, right? Right. And that's

the thing that Southerners, you know, sort of a nerd to their advantage was that in the South, it was much more common for someone to have grown up on a farm, grown up hunting for their own food, to be a natural or better marksman. And the N. was a rifle. Both rifles were very accurate for the era, but if you were a good marksman, the Enfield was a great rifle to have. And many Southerners were already sort of naturally good at handling these weapons. And so that was, you know, one real bonus for the South. Northern men who worked in factories or whose families had moved off of farms, lived in cities, didn't have this experience. And so the South did have, you know, in general, better military

experience, better marksmen as well. But by and large, kind of even, could have gone either way, I suppose, depending on other factors, between these small arms that played such a big factor. So number three gets more into the heavy duty stuff or into the artillery, something called the dictator, which I had a vague memory of before prepping for this. But it's a major piece of weaponry. Describe this for us. It basically looks like a big cauldron, but it's made of sort of cast iron, right? Rod iron. And it was a seacoast mortar.

And so when we think of the Civil War, we think of guns on wheels. So you have your brass, Napoleonic guns. When you go to a battlefield, those are the green ones. They've oxidized over time because they were made of brass. You also have the big black guns. Those are your iron parrot guns. Those are rifled artillery weapons that were developed during the war because they shoot further and faster again because of that rifling. And then you had over the course of the war as it becomes clear that the Union Army to get what it wants is going to have to execute. a series of sieges in places like Vicksburg and Petersburg, you get generals innovating. And you get people like US Grant saying, okay, these cannons on wheels are all well and good, but they don't have the firepower we need to basically shake cities to the ground. They don't have big enough barrels. You can't put enough black powder. You can't put large enough projectiles in them. So let's take all of these guns that we have on the sea coasts, which we're not really

using because there's not really a ton of kind of naval fighting going on. Let's put them on railroad tracks and let's deposit them in the middle of these infantry camps and fire them at these cities. And so they take these sea coast weapons that you would have found sort of protecting the shorelines of the United States and convert them into siege weapons during the Civil War. The dictator lobs 200 pound mortars. I'm trying to picture this. Tell me what a mortar looks like. Yeah. So it's sort of a conical.

It's not a cannonball, right? It's bigger, taller, more pointy at the top. And you could have different kinds. So in the Civil War, you have basically four different kinds of artillery shot. You have your solid cannonballs. You have a cannonball that is packed with black powder and has a fuse that explodes into shrapnel. And then you basically have coffee cans filled with nails, not really nails, but you would have a coffee can filled with little musket balls. Or a coffee can filled with slightly larger cannon balls, sort of maybe three or four inch in diameter.

that again packed with black powder and would explode and sort of create a field of shrapnel out at your enemy. Soldiers hated this the most. Again, musket wounds principally the main way soldiers were wounded. But if you'd asked a Civil War soldier what they feared the most, it was that kind of exploding shrapnel artillery. And mortars would explode as well. They're just 200 pounds. A cannon ball is about 12 pounds. So if you imagine a cannon on a Civil War battlefield, the size of that tube, what would go in there, about a 12-pound ball,

200 pounds is pretty significant in terms of its size and its explosive power. We're listing this as the number three most important weapon in the Civil War. How was that so decisive? I mean, it seems like a gigantic effort to get these things around. How could they play such a present role? The Union had to take the fight to the Confederacy, and that meant also trying to erode civilian confidence in the Confederate Army. And so when you're shelling cities like Vicksburg or Petersburg or Sherman

outside of Atlanta, you want to make an impression and you want to impact morale. And that's another thing that weapons can do. If you're in Vicksburg or Petersburg and you're just sitting there on a normal Tuesday afternoon and a shell hits, now all of a sudden you're thinking, well, is there going to be another one? You're basically kind of playing games with this civilian population, trying to get them to break. It is psychologically unthinkable. For me, I can't imagine I've never been through a bombing campaign. Oh, my Lord, can you imagine? What's so fast fascinating, Cecily, is how the civil war becomes this crucible of invention. You know, I guess having a war on your own turf does a lot. You know, there's a lot of urgency. And so people want to win.

And so there's a lot more spending going on by the government for sure. And it can happen pretty quickly. I mean, we've got the railroad lines to take these new weaponsaries right down there. It's a really interesting factor, though, I never really considered how the context of the civil war really fueled the development of this weaponry. Yeah, unfortunately, right. Interesting. Okay. So number four, ironclad ships. I've mentioned the naval thing. I mean, this was, of course, my favorite thing when I was a kid, the steampunk of Civil War, the ironclads. You know, I really went down the hole on this one because I was interested in whether the Nautilus inspired Jules Verne. I wondered if that was the case. And indeed, it did. It was like right there. I mean, Jules Verne was right around that time period. And Captain Nemo was doing just what

Everybody was seeing in the papers. It's crazy. Talk to me about how innovative and just this was a nuts thing for people in those days. Yeah. So is it really innovation if no one else picks up on it? So the iron clouds are this fascinating. I mean, it's a great idea in principle. We do centuries of naval warfare with these wood boats. And the United States is watching this. They've never really had much of a Navy.

Thomas Jefferson, you know, during his presidency was like, is six boats enough? Are we, is that sufficient? And the Navy was like, no, and he was like, great, six boats. So the United States in the 19th century was not really a naval superpower. They'd become one at the turn of the century with the theory of people like Mahan when he says, you know, you need a Navy to be a world power. But at the time of the Civil War, the United States was a backwater Navy at best. But that still was better than the Confederacy because they had zero boats. And so the Confederacy has to build a Navy from the ground up.

That's a much sort of more of a struggle. but what the United States decides to do is basically stick metal plates to the outside of all their boats, because cannonballs will just bounce off. In principle, a great idea. Boats have to float, and metal is heavy. So the trade-off is pretty significant. These are very slow-moving vessels. They can't go in very shallow waters.

The Civil War is going to be as much a brown-water war, a riverine war, as it is going to be an ocean-going war. But they make it work. There's actually a flotilla of ironclads developed for service on the Mississippi River, the Mississippi River Squadron. You can go see one of these boats, which has been pulled up from the dregs of the Yazoo River at the Vicksburg Battlefield, if you're ever visiting. It's called the Cairo. They were referred to as Pook's turtles, because that's really kind of what they looked like. If you see a kind of turtle floating above the water with its hard shell on the back, that seems to have been the inspiration. These were low boats that kind of swum along the waters with this protective shell on top.

Yeah, I mean, the most famous is the monitor, of course, which almost seems more submarine than it does battleship. You know, it's just really below the water line for the most part. I guess that serves several purposes. You've also taken yourself, you know, out of the line of fire if you're down below the water. But it's also probably just practical because it's hard to float that kind of heavy metal thing. It's really quite extraordinary to imagine fighting a battle inside of an ironclad. I mean, let's take the monitor, for example, anybody who doesn't know what this looks like is, How long are we talking about?

100 feet? Yeah. I mean, there weren't huge boats. Yeah. I mean, again, they would have sunk if they were much heavier. Exactly. So the monitors, like, pointed to both ends, I think. There's a turret on top, and that's above the water, obviously.

They're firing out of this turnable turret that can move around. And everybody else is underneath. I don't know how big the crew was, but it's an incredibly claustrophobic, dark, strange place that has this filled with smoke and all the rest of it when this is all under the heat of battle. Almost incredible would be the sound of firing from your own guns, never mind getting hit. Yeah, the reverberation, the echo inside of these things must have been immense. And just the powder sort of spilling in and you're sort of choking on it and it's hot. And it's, yeah, it would not have been a pleasant experience.

I'm talking about the famous, you know, Merrimack and Monitor thing, which is one battle. But you're talking about more importantly, really, on the Mississippi in these sieges, these other kinds of ironclads. which are not quite as mysterious looking as the monitor. But anyway, it all played a very innovative and scary role in the Civil War. And this really did have a worldwide impact, didn't it? It was a brand new idea. It did. And a lot of countries thought, okay, maybe the Americans are onto something.

And they sort of started to think about it and develop it. And what actually happened was the United States is really the country that becomes this intermediate phase in the transition from wood to metal, naval vessels. And so by World War I, right, you start to get the, you know, earliest sort of classes of these large, what will eventually become battleships, which are constructed out of fabricated metal rather than wood. And so the Civil War really is this turning point. The United States is trying something. It just turns out you need to pick one or the other. Having both materials on the same boat isn't the best idea.

But the Confederates do try to develop an actual submarine. This fascinates people. The CSS Hunley, which was a metal sort of boat that, kind of went along with a crank shaft about a crew of six. It had this big pointy kind of ramrod on the front of it. And the idea was it would go just below the surface and sort of crank its way up to a big boat, pierced the hull to sink it, and then sort of retreat. It pierced one ship. It did its job once. It also sank about four times. And the entire crew was killed each time. And they brought it back up and they said, so who's next? Who wants to go this? You know, and I imagine

And the fourth crew was like, really? Like, what did we do? Right? Let's describe specifically just in case people don't know. How much armor were on these ironclads? A couple inches thick of, yeah, sort of metal plate. And basically, anything above the water would have been covered. So the surface area of the boat above the water would have been kind of covered.

75 tons of armor sported about 13 guns. Could have crews up to 250 men. I mean, these are the big ones that we're talking about on the Mississippi River, right? Yeah. Can you describe to me how those sieges went? I think we need to be clear about this. Sure. So Vicksburg in particular, it's on a huge bluff above the Mississippi River. And the Confederates, very wisely, line that entire bluff with a lot of guns, that they can fire down onto the river at any vessel that passes by. They also plant charged mines, basically underwater explosives along the river that these vessels had to navigate. So these boats were doing two things. They were trying to disarm the mines. They were trying to crawl kind of very slowly along the river with all of this protective armor

and not hit the mines, but sort of locate them and disable them. And then in sort of moments of real crisis, what they needed to do, when Grant failed to get a Vicksburg from multiple directions over land, he finally realized he was north of the city. He had tried to go around the back. He had tried to dig a canal to get at Vicksburg. he finally said, we just have to go down the river. So what we're going to have to do is we're going to have to put our infantry on these boats, and we're going to have to hope that this sort of ironclad armor will help us run the batteries through Vicksburg.

And so they go in the cover of darkness, which helps. They do get spotted, but there's very, very few casualties as Grant begins to run his infantrymen down to the southern side of Vicksburg, where he can get them on land on the right side of the river, and run them around back at the city and start his army. siege. And so they were basically kind of tanks that carried the men to battle. You read his memoirs about that time and the landscape is so gnarly. You know, just moving people around on that shoreline and everything, never mind people are firing at you the same time. It's just, it's one of the many episodes where you wonder, how did they even fight this war? You know, how would you have

the perspective to be able to win a battle? I mean, that is what Grant is a genius at. He can zoom out to that level. And he does. And Grant gets a lot of credit for working hand in hand. with the Navy. I mean, this was one of the first kind of multi-branch operations. Prior to the Civil War, and we can talk about this as a weapons innovation, our branches didn't really work together. They sort of did their own thing. And during the Civil War, people like Grant really start to innovate and say, hey, the Army can use naval technology, and we're going to do it. And we're going to work together on this. The power of the quartermaster. He was the one that really showed up. Supply lines and management really count. That ironclad era is so interesting, so much of the

Civil Wars like this where they sort of plant the seed for something that happens later on. It's almost like you're looking into a crystal ball when you look at the American Civil War as to how 20th century war and beyond will be fought. It's incredible. Minus air power, of course, but that's not long to come. They did have hot air balloons. There you go. Okay. They weren't very dangerous, but they were aloft. But that era of the ironclads sort of happens and then is over for a long time. It's one of those seeds that takes a while to sprout. All right. Number five, an oldie but a goodie, the cavalry, the horse, fundamental to the Civil War still, just like it was under Alexander the Great, but they're taking it again to another level, aren't they?

They are. About two million horses will serve in the American Civil War, and half of them will be casualties as a result of the conflict. It was a very, very demanding war. So if you're in the United States and you're in the cavalry, you'll be given a whole. horse. If you're in the Confederacy, you're in the cavalry, you got to bring your own. It's a B-Y-O-H situation in the Confederacy. But these horses were sort of critical, not just for cavalry, but for pulling artillery. Each one of those guns, again, that you see out on a Civil War battlefield today, six horses to pull one of those things when it had its gun and its case on and its slumber. Ambulances, so you have a bunch of wounded after a battle. You need horses to pull the ambulances. These men can't walk.

They need to be sort of ferried from place to place. And I don't mean to slight mules, though they always get slighted. We're talking about horses and mules, but of course, horses get all the attention. But they're also critical for the cavalry. And what the cavalry is doing, how are horses a weapon? If you don't have cavalry and you don't have mobility, you have no idea where your enemy is. During the Civil War, horses were the eyes and ears of the army, because they took the cavalry to gather all of the intelligence they needed about where your enemy was.

And in that way, they're really a true weapon during the war. I think of the South as being better at this than the North because of the famous, you know, cavalry officers and all these things. And they were always running around tearing up railroads and doing all kinds of stuff. Is that true what my feeling is? Through the first half of the war, certainly the Southern cavalry was vastly superior to the United States. The United States starts to catch up around the Gettysburg campaign. And people really, even the Confederates say the Battle of Brandy Station, which is the largest cavalry battle of the war, about 20,000 horses are fighting on both sides during this battle. It kind of made the Union cavalry, sort of accelerated them.

The loss of Jeb Stewart in 64 for the South is also really critical for that. I mean, Jeb Stewart was probably one of the greatest cavalrymen in American history. He just had this capacity to take these bold gambles. He rode around the entire Union Army twice. Now, that was a Union Army commanded by George McClellan. It was not moving, but it's still impressive and we'll still give Jeb Stewart some credit for what he achieved. What was different, though, about the cavalry during Civil War times? How were they using it differently than in the past?

They weren't really fighting. So cavalry battles are very rare. You might have a sort of adjacent cavalry skirmish to a lot of battles, but fighting on horseback wasn't happening so much. Horses are really being used to get things to the battlefield to let the infantry start fighting. So during the Napoleonic Wars, you have these great cavalry charges, right? Or even in sort of 19th century British history, the charge of the Light Brigade. But you don't really have that kind of cavalry fighting in the Civil War. You really have more of that sort of logistical work, the transportation, as well as the intelligence gathering and the spy.

And you wouldn't have those charges because the weapons were better because they could shoot you. Never mind, those grape seed shot coming from the artillery, all that sort of stuff is going on. And even then with the kind of safety precautions they were taking with the cavalry, George Custer had 11 horses shot out from under him. Philip Sheridan had something like 20 horses. And I think Nathan Bedford Forrest claimed to have had 38 horses shot out from under him during the war. Gosh, is there a horse memorial somewhere in the United States for this? A couple of battlefields have them. Murfreesboro has a monument to the horses or Stones River has a monument to the horses. But there should be because, you know, again, we have these great parallels of these. men who fought the war, and soldiers who went to West Point tended to love horses, because

horsemanship and sort of horse riding was a huge part of the course of instruction at West Point for officers. Ulysses S. Grant held jumping records at West Point that lasted 20, 30 years after the war, an incredible horseman, and believed in these animals and believed that they should be kept safe. So there are famous stories during the Overland campaign as Grant is sort of trudging toward Petersburg, kind of working his way past Lee toward Richmond. where he's sort of riding in the rear of the army, he comes across sort of teamsters beating up a horse. He loses his mind.

Grant is not a guy who loses his cool, but he sees a horse getting abused, an animal getting mistreated, and he basically tells the men he'll have them, you know, drawn and quartered rather than see this horse be mistreated any further. I mean, these generals, and there's similar stories about Lee, understood how critical these animals were to the army, and they did not want to see them misused or abused.

On the Confederate side we have Jeb Stewart. On the north side, I know we famously have George Custer, right? I mean, he was a cavalry man first and foremost. Yeah, and he loved horses. And he's also the youngest major general during the war. And this is often, you kind of wanted young guys to be in the cavalry because they were not quite experienced enough to know how dumb it was to want to be in the cavalry and up on a horse and be a big target.

So Custer's 23 when he becomes a major general. And he just, he loves it. He has this sort of dash and daring, right? He outfitted all his men with red bandanas. He just, he loved the idea of being a cavalryman. And Americans were fascinated by cavalrymen. If you look at the covers of Harper's Weekly or Frank Leslie's, you will see cavalry on the cover in sort of great disproportion to the amount that the cavalry was actually doing,

you know, in terms of fighting and helping to win the war. But people were obsessed. And so, you know, Custer's a great soldier. He's part of this sort of crop of young generals that Phil shared and really cultivates over the course of the war, and then Sheridan takes all of those kind of young boys west after the conflict, and they really kind of carry out the major campaigns of the Indian wars. Harkening back to the beginning of this list, you had mentioned the breech-loading muskets that applied to this cavalry use. I mean, had it been developed purely those breach-loaders for horseback firing?

I think so. I think that was principally what they were thinking about. There's very little reason for an infantryman to have a gun that short, because again, you don't get as much. sort of distance the barrels not as long, but for the cavalry, it makes sense. And so, you know, what would often happen is the government couldn't afford to buy a lot of these guns. And they still weren't sure if these breach loaders were going to pan out. And so what would often happen is that officers who really believed in them, who tended to have a bit of money, especially sort of men from civilian life who'd gotten themselves a nice colonel C in a cavalry regiment, would say, hey, I'm going to buy a thousand of these and give them to my men. And so sometimes they were a little bit off the books.

You would have a colonel sort of buy enough guns for his regiment because he believed in them. And so weapons manufacturers were also kind of selling to officers in a way. They were trying to get these guys to, you know, buy small shipments of their guns for their men. In summary of this list, and it's a short list, I mean, there are many, many other pieces of artillery and specific weapons that we could talk about. But we've sort of sketched out a briefing for our time here today. I just want to say in summary that it's so interesting how straddley this whole thing is, you know, just to talk about horses for a moment, they are used in World War I, obviously, but in World War I, horses are just wiped out all over the place.

It's the end of that. It's also quote, the advent of the combustible engine, so we're on to that as well, but they are made obsolete by the terror of the battlefield, essentially. So much is true in this regard with the civil war in terms of going from old school warfare to new and that's why people call it the first modern war is that we're just seeing all these things outdated

almost in real time during the war it's amazing. Yeah and sort of seeds of the deadly sort of destruction to come in World War I it's amazing so you've probably had this experience too of showing someone a photograph of what Petersburg looked like as the Confederates

evacuated their lines toward Appomat And you could show that to someone, and they'd say, that's Belgium in 1917. I mean, it's a landscape carved up by trenches. It's completely kind of obliterated. The Civil War was a trench war by the end. And they had started to develop these guns that had sort of six barrels in a circle and a crankshaft that you could feed bullets into that look a lot like machine guns to come. So there are real kind of seeds of the destructive technology that we're going to see in really the next great

war. There was a lot of attention around the world about the American Civil War. There were a lot of observers watching what was happening on the battlefield. What kind of effect did it have worldwide on weapon technology and innovations? Yeah, I think we've talked about it here and there. They declined to go with the ironclad idea, but they certainly pick up some of the tactical innovations. So it's so funny, American tactics are based principally on French and British tactics. The Americans had sent observers to the Crimean War. This is the most recent conflict that's printed in their mind when they're thinking about fighting the Civil War. But the British and the French send observers back. And so they have sort of infantry colonels like Arthur James Lyon, Freemantle is one of the most famous, a British observers who comes. He's with both armies. He's trying to kind of make sense of what's going on. He's writing back saying, here's what they're doing, here's what they're not. And they're also using it to judge whether or not they're going to support one side or the other. So we know there's very minimal foreign intervention in the Civil War. Huge contrast to the American Revolution in this respect.

In the American Revolution, right, the French and the Spanish sort of realize that these American rebels need help, and they send men and guns and ships and all the things the Americans need to defeat the British. We don't really get that as much except the contracted services, so the Confederates build a lot of ships in places like Liverpool. They use British weapons in the form of the Enfield muskets, but that's not Britain tacitly saying we're supporting the Confederacy. Most of these foreign nations remain neutral. They kind of let the Americans fight it out on their own terms.

But then again, I do think they take away some of these sort of tactical changes, the trench warfare. Obviously, imprints on the minds of Europeans. I think the development of sort of a repeating firing weapon like the Gatling gun lays the seeds for something like the machine gun. But I don't know that the Civil War necessarily evolves specific ideas about either weapons or tactics for the British or the French. But it does evolve warfare in a way that, you know, it makes it okay to involve civilians, something that sort of modern 20th century wars will do. So there are sort of maybe bigger picture kind of military issues that these foreign observers pick up on. But I will say there was not such an imbalance that one way or the other, there was a need for intervention. Also, the Civil War kind of erodes the boundary between battlefield and home front.

Like it becomes normal or it's normalized by certainly Sherman and likes to fire right at towns and destroy towns and the civilians in them. The American Civil War, you know, erases that line. And suddenly you end up, you know, you can project forward and think about EAP and, you know, places in World War I that are just destroyed, you know, and it's just becomes a normal part of war as we see today. They're really thinking about how to justify it. So you get the creation of the first American laws of war, a code of war known as the Lieber Code, which tries to justify, you know, as a military necessity, this is okay. And I think if we want to talk about what do the Europeans pick up from the Civil War, the Lieber Code, this code of just war is a huge point of fascination for European observers. Lever himself is a German, a Prussian. And so that is a huge part of what Europeans come out of the Civil War thinking about.

I use the word cavalier at the top of this conversation. it is tempting to summarize everything so quickly here in the Civil War. There were so many nooks and crannies and so much profound stuff that goes on here. We've done a list of five weapons. That's because we didn't have time to do 25 because there's so many things to talk about. But thank you so much for taking us through this. You're going to come back again. I hate to tell you, Cecily.

In the meantime, what's new for you in your career? Are you coming out with any new books? So I'm working on a book on Abraham Lincoln in the West. Yeah, I'm starting as I mentioned. And so I've had a great two years at Texas Women's University. But in the fall, I'll be the new historian of Wyoming in the American West at the University of Wyoming. So I've moved to Laramie. It's very exciting.

I think I'm going to write a book about the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868. So working on a few projects here and there. Thank you so much. See you soon. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. As you've made it this far, why not like and follow us wherever you get your podcasts? American History Hit, a podcast from History Hit.