A House Divided: Bloody Civil War Tactics I

Intro.: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts.

Content: In the course of military history it has often been the case that armies prepare for the last war. Unable to see into the future, changes in strategy, tactics and weaponry come only with the experience of the current war. It is one of the great tragedies of the American Civil War that the learning curve among military leaders was so slow that tactics even up until the last year produced a grisly ingathering of causalities on both sides – more than 600,000 dead over a four-year period. Recognizing that disease was one of the most vicious of executioners in both Rebel and Yankee armies, leaders still were painfully slow on the uptake, not realizing that the tactics they were using increased casualty rates.