American Civil War: The First Modern War.

This was a research paper written for my first Masters class. It details what made the US Civil War into the first modern war by analyzing different aspects of the war itself. Such as the soldiers, from their armaments to overall demeanor (style, what they carried and how they fought). To the technology, from messages to trains to hot air balloons. To naval capabilities, such as the use of Ironclads and The Hunley. To tactics and politics. To finally medicine and how it changed during the war from the efforts of a few wives, the town doctor, volunteers and religious helpers to a well-organized system from ambulances to well-trained nurses to field hospitals to surgery to proper sanitation.

Written 13th of May, 2020

The American Civil War, the War Between the States, the war that has divided a nation -- it is known by many names. It is a war that brought the issue of states’ rights and slavery to an explosive and bloody head. But for all the things that The Civil War is known, a Modern War is not one of them. A Modern War is a term that many have used to describe conflicts as varied as World War I to wars that currently rage.  It is defined as a “.  .  .  (N)otable contrast with previous military concepts, methods, and technology, emphasizing how combatants must modernize to preserve their battle worthiness.” The Civil War meets that definition in many ways, from naval weaponry that made their predecessors obsolete to tactics of fighting and airpower that forever changed the battlefield. 

The book, The Oxford History of Modern War, describes a “Modern war as being the product of three distinct kinds of change— administrative, technical, and ideological. Not all of these can be seen in any straightforward way as ‘progress,’ though they seem to be irreversible. Nor have they developed at the same pace.”  Now, it is important to look back at the American Civil War in how it is remembered: two great armies equally measured in determination and arms, marching shoulder-to-shoulder trying to draw close to each other to open fire and drive the other side back and seize the battlefield.   But what would happen during these battles were all- out slaughters by cannon and rifle fire raining down on either side while the generals tried to overwhelm their opponents in either flanking maneuvers or by just sheer numbers being thrown at the receiving side hoping they will give up. This was a common sight at battles like Antietam, Fredericksburg, Shiloh -- known for the terror that new technology such as rifling created when it clashed with old school style of advancing on and off the battlefield. No glory. No Captain Price. No cinematic ideas of right and wrong. So, these aspects beg the question: how is a war of pure senseless violence over the rights of a few a Modern War? 

The first part of the answer to that question is to first look at what made The Civil War a Modern War.  First are soldiers, from their armaments to overall demeanor (style, what they carried and how they fought). Second is technology, from messages to trains to hot air balloons. Third is naval capabilities, such as the use of Ironclads and The Hunley. Fourth are tactics and politics. As an example, Sherman’s March to the Sea and Lincoln’s election and Reconstruction in connection with Johnson and Grant, aspects that historians can point to in order to define its status as a Modern War. Fifth is medicine and how it changed during the war from the efforts of a few wives, the town doctor, volunteers and religious helpers to a well-organized system from ambulances to well-trained nurses to field hospitals to surgery to proper sanitation. It is important to note that before the march to prove that the Civil War is a modern war and not a prototype to modern war. The way to discourage any notion about that it is important to look at what defines a prototype. The Cambridge Dictionary describes the word prototype as, “the first example of something, such as a machine or other industrial product, from which all later forms are developed.” To give examples that pertain to The Civil War: before there was The Hunley, there was The Turtle used during the Revolutionary War that was not successful, before Newton Knight and the Knight Company and the Bushwhackers (Civil War) there were the Green Mountain Boys and The Swamp Fox (American Revolution), both not very organized but very good at causing mayhem to their enemies. There are countless examples of attempts by various armies stretching hundreds of years before the US Civil War; there were attempts at creating what would be known today as tools and tactics of modern warfare as it is known today. The Civil War was the first time where these tactics were used successfully; however short or minor the innovation or method, they all proved to be not only innovative but also in many cases successful by either breaking the will of an enemy by the precise use of “hard war” tactics , laying the ground work for modern medical procedures both civilian and military  or taking existing technology and pushing it to its absolute limits to protect lives as well as take them. 

To begin, during The Civil War, the average soldier on both sides was white; however, the Union Army allowed African-American soldiers to fight from 1863-1865. It is important to note that other groups served too, such as Jewish-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Native Americans and even Asian-Americans; there were also women who served but in the disguise of men. All served in mixed and segregated units during the war. According to some estimates, “2.1 million — the number of Northerners mobilized to fight for the Union army. While, 880,000 — number of Southerners mobilized for the Confederacy.”   In regards to being a modern army, the Union Army had a distinct advantage over the Confederacy when it came to equipment.  The North had more factories to produce supplies, more people to work in the factories, and more railroads to deliver the supplies to the soldiers. Along with a standard uniform, the “Union Soldiers carried their personal belongings on their backs in a knapsack made of cotton cloth or canvas and painted black to repel water. Called the ‘Soldier's trunk’ it was large enough to hold a soldier's extra clothing, personal items, a gum blanket and shelter half (or ‘dog tent’) with a rolled-up blanket or overcoat strapped on top. Union Soldiers were also issued a haversack made of painted canvas and with a removable cotton liner to carry food.  Worn over the shoulder, haversacks were handy for carrying rations of pork, hardtack, coffee, personal items, and extra ammunition. After several weeks loaded with salt pork and other food, haversacks tended to became foul-smelling and saturated with grease, but the liner was easily removed for washing or replacement.” Along with these, infantry soldiers were equipped with primarily the Springfield Model 1861; with its rifling, it made the smooth bore muskets a thing of the past with the Springfield’s rifling.  It gave the average soldier an increased kill radius of over 250 yards, an improvement of the musket’s 75 yards. Officers would carry revolvers as well as swords although the latter were only good in hand-to-hand combat. Those are the basic infantry weapons that were used by both the Union Army and the Confederate army as well. By 1863, however, there was a new weapon being introduced to the battlefield that was inefficient and dangerous. 

In the same year, 1863, there was another option: so-called repeating rifles, or weapons that could fire more than one bullet before needing a reload. The most famous of these guns, the Spencer Carbine, could fire seven shots in 30 seconds. Although primitive by comparison to the weapons of today, these were huge improvements in such a short amount of time. 

Similarly, the tactics of the battlefields of 1861-1862 would soon disappear in the years in 1863-1865; what would appear out of the gun smoke and fog would be a new way of fighting something more modern, trench and guerilla warfare on a more massive scale than had ever been seen before on the battlefields of the 19th century.

  Trench warfare made famous during World War I was a terrifying prospect; to this day, the reflections and memories of those who served bring feelings of horror and despair: endless seas of muddy water, storms of bullets raining down upon the once- peaceful landscape and the only silence was the calm after the storm, which brought death with it: “The trench was a horrible sight. The dead were stretched out on one side, one on top of each other six feet high. I thought at the time I should never get the peculiar disgusting smell of the vapour of warm human blood heated by the sun out of my nostrils. I would rather have smelt gas a hundred times. I can never describe that faint sickening, horrible smell which several times nearly knocked me up altogether.”– British Captain Leeham. It is hard to believe this in some way, but the trenches were as horrible as they say, but for some, it was the only safe place for soldiers as those in The Civil War found out the hard way. 

Many, when visualizing The Civil War , believed that it usually takes place on some rolling hilled battlefield, but by the time 1864 had blown in, earth works like trenches or more modern fortifications like them could be seen on almost every battlefield from the siege of Atlanta to the Wilderness to Kennesaw Mountain to Cold Harbor to Charleston to the most famous, Petersburg. 

Now, trench warfare is confused with siege warfare because they both are used to defend cities or territory, but trench warfare involves long, deep ditches dug as protective defenses with no walls, like castles. At the beginning of The Civil War, it was seen as cowardice to hide behind walls or any real form of cover, but that changed during The Civil War.   After many battles like Fredericksburg, where after many tries as long as the enemy could keep a steady supply of ammo or reinforcements swarming, an enemy’s position was never going to be over-run. At the Battle of Fredericksburg, alone on one part of the battlefield in an area called Slaughter Pen, on December 13th 1862, General William B Franklin ordered 8000 men to attack the southernmost flank of the Confederate lines from 1:15 to 3:00.  As a result, “Nearly 5,000 soldiers fell in the life-and-death struggle. Across that bloody plain, and in a radius of some 400 yards.” Adding up the math that means that a) in a time period of 105 minutes 47.6 Union soldiers died per minute and b) 12.5 Union soldiers died for 1 Yard of territory. It is important to also note that while there were no actual trenches, the Union army of 8,000 marched across an open field against 38,000 Confederate Soldier protected by a railroad embankment and forest. 

The defeat at Fredericksburg marked the end of fighting of 1862 and the beginning of the end of these senseless and costly tactics for the Union army that would painfully be improved upon as the war dragged on. The next year there would be a change coming. Vicksburg was the first battle of The Civil War for both sides to use predominantly old fashioned and new tactics in a fight to control the battlefield. From trenches to hand grenades to ironclads, the Battle of Vicksburg was a modern battle but would be, for the most part, an isolated incident but not for General Grant, who would see it again in 1864-1865. During and before The Civil War, there was a taboo about taking cover and fighting in way today would seem like common sense things to do. That wasn’t the case especially during The Civil War, but it had changed due to the improvements in weaponry. For example, at the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse, General John Sedgwick was directing troop movements at Spotsylvania Courthouse; he scolded his men for dodging bullets from sharpshooters concealed in the distant woods, declaring, “I am ashamed of you dodging that way. They couldn't hit an elephant at this distance.”  Seconds later, a Confederate sharpshooter’s bullet mortally wounded Sedgwick. It is observed that, “By 1864, ‘dirt diggers”’ predominate on the battlefield, whether due to war weariness or to combat experience. Historians suggest that both sides fell into ‘an escalating spiral of ritualistic trench-building’ that eventually strangles the doctrine of mobility—all due to the overweening influence of Dennis Hart Mahan and his trench-obsessed engineers…. Defenders increase the effectiveness of their fire and their survival odds by digging. Most units enter the war armed with smoothbore muskets, but by 1864, both sides have equipped their front-line troops with rifle-muskets with longer and more accurate range. A few elite Federal units carry expensive repeating rifles—Spencers and Henrys—that can lay down a tremendous volume of fire. Entrenching, for the common soldier, becomes the rational response to the increasing lethality of the battlefield.” It is also important to understand that  Dennis Hart Mahan, a well-respected  military theorist and professor at West Point, “did not advocate an active defense in the belief that the entrenched defensive was superior to the frontal assault. Like all military writers at this time, Mahan believed frontal assaults, if properly executed, could carry entrenched positions”.

The Battle of Petersburg became the last major battle of The Civil War and is the most amazing example of how far the Union and Confederate armies had come in regards to waging what was once an unconventional war into what people know today as a modern war.  Although it had been almost two years prior to the events at Fredericksburg, the Union army still used some of the same old tactics, like the all-out assaults that had failed almost every year before but were tried. However, the Union Army tried several new tactics that would finally bring the Confederacy to its knees. The first of Grant’s plans was to unite the Union Army all under his command. Now there was organization in the Union Army but not like what Grant had planned. While most Union generals’ strategy usually involved capturing major cities like Richmond, Grant decided to wear out the Confederates, as “The primary objective of these operations would be the destruction of the South’s armies and resources to make war. In the West, Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman would lead three armies from Chattanooga, Tennessee, into Georgia, breaking up General Joseph E. Johnston’s Army of Tennessee and inflicting all possible damage to the Confederate infrastructure. Once he had extricated himself from a secondary campaign into Louisiana, Maj. Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks would capture Mobile, Alabama, one of the South’s last two major ports, and then drive northeast to hook up with Sherman. In the East, along with his duties as general in chief, Grant would exercise direct field supervision of the Virginia Theater and the Army of the Potomac, which he would accompany.” While Sherman and the others were out there accomplishing or burning their targets, Grant tried to strangle Petersburg and its railroads using a system of trenches and thousands of Union soldiers. Again, it is observed, “Only twenty-five miles south of Richmond, Petersburg was an important supply center to the Confederate capital. With its five railroad lines and key roads, both Grant and Lee knew if these could be cut Petersburg could no longer supply Richmond with much needed supplies and subsistence. Without this Lee would be forced to leave both cities.”

The only obstacle standing between Grant and Petersburg and the end to The Civil War was the Dimmock Line, a 16-kilometer-long defense system of redoubts that were connected by a series of trenches and other earthworks.   In front of them were ditches, rifle pits and hastily constructed barbed-wire-like obstacles with interlocking fields of fire overlooking open fields. Despite Grant not wanting the battle to become a siege, it did due to a mix of a command breakdown and the massive casualties sustained in the weeks prior. By June, the battle had become a siege where entrenched Union and Confederate soldiers tried every way they could to gain the advantage over the other. Much like the trench warfare in World War I, the Union and Confederates would use snipers, explosives, heavy artillery to wear out the other. From improvised ideas like the Crater, which involved setting off a huge black powder charge under Confederate trenches, to simple out flanking maneuvers, the battle of Petersburg was a different battlefield than that of Bull Run or Fredericksburg.  After months of heavy fighting, the Union Army finally seized Petersburg, and soon after, ended the war although at a huge cost of soldiers.   

It is interesting to note the evolution of both the frontlines and soldiers themselves from hand-packed muskets with rows of guys running across open fields to trench warfare which, although not as intricate as seen during the first World War, it was nevertheless the beginnings of what a Modern War would look like and not a prototypes of one. While the conventional Civil War did roar on battlefields like Gettysburg, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Bull Run, Shiloh and many more, the battles that were being fought behind the lines were just as important and sometimes more terrifying. 

In today’s world, when people hear the word insurgent, various thoughts come to mind -- American militia snipers shooting at British soldiers, French Resistance fighters sabotaging Nazi convoys, Viet Cong in the Tet Offensive, the Taliban shooting a young girl for going to school, IRA bombing police stations. These are all examples of insurgent activity. However, The Civil War does not come to mind when insurgents or insurgent activity is involved, even though some of the most famous historical events and figures during and after The Civil War were involved in so-called insurgent activity. It is noted that, “at first little more than an occasional annoyance to the occupiers, guerrilla attacks eventually posed a grave threat to Federal Control of some of the most strategic regions, including northern Virginia and middle Tennessee.”

One of the first incidents happened right after the bombardment of Fort Sumter, and it happened almost right on the front doorstep of the nation’s capital in Alexandria, Virginia. It was an average spring day on May 24th 1861 when Union Army Col. Elmer E. Ellsworth, “decided to take down an 8- by 14-foot Confederate flag—large enough to be seen by spyglass from the White House—had been visible in Alexandria for weeks, flown from the roof of an inn, the Marshall House.”  Ellsworth and four other soldiers went into the inn expecting resistance but found none; that was until the manager James W. Jackson came out of nowhere and shot Ellsworth fatally killing him. Jackson, “was a notorious secession leader, and a man of violent habits.”  He did not, though, succeed in taking back the flag because seconds after Ellsworth fell, Corporal Francis Brownell fatally shot Jackson. After the smoke had cleared, both men lay dead.  Two men – the first a personal friend of Abraham Lincoln who worked under him while Lincoln was a lawyer in Illinoi and on his presidential campaign.   At his funeral, Lincoln said that Ellsworth was "the greatest little man I ever met." The other was a rabid segregationist, “who had engaged in several street battles growing out of the session question.” Both men became symbols for their causes and would go down in history as some of the first casualties of the American Civil War, on the door steps of the nation’s capital. 

Throughout the rest of the war, guerrillas would revolutionize fighting in more ways than one and change not only the way wars were fought but also the ways the battle lines were laid and by whom. Famous guerrillas -- like famous outlaw Jesse James, Bloody Bill Anderson, William Quantrill, James H. Lane, and Newton Knight, even Mark Twain was a guerilla at one point -- played small roles yet managed to cause a great deal of trouble to their foes on minor yet painful scales. 

Yet that should not surprise.  After all, The Civil War basically grew out of the conflict known as Bleeding Kansas, between pro-slavery Missourians and anti-Slavery Kansans in the 1850’s. The violence there would soon become prevalent there and other places throughout the rest of the country. Most guerrillas were not professional soldiers from the way they dressed to the ways they carried themselves. In the regular Confederate army, there were drills, a chain of command and a set of rules. None of this applied really to guerrilla forces; they were not organized at least not on a grand scale given how new this form of warfare was and the technology available at the time. The first of the two most famous of these guerillas was a young Confederate Bushwhacker by the name of Bloody Bill Anderson, when “In 1864 Anderson’s band—which [also] included famed outlaw Jesse James—attacked a train in Centralia, Missouri, and butchered 22 unarmed Union soldiers. When Union troops were sent in pursuit, Anderson’s outfit—dressed in stolen Federal uniforms—ambushed them and slaughtered another 120 men. Desperate to put a stop to Anderson’s bloodshed, the Union Army eventually raised a small militia to hunt him down. In October of 1864, Anderson’s unit was trapped and outnumbered in Missouri, and ‘Bloody Bill ‘was killed when he tried to charge the Union troops.” Some say Anderson was a psychopath who just loved killing and saw the Civil War as a chance to get in touch with his darkest impulses; others say that war made him violent.    

The other renowned insurgent is much more of Robin Hood-like figure fighting the other side of the war; his name was Newton Knight, who will forever be remembered by Mathew McConaughey’s portrayed him in the movie, Free State of Jones. Knight opposed slavery like many in Jones County, Mississippi, and “Knight rallied about 125 others—some deserters, some enslaved people—and formed the Knight Company. They saw themselves as defending the residents of Jones County from the Confederacy. Their insurgent actions included impeding tax collectors, taking Confederate army supplies to redistribute to Jones County’s residents and even killing supporters of the Confederacy.” One of the reasons why Knight and his men fought the Confederacy was because in 1863, the Confederate Congress had passed the infamous “Twenty-Negro Law,” which allowed planters who owned twenty or more slaves to be exempt from fighting. Knight’s friend and comrade, Private Jasper Collins, was furious: “This law … makes it a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” Collins threw down his weapon and left the Confederate Army for good.  Many who fought on both sides were poor farmers and factory workers; so for rich people to be exempted from service, many Southerners saw this as a huge punch in the face: they were starving and dying away from their families who were also suffering not only under the duress of losing a loved one but along with being harassed by the home guard. Feeling a mix of homesickness and disenfranchisement by the war, many deserted. 

Desertions were common during The Civil War, especially for the Confederacy. What makes the example of the Free State of Jones important is that they were one of the few pro- Union guerilla groups operating in the Deep South, and much like the Bushwhackers, they caused a lot of trouble for their occupying forces.  But one of the most exceptional parts of this group is how they seemed to be working where “they hold the country in awe, openly boasting of their being in communication with the Yankees.” Being that Mississippi was a huge source of resources for The Confederacy, it would not be wrong for The Union to be encouraging or at least supporting these groups.

In all, “Despite the significant role that guerrillas played during the war, academically they have received very little attention. Early Civil War historians characterized guerrillas as interesting yet irrelevant, and as a result the importance of guerrillas during the Civil War has been largely understated. Today, however, historians are beginning to recognize the role that guerrillas played in shaping both the outcome of the war and wartime society.  Guerrillas, whether they fought as Bushwhackers, Jayhawkers, or partisan rangers, influenced both the Confederate home front and Union military policy, and proved to be important, if slightly overlooked, figures in the American Civil War.”

With the wider use of guerilla warfare came also new tactics, used by both sides, and  although most were not as organized as that of Yugoslavia’s resistance fighters, FARC,  the Viet Cong or Daesh (IS), they were nevertheless extremely effective from bombings to massive amounts of arson, demolitions and assassination done and used to end a war that felt like it had no end in sight. 

Assassination -- many are familiar with the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theater, but most see it as an isolated incident yet what if it weren’t? Beyond the battlefield plan hatched by the Union Army, it was a plan to burn Richmond to the ground and purposely single out and kill Jefferson Davis and members of his cabinet that stands out: “The Kilpatrick-Dahlgren Raid was an ambitious attempt by Union cavalrymen to assault the lightly defended Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia, and free prisoners of war during the American Civil War (1861–1865).” It failed due to some loose-lipped Union officers and a very smart network of Confederate spies. Early in February 1864, Kilpatrick consulted with United States president Abraham Lincoln and the secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton. He received permission for a raid that, “in conjunction with an infantry feint and another cavalry raid near Charlottesville, would approach Richmond from the north, destroying rails, canals, and Confederate infrastructure along the way.” This raid sent waves of anger throughout both the South and the North due to the shocking nature of the plan that involved deliberate acts of violence against elected officials. That would be a minor act in the year of 1864, however, as groups of Confederate soldiers and sympathizers would soon show the Union.  

Biological, chemical warfare are modern conceals for most militaries and government based on the fact that viruses and chemicals are easier to get a hold of than nuclear materials so far. Now there were biological weapons used before 1864 such as when Emperor Barbarossa poisoned water wells with human bodies, Tortona, Italy in 1511, Mongols catapulted bodies of plague victims over the city walls of Caffe, Crimean Peninsula in 1346, which inadvertently introduced the Black Death that killed of millions of people in Europe, and Napoleon flooded the plains around Mantua, Italy, to enhance the spread of malaria in 1797. Now what makes the Yellow Fever Plot of 1864 more like something that would be seen as something more sophisticated is the complexity of this virus while the previous uses were only used in particular battles or just indiscriminately. This was a well-planned attack. It started on the island of Bermuda, a major base of blockade running for The Confederacy when a Yellow Fever epidemic occurred there in the summer of 1864.  While on this island, Confederate sympathizer Dr. Blackburn went to the island to help quell the outbreak, but while on the island, Blackburn showed he had other reasons for being there. He took the soiled bedding and clothing of infected patients and packed them into trunks with new shirts and coats. Once back in Canada, Dr. Blackburn mixed the linens tainted with Yellow Fever with five trunks full of clothes. The objective was to be carried out by Godfey Hyams who was paid the sum of $100,000 to smuggle the trunks into “Washington City, to Norfolk, and as far South” as he could go “where the Federal Government held possession and had the most troops.” He instructed Hyams to dispose of the new clothing by auction with the exception of the valise, which was to be delivered by express to President Lincoln as a gift. Blackburn also specified the contents of the largest trunk were to be sold in Washington, D.C., callously remarking: “It will kill them at sixty yards.”  It would have succeeded but only failed because of two factors: one was that Hyam was a mercenary not a true believer so when Blackburn did not pay him, he turned on him. The second that was unknown at the time was that the black bile that victims of yellow fever produced was not the way it was spread. It was only until, “1881 Cuban epidemiologist Carlos Juan Finlay suggested that yellow fever was caused by an infectious agent transmitted by a mosquito now known as Aedes aegypt.” Although this plan was a failure, the fact that it could both be carried out by resources and by will means that there was a giant step in military technology. Acts such as these would be carried out several more times for example when the Confederate Army of Manhattan tried to burn New York City down in 1864 in an effort to terrorize and murder the people of New York. It though failed to do any real damage to the city. 

Later in 1865, there was a working plot to use poisons gas to kill politicians in Washington DC; it was theorized that “if thrown from the gallery of the House of Representatives, in Washington . . . [it] would kill every member on the floor in five minutes.” It was never used  because the poison was only effective against mice and cats in the dosage the Confederates would used it on, not humans, and the war had ended by the time it was seen as a potentially useful weapon.  It is also important to note that according to Dr. Guy R. Hasegawa’s paper, “Proposals for Chemical Weapons during the American Civil War,” both sides had tinkered with or at least thought of ways to use chemical weapons on their enemies. While scientists and politicians and doctors concocted their own advanced forms of mayhem, one other man was planning on using older fashioned ways of winning the war but with some more ingenuity to their methods. The setting for this was the state of Georgia and the man who would carry this out was William T. Sherman in what would be known as the March to the Sea.  

Sherman’s March to the Sea spanned November 15 until December 21, 1864; Union General William T. Sherman led some 60,000 soldiers on a 285-mile march from Atlanta to Savannah, Georgia. The purpose of Sherman’s March to the Sea was to frighten Georgia’s civilian population into abandoning the Confederate cause.” As the war dragged on for another bloody and violent year, the fall and winter of 1864 was going to be different. General Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln devised a plan that would finally defeat The Confederacy. The plan was while Grant was pursuing Lee in Virginia, there would be two other operations executed at the same time: one was in trying to capture Mobile, Alabama, and the other was to capture the cities of Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia with the intention of crippling the ability of The Confederacy to equip and supply itself. William T Sherman’s plan started out with him taking the city of Atlanta, one of the biggest hubs of Confederate rail lines. Following the roads to Savanah, Sherman and his men would bring the death and destruction of Civil War right to the front step of the Heart of Dixie. Now, although the main belief is that Sherman burned everything in his path and he and his men acted with an utter and malicious disregard for human life, that was not true in any way. If people want to see that, Phillip Sheridan was more like that while wreaking havoc on the Shenandoah Valley in 1864-1865. It was on November 9, 1864, when Sherman gave out Special Field Order 120, which would show an organized and meticulous plan to bring The Confederacy to its knees. The two most important parts of that order are IV. “Which clearly stated that ‘Soldiers must not enter the dwellings of the inhabitants, or commit any trespass,’ and VI. Which states ‘As for horses, mules, wagons, &c., belonging to the inhabitants, the cavalry and artillery may appropriate freely and without limit, discriminating, however, between the rich, who are usually hostile, and the poor or industrious, usually neutral or friendly.’” The reason why is that this shows that Sherman’s actions were not of total malice; he did have some rules and limits to what he would do and also he showed more aggressive ideals when it came to dealing with the plantation owners vs the poor farmers, who as seen by the 20 Negro Law were suffering to varying degrees. Nevertheless, Sherman managed to send a clear message from Texas to Georgia to Virginia that if The Confederacy was willing to continue its fight then it would it do so at its own peril. Although Sherman’s March is not an absolute showing of how The Civil War was a Modern War, it does show inadvertently how armies should and would use calculated violence on civilian populations such as the use of bombing factories during World War II, house-t- house clearing and air operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Along with new improvements in the ways of mass killings, new ways of communicating, transporting, and seeing became widely more available. Although it does seem slow by today’s standards, the telegraph allowed military personnel to be within easy communication with each other at 10 words per minute to add also an extensive network of over 15,000 miles of line. The military telegraph network proved its value in coordinating broad strategy within the first year of the war... William Tecumseh Sherman also recalled the “perfect concert of action” between his forces in Georgia and Grant’s in Virginia in 1864. He remembers, “Hardly a day intervened when General Grant did not know the exact state of facts with me, more than fifteen hundred miles off, as the wires ran.” The telegraph transformed the battlefield more than any other non-combative technology did during the war. 

Today, whenever the US Military needs eyes in the skies or needs to annihilate enemy combatants the main weapon of choice is the Predator Drone. Many might not know it, but its great-grandfather got his first taste of action during The Civil War. Before The Civil War, hot air balloons were just used for show; it was not until Prof. Thaddeus S. Lowe found a better use for them using a telegraph wire and the balloons’ ability to see as far as seven miles out: “This allowed Union guns to be repositioned and fired accurately at troops more than three miles away-a first in military history.” These primitive predator drones were nothing to laugh at.   Although they stopped seeing action after 1863, they had made their permanent mark on military history. They are said, “to have done over 3,000 reconnaissance missions in the two years they were operational,” as stated in The Pacific Commercial Advertiser a West Coast-based newspaper.

One of the most remarkable feats ever recorded in modern warfare, showing the ingenuity of man in bringing science to his aid, is the introduction of the Balloon, as an assistant in carrying on a war” The balloon did not serve long in the Union Army but laid the ground work for the modern day Air Force. Like guardian angels, the Union’s air corps watched over Union troops possibly saving McClennan at the Peninsular campaign  it is a brief but important part of Civil War history; yet what proved to be more if not the second most important battlefield advancement seen during The Civil War was making waves throughout the whole war both on and below the water. 

For as long as there have been ships, there has been conflict on the water, and throughout naval history, countries and empires have strived for naval superiority and the rivalry of both the Union and Confederacy navies were no exception. Although naval warfare was only a small part of the war compared to the bloody battlefields and muddy trenches that took place on land, the oceans and rivers were not safe either.  Additionally, it is a place where The Civil War turned into Modern War the fastest The best examples were seen during a great battle of Hampton’s Roads and in the onetime incident of the CS Hunley sinking the US Housatonic. These two instances would change naval warfare forever and their contributions can still be seen to this day. 

The debut of the navy was at the beginning of the war with the Anaconda Plan. The South didn’t have the industrial capacity that The North did; so it relied on international trade in order to equip and supply both its army and civilians. The goal was to use “The outward pressure of our Navy, in barring the enemy’s ports, crippling their power, and exhausting the resources of the States in rebellion; in depriving them of a market for their particular productions, and of the facilities for importing many vital requisites for the use of their Army and peoples, is slowly, surely … reducing the rebellion to … unconditional surrender.” Beyond blockade runners, small and fast ships that could out run the large Union naval ships, The Confederacy did not have an actual navy. The Union ships outnumbered The Confederate Navy in every aspect in the years of 1861-1862, but that changed in 1862 for a brief but critical moment. The moment came in the view of a terrifying ship known as the CSS Virginia, formerly known as The Merrimack, a Union naval ship that had been scuttled by its crew to avoid being captured by The Confederacy. When the ship was found by The Confederacy, most of the ship was unusable except the hull. The hull was salvaged and outfitted with iron plating. This iron armor made her virtually invulnerable to cannon or gunfire, a literal tank on the water. According to former head of the Confederate Navy, Catesby ap Roger Jones, the Virginia’s armaments, “consisted of ten guns, four single-banded Brooke rifles and six nine-inch Dahlgren's shell guns. Two of the rifles, bow and stern pivots, were seven-inch, of 14,500 pounds; the other two were 6 4-inch (32 pounds calibre) of 9,000 pounds, one on each broadside,”. which were almost as deadly as its long iron ram that sliced up the hull of any ship it charged. The CSS Virginia’s first mission was to break the Union blockade of Hampton’s Roads and protect the waterways to Richmond from Union advances. As The Virginia steamed towards Hampton’s Roads, another ship was heading there, too. The Virginia’s mission was to destroy The Union naval blockade. However, the Union Navy had different plans and that came in the form of the USS Monitor, the first Ironclad of the Union Navy and the only vessel capable of destroying or even matching the Virginia, but more importantly, protecting the fleet at Hampton’s Roads as well as the city of Washington D.C. from attack by the “rebel monster.” As The Monitor raced to Hampton’s Roads, the battle was already underway, which was more of a shooting gallery and the Union ships were the little wooden ducks. The day of March 9th ,1862, the battle itself was a scene of carnage.   As described by Lieutenant Samuel Dana Green, who was member of the USS Monitor: “We did not credit it, at first, but as we approached Hampton’s Roads, we could see the fine old Congress burning brightly, and we knew then it must be so. Badly indeed did we feel, to think those two fine old vessels had gone to their last homes, with so many of their brave crews. Our hearts were very full and we vowed vengeance on the ‘Merrimac,’ if it should ever be our lot to fall in with her.” The battle lasted for four hours with neither side being able to declare a clear victory; both were incredibly damaged and running extremely low on ammunition and, in The Monitor’s case, it had orders not to pursue The Virginia. Although this battle ended in a draw, the Battle of Hampton’s Roads sealed the viability of ironclad technology and showed that in a barrage of burning timbers, hot iron and deafening sound of cannon fire began the future of modern naval warfare. 

In Feb. 17, 1864, on a dark night in the Charleston Harbor, all seemed calm except unknown to the sailors on the USS Housatonic; they were being stalked from under the waves by a submarine. The CSS Hunley as it was called during the American Civil War, was a 12-metre long Confederate submarine created by H.L. Hunley armed with one charge of explosives attached to a spear was a crude invention and was as deadly to its crew as it was to its prey. She sank twice during early tests, claiming the lives of thirteen crewmen including Hunley himself.  In this, her only combat mission, she successfully sank The Housatonic before sinking herself for reasons still unknown. After its salvaging it in 2000 and after years of vacuuming silt and other ocean debris, the once thought to be crude sub proved to be quite a monumental feat of engineering. The Hunley had keel blocks along with a bilge pump, and “the largest blocks were connected to a quick-release mechanism, meaning if there was any trouble the crew could eject the blocks and quickly rise to the surface.” Although The Hunley’s advancements would disappear with it, it meant that technology was now able to bring about the age of submarines. The good news was after the disappearance of The Hunley, more subs would emerge, each better than the last in the sense of depths, oxygen levels, distance and the fact it didn’t kill the crew. It is noted that, “Despite this perilous beginning, engineers around the world were awakened to the potential of submarine technology.  Fifty years later, 375 German “U-Boats” wreaked havoc on the high seas”. The lesson to remember about ships like the USS Monitor, the CSS Virginia and the CSS Hunley is that although they were crude, as long as the idea has been around countries and even empires have toyed with and even created machines capable of causing terror on a whole new level, a level that would only be surpassed with the submarines and battleships of World War I and II. Although these ships, like the mini-ball, refilled cannons, torpedo bombs were made with the seemly the sole purpose of killing, The Civil War did introduce new ways of saving lives as well taking them on and, almost industrial scale, a scale that can be seen almost everywhere today.

Today, as well in every battlefield a modern army has been involved in since the First World War, medicine has been a god-send that has saved millions of lives with a molarity of the wounded being able to return to active duty as well as live a normal civilian life when their service concluded. The American Civil War brought many innovations to the US Military, such as proper sanitation, pavilion hospitals, ambulances, reconstructive surgery, and prosthetics, and all of which changed medicine in America forever – in its practices and ethics -- as the US entered the modern age. When people look at a Civil War hospital, it is nothing like it is today from overwhelming numbers of wounded, with very few doctors and nurses able to deal with the numbers in either experience or numbers. That is only about twenty-five percent true; this is why. It’s important to remember that in the wars like the Revolutionary and Mexican-American Wars, the number of wounded could be handled by a medical staff that comprised of doctors, local healers, religious officials and local volunteers. The Civil War, however, was not like that at all; it is estimated that around 620,000 Americans died during The Civil War from the carnage on the battlefield and disease. The main culprit of all this pain and suffering, “was modern technology meeting much more ancient tactics.” Tactics that were still being used in the 19th century. It is though important to note that “Civil War physicians were up to international standards in their knowledge of the medical science of the time, and during the war quickly forged into leadership in military medicine.”

By the time the Civil War erupted, it became clear that things needed to change with the scores of wounded coming in. To deal with this problem, the pavilion hospital came into play. When most people think of 18th or 19th century hospital, it usually was an old building, someone’s home or a church, and for many years that was the case, but with so many wounded being churned out every day, the need for actual hospitals that could house all the wounded was needed for both sides. The first pavilion-style hospital was created in 1861: “In Philadelphia, Satterlee or West Philadelphia US General Hospital opened in June of 1862 with 36 pavilions containing more than 3,500 beds. An additional 150 tents were located around the buildings for overflow in the event of an emergency or nearby engagement. Several other Pavilion-style hospitals of comparable size quickly followed in the North.” These hospitals were revolutionary and were just what the soldiers and the medical staffs needed in order to organize and save wounded soldiers.  It is observed that, “The design featured long narrow wards or units that incorporated multiple windows located in opposing pairs for cross-ventilation. Additional design features included other types of supplemental ventilation, specified heat sources, bed placement, square foot requirements for windows, cubic foot requirements per patient, nonporous building materials, building length to width ratios, door placements, location of support rooms, the number of stories, and the location of the sewers.”  These hospitals allowed the staff to treat them whether it was with the aim to get them back in action or to help them get ready to enter civilian life. Yet they were not the only major medical care improvements that led to the betterment of soldier’s lives.

To run these hospitals, the Union created, “The Preventive Service employed a corps of medical inspectors who visited camps, hospitals and transports of each army corps in the field. These inspectors were attentive to dangers from change of climate, exposure, malicious causes, hard marching or any failure of supplies or transportation." Their work would be very much appreciated as seen during the battle of Shiloh as observed by Surgeon R. MURRAY, who saw “In removing the wounded we were aided by boats fitted up by sanitary commissions and soldiers' relief societies and sent to the battle-field to convey wounded to the hospitals. Some of these, especially those under the direction of the United States Sanitary Commission, were of great service”.  National organizations, like the sanitary commission, “sent delegates into the hospitals to dispense food, clothing, money, and religious materials.” Although this was of great service, people like famous writer Walt Whitman depended primarily upon his own resources and gifts from family, friends, and anonymous donors who supported volunteer efforts like his after reading about it in newspapers. This idea of a Sanitary Commission would pay off in huge strides within a year of being implemented. 

While the Sanitary Commission tried to make hospitals better, there was, though, the problem of getting wounded soldiers from the battlefield to the hospitals. The answer was an improvement of a vehicle taken for granted for many: ambulances.  Ambulances allowed for wounded to be transported more quickly and in greater numbers than before. Before The Civil War, if a soldier were wounded, it was either walk or be carried or die. The introduction of ambulances was exactly the fourth option that was needed on the battlefield. These ambulances, which were at first just wagons that could hold soldiers with no shocks and no beds, were what was needed to transport medical supplies and the wounded.  It worked this way: “Once a soldier was wounded, medical personnel on the battlefield bandaged the soldier as fast they could, and gave him whiskey (to ease the shock) and morphine, if necessary, for pain. If his wounds demanded more attention, he was evacuated via Letterman’s ambulance and stretcher system to a nearby field hospital,” where they would possibly be able to get the help they needed or at least not wait to die for hours on the battlefield.  It is mostly thought of when a soldier got to a field hospital it was a scene of total carnage where the only thing more prevalent than the stench of death was the sights of blood and amputated limbs. Although the exact number is not known, in approximately 60,000 surgeries, about three-quarters of all of the operations performed during the war were amputations. Yet through the use of improved hospitals and staff, most amputees survived their wounds and their recovery. It is important to note, however, that these hospitals for all the improvements these were places of horror as described by Dr. Claiborne J. Walton a surgeon of the 21st Kentucky Volunteer Infantry: “We have been on this campaign fifty-six days and it has been almost one continued scene of carnage from day to day. I am not out of much of the groans of the wounded from morning till night. My hands are constantly steeped in blood. I have had them in blood and water so much that the nails are soft and tender.”

One shining example of that innovation involved the Angel of the Battlefield herself , Clara Barton: “We had expended every bandage, torn up every sheet in the house, and everything we could find, when who should drive up but our old friend Miss Barton, with a team loaded down with dressings of every kind, and everything we could ask for. She distributed her articles to the difference hospitals, worked all night making soup, all the next day and night, and when I left, four days after the battle, I left her there ministering to the wounded and the dying.” Although Clara Barton was one of the most famous of the nurses during The Civil War, she was one of thousands of women who left their lives at home to contribute to the war effort by providing bandages food and most commonly seen compassion. Barton once said that, “I may be compelled to face danger, but never fear it, and while our soldiers can stand and fight, I can stand and feed and nurse them.”   Along with ambulances, there was another life or some could say face saving technology in the works.

A relatively new development, one that does not get much credit unlike that of criophore or morphine, is that of reconstructive surgery, which gave hope and meaning to many injured soldiers. Today, it is known as plastic surgery, which has helped everyone from burn victims to patients with congenital deformities. Many soldiers in The Civil War who were wounded did not get shot in the leg or arm; some of them took shrapnel to the face. One of the few surgeons to succeed at reconstructive surgery was Dr. Gurdon Buck of New York, “who used in every conceivable modification, however, were only the simple or complex techniques of rotation, transposition, and/or advancement flaps, i.e., flap techniques, to reconstruct serious facial defects.” Although quite primitive by today’s standards, many of these operations allowed many soldiers to live normal lives. This surgery was later perfected during and after World War I, but that could not have been done without its improvements during The Civil War. 

It is important to note that although The Civil War is not thought of as a Modern War, does not mean that it isn’t.   Through a closer examination of the types of warfare introduced such as trench, guerilla, biological, chemical, total, naval, aerial and the various technological improvements, it possesses many characteristics of what many today see as a Modern War. Many will say that it does not have planes or automatic weapons, so it is not a Modern War, but it was right after the Industrial Revolution, an era that produced innovations that made interchangeable parts and mass production possible. Be it Syria, World War II, Afghanistan the Persian Gulf war or any other, this argument shows readers that the only thing that would have made this a prototype for a Modern War would be the fact that these types of plans were never attempted or successful in any way. From the trenches of Petersburg to the Pavilion hospitals throughout the US, it was eminently clear the US had become a new country, a new military force with new methods of waging war fifty years before World War I began. 

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