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Informationen zum Autor Mike Wright Klappentext Instant coffee was invented during the Civil War for use by Union troops, who hated it; holding races between lice was a popular pastime for both Johnny Reb and Billy Yank; 13% of the Confederate Army deserted during the conflict. These are three of the hundreds of bits of knowledge that Mike Wright makes available in his informative and entertaining What They Didn't Teach You About the Civil War, which focuses on the lives and ways of ordinary soldiers and of those they left behind.CHAPTER ONE Fort Sumter: The First Shot I shall await the first shot, and if you do not batter us to pieces, we shall be starved out in a few days. —Maj. Robert Anderson, U.S.A. April 11, 1861 They were the gangs that couldn’t shoot straight, both the Union and Confederate armies. We should be glad they couldn’t; they did enough damage as it was. Imagine how bloody it would have been if they could have shot straight. In 1862, George McClellan and the Union Army of the Potomac slogged their way up the rain-clogged Virginia peninsula, chasing a Confederate army slowly retreating toward Richmond. A regiment from Mississippi stumbled onto a unit from Georgia, each side thinking the other was the enemy. They opened fire—Mississippi Rebels blasting away at Georgia Confederates. Since neither group could shoot straight, the only casualty was a horse. Ulysses S. Grant once complained that his Northern troops were so green, so poorly trained, most of them couldn’t load their muskets. Many who did know how to load them didn’t know how to shoot them. Or maybe they tried to fire them but either the poorly made muskets didn’t work or the powder wouldn’t fire. Maybe the soldiers just thought they fired their rifles, but the battle raged around them so loudly they couldn’t hear whether they did or not. In any case, a lot of times, nothing happened. This worried the Union army brass, so after the three-day Battle of Gettysburg, they checked weapons left on the field. They found at least thirty-seven thousand discarded rifles. Sometimes the troops ran off without firing their rifles; sometimes their muskets misfired. Twenty-four thousand weapons were still loaded. Many of the weapons left behind—eighteen thousand—were loaded with not one, but at least two minié balls. Six thousand had a lot more, as many as ten unfired cartridges rammed down their barrels. The others were improperly loaded, sometimes backward, the lead bullet facing the rear of the weapon. If loaded backward, or loaded with more than one cartridge, the rifle would not fire. One poor soldier had managed to stuff nearly two dozen minié balls down his rifle, and then probably wondered why it didn’t fire. He was lucky the damn thing didn’t blow up in his face. Troops on both sides were not only poorly trained; in the case of the South, they usually were poorly armed. The tactics they used were left over from the Napoleonic wars, but the weapons weren’t. Whether it was Johnny Reb or Billy Yank, the technique was the same: march side by side, row after pitiful row, until you were about seventy-five to one hundred yards from the enemy. Then you’d fire point-blank at the other side. Modern rifles often are automatic weapons, firing multiples of small-caliber projectiles. In the Civil War, soldiers faced hordes of weapons that resembled high-caliber, low-velocity shotguns whose bullets often broke bones rather than simply going in and out of the unlucky victim’s body. This was a primary reason for so many amputations during the war, and a primary reason for so many one-legged, one-armed veterans in the years that followed. The mangled and maimed individuals seen at reunions or limping down Main Streets North and South were the ones who, against all odds, managed to survive. Most of these shotgunlike weapons were muzzle loaders, which was a ...
