Technology:
“REPEATERS”
Rifles with Minié bullets were easy and quick to load, but soldiers still had to pause
and reload after each shot. This was inefficient and dangerous. By 1863, however,
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.
Like many other Civil War technologies, these weapons were available to Northern
troops but not Southern ones: Southern factories had neither the equipment nor the
know-how to produce them. “I think the Johnnys [Confederate soldiers] are getting
rattled; they are afraid of our repeating rifles,” one Union soldier wrote. “They say
we are not fair, that we have guns that we load up on Sunday and shoot all the rest
of the week.”
BALLOONS AND SUBMARINES
Other newfangled weapons took to the air–for example, Union spies floated above
Confederate encampments and battle lines in hydrogen-filled passenger balloons,
sending reconnaissance information back to their commanders via telegraph–and to
the sea. “Iron-clad” warships prowled up and down the coast, maintaining a Union
blockade of Confederate ports.
For their part, Confederate sailors tried to sink these ironclads with submarines.
The first of these, the Confederate C.S.S. Hunley, was a metal tube that was 40 feet
long, 4 feet across, and held an 8-man crew. In 1864, the Hunley sank the Union
blockade ship Housatonic off the coast of Charleston but was itself wrecked in the
process.
THE RAILROAD
More important than these advanced weapons were larger-scale technological
innovations such as the railroad. Once again, the Union had the advantage. When the
war began, there were 22,000 miles of railroad track in the North and just 9,000 in
the South, and the North had almost all of the nation’s track and locomotive
factories. Furthermore, Northern tracks tended to be “standard gauge,” which meant
that any train car could ride on any track. Southern tracks, by contrast, were not
standardized, so people and goods frequently had to switch cars as they traveled–an
expensive and inefficient system.
Union officials used railroads to move troops and supplies from one place to
another. They also used thousands of soldiers to keep tracks and trains safe from
Confederate attack.
THE TELEGRAPH
Abraham Lincoln was the first president who was able to communicate on the spot
with his officers on the battlefield. The White House telegraph office enabled him to
monitor battlefield reports, lead real-time strategy meetings and deliver orders to
his men. Here, as well, the Confederate army was at a disadvantage: They lacked the
technological and industrial ability to conduct such a large-scale communication
campaign.
In 1861, the Union Army established the U.S. Military Telegraph Corps, led by a
young railroad man named Andrew Carnegie. The next year alone, the U.S.M.T.C.
trained 1,200 operators, strung 4,000 miles of telegraph wire and sent more than a
million messages to and from the battlefield.
CIVIL WAR PHOTOGRAPHY
The Civil War was the first war to be documented through the lens of a camera.
However, the era’s photographic process was far too elaborate for candid pictures.
Taking and developing photos using the so-called “wet-plate” process was a
meticulous, multi-step procedure that required more than one “camera operator”
and lots of chemicals and equipment. As a result, the images of the Civil War are not
action snapshots: They are portraits and landscapes. It was not until the 20th
century that photographers were able to take non-posed pictures on the battlefield.
Technological innovation had an enormous impact on the way people fought the
Civil War and on the way they remember it. Many of these inventions have played
important roles in military and civilian life ever since.
Medicine:
The most common battlefield injury was being wounded by enemy fire. Unless the
wounds were minor, this often led to amputation of limbs to prevent infection from
setting in; anti-biotics had not yet been discovered. Amputations had to be made at
the point where the wound occurred, often leaving men with stub limbs. Skin was
taken from the amputated limb to cover the wound and stitched to the stump.[31]
Men were generally partially sedated with chloroform or alcohol before surgeries.
When properly done, the patient would feel no pain during their surgery, but would
not be totally unconscious. Stonewall Jackson, for example, recalled the sound of the
saw cutting through the bone of his arm, but recalled no pain. Infection was the
most common cause of death of injured soldiers.[32][33]
It has been said that the American Civil War was the first "modern war" in terms of
technology and lethality of weapons, but that it was simultaneously fought "at the
end of the medical Middle Ages." Very little was known about the causes of disease,
and so a minor wound could easily become infected and take a life. Battlefield
surgeons were under qualified and hospitals were generally poorly supplied and
staffed. The most common battlefield operation was amputation. If a soldier was
badly wounded in the arm or leg, amputation was usually the only solution.
Surprisingly, about 75% of amputees survived the operation. Contrary to popular
belief, few soldiers experienced amputation without any anesthetic. Heavy doses of
chloroform were administered; in fact, a few soldiers died of chloroform poisoning,
rather than their wounds.
If a wound produced pus, it was thought that it meant the wound was healing, when
in fact it meant the injury was infected. Roughly three in five Union casualties and
two in three Confederate casualties died of disease.
Women Nurses and Volunteers in hospitals:
North and South, over 20,000 women volunteered to work in hospitals, usually in
nursing care.[34] They assisted surgeons during procedures, gave medicines,
supervised the feedings and cleaned the bedding and clothes. They gave good cheer,
wrote letters the men dictated, and comforted the dying.[35]
The Sanitary Commission handled most of the nursing care of the Union armies,
together with necessary acquisition and transportation of medical supplies.
Dorothea Dix, serving as the Commission's Superintendent, was able to convince the
medical corps of the value of women working in 350 Commission or Army
hospitals.[36] A representative nurse was Helen L. Gilson (1835–68) of Chelsea,
Massachusetts, who served in Sanitary Commission. She supervised supplies,
dressed wounds, and cooked special foods for patients on a limited diet. She worked
in hospitals after the battles of Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville,
Gettysburg. She was a successful administrator, especially at the hospital for black
soldiers at City Point, Virginia.[37] The middle class women North and South who
volunteered provided vitally needed nursing services and were rewarded with a
sense of patriotism and civic duty in addition to opportunity to demonstrate their
skills and gain new ones, while receiving wages and sharing the hardships of the
men.[38]
Mary Livermore,[39] Mary Ann Bickerdyke, and Annie Wittenmeyer played
leadership roles.[40] After the war some nurses wrote memoirs of their experiences;
examples include Dix, Livermore, Sarah Palmer Young, and Sarah Emma
Edmonds.[41]
Several thousand women were just as active in nursing in the Confederacy, but were
less well organized and faced severe shortages of supplies and a much weaker
system of 150 hospitals. Nursing and vital support services were provided not only
by matrons and nurses, but also by local volunteers, slaves, free blacks, and
prisoners of war.
Spies:
CONFEDERATE SIGNAL CORPS AND SECRET SERVICE BUREAU
The Confederate Signal Corps, which operated the semaphore system used for
communicating vital information between armies on the field, also set up a covert
intelligence operation known as the Secret Service Bureau. Headed by William
Norris, the former Baltimore lawyer who also served as chief signal officer for the
Confederacy, the bureau managed the so-called “Secret Line,” an ever-changing
system of couriers used to get information from Washington across the Potomac
and Rappahannock Rivers to Confederate officials in Richmond. The Secret Service
Bureau also handled the passing of coded messages from Richmond to Confederate
agents in the North, Canada and Europe.
A number of Confederate soldiers, especially cavalrymen, also acted as spies or
“scouts” for the rebel cause. Among the most famous were John Singleton Mosby,
known as the “Gray Ghost,” who led guerrilla warfare in western Virginia through
the latter years of the war, and especially J.E.B. Stuart, the celebrated cavalry officer
whom General Robert E. Lee called “the eyes of the army.”
UNION SPIES: ALLAN PINKERTON’S SECRET SERVICE
Allan Pinkerton, the founder of his own detective agency in Chicago, had collected
intelligence for Union General George B. McClellan during the first months of the
Civil War, while McClellan led the Department of Ohio. When President Abraham
Lincoln summoned McClellan to Washington late that summer, the general put the
detective in charge for intelligence for his Army of the Potomac, and Pinkerton set
up the first Union espionage operation in mid-1861. Calling himself E.J. Allen,
Pinkerton built a counterintelligence network in Washington and sent undercover
agents to ingratiate themselves in the Confederate capital of Richmond.
Unfortunately, Pinkerton’s intelligence reports from the field during 1862′s
Peninsula Campaign consistently miscalculated Confederate numbers at twice or
three times their actual strength, fueling McClellan’s repeated calls for
reinforcements and reluctance to act.
Though he called his operation the U.S. Secret Service, Pinkerton actually worked
only for McClellan. Union military intelligence was still decentralized at the time, as
generals (and even President Lincoln) employed their own agents to seek out
information and report back to them. Another prominent Union intelligence officer
was Lafayette C. Baker, who worked for the former Union General in Chief Winfield
Scott and later for Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. The brave but ruthless Baker
was notorious for rounding up Washingtonians suspected of having southern
sympathies; he later directed the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth, the actor and
Confederate sympathizer who shot and killed Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in April
1865.
PROMINENT CIVIL WAR SPIES
Thanks to her success, Rose O’Neal Greenhow was one of the first Confederate spies
targeted by Allan Pinkerton. Shortly after the southern victory in the First Battle of
Bull Run, Pinkerton put Greenhow under surveillance and subsequently arrested
her. Imprisoned in the Old Capitol Prison, she was released in June 1862 and sent to
Richmond. Belle Boyd, another famous southern belle-turned-Confederate spy,
helped smuggle intelligence to General Stonewall Jackson during his Shenandoah
Valley campaign in 1862. Like the Confederacy, the Union also made use of female
spies: Richmond’s Elizabeth Van Lew, known as “Crazy Bett,” risked her life running
an espionage operation out of her family’s farm, while Sarah Emma Edmonds
disguised herself as a black slave to enter Confederate camps in Virginia.
The British-born Timothy Webster, a former police officer in New York City, became
the Civil War’s first double agent. Sent by Pinkerton to Richmond, Webster
pretended to be a courier on the Secret Line, and managed to gain the trust of Judah
P. Benjamin, the Confederate secretary of war (later secretary of state). Benjamin
sent Webster to deliver documents to secessionists in Baltimore, which Webster
promptly passed on to Pinkerton and his staff. Webster was eventually arrested,
tried as a spy, and sentenced to death. Though Lincoln sent President Jefferson
Davis a message threatening to hang captured Confederate spies if Webster were
executed, the death sentence was carried out in late April 1862.