Civil War Field Artillery: Promise and Performance on the Battlefield by Earl J. Hess (review)

Reviewed by: Civil War Field Artillery: Promise and Performance on the Battlefield by Earl J. Hess Mitchell G. Klingenberg (bio) Civil War Field Artillery: Promise and Performance on the Battlefield. Earl J. Hess. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023. ISBN: 978-0807178003, 396 pp. , cloth, 50. 00. With this volume, Earl Hess continues his campaign to restore the American Civil War to the age of Napoleonic armed conflict, separating it, in military conduct, from modern, twentieth-century wars. As with the rifle musket and with logistics and supply, Civil War field artillery represented an incremental advance that conformed in theory, doctrine, and battlefield use to older ways of warfare. (See Hess's earlier works, Civil War Infantry Tactics: Training, Combat, and Small-Unit Effectiveness Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 2015; Civil War Logistics: A Study of Military Transportation Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017; and Civil War Supply and Strategy: Feeding Men and Moving Armies Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020). Thus, in terms of firepower, the Civil War never approximated a revolution in military affairs, and despite the refinements it developed from End Page 89 older European and American systems, Civil War field artillery remained bound by the tactical and technical limitations of those systems (xxii). Hess opens Civil War Field Artillery with an examination of the combat arm's European inheritance and its development in the American context. On the eve of war, American field artillery had made gains in design and engineering—barrels, fuzes (Hess insists on this spelling, citing its usage in contemporaneous field manuals), munitions, and carriages all evidenced improvement from artillery of earlier periods—but in organization and in terms of prioritization at the War Department, artillery in 1860 lagged the infantry and cavalry combat arms. Not until that same year did the War Department finally adopt Instruction for Field Artillery (the revised recommendations of the 1856 Barry Commission, a group convened to produce an accessible and sound manual of artillery organization and tactics) as its basic text for gunners, signaling an incremental but significant gain in institutional knowledge of artillery and the basic elements of its employment on the battlefield. Wars of the nineteenth century featured large volunteer armies in which infantry were the dominant combat arm, given democratic fervor, mass mobilizations, and the short amount of time required to organize and train formations. But the great "People's contest" (to borrow President Abraham Lincoln's famous descriptor, from his July 4, 1861, message to Congress in Special Session) from 1861 to 1865 required states to organize, train, and field expensive artillery formations that required different technical skills of the soldiers who manned them, and a higher degree of machine-like teamwork under fire, than their infantry counterparts. With Instruction for Field Artillery as their guide, and with battlefield experience, with time artillerists acquired unique proficiencies in movement and tactics—ranging from where to sit and ride on limbered caissons or weapons carriages; to the many components of a gun; to assembly and disassembly, firing and reloading, targeting, and, of course, formations when in battery on the firing line. There is an impressive granularity about Hess's book that tracks with his previous scholarship. Chapter 4 ("Hardware") details all aspects of field pieces from barrels, sights, vents, and primers to carriages and caissons. Hess notes how historians have emphasized capabilities of barrels and shot more than the carriages that carried them, a critical oversight, since the durability and maintenance of hardware that supported weapon pieces mattered for performance. This granularity is essential for how Hess grasps the war's nineteenth-century character: while artillerists in the conflict used some twelve different field artillery designs—almost all of which were rifled—and experimented with various End Page 90 assortments of projectiles and fuzes designed to maximize the destructiveness of those designs, soldiers never attained the full potential of rifled artillery, opting in many instances for the proven performance of smoothbores. How armies organized and employed field artillery—and which officers wielded tactical control of guns in battle—enabled and constrained artillery effectiveness. Indeed, the theme of command and control is central to Hess's analysis, and the ability to mass. . .