We will follow up Monday's lecture on the early months of the war by getting into the main battles of early 1862. With any luck, we'll get to Fredericksburg in December, 1862.
One of the first things we need to consider before going forward, however, is a bit of military technology that changed the way we fight wars, but not before a lot of men died in the Civil War in the process of making that discovery.
This video does a very good job of showing some key elements of the difference:
But what did this difference mean to the battlefield? In short, it meant a lot! And it isn't even all entirely evident in this video. We will discuss this in class today.
The difference was even more dramatic when rifling came to artillery.
Yet technology isn't everything - and it probably wasn't even a factor in the outcome in the war per se. But it did matter more broadly in the way societies planned for and executed their war plans, and it is worth noting that the North had a vast advantage in innovation and bringing new ideas into material existence.
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