The Final Frontier:
Trench Warfare and Civil War History
The study of trench warfare in 1864-1865 is the final frontier of Civil War military history. Nearly every battle and every skirmish from 1861 to 1863 has been closely examined; desperate for new topics, historians have prepared book-length biographies of many generals and are now working on the colonels. A few intrepid historians have tackled the events of the final year and a half of the war, including both campaign studies--the authoritative works of Gordon Rhea come immediately to mind--and battle monographs. A few, most notably Earl Hess with his trilogy, have delved directly into the topic of fortifications on the battlefield. Hess's work is groundbreaking so far as it goes, but he, too, seems to retreat into moving units across the battlefield in his final volume and avoids any definitive conclusions about all of the dirt moved over his many pages. Federal engineering and advancements in field fortifications won the Civil War.
Historians trained in primarily textual sources and accustomed to mentally maneuvering troops on the battlefield have generally been unable to master the nuances of trench warfare. The technical barriers alone are significant. One cannot learn about the rapid evolution of fortification technology by reading a military manual. Indeed, the most important technology that made trench warfare possible, the "rifle pit" (in its various forms), was not even taught at West Point and did not appear in the standard textbook/manual used by both sides, Dennis Hart Mahan's ubiquitous Field Fortification. Similarly, the traditional tools of the historian do not reveal the full use of fortifications and the sheer amount of digging that was done. Reports and personal accounts are incomplete and often garbled; the maps of the battlefield, even those prepared by professional surveyors under peacetime conditions, make mistakes and sometimes leave many important engineering details out. The post-war surveys of the siege of Petersburg, the most comprehensive cartographic record available, contain significant inaccuracies and depict a fraction of the military construction performed there.
Historians trained in primarily textual sources and accustomed to mentally maneuvering troops on the battlefield have generally been unable to master the nuances of trench warfare. The technical barriers alone are significant. One cannot learn about the rapid evolution of fortification technology by reading a military manual. Indeed, the most important technology that made trench warfare possible, the "rifle pit" (in its various forms), was not even taught at West Point and did not appear in the standard textbook/manual used by both sides, Dennis Hart Mahan's ubiquitous Field Fortification. Similarly, the traditional tools of the historian do not reveal the full use of fortifications and the sheer amount of digging that was done. Reports and personal accounts are incomplete and often garbled; the maps of the battlefield, even those prepared by professional surveyors under peacetime conditions, make mistakes and sometimes leave many important engineering details out. The post-war surveys of the siege of Petersburg, the most comprehensive cartographic record available, contain significant inaccuracies and depict a fraction of the military construction performed there.
The Petersburg Project is an ongoing, long-term research effort into trench warfare in the Civil War. Although fortifications were used frequently during the first years of the war, particularly during the latter half of 1863 they began to dominate the battlefield, leading to the entrenched struggles that characterized the final, climactic campaigns in both the Eastern and Western theaters of war. By that time, digging in became the rule and survival the goal; and when on the battlefield, neither side was without some kind of artificial defenses for long. The battlefields of Petersburg contain many surviving examples of military fortifications dating from 1862 through the end of the war. It is instructive to revisit and document these resources and to compare the architecture of early war and late war fortifications. The changes were rather profound.
The rise of trench warfare at Petersburg had an impact on military strategy and tactics in the nineteenth century that amounted to a military revolution. In fundamental ways, the Overland and Petersburg battles more closely resembled those of the First World War fifty years later than of Gettysburg less than a year before. This is a debated topic among Civil War historians, but there is little serious disagreement that --when viewed through the veteran's eyes-- a combatant at Austerlitz would have recognized the battlefields of Antietam or Stones River as the sort of terrible war that he fought; veterans of the Somme, on the other hand, would have looked upon the fighting at Richmond and Petersburg as more like the brutal war they experienced in Belgium and France -- minus the high explosives, machine guns, and poison gas. There were certainly incompetent generals, hyper-active engineers, deadly snipers, trench mortars, trench raids, tunneling and undermining and unexpected explosions beneath the front lines... and failed, futile attacks against fortified positions in the face of massed firepower. All too familiar.
Historians have offered various explanations for the late-war "habit" of "digging in." In our opinion, the range, accuracy, and experience of sharpshooters using rifled weapons drove the soldiers underground. Why would a rational human being who valued his life, not start throwing up a couple of logs and a little mound of earth in front of himself, if the enemy was aiming for his head very accurately from three hundred yards across the way? Firing a rifle and hitting a target takes some calculation and skill. I am confident that my predecessors from 150 years ago were capable of pulling off this trick. It was a challenge. Every community in the mid-1800s had competitions and awarded prizes. If you could shoot that poor squirrel through the eye, basically you were a breadwinner. "You got closest to the pin, you get the squirrel." A few Civil War historians think that our ancestors were somehow incapable of understanding the capabilities of their weapon and aiming accordingly. Considering that sometimes hungry shooters needed to drop a squirrel out of the tree at 300 yards so that there was food on the dinner table, this is an unusual opinion. Some historians have described in detail the deadly toll of daily sharpshooting along the Petersburg lines and yet claim a more accurate weapon on the battlefield made no difference to the situation. Seriously? This claim is, in our opinion, a pathetic appeal for attention. It makes no sense.
Historians also argue that common soldiers themselves drove the trend towards trench warfare by routinely digging in on their own initiative; although a few suggest that it was the commanders themselves who increased their reliance on fortifications as an element of strategy, or who forced their soldiers underground by deliberately maintaining close contact with the enemy.
Actually, all of these explanations are accurate, at least to a certain extent; but none are complete. The rise of trench warfare was a complex process involving a dynamic interplay of strategic, technological, institutional, cultural, and psychological factors. We aim (ultimately) to document that process and its impact on the final campaigns. For the moment we have been focusing our efforts largely (but not exclusively) on the Siege of Petersburg, Virginia (June 1864 to April 1865), particularly on the advent of combat trenching, the habit of digging in under fire but also of carrying the tools and experience needed to entrench into combat. During the Ninth Corps assault along the Jerusalem Plank Road on April 2, 1865, for example, soldiers carried axes, shovels, and picks to overcome obstacles and even carried empty gabions across no-man's land to be filled on-site and used to reverse captured artillery.
The primary goals of the Petersburg Project are to improve the understanding of trench warfare during the American Civil War, raise public awareness of the significance of entrenched battlefield sites, and promote the documentation, preservation, and interpretation of the surviving earthworks and other relevant [features and] artifacts. To accomplish these goals, we are also seeking new, clearer ways of presenting the information, much of it highly technical, to make it accessible and useful to casual readers and specialists alike. We hope that this website will serve as a testbed for some of these approaches.
The Project's historians and archeologists are using a cross-disciplinary approach involving textual research, field surveys, archeological investigations, and detailed analyses of the contemporary maps and photographs [, LiDAR and the powerful analytical capabilities of geographical Information systems (GIS)]. What we do is closely akin to what is commonly known as "battlefield archeology."
The Petersburg Project is working in cooperation with Petersburg National Battlefield and other elements of the National Park Service, with preservationists, local historians, and with the Civil War Fortification Study Group. We hope to encourage a dialogue on this subject among these communities and especially between historians and archeologists.
The rise of trench warfare at Petersburg had an impact on military strategy and tactics in the nineteenth century that amounted to a military revolution. In fundamental ways, the Overland and Petersburg battles more closely resembled those of the First World War fifty years later than of Gettysburg less than a year before. This is a debated topic among Civil War historians, but there is little serious disagreement that --when viewed through the veteran's eyes-- a combatant at Austerlitz would have recognized the battlefields of Antietam or Stones River as the sort of terrible war that he fought; veterans of the Somme, on the other hand, would have looked upon the fighting at Richmond and Petersburg as more like the brutal war they experienced in Belgium and France -- minus the high explosives, machine guns, and poison gas. There were certainly incompetent generals, hyper-active engineers, deadly snipers, trench mortars, trench raids, tunneling and undermining and unexpected explosions beneath the front lines... and failed, futile attacks against fortified positions in the face of massed firepower. All too familiar.
Historians have offered various explanations for the late-war "habit" of "digging in." In our opinion, the range, accuracy, and experience of sharpshooters using rifled weapons drove the soldiers underground. Why would a rational human being who valued his life, not start throwing up a couple of logs and a little mound of earth in front of himself, if the enemy was aiming for his head very accurately from three hundred yards across the way? Firing a rifle and hitting a target takes some calculation and skill. I am confident that my predecessors from 150 years ago were capable of pulling off this trick. It was a challenge. Every community in the mid-1800s had competitions and awarded prizes. If you could shoot that poor squirrel through the eye, basically you were a breadwinner. "You got closest to the pin, you get the squirrel." A few Civil War historians think that our ancestors were somehow incapable of understanding the capabilities of their weapon and aiming accordingly. Considering that sometimes hungry shooters needed to drop a squirrel out of the tree at 300 yards so that there was food on the dinner table, this is an unusual opinion. Some historians have described in detail the deadly toll of daily sharpshooting along the Petersburg lines and yet claim a more accurate weapon on the battlefield made no difference to the situation. Seriously? This claim is, in our opinion, a pathetic appeal for attention. It makes no sense.
Historians also argue that common soldiers themselves drove the trend towards trench warfare by routinely digging in on their own initiative; although a few suggest that it was the commanders themselves who increased their reliance on fortifications as an element of strategy, or who forced their soldiers underground by deliberately maintaining close contact with the enemy.
Actually, all of these explanations are accurate, at least to a certain extent; but none are complete. The rise of trench warfare was a complex process involving a dynamic interplay of strategic, technological, institutional, cultural, and psychological factors. We aim (ultimately) to document that process and its impact on the final campaigns. For the moment we have been focusing our efforts largely (but not exclusively) on the Siege of Petersburg, Virginia (June 1864 to April 1865), particularly on the advent of combat trenching, the habit of digging in under fire but also of carrying the tools and experience needed to entrench into combat. During the Ninth Corps assault along the Jerusalem Plank Road on April 2, 1865, for example, soldiers carried axes, shovels, and picks to overcome obstacles and even carried empty gabions across no-man's land to be filled on-site and used to reverse captured artillery.
The primary goals of the Petersburg Project are to improve the understanding of trench warfare during the American Civil War, raise public awareness of the significance of entrenched battlefield sites, and promote the documentation, preservation, and interpretation of the surviving earthworks and other relevant [features and] artifacts. To accomplish these goals, we are also seeking new, clearer ways of presenting the information, much of it highly technical, to make it accessible and useful to casual readers and specialists alike. We hope that this website will serve as a testbed for some of these approaches.
The Project's historians and archeologists are using a cross-disciplinary approach involving textual research, field surveys, archeological investigations, and detailed analyses of the contemporary maps and photographs [, LiDAR and the powerful analytical capabilities of geographical Information systems (GIS)]. What we do is closely akin to what is commonly known as "battlefield archeology."
The Petersburg Project is working in cooperation with Petersburg National Battlefield and other elements of the National Park Service, with preservationists, local historians, and with the Civil War Fortification Study Group. We hope to encourage a dialogue on this subject among these communities and especially between historians and archeologists.
We focus on the Siege of Petersburg. Petersburg was the longest battle of the Civil War -- 292 days of fighting. It was a battle in slow motion with as many as 200 casualties a week due to random artillery firing and sharpshooters. It was a major battle in slow motion that went on for nine months. That campaign represented the apotheosis of the tactical revolution that began a year before in the aftermath of the Battle of Gettysburg, and it saw the adoption of equally revolutionary strategic concepts better adapted to the prevailing tactical realities. Furthermore, Petersburg is ripe for study because surprisingly little known about it, and the surviving military features--in Petersburg National Battlefield's main unit and elsewhere--and unusually extensive photographic documentation provide ideal resources for us to hone our methodology. However, the study of Petersburg is a means to an end: understanding the "trench war" as a system of warfare.
