Engineering in the Confederate Heartland by Larry J. Daniel

Abstract

tailed its potential impact. The Civil War looked more like Napoleonic warfare than land combat in World War I. According to Hess, it was “mostly an old-fashioned war,” at least “as far as its artillery was concerned” (313). Hess extensively explores strategic effectiveness, the book’s other forest, but without reaching a conclusion. He addresses the matter repeatedly, at times equating effectiveness with efficiency, but he never actually defines the term. His exhaustive research yields only three instances in which medical personnel recorded wounds from artillery and infantry in the same engagement; artillery accounted for 8.8 percent, 26.7 percent, and 12.2 percent, respectively in those instances. The historical record addressed effectiveness often, though always subjectively. The most illuminating anecdote came from a Union captain who always wanted artillery support, regardless of whether it inflicted any casualties. A social-science or statistical methodology might have been able to wring more insights from the imperfect data.