Having set the stage and covered the first battle of Bull Run in Part I, Burns goes on to examine the soldiers of the Civil War, some of their weapons, some paradoxes, and the bloodiest battle so far, at Shiloh Church in Tennessee.
By this time, the second year of war, the men were no longer inexperienced in military life and not so filled with a longing for combat. Elijah Hunt Rhodes walks into his general's tent and asks for a furlough. Why? "I want to see my mother." Shiloh was eventually carried by the Union but at an appalling cost. It was becoming clear that battlefield tactics were outmoded, based on the Napoleonic model, in which lines of soldiers with fixed bayonets marched towards the enemy lines and finally charged. The problem was that the technology had changed. Napoleon's muskets needed to be fired by a single line of men because their range and accuracy were so limited. The musket fired a round ball whose trajectory resembled that of the baseball pitch sometimes called a "slider." But the soldiers of the Civil War used rifled muskets with Minier balls, with five times the range and much greater accuracy. A line of men marching towards the enemy only offered a better target at long range. The tactics hadn't kept up with the technology.
The episode sort of skips over some of the paradoxes of the Civil War. Most Confederate soldiers owned no slaves. They were subsistence farmers and craftsmen. Their enlistments were expiring and Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, needed to implement a national draft. Yet, the entire rebellion had been predicated on the notion that the central government in Richmond did not have such power over individual states.
In 1862 McClellan launches his failed peninsula campaign with an advantage of ten to one over his opponent but is outwitted by a theater buff who marches the same men back and forth, and in circles, and sets up logs ("Quaker guns") next to his artillery. MacGruder is able to convince McLellan that he, McGruder, has 100,000 Confederates instead of 7,000 desperate thespians. McLellan slogs slowly forward and eventually reaches the outskirts of Richmond itself, but it rains and the campaign is called off. McLellan seemed to have an almost infinite capacity for self deception. Every step he took was a "victory." And President Lincoln was "the original gorilla." It's hard to imagine how Burns and his team did such a magnificent job of something as seemingly unimportant as sound effects, but they're precise in nature and in volume. Locusts chatter in the afternoon sunshine. When the set-up for the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimac is described, it's possible faintly to hear the creaking of nautical ropes and lines in the background. All nicely done.
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