ABSTRACT
The conditions under which the Civil War soldier lived and fought showed in some respects a significant advance on the experience of earlier wars, but were in others extremely primitive, uncomfortable and, on occasion, horrific. When the war came there was a stock of well over 600,000 small arms in the whole country, with perhaps two-fifths of them in the South. With every passing month, the gap between Jominian theories and Civil War realities grew wider. The very weapons with which the war was fought suggest most clearly of all the overlapping of old and new which is so characteristic of the conflict as a whole. The ability to transport large quantities of both men and material over long distances in a short time gave greater mobility to armies and a new dimension to strategy. The men behind the guns mattered too, and new attitudes to manpower and its use evolved more quickly than any modern concept of firepower.
