"marching column positions of flag, drummers, officers..." Topic

Hi all,

can anyone of the experts about ACW help me with the question of how to build a marching Union regiment?

They marched 4 in a file or even more/less?
Where are the positions of officers, flagbearers etc.

The wise internet tells me that:
1 Regiment = 1000 men
1 Company = 100 men
Each company has the following officers
Captain (1), 1st. Lieut. (1), 2nd. Lieut. (1)
1st Sgt. (1), Sgts. (4) and Corporals (8)
Plus 2 musicians.

How can these march in a correct way?

Best wishes,

Michael

butternut2011.blogspot.de

An Infantry regiment marched in a column of four soldiers abreast. The Color Guard would be in the CENTER of the column not leading them. As to where officers and file closers were you have to know which direction they are going. Envision the regiment aligned in a 'battle line' in two ranks. The line is facing forward and the file closers are directly behind the line. If the order is to "left face" the regiment forms a column of 4 facing to the left and the file closers are on the left still, in their spots, 'behind' the regiment. If the order is to march "Right face" the file closers are the right of the column.

Don

Here is a diagram which shows an infantry regiment in a battle line.

Michael, even though the paper strength of a regiment was about 1,000, the actual mid-war field strength was somewhere around 400. This means that, subtracting the field officers and other staff, the average company was somewhere between 35-40.

A "column of fours" was not really a column, but rather a line in which everyone faced to the right (or occasionally the left) and every other file doubled to change from two ranks to four. This was known as marching by the right (or left) flank.

When they faced, the captain's position was one file forward and one pace to the left of the left-most man at the front, and the first sergeant was to the captain's right and in front of that man. The lieutenants and other sergeants were to the right of the company, two steps to the right of the right-most men in the "column of fours".

When in line of battle, the color guard, usually composed of 6-9 men, was attached to the center-right-most company, and placed on the left of that company. Depending on the size and number of companies (usually ten), they would be fairly close to the center of the regiment. When facing by the flank, they faced just like the other members of that company, and would remain near the center of the "column of fours." Hope this helps.

I can't seem to find a marching column diagram at the this time. I had a link for an animated diagram and showed it clearly but… did someone take it down? Where is it now?

Don

Yup. Color Guard in the center when the unit is marching by the flank.

One point that should be made is that as casualties occurred, and the individual companies were whittled down, they remained as individual companies for administrative duties. Pay, rations, guard mount, picket duty, etc, still happened and each company remained it's own group.

HOWEVER, many federal, (and likely CS) units combined those companies into larger groups of, say, 4-6 companies when on the march and in battle. It made maneuvering easier for everyone, and the merged companies became stronger and more useful than 10 25-40 man companies.

Yes, everyone here has spelled it out. Basically take the diagram of the regiment in line of battle that d effinger has provided and turn everyone right or left (and doubling up). If marching by the right flank, the lieutentant colonel would position himself at rhe front of the column while the major was in the center near the colors. If marching by the left flank, the major would be in the lead and the LTC in the center. The colonel could move wherever he wanted. The music could be either at the head of the column or the rear. If the regiment is allowed to march at "route step" they are basically at ease, don't have to march in step, and can carry their weapon however they wish. The company captains will drop back to the rears of their company (to prevent straggling).

The 1,000-man regiments soon melted down to 400 or less, not so much from battle casualties as from diseases.

Thank you all for this helpful replies!

@ d efinger: Where is the diagram from (I can't read all clearly)?

@ okiegamer:
@ donlomry:
@ TKindred: Thanks for reminding the casualties. It's always a difference between theoretical things and what are the facts.
@ScottWashburn: Sounds quite logic and easy. It remembers me to a scene of the film "Gods and Generals". At the battle of Fredericksburg Jeff Daniels (as J. Chamberlain) reminds:

"It's not difficult to move from line of battle to a column of fours.
It's much harder to move from column of fours into line of battle, and if we're called to make that move it will be when we are under fire…"

Best wishes,

Michael

Well, as an uncredited technical adviser for "Gods and Generals" (I was there for one day of shooting and the director asked me how to get all his troops from one formation to another) I have to say that Jeff Daniels' quote isn't entirely accurate :) It depends on HOW you want your line of battle facing. If you are marching by the right flank and you want your line of battle facing to the left (that is, the same direction it was originally facing before you faced to the right and went into a column of fours) the command is: "Front!" and it takes about two seconds and you have your line of battle back (after the inevitable dressing of ranks). If you want the line of battle facing to the right of your column of fours, the command is "On the right, by file into line-March!" It's a fairly complicated maneuver, but one the troops practiced a lot. Doing it under fire would make it a lot more difficult. Forming the line of battle facing the same direction as the column of fours is facing is more complicated yet. In fact you can't do it directly. First you have to form a column of companies (By Company into Line-March!) and then from there you can deploy into line by a number of different manuevers.

In fact, there are multiple ways to do almost any formation change. The drill manual is a tool kit to allow the colonel to do almost anything with his men that the situation requires. It's really very elegant.

Good to hear some examples there Scott. While I feel guys on the Naps Board tend to tie themselves up in knots on drill matters at times it's important to remember it was as vital in 1865 as it was in 1805!

People like to play ACW at regimental level but few rules bother to give any feel for how regiments were actually moved around.

Trajanus, to instruct my reenactment officers I created a "Drill Matrix" which showed nearly all the possible permutations of going from one formation to the other with the proper command to give and references to where to find the maneuver in the manuals. It's proved very useful over the years. A friend who is both a gamer and a reenactor saw it and decided to try and use it as the basis for a set of ACW rules. Well, it worked, but after quite a bit of play testing decided it would only be attractive to fanatics. Your average player just wants to move his troops from here to there and get them facing in that direction. To actually figure out HOW to make it happen was too much work! :)

I guess the next question (for us fanatics) would be how many manoeuvres actually got used.

There's a famous British Napoleonic memoir called "Adventures with the Connaught Rangers" by Willam Grattan in which the author states that their Colonel, who was a well respected man in the Army, only ever drilled them in nine basic manoeuvres!

His idea being that these were the most useful and essential, so he beat them into the ground learning those few and it served them right through the war!

That's a good question. I've done a great deal of research to determine if the book formations were actually used in battle and after reading thousands of AARs in the Offical Records, I can confidently say, yes they were. Book formations are mentioned in reports from 1861 to 1865. However, that doesn't sccount for all the MANEUVERS. For example, just off the top of my head I can count no less than 24 different ways to go from a line of battle into a column of companies. How many of those 24 were actually used? Probably only a few. As a reenactment battalion commander I do just as the Colonel in your book did: concentrate on the most useful formations. But I also throw in some of the less used ones in our drills. Over the years we've done every single maneuver in Casey's School of the Battalion at least once. But a lot of those we have done ONLY once :)

@ScottWashburn, gosh now you wouldn't happen to have a few dusty copies of your Matrix around, would you? ;-) That sounds like a lovely piece of reference!

Well, I do have a PDF version of it. Send me your e-mail address and I can give it to you.

Concerning casualties:

Does anyone can give me the real strenghts of the regiments fighting at Antietam? I read, that the first division of the Yankees had only about 4000 men in about 17 regiments, means around 150 – 250 men per regiment.

Michl Mauser,

You could average it out that way, but the thing is that regimental strengths at Antietam were all over the place. The federal army had been engaged heavily since April and had suffered some tremendous casualties due to combat, disease, and the general rigours of campaign.

However, there were other units that had recently joined the army headed to Antietam who hadn't seen anything more strenuous than a road march.

Thus you find the 7th Maine with 181 men present for duty, while the 20th Maine shows up with about 700 in the ranks. Regiments within a brigade could vary as well, and some brigades were about the size of a fresh regiment.

The Iron brigade has 800 men total at Antietam, while Phelps' brigade (same division) shows only 425 men in 5 regiments. Over to Wainwright's brigade (again, same division) the poor 76th NYI reports only "40 files" present for duty. Yet, the Division (Doubleday's) reports 4300 present for duty, including the men of the 4 attached artillery batteries.

So that's just one division. Strengths are all over the place, from those "40 files" to 800+ men. The PITA is deciding how best to represent this game-wise. This is one of the reasons why I prefer brigades as the smallest unit on the table. I can have every brigade represented by a single large base (usually 120mm frontage by 8mm depth) and then use strength and discipline factors to represent the "fighting ability" of the brigade, rather than have to have 4-6 variable-sized units on the table for each brigade.

Others may have different perspectives on this, and that's fine by me. What suits me won't be everyone's cup of tea, and that's good because we all come to the table with different interpretations of ACW combat. Comparing those different viewpoints gives us all a better perspective on it.

The primary source you need is a digital copy of "The Official Records" also known as the OR's. These may be online, but you can purchase a set pretty inexpensively on CD's. Worthwhile to have as you can use the internal search engine to locate the various AAR's for each unit you are interested in and go from there.

Another handy book, OOP, but still available second hand from time to time is "Unit Organizations of the American Civil War" by Richard Zimmermann. It was published by RAFM many years ago, but is a nice comcise guide to how the units were organized, and gives a number of TOE's for various battles, along with strengths where available, and includes Antietam.

Hope this helps,

V/R

Wow, this brings back memories, wish I had a dollar every time I heard "by company into line"!