Was the Civil War the first modern war

What was the first modern war? It depends who you ask. The Crimean War, American Civil War and Franco-Prussian War have all at various times been put forth as contenders. Yet, most contemporary conflict is fought outside the Western Hemisphere. If one is to include the history of Africa and Asia, then the British expedition in Abyssinia (generally present-day Ethiopia) is as good a candidate as any. Volker Matthies argues that the 1867–1868 conflict, which began with a British invasion aimed at freeing hostages held by Emperor Tewodros II, was the first humanitarian intervention in the modern sense of the term.

Just as the carnage at Cold Harbor in 1864 and at the Sedan in 1870 foreshadowed greater bloodshed at the Somme in 1916, this Victorian “Little War” has much in common with conflict today. There were war correspondents, railway lines, and modern weaponry (though supported by some 30,000 elephants, horses, and mules). The main difference between that intervention and humanitarian interventions of today was its scale: The British expeditionary force was comprised of 60,000 men; in the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada, less than 8,000 forces were put ashore.

Despite the large force there was no impetus to occupy the country—romantic notions of Abyssinia as the last Christian kingdom made an outright occupation distasteful. The conflict started when Tewodros took a number of diplomats, European citizens, and their servants hostage. He did so to use the captives as bargaining chips in a diplomatic dispute with the British Empire. The most notable among the British citizens was Hormuzd Rassam, a Mosul-born Assyrian well known for his important role in the discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

For its diplomatic misunderstandings, logistics, and the colorful anti-war movement it generated, the conflict is worth studying. The Battle of Magadala is little known outside of Ethiopia (and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom). Matthies has thus done modern-day observers of conflict a great service with his superb work, The Siege of Magdala: The British Empire Against the Emperor of Ethiopia.

Kudos should be given to Matthies for this short (234 pages) yet comprehensive account, which draws on previously untapped sources (mostly German) to provide a complete picture of the campaign.

Whereas narratives that extend beyond the perspective of the European combatants in wars of the nineteenth century are unfortunately rare, the Ethiopian side is covered as much as possible in Matthies’ work. The author has done a remarkable job weaving political, military, logistical, and journalistic angles into a complete history. The book is made easier to read by ample use of sidebars where the writer spends several hundred words describing important side-topics.

As the Italians would learn in 1930s, and the Allies in the Second World War, warfare in the Horn of Africa is a quartermaster’s war. The British were fully up to this task. Deploying with massive numbers of animals, and even building a short railway, the expeditionary force built the infrastructure necessary to support a large army marching into the interior of Ethiopia for Magdala, the mountain fortress that Teowdros occupied and was far from the Red Sea coast.

The battle included relatively little actual fighting. Tewodros failed to use the terrain to his advantage, like a number of his modern-day dictatorial counterparts—Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War, for example, and Idi Amin during the Uganda—Tanzania War. In both of these cases military power was largely aimed at solidifying political control, not at winning battles. Tewodros also used modern weaponry poorly. He had a large modern mortar that cracked when he tried to use it (a replica of which is located today in downtown Addis Abba.) If Tewodros had divided his forces and waged guerrilla warfare on the British supply lines, the conflict could have been extended, sapping at least some British will to continue the fight. In the end, as the British forces close in on Magdala, Tewodros apparently shot himself.

A curious, unresolved postscript to the conflict is the fate of period artifacts seized by the British. Following the capture of Magdala, British soldiers looted the place of its royal treasury. A group known as AFROMET has advocated the return of treasures. Yet, most of the items remain house firmly in the British Museum in London, an enduring remnant of this first modern war.

It was the American Civil War that really foreshadowed the industrial era and European military observers knew it.

by Peter Suciu

It was one of the bloodiest conflicts of the era, and arguably the first “modern war.” It saw a wave of new innovations including modernized warships, the use of aerial observation, more rapid firing small arms and even submarines. If this sounds like the First World War that would be incorrect.

The American Civil War was truly the first modern war and a plethora of new advances were introduced and changed warfare forever.

The Telegraph and Railroad

Prior to the Civil War communications could take days, even weeks to travel only few hundred miles, but that began to change as the telegraph provided vital tactical, operational and strategic communications. Its use has been credited as a contributor to the Union victory. During the war the  (USMT) handed some 6.5 million messages and laid some 15,000 miles of telegraph lines.

Likewise, the American Civil War was the first conflict in which railroads also provide to be a major factor. In the years leading up to the war, the Northern states laid around 22,000 miles while the South had laid 9,500 miles. The use of railroads on both sides became critically important in transporting men and material.

Iron Ships and Submarines

While the European powers—notably France the United Kingdom—had developed modern naval warships or so-called “ironclads” before the outbreak of the Civil War, it was in the waters off the coast of Virginia where the warships first engaged in combat. After the Civil War, naval warfare never went back to wooden sailing ships and the latter half of the nineteenth-century saw a naval arms race as ships became larger and more heavily armed.

The War Between the States also saw one of the first successful uses of a submarine. The CSN Hunley was essentially an iron tomb for the eight man crew, but it became the first submarine to successfully sink an enemy warship when it was used to successfully deploy a mine on the USS Housatonic.

Rapid Fire Weapons

It is correct that the First World War was the first large scale conflict to see the use of machine guns, but it was the Civil War some fifty years earlier that introduced modern firearms. Muzzle loading firearms gave way to breach-loading repeating rifles, while the Gatling Gun was employed in small numbers.

Fifty years before the Civil War, armies fought with weapons little improved from those employed for well over a century. But fifty years after the Civil War, rapid fire machines changed the concept of war. It was on the terrible and bloody battlefields of conflict that a small arms revolution took place.

Aerial Observation

The American Civil War was fought four decades before the Wright Brothers successfully conducted the first powered flight, but the war is notable for the use of observation balloons, which allowed both sides to monitor enemy troop movements and to direct artillery fire. U.S. Army aviation can also trace its origins back to those hydrogen-filled balloons.

Moreover, both sides had reportedly considered powered flying machines—precursors to the airplane. Nothing came of these efforts, but it is clear that even before the word “airplane” entered in the vernacular forward thinking military planners were already considering how such a weapon could be employed.

Photography

Photographic images of earlier conflicts exist, notably the Crimean War, but it was the American Civil War that is considered to be the first major conflict to be so extensively photographed. Studio owner Mathew Brady is usually credited with most of the photographs taken, but it was Alexander Gardner and his team—working for Brady—who actually took most of the photos.

The use of photographs chronicled the conflict in a way unlike any prior conflict. It allowed a greater understanding of what it was actually like in the field. While painters still traveled along with the armies, few paintings of any battle had shown the bloated corpses or the other horrors of war that photographs provided.

Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer who has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers and websites. He regularly writes about military small arms, and is the author of several books on military headgear including A Gallery of Military Headdress, which is available on Amazon.com.

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