Posted on 07/31/2005 3:03:10 PM PDT by nickcarraway
PBS in our area, and maybe nation wide, carries a show, I think, called Battle for Britain. It covers many battles on British soil, one of which was this one.
The Scots were still in their sword and dagger mode while the Brits were a modern army with cannon and musket. The armies were just that, not small groups like L&C. The Scots had tried to surprise the Brits by maneuver in the night but ended up just getting worn out. They made a frontal attack which ended up a mess because of the lay of the land. The Scots depended on close combat, but the Brits had practiced reloading their muskets and could fire about three times as fast as they had in the previous battles they lost. Plus they developed a tactic of thrusting their bayonets to the right instead of ahead, which caught the Scots in their most vulnerable battle stance, behind their shield and under their armor. (Not many of those at L&C.)
The Scots never got an order to charge. They just got tired of taking cannon fire and attacked on their own, so it was a ragged attack with the right line going in before the left, which was also bogged down by swampy ground. The right broke through, but the Brits had a rear line in reserve and it closed around the Scots and directed fire into the group. They panicked and ran back toward the lines which caused even more confusion with the Scots, who broke and tried to flee. From there on it was butchery, including after the battle were the Brits killed the wounded.
There were earlier battles that had some resemblance to L&C, but only in the skirmishing before the battle. In essence, at L&C you had Brits fighting Brits (Army vs. militia) with basically the same tactics. Not so, here.
It was also, in the end, a good thing for Scotland as a whole. A lot of Lowland Protestant Scots fought alongside the Red Coats at Culloden. The end of feudal Scotland led the way to the flowering of Edinburgh and Glasgow as centers of learning, modern ideas of human freedom from people like Hume and Smith, and the replacement of mercantilism with the beginnings of modern capitalism. The Jacobites were colorful and heroic but they were defending an archaic system of tribal chiefdoms and a deposed king (James II) who did not deserve such devotion.
I'd say that is a spot on assessment there katana.
For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two oclock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is stll time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago....
William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust
Thanks for the ping. "Almost won" is a grim epitaph.
This story just goes to show that muskets and grape shot trump broadswords and dirks.
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