JW: The average infantry unit would drill, weather permitting, four hours a day, every day, because the drill was so complex. Did these guys back in the day really have all that stuff down pat? I mean, you’ve got three hundred pages devoted exclusively to complex formation drilling. GO: I picked one up at First Manassas and thumbed through it. Although he was probably less polite than that. So I can understand where Jackson would be saying, on the march, you know, get down and walk. But they had the horses to spare where the Confederates didn’t. The Confederate artillery teams almost exclusively had four horse hitches, whereas the Union artillery had six, which gave them a little better mobility and speed over the ground. And the Confederates, being short of horses, had to take care of them to the greatest extent that they could. But on the march, they would walk, because it reduced the load on the horses. JW: Well, it would depend…on the battlefield, riding on the limbers, they could get where they were going in a hurry. So I was playing around with the artillery in Scourge of War, and I see three guys get up and sit on the limber as I’m moving it around, and was wondering if the Jackson story was apocryphal, or is that a level of detail you’re not as concerned with modeling here? GO: They ran a demonstration of artillery canon fire at Second Manassas, over by Brawner’s Farm, and one of the things they talked about was that Jackson had a sort of philosophy where if he ever caught any of the guys riding on the limbers, he’d have them shot.
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