Civil War Field Fortifications
A Glossary of Terms Applied to Civil War Field Fortifications
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An Introductory Essay on Terminology
It really doesn't take very much research to realize that the terminology applied to field fortifications during the Civil War was, to say the least, inexact. Large numbers of poorly informed individuals were rather suddenly exposed to engineers' jargon without much more than a hint at what the terms meant or how they could be used in an adequately descriptive manner. In not a few cases the terminology appropriate to permanent fortifications was applied more or less at random and inaccurately to field works, in many more cases inexact terminology was carried full bodied from civilian life and used in its unimproved state.
In reading after actions reports, diaries, memoirs, and the like, one has to be both alert and just as creative as the material's author to be able to interpret meaning from misplaced terminology. When an officer mentions in his after action report that his troops attacked the enemy's "ramparts" and a permanent fortification with a real rampart was nowhere near the battleground, then it is a pretty simple thing to read the author's meaning: rampart meant parapet. While one would be hard pressed to find the term "moat" in any nineteenth century engineering manuals, it was, and still is, one of the more common substitutions for "ditch." One officer whose troops participated in the Federal attack on the Third Louisiana Redan at Vicksburg following the first mine explosion on June 25, 1863 wrote in his after action report that his troops moved up through the "gap" that lead to the crater, but that he had to halt most of his troops in the "gap" and send them forward in small groups into the crater. Wouldn't the crater itself be the gap? The context of the report makes it clear that the officer's "gap" was everyone else's "sap." When an artillerist who survived the destruction of the garrison of Fort Pillow in April, 1864 reported that the artillery was firing through "port holes" in the field work, the sense of the thing is clear whether his terminology was appropriate or not.
Too strict a demand for adherence to appropriate terminology in the sources would be self-defeating, and rather on the stuffy side at that. But it is important to know the difference between a "moat" and a "ditch," or a "port hole" and an "embrasure." Simply because terminology was misapplied doesn't mean that it should be misapplied. If many civil war soldiers used the terms "breast height," "breastwork," and "rifle pit" as though they were one in the same thing , that doesn't mean that the practice has to be repeated. It is, in fact, absolutely necessary to understand the proper application of terms in their nineteenth century context to be able to understand what and how Civil War soldiers thought about the practical application of field fortifications. A breastwork and a rifle pit, to carry on with the example, had about the same effect for an individual under enemy fire; under that circumstance the niceties of engineers' jargon tended to lose meaning rapidly. But just as important from an historical point of view, at some point an engineer made the decision to construct a breastwork rather than a rifle pit and knowing the characteristics of the two things can suggest the course of the engineer's thinking and purpose and illuminate how he applied his understanding of the design and use of field fortifications to a specific location. In other words, specific types of field works had specific purposes and knowing the difference between them and expressing that knowledge through the proper application of terminology can help explain why Civil War soldiers did things as they did and not in some other way.
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