I think he is really over simplifying things to the point it is difficult to argue with him too much. He doesn't really cite any specific battles where he thinks a bayonet charge would have been useful, or compare the number of charges in the European wars vs the Civil War and so on.

I'll give it a shot though. In general, it seems like he is completely ignoring a huge amount of charges and assaults that took place during the American Civil War because they are not explicitly "Bayonet Charges" or exactly mirror the many smaller bayonet charges of the Napoleonic Wars. For example, at Gaines' Mill in 1862, almost 32,000 soldiers in 16 brigades assaulted Union defensive positions and drove them off in what was the largest assault of the war. Not coincidentally, it was one of the deadliest battles of the war with over 15,000 casualties.

This would be a common theme that Civil War generals were wise too. An assault could prove timely, but were tricky. Poorly timed assaults could cost you everything, while a successful one only had a chance of succeeding. Its a careful cost/benefit analysis. The improvements in rifles and accurate and fast loading Minie balls made a poorly timed charge suicide. This is the same reason there were so few cavalry charges. Accurate and fast fire from soldiers and artillery was withering by the 1860s.

Pickett's Charge, just a year or so later, is a great example of when a poorly timed assault can go wrong. Of the 12,500 men who charged the Union lines, over half became casualties, with officers suffering even worse. There are plenty of accounts of other charges suffering similar fates. Just look at Cold Harbor, or the Battle of the Crater, or Bentonville where poorly timed charges resulted in literal massacres.

But don't think that Civil War leaders avoided ordering charges or that soldiers were afraid of charging. Just look at the battles at Little Roundtop at Gettysburg, Longstreet's 20,000 man charge at Chickamauga, the massive charges and counter-charges at Spotsylvania, or when three cavalry divisions successfully charged at Third Winchester. There are countless more examples of tens of thousands of men charging into well fortified positions backed that were up by artillery and succeeding.

In most of the latter cases there is a common theme, they are massive charges. This was necessary to weather the blistering fire and dislodge the fortifications and artillery and still have the momentum to drive enough opposing men to be worth the effort. An unsupported charge that only drives off one or two regiments who can regroup later may only result in the charger being surrounded and cut apart. The charges had to be large enough to matter in the context of the massive battles of the American Civil War. The reality was that the bayonet charge which might involve a few regiments did not really go away, it had evolved into huge operations using ten or more brigades and in some cases even whole armies.

I don't know enough about the Napoleonic Wars to say much more, but I feel like he is vastly overstating the number and effectiveness of bayonet charges as well. They were there, and they happened, but the same rules applied as they did in the American Civil War. They need to be meaningful and well timed or else it can result in your ruin.

Is LindyBeige a legitimate historian?

It is a common observation among generals at the time (Robert E. Lee, William T. Sherman, and John Bell Hood among others) that it was better to charge home with the bayonet than to stand and exchange fire. A bayonet charge would force an issue and reduce casualties by making the fighting as short as possible. To see this articulated by Hood in particular with the following general order (General Field Orders No. 7, HDQRS. Army of Tennessee, O.R. 38, part 5, 909 here: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924079597013;view=1up;seq=911)

"SOLDIERS: Experience has proved to you that safety in time of battle consists of getting into close quarters with your enemy. [Emphasis mine] Guns and colors are the only unerring indications of victory. The valor of troops is easily estimated, too, by the number of these secured. If your enemy is allowed to continue the operation of flanking you out of position, our cause is in great peril. Your recent brilliant success proves the ability to prevent it. You have but to will it, and God will grant us the victory your commanders and country expect.

	J.B. Hood, General" 

However, I take issue with the idea that American Civil War was bloodier or had higher casualties than contemporary or even earlier European conflicts, which saw much more use of bayonets and even much more close-combat oriented weapons such as pikes. In his excellent thesis, The Rifle Musket in Civil War Combat: Reality and Myth, Earl J. Hess has several charts breaking down casualty rates by percentage between American Civil War battles and European battles. These are tables 8.1 and 8.2 on pages 199-200, respectively.

The bloodiest battle of the American Civil War was Gettysburg. At Gettysburg, the Confederate army took a 30.2% casualty rate, while the Federal army took a casualty rate of 21.2%. For comparison, Blenheim, more than a 100 years earlier, saw a 33.3% casualty rate for the French and 23.2% for the Alliance forces. That is a pretty similar casualty rate. By rates, Waterloo was even bloodier, with a 61.1% French casualty versus an Allied rate of 32.3%. It can be argued that in some ways the American Civil War was less bloody than its Napoleonic predecessors.

Short(ish) Answer:

Note: Long(er) answer here

Why were Union and Confederate generals hesitant to use the bayonet?

They weren’t hesitant to use the bayonet, per se. It’s just that the bayonet was a tool, just like the musket. Sometimes, the bayonet was thought to be the best tool to use, like Emory Upton’s massed assault on the Mule Shoe in 1864. In other cases, charges were spontaneous affairs, like the chaotic assault up Missionary Ridge in 1863.

Another point, obviously there were bayonet charges in the American Civil War. However, they seem to be mainly desperate attempts to turn the tide of a battle, not attempts to press the advantage. See Pickett's Charge.

Bayonet charges (or other assaults that had some bayonet fighting) happened for many different reasons. Some assaults were quite large and involved 20,000+ men, while others involved a few dozen or a few hundred.

Most commonly, charges were launched to dislodge an enemy from fortifications or strong defensive positions. Since standing in an open field while getting shot at from a trench was a bad deal, getting stuck in could be a better option. Some of these assaults failed, with bloody results. The frontal assaults on Cold Harbor in 1864 cost Grant nearly 13,000 men, something he bitterly regretted the rest of his life. In 1864, a Maine regiment charged Confederate breastworks at Petersburg, losing 115 killed and 489 wounded, nearly 67% losses. In other cases, charges worked. In 1864 another assault near Petersbug by Horatio Wright’s VII Corps would fair much better, rolling over Confederate lines and leading to the fall of Petersburg and Richmond. There are several other examples of successful large-scale attacks.

Bayonet charges could also be launched to buy time. During the Second Day at Gettysburg, the 1st Minnesota was ordered to counter-attack advancing Confederate troops to let Hancock’s II corps re-organized. The Minnesotans charged across an open field and never made it to Rebel lines. They lost 215 men in just five minutes, an 82% loss rate. Only 47 men made it back to friendly lines, having bought precious minutes for the Union.

In other cases, bayonet attacks happened when units simply ran out of ammunition. Its ammunition gone by the end of the Second Day at Gettysburg, part of 137th New York covered the retreat of its comrades by launching a bayonet charge in the dying light. Earlier in the day, on the other end of the battlefield, the 20th Maine had launched its own famous charge down the Little Round Top.

With all that said, actual bayonet-on-bayonet fighters were pretty rare. Much like the Napoleonic Wars, bayonets and swords accounted for relatively few Civil War battlefield deaths and injuries. Union surgeons treated about 250,000 men for bullet and shrapnel wounds, compared to just 1,000 men treated for bayonet and saber wounds.

LindyBeige, amongst others, has made the assertion that high casualties in the American Civil War were, in part, due to unwillingness on both sides to use the bayonet to press advantages. Is this a valid claim?

…his idea is that once one side had a significant advantage, they should equip bayonets and charge the enemy who in turn would route. This minimizes casualties since it minimizes the time spent standing in lines shooting at each other.

So Lloyd makes the contention that “bayonets save lives,” because soldiers run away when charged, whereas soldiers who shoot it out with muskets fight a longer, bloodier battle.

To some extent, this is true. Many bayonet charges never lead to a clash of cold steel, because one side broke and ran before the attack could be driven home. Either the attackers were routed by gunfire or the defenders lost their nerve and booked it. In the rare cases where bayonet-on-bayonet combat did occur, it was usually during battles for villages, woods, or fortifications.

Lloyd then claims that the Civil War was bloodier because Johnny Yank and Billy Reb shot at each other, rather than charging in cold steel to break the enemy. This is just flat-out wrong. It’s based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how bayonets were used during the Napoleonic Wars and how Civil War infantry combat actually worked (my upcoming Long Answer has more on this).

Aggressively using the bayonet more often during the Civil War would not have lowered casualty rates. Instead, more bayonet use would have resulted in higher casualty rates.

Consider the shift in technology that happened between the two wars. Napoleonic troops facing smoothbore muskets had to cross 50-100 yards to ground to press home a bayonet attack after exchanging volleys. After about 50 meters, a smoothbore musket’s ball became “spent” and considerably less-deadly, so wounded men had a good chance of returning to action (see page 72).

On the other hand, Civil War troops facing longer-ranged, more accurate rifled muskets had to cross a “deadly ground” of around 150-200 yards, which gave their opponents more time to fire. Their conical Minié bullets flew faster and hit harder. Compared to older musket balls, these new bullets inflicted much more severe wounds to bone and flesh (warning: NFSW photos). Charges across open ground could be (and often were) torn to shreds by multiple volleys.

As for the point about saving lives, a few things come to mind. When looking at death tolls, it’s important to note that during the Napoleonic Wars and the Civil War, germs killed more men than bullets. Nevertheless, the Minié ball and the rifled musket were certainly more lethal than the musket ball and the Brown Bess. Paradoxically, deadlier weapons don’t always lead to deadlier battles, however. Trevor DePuy points out that the Napoleonic Wars and the Civil War had nearly identical daily battle casualty rates per day: about 15% for the winning side and about 20% for the losing side. You can see this graphic for a visualization.

If Lloyd’s contentions that “bayonets save lives” and that the Civil War needed more cold steel were correct, then you’d expect the bayonet-rich Napoleonic Wars to have a far lower death rate than the bayonet-poor Civil War. But that isn’t what the data shows.

Let's start from the beginning, and work our way to your specific question.

Why was the American Civil War so deadly?

First and foremost, the number one killer during the war was disease. Armies were composed from a great many men, drawn from widely separated regions across the country, deployed in distant theaters, and kept in close confines of questionable sanitation and safety. There is no better environment for the spread of disease; attrition to sickness can for the most part be considered a given.

With this in mind, the most important factor setting the American Civil War apart from previous American wars the sheer number of men mobilized; in rough terms, the total exceeds three million. Year-round, the US and Confederacy maintained at least 800,000 men under arms, and the war continued for four years. Not only did this naturally increase the scale of the disease problem, but indeed battle casualties were higher, as more men were fighting and trying to kill each other.

The question then is first, why were so many men mobilized, and second, why did the war last as long as it did? An important place to start with both questions is the strategic objectives of the two combatants. The United States pursued nothing less than the total conquest and reintegration of the Confederacy into the Union; after Jan 1 1863, this was extended to dismantling the system of slavery that was the very bedrock of Southern society. As an extension of this, Southerners feared the threatened end of slavery would mean the end of their preeminence altogether; not only would slaves be free, but would be their equals or even their masters. It should not be hard to see why the South fought with such determination for such a monstrous system.

On the other hand, the US felt the Confederacy to be an existential threat as well. The Confederate attempt at secession threatened the legal and ideological foundation of the United States; the US Constitution requires that a republican form of government be maintained, and this would be impossible if legitimate elections could be disregarded at will by dissident states. This isn't often well understood, as our narratives tend to concentrate on emancipation or abolition as the chief motivation behind the Union war effort. Moreover, many of us have lost what the Union and republican government meant to the men who fought for it. This came up in conversation with another flair here, so I'll quote my response there.

Lincoln on July 4 1861 called it,

that form, and substance of government, whose leading object is, to elevate the condition of men—to lift artificial weights from all shoulders—to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all—to afford all, an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.

It was a duty of filial piety to maintain this form of government, which their forefathers had created in the shared national struggle of the American Revolution. Whereas in contemporary societies in Russia, Germany, and England retained ossified systems of subordination and deference, the Americans believed themselves masters of their own destiny because of this government, this Union their fathers had handed down.

Following the failure of the 1848 Revolutions, there was a linked sentiment that republican government was on the back foot; they felt that the cause of posterity as well demanded they fight to preserve the Union. If a contentious election was enough to tear the nation apart into a horrific civil war, it would be seen as a failure of republican government for all nations. Quoting the Gettysburg address is almost trite, but it's worth recognizing that this 90 second speech makes two references to the war in a global context,

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

and

that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

In war, the value of the objective determines the sacrifice that can be borne; to many Americans, the Union and all that it represented was worth sacrifice without end.

That only gets us part of the way there, though. While the American people were willing to give everything to preserve the Union, we still have to ask how the price became so high. After all, the US was far more powerful than the Confederacy, with more than twice the population and vastly greater industrial resources. Why were they not simply crushed in the first battle and wholly overrun? The Confederate capital in Richmond, their chief rail hub and industrial center, was not more than a hundred miles from Washington; such a campaign wouldn't have been beyond the logistical abilities of a medieval state, much less a modern nation with railroads, telegraphs, and steamships.

Ideally, the Union would have been able to call on a large, disciplined, and loyal regular army that would easily overpower anything the rebellion could scrape together on short notice. The problem was that the US in 1861 barely had an army. Its 16,000 or so men (in an age where half a million was none too many for a power of its size and wealth) were widely scattered in frontier garrisons in the west, and not immediately available for aggressive action against the Confederates. As such, the US needed to mobilize a new army essentially from scratch. While the army could have cannibalized the pre-war regulars for cadre to speed up the mobilization and training of new formations, this was not done. As a result, following the poor performance of the 90 day volunteers at 1st Bull Run, the rest of 1861 passed without general engagements between the core armies of either side. As such, many thousands died of disease and minor actions before a general engagement between the combatants' main armies had even taken place.

Long(er) Answer:

Here’s the key contention:

LindyBeige, amongst others, has made the assertion that high casualties in the American Civil War were, in part, due to unwillingness on both sides to use the bayonet to press advantages … his idea is that once one side had a significant advantage, they should equip bayonets and charge the enemy who in turn would route. This minimizes casualties since it minimizes the time spent standing in lines shooting at each other.

There’s quite a lot going on here, so let’s unpack it.

1. Is it true the bayonet was used more before 1860 and less afterwards? Why?
2. Is his characterization of the Napoleonic Wars and other 18th century wars as bayonet-rich conflicts accurate? When was the bayonet supposed to be used by a European army c.1800?
3. Is his characterization of the Civil War and other post-1860 wars as bayonet-poor conflicts accurate? Were senior officers reluctant to use the bayonet on a large scale? Were more junior officers reluctant to use bayonets on a small scale? When were bayonet charges used?
4. Which wars were deadlier? The Napoleonic Wars or the American Civil War?
5. Were bayonet charges a really a “cheaper” way to win Civil War battles?
6. Why was the American Civil War so deadly?

As we look at all this, it become pretty clear he's right about a few points (people tended to run away rather than get stabbed) and badly-mistaken about some other things (why Civil War combat was deadly, the relative casualty rates between both wars, etc.).

Point 1: Is it true the bayonet was used more before 1860 and less afterwards? Why? Yes. As John Stone notes in his piece “The Point of the Bayonet:”

Statistics on the proportion of casualties attributable to bayonet fighting attest to a rapid decline in frequency from the mid-nineteenth century on. Previously, the bayonet had proved an important killer. According to one source, it was responsible (along with sabers--the cavalry's weapon of choice) for some 15-20 percent of battlefield casualties during the period of 1800 to 1850. And then suddenly, its contribution in this regard fell off dramatically. After 1860 saber and bayonet casualties dropped to between just 4 to 6 percent of the total [Note: he cites Trevor Dupuy’s Understanding War for these figures].

Why does this happen? I think the answer is simple: firepower. In the case of the American Civil War, the rifled musket made bayonet charges across open ground very difficult (see Point 5 for more). The Franco-Austrian War of 1859 showed men could charge rifles and win, but often at great cost.

The arrival of breech-loading rifle made frontal bayonet charges even more risky. On 3 July, 1864 a company of 180 Danish infantrymen charged a firing line of 75 Prussian soldiers outside the small town of Lundby. The Prussians fired their Dreyse needle guns when the Danes were just 200 yards away. The Danes dropped and wavered, then kept coming. The Prussians quickly reloaded and got off a second volley, this one from 150 yards. Despite more volleys, the Danes got within 25 yards, fired off a few shots and fell back. All in all, the Prussians and their Dreyse needle guns had fired off 6,000 rounds in just 20 minutes. Paul Lockhart writes about the aftermath of Lundby in “The Gun That Should Have Changed Everything”:

For the Danes, the skirmish at Lundby had been an absolute slaughter. Thirty-one men had been killed outright. Another 44 were wounded, and 2 officers and 37 men were taken to Hobro as prisoners; one of those officers died of his wounds a month later. Hammerich’s company had, in short, lost more than 50 percent of its strength in a scuffle that lasted less than 20 minutes. The Prussians, by contrast, suffered three men lightly wounded.

Although the bayonet didn’t disappear from Western warfare after 1860, it was used less and less often in actual combat.