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  • Astride Two Worlds: Technology and the American Civil War ed. by Barton C. Hacker
  • Bart Talbert
Astride Two Worlds: Technology and the American Civil War. Edited by Barton C. Hacker. ( Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2016. Pp. vi, 262. $37.95, ISBN 978-1-935623-91-5.)

Barton C. Hacker's edited collection Astride Two Worlds: Technology and the American Civil War investigates how industrialization and technology affected "the course and conduct of the Civil War" (p. v). The contributors maintain the war "straddled two ages" in a technological sense, foreshadowing 1914's "scope and deadliness," field fortifications, and capacity to field larger armies while retaining a Napoleonic use of animals for logistics, smoothbore guns for firepower, and other older methods (pp. v, vi). The work seeks to show that though there were "more failures than successes," innovators used a "systematic empiricism" to harness new ideas and weapons to support the war effort, and the technological novelties of the antebellum and war years helped the United States become a leading world industrial power during the last quarter of the nineteenth century (pp. vi, 13).

Hacker's excellent bibliographical overview, "How Technology Shaped the Conduct of War," is followed by four chapters that make up Part 1, "Technological Realities," which studies the varying improvements to Napoleonic-era systems and the new inventions. The four chapters of Part 2, "Technological Dreams," review how decision makers failed to implement new ideas due to a lack of acceptance and technical knowledge. The authors rely heavily on the latest secondary works on technology and industrialization during the Civil War era, contemporary technical reports, government documents, periodicals like Scientific American, standard memoirs, and battle histories.

Merritt Roe Smith's "Yankee Armorers and the Union War Machine" and Steven A. Walton's "Heavy Artillery Transformed" detail how the Civil War was a critical juncture in the emergence of modern America while also showing that the changes had been underway for decades. Smith describes how the United States Armory at Springfield, Massachusetts, coordinated the efforts of over thirty private firms, like the Colt Company and the Sharps Rifle Company, in a process that was a "complex tapestry of innovation, cooperation, and diffusion" that spread to related industries and propelled "the nation toward much more active engagement in world affairs" (pp. 29, 49). Finally, Smith maintains that technical and logistical advances were major reasons why the North won the war; the South, despite all its military qualities, was simply "'worn down'" (p. 49).

In "Information Flows and Field Armies," Seymour E. Goodman assesses information flows within larger armies and to distant command centers. He finds that innovations like binoculars and photography aided older methods of sight on inner tactical levels, and telegraphs and railroads aided external flows, though the latter could lead to information overload. As usual, we find that the North held a great advantage; for instance, it constructed thousands of miles of new telegraph lines during the war while the South struggled to maintain its original infrastructure. In "Veterinary Care in the Union Cavalry," David J. Gerleman finds that the Union spent $100 million to purchase and maintain more than 800,000 horses, but the government's ability to preserve the horses' health was sorely lacking. Contrasting the great strides made in human care, [End Page 470] Gerleman notes that the army spent only $9,000 a month on average for veterinarians and medicine but spent huge sums ($180,000 a month) on one of the many depots that rehabilitated only 50–60 percent of its horses. Trained veterinarians were available, but the problem was that no law, in spite of many protests from within and outside the army, provided the commissioned officer status and pay that could attract them.

Part 2 opens with Jorit Wintjes's study of Confederate efforts to counter the Union navy's powerful ships by developing low-cost but lethal spar-torpedo boats. He finds that though there were tactical successes, the Confederacy could not produce enough technologically proficient vessels, provide qualified personnel, and operate the few boats they created due to an "insufficient industrial base" (p. 151). He also shows that lessons learned in the war led...

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