The civil war known as the first great war of the industrial age. The industrialization is shown in that the civil war had several new guns and weapons such as Torpedoes and the first ship was sunk by a submarine. The Civil War has been understood as a war between an industrial power, the north and a largely pre industrial society, the south. Before the industrial revolution western armies were always beating non-western armies. Historians often call the American Civil War the first modern war. Several of the new weapons and tactics went against the fundamental conceptions of what constituted proper conduct of war and it made change difficult and unsettling. Military conditions were in constant movement during the industrial age as new weapons were made, transportation and communication were improved and so were the tactics to the war.
The early part of the nineteenth century from 1815 to 1848 saw a long period of peace in Europe with a lot of industrial expansion. At the beginning of the American Civil war both north and south scrambled to get/make powerful armies to support their problems. The military leaders on both sides all shared the same military training as well as the basic meaning of how an army should be built and how a war should be fought. The military training as well as the tactics of the civil war was aimed towards imitating the grand armies created by Napoleon.
The campaigns of Napoleon formed the bases of formal military education throughout the western world. At the beginning or start of the civil war the existing belief of military warfare was about to become old/out of date. The old lessons of warfare had to be re-written by the American Generals serving in the American Civil War. War began to take a new turn. Old world tactics and training were inefficient due to modern weapons.
