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Item Code: 1179-1276
Early war volunteers were subject not only to the “school of the soldier,” as laid out in manuals, but also to classes for NCOs and officers, held in the regimental camps by night while daytime was devoted to drill and putting into practice the military principles all were striving to learn. This manual was authored in 1861 by Lt. William P. Craighill while an assistant professor of engineering at West Point. This is a nice copy, complete, published by Van Nostrand in New York with an 1862 date, bound in brown leather with the title gilt blindstamped on the cover, and the Van Nostrand name impressed at lower front, showing just some wear to the edges and spine with a short tear on the very top edge of the binding on the spine.
French military theory and practice was all the rage, as the high point of the military arts. As Craighill notes, the book is based on a French manual written for the staff corps with the idea that such an officer, “should be capable, among other things, of filling the place of almost any other officer of the army,” so the 314 numbered pages, with 26 figures, in a convenient pocket size, cover a wide variety of details on the proper procedures of the army, from duties of different officers, to administration and paperwork, to logistics, to practical principles of employing different branches of the armed forces, marching, camping, establishing outposts, sending out patrols of differing numbers men, and the nitty-gritty of constructing field works and fortifications, etc., so it is not all higher-echelon material. A quick look at the titles of the figures shows they range from “Method of breaking infantry square with cavalry” to construction of a “kneading trough” in a section on cooking in the field. The book does not have a table of contents, but uses a detailed index in the back for easy reference, which must have come in handy for an officer expected to be a jack-of-all-trades.
This is a key manual to have in an officer’s display or in studying the inner workings of the army. Naturally, many of its objects were likely more aspired to than attained, but it is still a key piece in understanding the Civil War military. [sr] [ph:L]
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