Battle Tactics of the American Civil War reappraises the events, the weapons used, the men of the novice armies, their leaders and the strategies employed in the Civil War - which was fought with a new generation of weapons and trench systems similar to those of World War One. The author argues that the conditions of combat were little changed from those of earlier times and far from being the birthplace of modern battlefield tactics, the Civil War was in reality the last Napoleonic-style war. The book is rich in description and analysis and Griffith's wide knowledge of military history brings alive a real feeling of how the nineteenth-century battle worked.