The Reports Come Home

Five clear frictions. Three detailed reports. The Army had six years before Fort Sumter to act on them.

The Reports Come Home

Delafield’s Report on the Art of War in Europe in 1854, 1855, and 1856 appeared in 1860. McClellan’s report came in 1857. Mordecai’s followed. Together they represented the most thorough assessment of modern warfare any American institution held.

The Army adopted the McClellan saddle. It drew on Mordecai’s ordnance data to adopt the M1857 Napoleon cannon — a lightweight 12-pounder that fired both artillery and howitzer shells. Some fortification doctrine reflected Delafield’s siege observations.

The rest waited.

Infantry tactics held to the old formations. The medical corps had no real structure. Cavalry doctrine clung to the saber charge. The Army was small, tradition-bound, and slow.

In Part 2, the war arrives — and comes to collect. First Bull Run. The three men’s fates. The Peninsula Campaign, Vicksburg, and the brutal process by which the Army finally learned what the Commission had already written down.

The Men Behind the Reports

The Delafield Commission is not a policy document. It is three men navigating a world on the edge of a different kind of war. Delafield, Mordecai, and McClellan belong to a
generation of West Point officers who shaped the Civil War from both sides of it.

That generation’s full story begins before Fort Sumter, in the classrooms and on the parade ground of a small military academy on the Hudson River.

Read Chapter One of Cadets to Captains and meet them before the war found them.
Start reading at tomfoconnor.com

Steel and Honor Press | Tom O’Connor ’73 Continue with Part 2: “When the War Came to Collect”

The original commission numbered five men. One who declined was Robert E. Lee. He later said he regretted it.

On April 11, 1855, the three officers sailed from Boston. Over the next several months they moved through the military establishments of Britain, Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, and Russia. The Russians refused to let them near the front. They pressed through Constantinople anyway. When they reached Balaclava on October 8, 1855, Sevastopol had already fallen. The siege had lasted eleven months and killed five hundred thousand men. The Commission walked the ruins.

Mordecai, characteristically blunt, called the entire journey a “ridiculous failure.”

He was wrong. But not entirely.

What the Ruins Said

Sevastopol did not fall to infantry assault. It fell to time, disease, and the collapse of Russian logistics. What the Commission found in the rubble told a clear story about what modern war had become.

The rifle changed the killing range. A smooth-bore musket was dangerous at eighty yards. The rifled musket with the Minié ball was lethal at four hundred. Infantry tactics still called for close-order formations — lines of men closing on the enemy the way they charged at Waterloo. The Commission documented the new geometry in detail. Every formation that advanced across open ground against a rifled line was walking into a different war than the one its tactics were designed for.

Earthworks had replaced stone walls. Delafield watched Russian earth fortifications absorb artillery rounds that would have shattered masonry. Earthen walls bent and could
be rebuilt overnight. They could extend for miles. His report said so plainly: “The earthwork is the fortification of the future.” He was right, as Petersburg would prove nine years later across nine and a half months of siege.

Logistics decides wars. British soldiers at Balaclava starved while supply ships sat idle in the harbor. The Commission traced the failure with precision. Supply chains, they
concluded, were as decisive as tactics. An army that could not feed itself could not fight.

Medical care could not wait for reform. Florence Nightingale cut British hospital mortality from forty percent to two percent by imposing sanitation and organization. The
Commission saw it. The model existed. It took a catastrophe to force its adoption.

Cavalry needed a new role. Two hundred and seventy-eight men died in minutes at Balaclava. McClellan studied the aftermath. Saber charges into rifle fire were finished.
Cavalry’s value lay in reconnaissance and speed, not shock. He wrote it down. He also found, in an Austrian depot, a saddle design that the U.S. Army would use until it stopped
using horses.

They Already Knew

The Delafield Commission, Part 1: Three Men, One Ruined City, and the Lessons That Came Home

On July 3, 1863, twelve thousand five hundred Confederate soldiers walked into a mile of open Pennsylvania farmland. Rifles met them at four hundred yards. More than half were
dead or wounded before the survivors reached the stone wall.

Every officer on that field knew the rifled musket’s range. They knew because three West Point officers had watched the same arithmetic play out at Sevastopol in 1855, written it down, and filed the reports when they came home. The Army shelved them. The men kept marching.

That gap is where this story begins.

An Assignment Born of Foresight

In the spring of 1855, Secretary of War Jefferson Davis sent a small commission to observe the Crimean War — the most modern conflict the world had yet seen. Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire fought Russia across a peninsula in the Black Sea. Davis wanted American eyes on it.

He chose three men. Major Richard Delafield, an engineer and valedictorian of the West Point Class of 1818, led the group. Major Alfred Mordecai, the nation’s foremost ordnance
expert, brought his eye for artillery and firearms. Captain George McClellan, the youngest of the three and the only one with combat experience, came with strong French and a cavalryman’s instincts.