There was, on the part of the men, great hysterical excitement, eagerness to go forward and a reckless disregard of life, of every thing but victory.
Major Rufus R. Dawes

There is a military dictum that says generals are always fighting the previous war. This was probably never more true than with the American Civil War. For years armies advanced and fought in solid, tightly packed formations. This brought to bear the full weight of volley fire from the smooth bore muskets of the rank and file. Only now such Napoleonic formations became better targets than fighting columns. During the Civil War most soldiers were equipped with a rifled musket firing a conical shaped bullet resulting in a long-range, accurate and deadly fusillade. In the open field and pasture of the American farmland, men were cut down by the dozens. However, some lucky few would find sanctuary behind the fieldstone walls that often designated property’s end.
...Rock picking is every farmer’s springtime misery. During the winter as the earth freezes and thaws, rocks rise to the surface of the fields; they must be removed before plowing can proceed. Stacked at the edges of the fields, they are the raw material for stone walls. A great amount of human strength went into the building of these walls. Each stone wall was prepared by a trench a foot wider than the top stones, and two feet deep for the foundation. These stone walls would not be standing today if not for these underground bases. A good stone wall is said to last a couple of hundred years, and if a soldier had enough ammunition he could hold out there for nearly as long. As good as any prepared defense, these walls played an integral role in many of the war’s greatest battles.
...At the Battle of Fredericksburg, Lee deployed approximately 20,000 men on his left flank, on the ridge known as Marye’s Heights, behind a stone wall at the crest of the ridge. The initial assaults on this position began at 11 a.m. with the Union Brigadier General French’s men facing a steep- banked drainage ditch and a wide, open plain of 400 yards, dominated by Confederate infantry and artillery behind a sunken road and stone wall. Earlier, Longstreet had been assured by artillerist Edward Porter Alexander, “A chicken could not live on that field when we open on it.” The Federals attacking had to file in columns over two small bridges across the drainage ditch, making them a massed target. After French’s division was repulsed with heavy losses, Burnside sent in the divisions of Hancock and Howard, which met a similar fate. By this time, Pickett’s division and one of Hood’s brigades had marched north to reinforce Marye’s Heights. Griffin’s division renewed the attack at 3:30 p.m., followed by Humphrey’s division at 4 p.m.; in all six Union divisions had been sent in, generally one brigade at a time, for a total of sixteen individual charges, all of which failed, costing them from 6,000 to 8,000 casualties. The action at the wall also included the charge of the Irish Brigade, which lost 50% of its strength but advanced further up the heights than any other Union Brigade.
...A year later at the Battle of Gettysburg, the Rebels met a similar fate. On the third day of battle about 12,500 men marched deliberately in line against the Union positions in an action that became infamously known as “Pickett’s Charge.” The entire force consisted of nine brigades of men stretching over a mile-long front. The Confederates encountered heavy artillery fire while advancing across open fields nearly a mile to reach the Union line. The ground between the two armies is slightly undulating, and the advancing troops periodically disappeared from the view of the Union cannoneers. As the three Confederate divisions advanced, awaiting Union soldiers began shouting “Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg! Fredericksburg!” in reference to the disastrous Union advance on the Confederate line during the 1862 battle. Shell and solid shot in the beginning turned to canister and musket fire as the Confederates came within 400 yards of the Union line. The mile-long front shrank to less than half a mile as the men filled in gaps that appeared throughout the line. On the left flank of the attack, Brockenbrough’s brigade virtually evaporated, decimated by artillery fire from Cemetery Hill. Davis’s brigade, on the left flank of the charge, was scythed by musket and artillery fire. Pickett’s Virginians had been subjected to the least fire in the beginning of the charge and wheeled to their left toward a minor salient in the Union center. This position of the lines was marked by a low stone wall taking a short right-angle turn known afterwards as “The Angle.” They marched in two lines. As the division wheeled to the left, its right flank was exposed to the front of Doubleday’s Union division on Cemetery Ridge. Stannard’s Vermont Brigade marched forward, faced north and delivered withering fire into the rear of Kemper’s brigade. Although some Confederates were able to breach the stone wall that shielded many of the Union defenders, they could not maintain their hold and were repulsed with over 50% casualties, ending the battle.

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