The United States Army and Urban Combat in the Nineteenth Century

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Scholars have investigated the effectiveness of military organizations in twentieth-century warfare and have evaluated their ability to defeat their enemies in wartime or adapt to changes that developed in peacetime. Few have studied the military effectiveness of nineteenth-century armies as closely. This paper examines the operational and tactical effectiveness of two American armies in the mid-1800s by comparing how they approached urban combat, something for which the United States military was not prepared. This paper compares how Americans reacted to urban combat in the battle of Monterrey in 1846 with urban combat in the battle of Fredericksburg in 1862. It also seeks to explain why one army fought effectively and the other did not.