The Crimean War was significant to Civil War Re-enactors/Historians for many reasons.  This was the last European War of the Napoleonic era.  New technology, such as the rifle, was coming into use.  This was one of the first European wars after the Industrial Revolution began.  The war ended with siege warfare, occurring in trenches.  For American history scholars, the Crimean War holds some special interest.  Many parallels can be drawn between occurrences in the Crimean War and the American Civil War.

Military observers from the United States, led by Major Richard Delafield, had traveled to the Crimea where they had inspected the British and Russian lines (in company with Danish officers), but not the French positions.  This was because the French commander decided that their findings might breach security.  On their return to Washington, they brought with them a weight of evidence which they were able to put to good use in planning reforms for the United States Army at a time when the nation was becoming aware of its industrial potential. Some of those lessons would be put to good use in the American Civil War.

While the fighting in the Crimea was not entirely a product of advanced industrial technology, it did usher in several changes which were developed further during the Civil War.  Among the most important of these were field hospitals, the electric telegraph, and improved semaphore signaling.  In Peto and Brassey's Balaklava railway, the Americans saw how railroads could be used to transfer wounded and move supplies.  They took note of the advances being made in military aviation with the development of the gas filled observation balloon.  Civil War armies were the first to use railroads to transport men and supplies - Sherman's advance from Chattanooga to Atlanta was facilitated by the Military Railroad Construction Corps - and the Union Army was the first in the world to appoint specialist signaling officers.

Delafield's commission also reported on the influence of the Minie rifles used to such good effect by the British and French infantrymen.  But although they conceded that the new weapon had range, velocity, and accuracy, only one member of the commission, Major George B. McClellan, noted its impact during the fighting on the Inkerman plateau.  Its use made the old black powder muskets obsolete an gave the British and French infantrymen a tactical advantage.  But McClellan's fellow observers chose to focus on the siege and counter siege operations at Sevastopol in which the new rifle's employment was confined to sniping.  In this respect, they were also influenced by the findings of Antoine Henri Jomini, an energetic French staff officer, whose study of the Crimean War rejected the idea that the new weapons would change the traditional massed frontal assault and close quartered combat with the bayonet, the much vaunted arme terrible.  His findings seemed to be reinforced by the magnitude of the French victories at Megenta and Solferino during the war to liberate northern Italy in 1859.

Instead of examining how the new weapons might affect battlefield tactics, the Americans concentrated on Russian Lieutenant Colonel Franz Todleben's field fortifications, much admired as a tactical defense system which did not require the construction of heavily entrenched positions.  McClellan noted that they "proved that temporary works in the hands of a skillful garrison are susceptible of a longer defense than was generally supposed."  This thinking inclined the U.S. Army to believe that entrenched defense could form the basis of its tactical system.  In that sense, the Allies' experience at Sevastopol pointed the way to the sieges of Vicksburg and Petersburg/Richmond in which the Confederate defenders were able to repel frontal infantry assaults.  In doing so, forced Grant's army to institute a formal siege.  Frontal attacks also dominated the early battles, with disastrous results for the Union Army at the First Battle of Bull Run, when inexperienced troops broke and fled in the face of disciplined rifle power.

By the end of the fighting in 1865, the conflict in the United States had also brought change to the art of warfare.  The North's superior manpower and its industrial base proved that the weight of well organized men, reserves, and material could be decisive.  Sherman's introduction of "total war" in his March to the Sea destroyed civilian morale and the will to continue the war.  Finally, as happens in any conflict, technological changes were more rapid than they might have been in peace time.  Rifled artillery and the field telegraph came into their own on the battlefield,  At sea, the Confederate Navy's submersible CSS H.L. Hunley sank the Federal sloop USS Housatonic in 1864, the first time a surface warship was sunk by a submarine.  Another factor which pointed to future wars came from the soldiers' experience of battle.  With Springfield and Enfield rifles capable of killing the enemy at greater range that the old muskets, soldiers had to learn to take cover in trenches.  Massed infantry assaults were no longer acceptable and gradually the column gave way to more flexible formations.  That, too, was new to warfare.

Given the impact it had, not just in the United States, but also in the wider world, the American Civil War was much studied by the European powers - although, as with the Crimean War, the lessons were not always understood.  Books about it are legion and the official U.S. records alone run to 154 volumes.  It has been described as the first of the modern wars, in that it produced a mighty volume of histories, personal recollections, newspaper reports, photographs, letters, diaries, and fiction.  But the forerunner was the war in the Crimea, which spawned a huge number of books, many of them written during the conflict or within a year or two after its conclusion.