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By Geoffrey Wawro

ity Gen. John Sedgwick. Hewas killed at the Battle ofSpotsylvania Court Housein May 1864 by a sniper800 yards away. While he

was placing field guns behind his frontline, Sedgwick waved toward the dis-tant Rebel sharpshooters and laughing-ly enjoined his gunners to ignore theirsporadic shots: “What are you dodgingfor? They couldn’t hit an elephant atthis distance!” Seconds later, a bulletsmashed into Sedgwick’s face, killinghim instantly.Sedgwick, the highest-ranking

Union general killed in the Civil War,was just one of the more prominentvictims of CivilWar sniping, a form ofcombat that came into its own as rifletechnology improved during the 19thcentury. Effective sniping requiredrifles—as opposed to muskets—andthe infantry rifle was still in its infancyin the 1860s.Although Prussian guard troops

had fired a few rifle shots in theEuropean revolutions of 1848, Britishlight infantry had been the first to userifles to devastating effect: againstRussian musketeers in the CrimeanWar, which was fought from 1854 to1856 on Russia’s Black Sea coast.Thereafter, all armies had re-equippedwith rifles, which were essentiallymuskets with grooved barrels thatwould “take” the soft lead of a bulletand fling it in a tight, spiraling shot ata distant target. Whereas musketrounds rolled and hopped like knuckleballs, rifle rounds screamed in likefastballs—straight down the pipe.Or nearly straight. Even the best

rifles developed in the 1850s and 1860sdid not entirely solve the problem of tra-jectory. The standard .52-, .54-, or .58-caliber mid-19th-century rifle roundwas a heavy lump of lead, a veritablecannonball of a bullet. To fire it accu-rately downrange, infantry had to ele-

vate their rifles so that the heavy, sinkingballwould fly out far enough before top-pling into an onrushing, distant adver-sary. Misjudge your distance from theenemy by as little as 30 yards—easilydone at 300 yards—and your bulletwould whistle harmlessly over his head.No wonder that Union infantry hadrequired on average 900 pounds of leadand 240 pounds of black powder to killa single Confederate in the CivilWar, orthat only one out of every 250 Prussianbullets fired in the Austro-Prussian Warof 1866 actually struck anAustrian.Statistics like these suggest the dif-

ficulty of sniping in the Civil War.“Sharpshooting” was a job for marks-men. Getting into the New HampshireSharpshooters, one of dozens of Unionlight infantry outfits, required feats ofaccuracy: at 600 feet, 10 consecutiveshots at an average of five inches fromthe bull’s-eye. Col. Hiram Berdan, whowas ordered by Gen. Winfield Scott tocreate two entire sharpshooter regi-ments from companies raised in thevarious states of the Union, was him-self a famous crack shot—the best inthe Union army.Winning army target-shooting con-

tests every year between the MexicanWar and the CivilWar, Berdan used hiscelebrity to recruit. During tryouts for

the Sharpshooters in 1861-62—regu-larly attended by President AbrahamLincoln and his Cabinet—Berdanwould fire at life-size drawings ofConfederate President Jefferson Davisfrom 200 yards and score repeatedhead shots. One story had him asking aspectator, “Where shall I place the nextone?” “In the right eye,” came the

As rifle technology improved in the 19th century, a new form of combatcame into its own, evolving during the American Civil War into sniping.

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Civil War Snipers

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Celebrated sharpshooter Col. Hiram Berdan.

‘Where shall Iplace the nextone?’ ‘In theright eye,’ camethe answer, andthe next shottore away theright eye.

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answer, and the next shot tore away theright eye.Finely made or customized rifles

generally were required to make suchshots. A favorite Confederate sniperrifle—procured in small quantitiesfrom blockade runners—was the .45-caliber British Whitworth. When itwas fitted with a telescopic sight, theWhitworth had what was grimly called“killing accuracy” of 1,500 yards. TheWhitworth barrel was drilled in ahexagonal pattern and fired a bulletshaped like a threaded nut. Gen.William Haines Lytle, the Ohio-bornUnion soldier-poet, was shot off hishorse and killed by a Whitworth-armed Confederate sharpshooter at theBattle of Chickamauga in September1863. (Lytle had 10 months earlierwritten his last poem—“Lines on MyThirty-Sixth Birthday”—which, trueto its Byronic title, predicted his immi-nent death in battle.)The Manchester-made Whitworth

and its nut-shaped bullet also killedGen. “Uncle John” Sedgwick atSpotsylvania Court House. The sniperwas probably Ben Powell, a Rebelcrack shot who, like today’s snipers,was conceded virtual independence byhis officers. His only job was to rovealong the Union lines looking for aclean shot. Berry Benson, anotherConfederate sharpshooter, recalledmeeting Powell in theWilderness (siteof the May 1864 battle that resulted innearly 30,000 total casualties) andexamining his Whitworth, which wasso powerful that it could serve as a sortof howitzer when no direct fire targetsoffered themselves.“Having nothing to do, I went down

across a field where Ben Powell, withhis Whitworth rifle, was sharpshoot-ing,” Benson recalled in his memoir,Confederate Scout Sniper. “There hadbeen a number of Whitworth rifles(with telescope sight) brought fromEngland, running the blockade. Theseguns with ammunition had been dis-tributed to the army, our brigade receiv-ing one. It was given to Powell, as he

was known to be an excellent shot. Incampaigns, he posted himself wherev-er he pleased, for the purpose of pick-ing off the enemy’s men. I shot the guna few times. It kicked powerfully. . . .Once at Petersburg Powell gave[Blackwood] the gun to shoot, and asthere was nobody particular in sight toshoot at, he held it up at a high angleand fired it over into the besiegers’camp. Not long after, in a Northernpaper, he read an account of two menbeing shot at a well, struck by the sameball, which had come so far that thereport of the gun was not heard. Andthe day given was the same dayBlackwood fired theWhitworth.”

Weapons of choiceThe sniper’s weapon of choice was theso-called American rifle. Individuallycrafted and sold to hunters and targetshooters before the war, “American,”“benchrest,” or “match” rifles were soheavy—14 to 40 pounds, two to four

times the weight of a factory-made in-fantry rifle—that they had to be aimedand fired with the barrel resting on abench, fence, or other support. Theaccuracy of these aptly named “heav-ies”—like the 35-pound, .46-caliber

Morgan rifle made in small batches byJohn C. Wells of Milwaukee—derivedfrom the massive barrel and superiorengineering.To get the most from their rifling,

benchrest bores were much tighter thanstandard rifles, which necessitated spe-cial accouterments. Merely to load abullet down the long barrel, the sniperhad to fit the benchrest rifle with a“false muzzle” and a “bullet starter.”The false muzzle was essentially a fun-nel placed in the barrel of the rifle tohold the wide bullet in place on the lipof the narrow gun barrel. The bulletstarter was a stubby, piston-driven ram-rod that fit inside the false muzzle andallowed the sniper to jam the bulletdown the rifle barrel and seat it in thebreech without gouging the finelywrought true muzzle.Still, with just one really first-class

sniper rifle per brigade—usually left inthe supply wagons to be brought for-ward when opportunities arose—most

sharpshooters made do with the bestrifle they could procure officially orscrounge unofficially. As always, therich, industrialized Union with itsflourishing arms industry got the beststuff. After personally intervening in

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A breech-loading Sharps rifle. In skilled hands, it became one of the deadliest weapons of the war.

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Washington with the army staff andthe secretary of war, Berdan procureda special rifle for his two Sharpshooterregiments: the Model 1859 .52-caliberSharps—nicknamed the “Berdan”—which, in skilled hands, became one ofthe deadliest weapons of the war.

Though not as well engineered as amatch rifle or the Whitworth, theBerdan Sharps was a breech-loadercapable of firing four times morequickly than muzzle-loaders like theWhitworth, and it was accurate out to700 yards in skilled hands.But Berdan never relied on technol-

ogy alone. “To be effective sharp-shooters the men have to be as skilledin field craft as they are in marksman-ship,” he wrote in 1861. “They must beself-assured yet highly disciplined andabove all they must be dedicated.” Thisdirective got to the heart of sniping.Asterrifying as it was for the victims, itwas hard on the practitioners as well—physically and psychologically. BerryBenson, a Rebel sharpshooter, sur-veyed his own results along the“Bloody Angle” at Spotsylvania andnoted his disgust: “This horrid confu-sion, these wet, muddy graves—thisreeking mass of corruption, of rottingcorpses. . . .How a man can look uponsuch a scene and still take pleasure inwar seems past belief.”

Freelance snipersNeither army trained snipers in the pro-fessional, dedicated way that they aredeveloped today. Rather, they usedsharpshooter units to scout and harassthe enemy. Some individuals, like theConfederacy’s Ben Powell or thefamously shaggy Union sniper Truman“California Joe” Head, would stand outas particularly good shots and gradual-

ly slip the bonds of military discipline,working more and more as freelancesnipers, less and less as uniformedsharpshooters. California Joe—a favor-ite of Berdan and the Northern press—was celebrated for the number and dif-ficulty of his “kills” with the Sharps

rifle, one of them at 1,500 yards.It would generally bemore accurate

to call Civil War snipers light infantry,what the Europeans called skirmish-ers: American equivalents of thePrussian fusilier, theAustrian jäger, orthe French chasseur. Although HiramBerdan organized the two green-jack-eted Union sharpshooter regiments,they were trained by Caspar Trepp, aSwiss infantry officer who had foughtwith Garibaldi in Italy and with theBritish in the Crimea. Like Europeanlight infantry, American sharpshooterswere trained to fight in open order—with wide intervals between the

men—use cover, and advance andretreat on bugle and drum signals.As in Europe, big Civil War battles

drew whole sharpshooter units intoaction. Pitzer’s Wood and the Devil’sDen at Gettysburg—a low ridgecrowned with broken stone masses—were fought over by companies ofConfederate and Union sharpshootersin July 1863. One of the most famousCivil War photographs—AlexanderGardener’s Death of a Rebel Sniper—shows a dead Confederate sharpshoot-er in a carefully constructed sniper’s

nest in the Devil’s Den.Firing at long range—more than 500

yards across Plum Run to the RoundTops—Confederate marksmen piled upUnion casualties at Gettysburg beforethey themselves were rooted out byUnion sharpshooters and artillery fire.One of the dead Rebel snipers was dis-covered with a Leonard target rifle inhis hands.A 36-poundmatch riflemadein New Hampshire, the Leonard hadhairsplitting accuracy up to 1,000 yards.“From a distance of nearly half a mile,the Rebel sharpshooters drew a bead onus with a precision that deserved thehighest commendation of their officers,

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Dead Confederate sharpshooter in the Devil’s Den at Gettysburg.

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‘How a man can look upon sucha scene and still take pleasure

in war seems past belief,’ aRebel sniper noted in disgust.

but that made us curse the day theywere born,” a Union veteran recalledbitterly. On Little Round Top, anxiousUnion officers scanned the Devil’s Denwith field glasses to locate the muzzleflashes and smoke puffs from theConfederate rifles. When a sniper wasdetected, a percussion shell would befired into his lair. Several Confederatesharpshooters were killed in this way.Gardener photographed one of them;the corpse—killed by concussion—was unscathed, and its trigger fingerwas crooked to fire.

Piling up casualtiesThis vulnerability in fixed positions—invisible, smokeless powder would notbe introduced until the 1890s—ex-plained the Civil War sniper’s prefer-ence for trees, which concealed themuzzle flash better, waved away the

charcoal smoke, and offered a lessobvious target to frustrated gunners.One of Winslow Homer’s best-knownCivil War illustrations was The Sharp-shooter, published in Harper’s Weeklyin 1862. It depicts aYankee sniper in atree near Yorktown during the Penin-sula Campaign. The sniper, one ofBerdan’s Sharpshooters, is sitting on atree branch and squinting through thesights of a James target rifle. The .45-caliber, muzzle-loading James, with itsfour-power telescopic sight, was a rela-tively light sniper rifle—just 14pounds—yet in Homer’s drawing theshooter is bracing the rifle on a branch

to improve his aim. Two companies ofBerdan’s Sharpshooters used the Jamestarget rifle to pick off Confederatedefenders during the siege ofYorktownin the spring of 1862.WinslowHomer was appalled by the

impressions he gathered during his sit-tings with the sharpshooter. At onepoint, he peered through the telescopic

sight at an unsuspecting enemy. In a let-ter to a friend, Homer crudely sketchedwhat he had seen: a Confederate officerstriding through tall grass, the sniper’scrosshairs on his chest. “The aboveimpression,” he wrote, “struck me asbeing as nearmurder as anything I couldthink of in connection with the army.”Modern warfare had not yet evolved

the dreadfully efficient two-man sniperteams ofWorldWar II or their dedicat-ed rifle and ammunition designs. Butalready in the 1860s, with opposingarmies sinking into trenches and bat-tery positions to fight multiday battlesalong long, fortified lines, the sniperwas being born as a force multiplier.First developed as a scout and a picket,the sniper came in the course of theAmerican Civil War to be valued as a

low-cost, high-impact weapon, capableof demoralizing an entire battalion offield artillery or knocking a good gen-eral out of the saddle. (The loss of Gen.John Sedgwick to a sniper at Spot-sylvania, Ulysses S. Grant famouslysaid, “is greater than the loss of a wholedivision of troops.”)Nevertheless, light infantry advo-

cates like Hiram Berdan preferred toconcentrate their sharpshooters as skir-mishers. Sniping therefore continuedas a haphazard arrangement until1914, when, with million-man armiesdeployed within bullet range of eachother, snipers would finally begin to bedeveloped as dedicated “special opera-tions forces.”

Geoffrey Wawro is professor ofstrategic studies at the U.S. NavalWar College in Newport, R.I. He isthe author of The Franco-PrussianWar: Warfare and Society in Europe,1792-1914, and The Austro-PrussianWar. He wishes to thank Prof.Richard Lowe of the University ofNorth Texas for his generous adviceon this article.

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Sitting with asharpshooter,artist Winslow

Homer wasappalled,

calling thepractice ‘near

murder.’

Union sniper Truman “California Joe” Head.

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