Snipers Na Guerra Civil Eua

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May/June 2005THE HISTORY CHANNEL MAGAZINE 27

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answer, and the next shot tore away theright eye.

Finely made or customized riflesgenerally 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 Whitworthand its nut-shaped bullet also killedGen. “Uncle John” Sedgwick atSpotsylvania Court House. The sniperwas probably Ben Powell, a Rebel

crack 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 the Wilderness (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 downacross 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-tributedto 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 the Whitworth.”

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 boreswere 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-classsniper 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 best

stuff. After personally intervening in

May/June 2005THE HISTORY CHANNEL MAGAZINE28

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 of the 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.” This

directive 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 out

as 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 wouldgenerally be more accurate

to call Civil War snipers light infantry,what the Europeans called skirmish-ers: American equivalents of thePrussian fusilier , the Austrian 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 battlesdrew 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 of Confederate 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.Firingat 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 inhishands.A 36-pound match rifle madein New Hampshire, the Leonard hadhairsplitting accuracyup to 1,000 yards.“From a distance of nearly half a mile,the Rebel sharpshooters drew a bead onus with a precision that deserved the

highest commendation of their officers,

May/June 2005THE HISTORY CHANNEL MAGAZINE 29

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

L I B R A R Y O F C O N G R E S

S

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

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

Snipers Na Guerra Civil Eua

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