Civil War Snipers
As rifle technology improved in the 19th century, a new form of combat
came into its own, evolving during the American Civil War into sniping.
By Geoffrey Wawro
ity Gen. John Sedgwick. He
P was killed at the Battle of
Spotsylvania Court House
in May 1864 by a sniper
800 yards away. While he
was placing field guns behind his front
line, Sedgwick waved toward the dis-
tant Rebel sharpshooters and laughing-
ly enjoined his gunners to ignore their
sporadic shots: “What are you dodging
for? They couldn’t hit an elephant at
this distance!” Seconds later, a bullet
smashed into Sedgwick’s face, killing
him instantly.
Sedgwick, the highest-ranking
Union general killed in the Civil War,
was just one of the more prominent
victims of Civil War sniping, a form of
combat that came into its own as rifle
technology improved during the 19th
century. Effective sniping required
rifles—as opposed to muskets—and
the infantry rifle was still in its infancy
in the 1860s.
Although Prussian guard troops
had fired a few rifle shots in the
European revolutions of 1848, British
light infantry had been the first to use
rifles to devastating effect: against
Russian musketeers in the Crimean
War, which was fought from 1854 to
1856 on Russia’s Black Sea coast.
Thereafter, all armies had re-equipped
with rifles, which were essentially
muskets with grooved barrels that
would “take” the soft lead of a bullet
and fling it in a tight, spiraling shot at
a distant target. Whereas musket
rounds rolled and hopped like knuckle
balls, rifle rounds screamed in like
fastballs—straight down the pipe.
Or nearly straight. Even the best
26 THE HISTORY CHANNEL MAGAZINE
May/June 2005
rifles developed in the 1850s and 1860s
did not entirely solve the problem of tra-
jectory. The standard .52-, .54-, or .58-
caliber mid-19th-century rifle round
was a heavy lump of lead, a veritable
cannonball of a bullet. To fire it accu-
rately downrange, infantry had to ele-
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Celebrated sharpshooter Col. Hiram Berdan.
vate their rifles so that the heavy, sinking
ball would fly out far enough before top-
pling into an onrushing, distant adver-
sary. Misjudge your distance from the
enemy by as little as 30 yards—easily
done at 300 yards—and your bullet
would whistle harmlessly over his head.
No wonder that Union infantry had
required on average 900 pounds of lead
and 240 pounds of black powder to kill
a single Confederate in the Civil War, or
that only one out of every 250 Prussian
bullets fired in the Austro-Prussian War
of 1866 actually struck an Austrian.
Statistics like these suggest the dif-
ficulty of sniping in the Civil War.
“Sharpshooting” was a job for marks-
men. Getting into the New Hampshire
Sharpshooters, one of dozens of Union
light infantry outfits, required feats of
accuracy: at 600 feet, 10 consecutive
shots at an average of five inches from
the bull’s-eye. Col. Hiram Berdan, who
was ordered by Gen. Winfield Scott to
create two entire sharpshooter regi-
ments from companies raised in the
various states of the Union, was him-
self a famous crack shot—the best in
the Union army.
Winning army target-shooting con-
tests every year between the Mexican
War and the Civil War, Berdan used his
celebrity to recruit. During tryouts for
‘Where shall I
place the next
one?’ ‘In the
right eye,’ came
the answer, and
the next shot
tore away the
right eye.
the Sharpshooters in 1861-62—regu-
larly attended by President Abraham
Lincoln and his Cabinet—Berdan
would fire at life-size drawings of
Confederate President Jefferson Davis
from 200 yards and score repeated
head shots. One story had him asking a
spectator, “Where shall I place the next
one?” “In the right eye,” came the
 MITCH KEZAR

THE HISTORY CHANNEL MAGAZINE 27

May/June 2005
 answer, and the next shot tore away the
right eye.
Finely made or customized rifles
generally were required to make such
shots. A favorite Confederate sniper
rifle—procured in small quantities
from blockade runners—was the .45-
caliber British Whitworth. When it
was fitted with a telescopic sight, the
Whitworth had what was grimly called
“killing accuracy” of 1,500 yards. The
Whitworth barrel was drilled in a
hexagonal pattern and fired a bullet
shaped like a threaded nut. Gen.
William Haines Lytle, the Ohio-born
Union soldier-poet, was shot off his
horse and killed by a Whitworth-
armed Confederate sharpshooter at the
Battle of Chickamauga in September
1863. (Lytle had 10 months earlier
written his last poem—“Lines on My
Thirty-Sixth Birthday”—which, true
to its Byronic title, predicted his immi-
nent death in battle.)
The Manchester-made Whitworth
and its nut-shaped bullet also killed
Gen. “Uncle John” Sedgwick at
Spotsylvania Court House. The sniper
was probably Ben Powell, a Rebel
crack shot who, like today’s snipers,
was conceded virtual independence by
his officers. His only job was to rove
along the Union lines looking for a
clean shot. Berry Benson, another
Confederate sharpshooter, recalled
meeting Powell in the Wilderness (site
of the May 1864 battle that resulted in
nearly 30,000 total casualties) and
examining his Whitworth, which was
so powerful that it could serve as a sort
of howitzer when no direct fire targets
was known to be an excellent shot. In
campaigns, he posted himself wherev-
er he pleased, for the purpose of pick-
ing off the enemy’s men. I shot the gun
a few times. It kicked powerfully. . . .
Once at Petersburg Powell gave
[Blackwood] the gun to shoot, and as
there was nobody particular in sight to
shoot at, he held it up at a high angle
and fired it over into the besiegers’
camp. Not long after, in a Northern
paper, he read an account of two men
being shot at a well, struck by the same
ball, which had come so far that the
report of the gun was not heard. And
the day given was the same day
Blackwood fired the Whitworth.”
Weapons of choice
The sniper’s weapon of choice was the
so-called American rifle. Individually
crafted and sold to hunters and target
shooters before the war, “American,”
“benchrest,” or “match” rifles were so
heavy—14 to 40 pounds, two to four
Morgan rifle made in small batches by
John C. Wells of Milwaukee—derived
from the massive barrel and superior
engineering.
To get the most from their rifling,
benchrest bores were much tighter than
standard rifles, which necessitated spe-
cial accouterments. Merely to load a
bullet down the long barrel, the sniper
had 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 to
hold the wide bullet in place on the lip
of the narrow gun barrel. The bullet
starter was a stubby, piston-driven ram-
rod that fit inside the false muzzle and
allowed the sniper to jam the bullet
down the rifle barrel and seat it in the
breech without gouging the finely
wrought true muzzle.
Still, with just one really first-class
sniper rifle per brigade—usually left in
the supply wagons to be brought for-
ward when opportunities arose—most
MITCH KEZAR

offered themselves.
“Having nothing to do, I went down
across a field where Ben Powell, with
his Whitworth rifle, was sharpshoot-

Confederate Scout Sniper. “There had

ing,” Benson recalled in his memoir, A breech-loading Sharps rifle. In skilled hands, it became one of the deadliest weapons of the war.

been a number of Whitworth rifles
(with telescope sight) brought from
England, running the blockade. These
guns with ammunition had been dis-
tributed to the army, our brigade receiv-
ing one. It was given to Powell, as he
times the weight of a factory-made in-
fantry rifle—that they had to be aimed
and fired with the barrel resting on a
bench, fence, or other support. The
accuracy of these aptly named “heav-
ies”—like the 35-pound, .46-caliber
sharpshooters made do with the best
rifle they could procure officially or
scrounge unofficially. As always, the
rich, industrialized Union with its
flourishing arms industry got the best
stuff. After personally intervening in

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May/June 2005
Washington with the army staff and
the secretary of war, Berdan procured
a special rifle for his two Sharpshooter
regiments: the Model 1859 .52-caliber
Sharps—nicknamed the “Berdan”—
which, in skilled hands, became one of
the deadliest weapons of the war.
‘How a man can look upon such
a scene and still take pleasure
in war seems past belief,’ a
Rebel sniper noted in disgust.
Though not as well engineered as a
match rifle or the Whitworth, the
Berdan Sharps was a breech-loader
capable of firing four times more
quickly than muzzle-loaders like the
Whitworth, and it was accurate out to
700 yards in skilled hands.
But Berdan never relied on technol-
ogy alone. “To be effective sharp-
shooters the men have to be as skilled
in field craft as they are in marksman-
ship,” he wrote in 1861. “They must be
self-assured yet highly disciplined and
above all they must be dedicated.” This
directive got to the heart of sniping. As
terrifying as it was for the victims, it
was hard on the practitioners as well—
physically and psychologically. Berry
Benson, a Rebel sharpshooter, sur-
veyed his own results along the
“Bloody Angle” at Spotsylvania and
noted his disgust: “This horrid confu-
sion, these wet, muddy graves—this
reeking mass of corruption, of rotting
corpses. . . .How a man can look upon
such a scene and still take pleasure in
war seems past belief.”
Freelance snipers
Neither army trained snipers in the pro-
fessional, dedicated way that they are
developed today. Rather, they used
sharpshooter units to scout and harass
the enemy. Some individuals, like the
Confederacy’s Ben Powell or the
famously 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 freelance
snipers, less and less as uniformed
sharpshooters. 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
Dead Confederate sharpshooter in the Devil’s Den at Gettysburg.
rifle, one of them at 1,500 yards.
It would generally be more accurate
what the Europeans called skirmish-
to call Civil War snipers light infantry,
ers: American equivalents of the
Prussian fusilier, the Austrian jäger, or
the French chasseur. Although Hiram
Berdan organized the two green-jack-
eted Union sharpshooter regiments,
they were trained by Caspar Trepp, a
Swiss infantry officer who had fought
with Garibaldi in Italy and with the
British in the Crimea. Like European
light infantry, American sharpshooters
were trained to fight in open order—
with wide intervals between the
men—use cover, and advance and
retreat on bugle and drum signals.
As in Europe, big Civil War battles
drew whole sharpshooter units into
action. Pitzer’s Wood and the Devil’s
Den at Gettysburg—a low ridge
crowned with broken stone masses—
were fought over by companies of
Confederate and Union sharpshooters
in July 1863. One of the most famous
Gardener’s Death of a Rebel Sniper—
Civil War photographs—Alexander
shows a dead Confederate sharpshoot-
er in a carefully constructed sniper’s
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
nest in the Devil’s Den.
Firing at long range—more than 500
yards across Plum Run to the Round
Tops—Confederate marksmen piled up
Union casualties at Gettysburg before
they themselves were rooted out by
Union sharpshooters and artillery fire.
One of the dead Rebel snipers was dis-
covered with a Leonard target rifle in
his hands. A 36-pound match rifle made
in New Hampshire, the Leonard had
hairsplitting accuracy up to 1,000 yards.
“From a distance of nearly half a mile,
the Rebel sharpshooters drew a bead on
us with a precision that deserved the
highest commendation of their officers,
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May/June 2005
but that made us curse the day they
were born,” a Union veteran recalled
bitterly. On Little Round Top, anxious
Union officers scanned the Devil’s Den
with field glasses to locate the muzzle
flashes and smoke puffs from the
Confederate rifles. When a sniper was
detected, a percussion shell would be
fired into his lair. Several Confederate
sharpshooters were killed in this way.
Gardener photographed one of them;
the corpse—killed by concussion—
was unscathed, and its trigger finger
was crooked to fire.
Piling up casualties
This vulnerability in fixed positions—
invisible, smokeless powder would not
be introduced until the 1890s—ex-
plained the Civil War sniper’s prefer-
ence for trees, which concealed the
muzzle flash better, waved away the
Sitting with a
sharpshooter,
artist Winslow
Homer was
appalled,
calling the
practice ‘near
murder.’
charcoal smoke, and offered a less
obvious target to frustrated gunners.
Civil War illustrations was The Sharp-
One of Winslow Homer’s best-known
shooter, published in Harper’s Weekly
in 1862. It depicts a Yankee sniper in a
tree near Yorktown during the Penin-
sula Campaign. The sniper, one of
Berdan’s Sharpshooters, is sitting on a
tree branch and squinting through the
sights of a James target rifle. The .45-
caliber, muzzle-loading James, with its
four-power telescopic sight, was a rela-
tively light sniper rifle—just 14
pounds—yet in Homer’s drawing the
shooter is bracing the rifle on a branch
30 THE HISTORY CHANNEL MAGAZINE
May/June 2005
to improve his aim. Two companies of
Berdan’s Sharpshooters used the James
target rifle to pick off Confederate
defenders during the siege of Yorktown
in the spring of 1862.
Winslow Homer was appalled by the
impressions he gathered during his sit-
tings with the sharpshooter. At one
point, he peered through the telescopic
Union sniper Truman “California Joe” Head.
sight at an unsuspecting enemy. In a let-
ter to a friend, Homer crudely sketched
what he had seen: a Confederate officer
striding through tall grass, the sniper’s
crosshairs on his chest. “The above
impression,” he wrote, “struck me as
being as near murder as anything I could
think of in connection with the army.”
Modern warfare had not yet evolved
the dreadfully efficient two-man sniper
teams of World War II or their dedicat-
ed rifle and ammunition designs. But
already in the 1860s, with opposing
armies sinking into trenches and bat-
tery positions to fight multiday battles
along long, fortified lines, the sniper
was being born as a force multiplier.
First developed as a scout and a picket,
the sniper came in the course of the
American Civil War to be valued as a
low-cost, high-impact weapon, capable
of demoralizing an entire battalion of
field 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 famously
said, “is greater than the loss of a whole
division of troops.”)
Nevertheless, light infantry advo-
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
cates like Hiram Berdan preferred to
concentrate their sharpshooters as skir-
mishers. Sniping therefore continued
as a haphazard arrangement until
1914, when, with million-man armies
deployed within bullet range of each
other, snipers would finally begin to be
developed as dedicated “special opera-
tions forces.” H
Geoffrey Wawro is professor of
strategic studies at the U.S. Naval
War College in Newport, R.I. He is
the author of The Franco-Prussian
1792-1914, and The Austro-Prussian
War: Warfare and Society in Europe,
War. He wishes to thank Prof.
Richard Lowe of the University of
North Texas for his generous advice
on this article.