Quite a number of books and articles mention sharpshooters (presumably Union & Confederate) using special glasses to gain clearer vision of their intended targets, and at any given time you can find several for sale on Ebay and other outlets, and at Civil War shows. Usually these are nickeled steel frame spectacles with orange lenses frosted except for a clear spot in the center. Were they actually used, and if so when and where?
The answer, unfortunately, is that they are not sharpshooting glasses and in fact have nothing to do with sharpshooting or the Civil War. I will tell you what they were really used for in a bit.
First I’d like to recommend an excellent web article on period glasses, or spectacles as they were called then, which I think will be of use to reenactors who are looking to perfect their impression. The authors are members of the Ocular Heritage Society and seem quite knowledgeable. The section we are concerned about starts on page 17, in which they consider the “sharpshooter glasses.”
… there are large numbers of an unusual type of spectacles sold as “Civil War shooting spectacles” or “sharpshooter glasses” on the antique market – indeed, probably more than the total number of sharpshooters in the War. Extensive searching in newspaper advertisements, optician books and publications, the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, sharpshooter and regimental histories, and many other books, documents and other sources during the last fifteen years have failed to establish the use of this style of glasses by soldiers during or before the Civil War. An inquiry made to the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Centre at the Army War College asked the curators to search their records – no evidence of Civil War use of shooting spectacles could be found.
I would agree. I have been researching Civil War sharpshooters for about the same length of time (and wrote a book about it) and I have never seen a contemporary mention of them either. One has to be careful with negative evidence, but as the authors say, since they were rather unusual you’d expect someone to at least mention them. So my conclusion matches theirs – there are no contemporary mentions of such shooting spectacles, and the earliest mentions of commercially available “shooting glasses or spectacles” are not until much later.
It has been suggested that they were actually “sun goggles” issued to British troops in Egypt and the Sudan in the 1880s and 90s. While there is ample documentation (and even a few photos) of these glasses, they appear to be quite different than the “sharpshooter glasses” sold as CW issue. For one thing they had blue lenses and were goggles rather than glasses, as can be seen from the contemporary sketch of a British officer.
No, they were actually glasses made to shield weaker eyes from excessive light. The idea goes all the way back to 1756, when a London optician named Benjamin Martin introduced his “Visual Glasses.” These glasses featured a horn or tortoiseshell rim that restricted the light entering the lenses, and were the first sunglasses. The idea caught on for those with “weak” eyes, and in 1839 an American, Charles Jachan, patented a modified version of Martin’s glasses, which he described as follows:
The object of my invention is to protect the eye from too strong a light as much as possible, and this I effect by leaving only a small portion of the surface of the glasses polished and surrounding it with a ground space extending to the circumference or outside rim, intended to obstruct the passage of the rays of light and soften their effect upon the eye, leaving that portion opposite the pupil a small clear circular space.
In other words an early form of sunglasses. They looked like this:
Looks pretty similar except for the location of the clear space. Jachan’s glasses were evidently fairly popular (though few examples survive) but there’s no mention of them having anything do do with shooting. But now let’s jump to the turn of the century to the 1897 Sears & Roebuck catalog, where we find a later version (Jachan’s patent having long since expired) advertised as “shooting spectacles”, although the ad is at pains to explain that they are “very largely used by tourists for looking at scenery.”
There are two versions – one with plain steel frames and another, at twice the price, with nickeled frames. These specs, with their amber lenses and clear centers, appear to be identical with what’s being sold today as “sharpshooter glasses.” They were apparently quite common and also appear in the Montgomery Ward catalogs of about the same time.
But let’s look at another piece of evidence. Most of the “sharpshooter glasses” I’ve seen for sale have the nickeled frames, which would have been rather expensive at the time of the Civil War. The principles of electroplating had been known since the 1750s, but the process had only become practical in the 1850s. Even so, it remained an expensive, high end process used mainly for plating precious metals to jewelry, silverware, &c. The first commercial electroplating plant did not open (in Germany) until 1876. After that, however, plants proliferated and the cost began to drop dramatically. By the end of the decade we see nickel plated firearms and by the turn of the century it was being used for consumer items like — glasses.
It seems very unlikely that either army would have bought these rather expensive items (especially since the Federals did not even buy sharpshooter rifles) or that individual soldiers could have afforded them, nor has any evidence of such purchases turned up.
Were these spectacles really used for shooting? Maybe. I’ve looked though civilian texts on rifle shooting and have not found any reference to them before 1880 or so, and most references (which do not specify what the spectacles looked like) are from the turn of the century. The books that do mention them do so only in passing, and there is no mention of them at all in military marksmanship texts. The only military reference I’ve seen is from the Navy shooting team in 1908, who had a surgeon to make some special (and corrected) shooting glasses.
Overall conclusion is that the “sharpshooter glasses” seen today are really mass-marketed turn of the century sunglasses, made fully forty years later, and had nothing to do with the Civil War or sharpshooting.
Perhaps the next item to be discovered is “artillery glasses,” which were supposed to have been used by cannoneers in the Late Unpleasantness to shield their eyes during firing. Although I have no doubt that some purported examples will turn up for sale, their existence, like that of the sharpshooter glasses, if just so much applesauce.
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