Tag: sharpshooters
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Blue & Gray article on Fort Stedman
In a previous post I looked at some order of battle problems with the recent Blue & Gray article on Fort Stedman. Today I’ll look more at the article itself, particularly the treatment of the sharpshooters. There are some issues, as I’ll try to point out, with which I disagree but are honest differences of […]
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Pot Hunters, Sharpshooters, and Snipers
Being raised in the South I’ve heard the term “pot hunter” all my life. It has nothing to do with hunting for pots (a pejorative reserved for archaeological looters) but rather means someone who hunts to put food on the table. Whatever appears on the dinner table was walking around in the woods a short […]
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“The stuff of the troops”
One of the few criticisms I got on my sharpshooter book was in quoting this passage: It became painfully apparent that, however inferior the Confederate armies were in point of education and general intelligence to the men of the Union, man for man they were the superiors of their northern antagonists in the use of […]
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Union Sharpshooter Policy
I mentioned in a previous post how state politcs affected the assigment of Union sharpshooter units, and will bring up a few more examples. It did not help that the Federals didn’t really have any sort of policy on the matter. Berdan did raise two regiments early in the war, and got on well with […]
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Minnesota Sharpshooter Letter
Historians make much of the problems the Confederacy had with state’s rights, and how it hindered the war effort. They haven’t paid enough attention, I think, to the problems it caused to the Union war effort. I found out about one aspect of it while researching the sharpshooter book, about how the various states tried, […]
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Finding the Range
Range estimation was a critical skill for the Civil War sharpshooter. The low muzzle velocity of black powder rifles (less than half of what is common today) meant that the bullet traveled in a high arc rather than on a flat trajectory. One manual of the day warned that if a riflemen fired an Enfield […]
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Execution of Sharpshooters?
While giving a presentation recently I mentioned that only one Confederate sharpshooter’s badge had survived. A gentleman in the audience assured me that the reason was that no one dared to wear them because sharpshooters were summarily executed when captured. He could not, however, provide me with any examples. So I’m wondering…does anyone else have […]