Inside the Crosshairs Read online

  The French, the other major military force of the eighteenth century, developed their own standard military flintlock. Other than having a slightly smaller .69 caliber, the French Charleville closely resembled the British Brown Bess—down to the lack of accuracy. Even the most skilled marksmen had little control over where the shot landed.

  A common military rhyme of the period about both British and French musket shots summed up the situation:

  One went high,

  and one went low,

  and where in Hell

  did the other one go.

  British Brown Besses and French Charlevilles faced each other in North America during the Seven Years’ War (1756–63), an extension of the two countries’ conflict in Europe. American colonists, who accompanied the British as members of local militias, were also armed with the Brown Bess or other smooth-bore muskets that were “accurate” for only eighty yards or less. Toward the end of the conflict, the British formed the 60th Royal Americans as sharpshooters equipped with Pennsylvania long rifles. There is no record, however, that those marksmen had any influence on the war’s final battles, perhaps because British commanders saw little use for weapons that could not mount bayonets. Cold steel rather than hot shot remained the deciding factor in most battles.

  The first accurate long-range shooters to influence a battle in America came forward in the Revolutionary War. Americans armed their rebel army with Brown Besses captured from the British, with Charlevilles purchased from the French, and with locally produced .75-caliber flintlocks—called Committee of Safety muskets, authorized by the Continental Congress in November 1775. All of these weapons shared the inaccuracy common to smooth-bore muskets. Except when fired in volley at close range or employed as holders for bayonets, they were so ineffective that Benjamin Franklin recommended arming the revolutionary army with bows and arrows rather than the unpredictable muskets.

  British ordnance expert Major George Hanger wrote about the accuracy of Revolutionary War muskets of both sides, stating, “A soldier’s musket will strike the figure of a man at 80 yards; it may even at a hundred, but a soldier must be very unfortunate indeed who shall be wounded by a common musket at 150 yards, provided his antagonist aims at him; and as to firing at a man at 200 yards, with a common musket, you may just as well fire at the moon. No man ever was ever killed by a musket at 200 yards by the person who aimed at him.”

  American military commanders quickly recognized that they had neither the manpower nor the firepower to fight the British army at close quarters. They were also aware that all the Revolution had to do to succeed was to survive. As long as George Washington and other American commanders had forces in the field, whether engaged in combat or not, the fledgling United States continued to exist. As a result, Washington and his subordinates avoided open combat and often engaged in guerrilla-like warfare, knowing that eventually Britain would either tire of the conflict or would recall its forces to Europe to engage other enemies.

  The Pennsylvania long rifle was the most effective weapon for the Americans’ tactics. During skirmishes and harassing attacks, the sharpshooters armed with those rifles engaged the enemy from distances the British Brown Besses could not reach. In closer, more sustained combat, the rifle marksmen could pick off British commanders behind main battle lines at ranges of 200 to 250 meters.

  On June 14, 1775, the Continental Congress authorized Pennsylvania to form six companies of longriflemen, and then a few days later expanded the order to nine companies. The first company mustered into service on June 29 at Northumberland with John Lowden as its captain and James Parr as first lieutenant. In its ranks stood Timothy Murphy, who would become America’s first expert combat marksman and a hero of the Revolution.

  The rifle companies united into the Pennsylvania Rifle Battalion, renamed the 1st Pennsylvania Continental Regiment in July 1776, under command of Colonel William Thompson, and for two years supported most of Washington’s major engagements, firing from hidden positions to slow the British advance and covering the retreat of the rebel army when it broke contact.

  In mid-June 1777, Washington transferred the 1st Pennsylvania, including Tim Murphy, to Morgan’s Rifle Corps with instructions that the unit oppose the British army advance, under the command of General John Burgoyne, down the Hudson River Valley. Colonel Daniel Morgan, commander of the 500-man corps and an expert marksman himself, held more than mere revolutionary zeal against the British. While working for the British as a teamster in 1756, he had struck an officer during an argument and had been horsewhipped as punishment. Throughout his command of the rifle corps, Morgan often encouraged his marksmen to “shoot for the epaulets”—uniform adornments worn only by officers.

  A contemporary description of Morgan’s sharpshooters reported that the men of the rugged, hard-bitten group each carried a long knife and hatchet in addition to a long rifle. They dressed in buckskins and moccasins. Many wore the slogan “Liberty or Death” embroidered on their hunting shirts or on their caps.

  After the First Battle of Freeman’s Farm, in New York on September 19, 1777, the U.S. commander, General Horatio Gates, credited Morgan’s riflemen for the success in briefly stopping Burgoyne’s advance. At the Second Battle of Freeman’s Farm, on October 7. Morgan’s corps—and particularly Private Timothy Murphy—might very well have influenced the outcome of the American Revolution.

  Burgoyne dispatched General Simon Frazer to probe the American flank at Bemis Heights, along the Hudson River, to prepare the way for the main attack. Morgan’s men rushed to cut off the British advance. Frazer, mounted on a distinctive iron-gray gelding some 300 yards from the Americans, immediately became a target of the American sharpshooters. The first two Pennsylvania rifle bullets, fired by Murphy and a counterpart, hit the general’s saddle and passed harmlessly through the horse’s mane. Murphy, who had climbed into a small tree for better observation, then fired the third shot, which knocked Frazer from his horse with a mortal wound.[7]

  When Frazer fell, his troops broke off their attack and retreated, forcing Burgoyne to cease his offensive and withdraw northward to Saratoga, where the Americans surrounded the British positions. Morgan’s sharpshooters fired at all redcoats who dared expose themselves. On October 17, the British surrendered. Burgoyne acknowledged the impact of the American longriflemen on the battle, later remarking, “Morgan’s men were the most famous Corps of the Continental Army. All of them crack shots.”

  The surrender of the British at Saratoga was a turning point in the war because the Americans realized that they could defeat the British on the battlefield. Murphy’s well-aimed shot that brought down Frazer and disrupted the British advance certainly contributed to the victory. Also, as a result of the victory at Saratoga, France recognized the United States and became a valuable ally.

  Morgan’s riflemen continued to harass the British, adding substantial numbers to their kills for the remainder of the war. Murphy changed units several times, and there is evidence that on occasion he dressed as a civilian or an Indian to penetrate enemy lines.

  Other British commanders came to the same conclusions as Burgoyne about the efficiency of the American riflemen. They formed their own sharpshooter units and hired German jaegers—at double the going rate for mercenaries—to cross the Atlantic to fight the American rebels.[8] Many of the jaegers were no more than glorified sports hunters, having little ability or motivation to be military sharpshooters. The few companies of jaegers that did make their way to America had no impact on the war because of their lack of military experience and the fact that their short-barreled rifles proved inferior to the American long rifles.

  Major Patrick Ferguson of the 70th Foot Regiment led a more successful British effort to employ marksmen in the American Revolution. Ferguson, known throughout Britain as the finest shot in the army, developed an extremely accurate, rapid breech-reloading rifle early in the war. Capable of mounting a bayonet on its thirty-four-inch barrel, the .68-caliber “Ferguson rifle” co
uld fire four to six rounds per minute.

  Ferguson brought 100 of his rifles to the United States in 1777 and succeeded in killing and harassing the enemy forces at long ranges. Ferguson had an even greater opportunity than Tim Murphy to influence the outcome of the war. Yet he did not take it.

  Early on the morning of October 4, 1777, in a heavy fog at Germantown, near Philadelphia, Ferguson went forward of the British lines with a local guide in the hope of finding an unsuspecting target. General George Washington, on a reconnaissance mission with a few of his staff, approached within range of the British marksman. The guide told Ferguson that the mounted soldier was the commander of the American army, but before the British officer could shoot, Washington and his party turned back toward their lines. Ferguson did not fire. He explained in a letter to a relative, “It is not pleasant to fire at the back of an unoffending individual who was acquitting himself very coolly of his duty, so I let him alone.”

  A few days later Ferguson suffered serious wounds and his company was disbanded. No written records provide the British rationale for discontinuing the sharpshooter unit and withdrawing the rifles from the service other than that the Ferguson rifles’ stocks tended to crack during sustained service and that their nonstandard caliber increased logistic problems.

  The real reason, however, might have been attitudinal and economic. British officers in general strongly disdained the ungentlemanly practice of shooting the enemy from hidden positions at far distances. They also believed that few soldiers could ever master the skill of range estimation required for accurate shooting. British enlisted men also disliked the sharpshooter concept and few volunteered. Most of Ferguson’s marksmen came not from the ranks of the regular British army but from Carolinian and Virginian loyalists.

  The British were slow to adopt rifles to replace muskets for several other reasons as well. The cost of rifles limited their production, and the long Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815) were depleting the royal treasury. Also, the longer time required to reload a rifle discouraged its use in the mass formations the British favored.

  The British did, however, eventually organize sharpshooter units to combat the French and their allies on the Continent. During the campaign in Spain, the British formed the 5th Battalion, 60th Regiment, composed mostly of German mercenary sharpshooters, and the 95th Rifles, manned by British marksmen. A short-barreled .65-caliber rifle, designed by British gun maker Ezekiel Baker to weigh nine and one-half pounds, served as the primary weapon of both units. It could fire a smaller shot in a smooth-bore mode or a larger one as a rifle, but the “Baker rifle” had a limited range of about 200 meters. Baker made his product more acceptable to army traditionalists by including a long bayonet in its design.

  The limitations of the Baker rifle did not prevent British sharpshooters from making their mark on the Peninsula Wars. During the battle at the bridge of Cacabelos on January 16, 1809, a member of the 95th Rifles killed French General Auguste François Colbert with a single shot.

  The 60th Regiment, also known as the King’s Royal Rifles, made its own lasting impression. In a letter to his minister of war in September 1813, French Marshall Nicolas Soult wrote an excellent account of the British sharpshooters’ tactics and influence. According to Soult, “There is in the English Army a battalion of the 60th, consisting of three companies. This battalion is never concentrated, but has a company attached to each infantry division. It is armed with a short rifle; the men are selected for their marksmanship; they perform the duties of scouts, and in action are expressly ordered to pick off officers, especially field or general officers.”

  Marshall Soult also noted the effectiveness of the sharpshooters units: “This mode of making war and of injuring the enemy is very detrimental to us; our casualties in officers are so great that after a couple of actions the whole number are usually disabled. I saw battalions whose officers had been disabled in the ratio of one officer to eight men. I also saw battalions which were reduced to two, or three officers, although less than one-sixth of their own men had been disabled.”

  Other armies also adopted the use of special marksmen. Spanish guerrillas employed sharpshooters during the Peninsula Wars. The Russians issued as many 20,000 rifles, known as “Mupa muskets,” to their regular infantry forces during the conflict on the Continent. The single most influential shot of the Napoleonic Wars, however, was fired by a sharpshooter attached to the French navy.

  On the morning of October 21, 1805, Private Robert Guillemard clambered into the rigging of the French man-of-war Redoubtable as the British fleet closed off Spain’s Cape Trafalgar. When the HMS Victory came alongside the Redoubtable, Guillemard spotted a man in an admiral’s uniform complete with glittering cords and decorations. The French rifleman fired a shot that struck Admiral Horatio Nelson in the spine and killed him. The British would ultimately win the battle and the war, but on that day in October, a French private brought down a British admiral with a single round.[9]

  Back in the United States, American gun makers continued to make improvements to muskets and rifles. However, because of its lower manufacturing costs and speed of reloading, the smooth-bore musket remained the primary weapon of the small post-Revolution U.S. Army. Springfield, Massachusetts, and Harpers Ferry, Virginia, became the American arms-manufacturing centers, producing a series of musket models that incorporated improvements and standardized parts while staying with a caliber of .69 and a barrel length of forty-two to forty-four inches. During the first decade of the nineteenth century, smooth-bore muskets constituted more than 80 percent of U.S. long-weapon production.

  Meanwhile American gunmakers, still mostly in Pennsylvania, continued to improve what were already the finest rifles in the world, but the handmade weapons, primarily in private hands for use in hunting and sports shooting, remained too expensive for the military and most civilians.

  While muskets dominated the fighting of both sides in the War of 1812, between the United States and Great Britain, the rifle made a significant contribution in several battles and gained further notice as a weapon to fear. At the Battle of Lake Erie on September 10, 1813, Commander Oliver Perry employed one hundred Kentucky infantrymen armed with long rifles to sweep the decks of the British fleet and ensure victory for the American navy.

  The rifle proved even more influential to the American victory at the Battle of New Orleans. On January 8, 1815, more than 8,000 British soldiers attacked a force of about half that number of Americans on the Chalmette Plains outside the city. U.S. General Andrew Jackson commanded a mixed army of regulars, militiamen, blacks, sailors, and frontiersmen protected by mud banks and cotton bales. Two thousand of Jackson’s force, mostly frontiersmen from Kentucky, carried Pennsylvania long rifles[10] and engaged the approaching British at several hundred meters. In a brief battle, the Americans brought down more than 1,500 enemy soldiers, most from rifle fire, and handed the British their worst defeat of the war. The Americans lost only 60 men.[11]

  While armies on the Continent and in America were perfecting the use of the flintlock rifle, two European inventors were designing changes that would place dependable rifles in the hands of every infantryman. In 1807, the Reverend Alexander Forsyth of Scotland secured a patent for a percussion firing system that used the strike of a cock upon a plunger to explode a bit of detonating powder. Because the Forsyth lock proved reliable in all types of weather, gun makers around the globe copied and improved the system. By 1820 American gunsmiths had refined the ignition system by using fulminate of mercury in a one-eighth-inch copper cap inside the mechanism to stabilize the firing process of the main charge.

  After extensive tests, the British army adopted the percussion system in 1839, and the United States followed with its Model 1842 percussion musket three years later. Other armies also adopted the percussion system because of its reliability and its design, which allowed both flintlock muskets and rifles to readily be converted. By 1850 flintlocks were relics in armies and among sports shooters.

&n
bsp; The advances in ignition systems came simultaneously with innovations in munitions. In 1848, French Captain Claude E. Minié created a cylindrical lead bullet with a conical head and an iron cupped base to replace the round shot that had been used for the first 500 years of firearms. Grooves around the base of the bullet expanded to tightly fit into the rifling and to scrape out powder residue as the bullet exited the barrel. The “minié ball,” only fractionally smaller than the barrel, loaded easily yet produced more power and accuracy. Its first wide-scale use was in the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856, where it proved its worth on the battlefield.

  The percussion system, the minié ball, and improved powder were common in the “first modern war,” the American Civil War. The .58-caliber U.S. Model 1855 rifled musket and its subsequent modifications in 1861 and 1863 became the standard individual weapons of both sides in the Civil War,[12] although both the North and the South imported British Enfields of similar design. Soldiers then carried weapons capable of a sustained rate of fire of three rounds per minute with reasonable accuracy at up to 500 meters and outside ranges in excess of 1,000 meters.

  Regardless of improved accuracy and range, small arms proved no better than the soldier pulling the trigger. Some men were better shots than others, and commanders on both sides, knowing marksmen could be better employed than just as regular infantrymen, formed special units of sharpshooters.

  Shortly after the fall of Fort Sumter, Union Colonel Hiram Berdan, a New York City engineer and weapons inventor with a competition shooting background, lobbied for and received permission to form regiments of outstanding marksmen. In the summer of 1861 he recruited volunteers for the 1st and 2nd U.S. Sharpshooters Regiments, often called “Berdan’s Sharpshooters,” although he actually commanded only the 1st Regiment; Colonel Henry A. Post commanded the 2nd Regiment.