American Rifle - Alexander Rose [100]
During the war the Union’s Hiram Berdan had established the U.S. Sharpshooters (it had been intended that they use Sharps rifles), but he had set formidable entrance requirements. Not a man joined his regiment unless he could cluster ten consecutive shots into a target two hundred yards away. Two-thirds of the applicants failed; the majority of those making the cut were “the hunters of New-England and the West,” according to a newspaperman attending the trials. That same reporter noticed that the human-shaped target’s “region of the heart” was particularly perforated—like a sieve, in fact.1 The Confederate Army naturally benefited from the South’s relatively greater number of skilled shooters, and it trained its sharpshooters at distances up to nine hundred yards. Accurate records were kept for each man’s performance, and those congenitally unable to improve their scores were sent back to their regular units.2 But outside the specialized units, the experience of Captain George W. Wingate was more usual: he discovered that most of his New York company couldn’t hit a barrel lid at one hundred yards and so was forced to use an imported British manual on riflemanship to teach them the rudiments of shooting.
Escaping Ordnance’s notice was the fact that their fine theories had long ceased to bear much resemblance to the reality of military training and campaigning. Line officers (those commanding troops that were engaged in fighting or other operations on the frontier or in the field) ignored, by and large, the dictates and regulations issued by Ordnance staff officers. The farther a commander was from Washington, the less likely he was to pay any attention to his colleagues in the capital.
Even before the war officers overseeing the western territories had given marksmanship training short shrift. Regarded as a quaint affectation of the East Coast staff elite, “target practice” before the mid-1850s had often consisted of a soldier whose watch was over firing a round at a crude bull’s-eye painted on a guardhouse. (And even that was only because live weapons had to be deactivated after guard duty—by laboriously using a screwlike instrument to “pull” the ball out—so that soldiers saved time by pulling the trigger instead.) Wrote a private in the Second Dragoons, so few officers believed the men required any more practice with their weapons that, in his five months of wearing “Uncle Sam’s livery,” he had been taken out for proper target shooting just twice.3
In 1854 officers were ordered to train their men with the new rifle-muskets being issued, but they were given no means of standardizing results. Many simply invented their own standards, which happened, for instance, at the forts along the Rio Grande, where a target eight feet tall and eighteen inches wide—presumably representing a gangly beanpole of an Indian—was used and any hits were reported to Washington as “bull’s-eyes.” Even then two-thirds of the rounds fired at one hundred yards missed. A few companies actually used blanks. Similarly, the colonel in charge of Fort Laramie on the northern Plains reported that about half his troops might one day “become expert enough to shoot at a crowd,” while the rest could be counted as just moderate shots.4
Three years later a captain in the Tenth Infantry with sound connections to the Ordnance Department, Henry Heth, was given the task of producing a uniform manual of small-arms instruction. It was unoriginal stuff but was still greatly needed, considering that in 1855 an inspection of 325 recruits’ rifles at Santa Fe revealed that 140 of them had been loaded with the ball first and powder second.5
Heth copied a French textbook that was intended for teaching recruits wholly unfamiliar with firearms, ballistics, or the basic principles