American Rifle - Alexander Rose [102]
In 1870, alarmed by the army’s insouciance, Church launched a campaign in his journal (which he would edit until 1917) to expose what he believed was the shameful decline in American shooting prowess. He took particular delight in publishing not only embarrassingly critical analyses of units’ performances on the range but letters from officers whistleblowing about their men’s terrible aim. Bolstered by the reaction he had inspired, Church asked a friend, George Wingate—the very same man who had discovered that his company couldn’t hit a barrel lid during the war—to publish a series of six articles on rifle practice and target shooting to enlighten his military readers. Those issues quickly sold out. Wingate, a thirty-year-old New York lawyer, then published them as a book, Manual for Target Practice, which went through at least seven editions and caused a surge of interest in marksmanship.15
From the beginning, concerned that Americans’ enthusiasm for all things martial had dimmed after four blood-drenched years of warfare and 620,000 fatalities, Church and Wingate sought to create a forward-thinking, positive ethos around the figure of the American sharpshooter. Unlike the ill-trained cannon fodder of the Union and Confederate armies, the sharpshooter would bypass the sordid, squalid battlefield and fight his battles cleanly and humanely, with a single shot to the head at eight hundred yards. If Americans adopted marksmanship as their creed, the duration and intensity of future conflicts would be greatly reduced, leaving no more thousands of veterans without jaws, eyes, legs, or arms. The cult of accuracy that Church and Wingate nurtured was a progressive one—not in political, but in military terms—somewhat analogous to today’s theories about technological superiority erasing the need for traditional means of fighting.
The duo drew inspiration from the Germans, who had themselves recently fought several wars of unification and had won them speedily and bloodlessly (at least compared to the Civil War). Impressed by their prowess, and hoping that some of the magic might rub off, the army even began specifically looking for German recruits. An officer in the Fourth Cavalry, while believing the Irish to be “more intelligent and resourceful as a rule,” thought that “if a German was fit to be a noncommissioned officer he usually made a good one—he was feared by the men, did not curry favor, but was rigid in carrying out orders.”16 Similarly, in 1872 the army started to copy Prussian style for its dress uniforms, and it outfitted the cavalry and artillery with German spiked helmets—better known as Pickelhauben—sporting a metal eagle and a horsehair plume (yellow for cavalry, red for artillery).17
In Church and Wingate’s opinion, the Germans had clean hands, virtuous minds, and pure hearts; one could easily extol the similarities between Prussianism and Puritanism. The two countries’ standards of morality and work habits were alike, both were predominantly Protestant, and they shared a federal political system. (True, the Germans were ruled by an emperor, but according to George Bancroft, the American “envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary” to Berlin between 1867 and 1874, he observed republican niceties.) Among intellectuals such German philosophers as Hegel and Marx were coming into vogue, and perhaps most important the “Iron Chancellor” and architect of German unification, Otto von Bismarck, had been sufficiently foresighted during the Civil War to have backed the Union.18
Napoleon III of France, conversely, had played his cards disastrously. Instinctively siding with the more “aristocratic” South, the emperor had further inflamed tensions with the Lincoln administration by toppling the U.S.-backed president Benito Juárez and placing Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg on the Mexican throne. Napoleon’s