American Rifle - Alexander Rose [80]
Firepower advocates dismissed the presence of talented individuals in the line as merely fortuitous. Perhaps at the long ranges (four hundred yards and above) that Ordnance claimed were the average battlefield distance between opposing sides, sharpshooters could work wonders picking off glinty-epauletted officers, but hard fighting was close fighting.
During Civil War firefights—including battles, skirmishes, and low-level actions—the average distance between Confederate and Unionist was a mere 127 yards.145 Yardage varied widely, with the prime killing ground being between 80 and 120 yards. There were even firefights at the terrifying distance of 10 or 20 yards. These nightmares nearly always happened either in darkness, or when one side coolly held its fire until the last moment, or when combatants came to grips in the woods. During the latter instances the Confederates, harking back to colonial days, would shout Indian cries, and at times the brush was so impenetrable that soldiers were blasting each other at fifteen paces.
Those favoring repeaters highlighted the danger of relying on careful marksmanship in the fluid circumstances of the modern battleground: a small error in precisely judging range and wind resulted in a miss. That was why one Confederate infantryman at Drewey’s Bluff, Virginia, in May 1864 noticed a tall pine behind him riddled with bullets from top to bottom; cones and needles from its loftiest branches kept falling onto his breastworks.146 Far better, it was argued, to close the distance as quickly as possible and devastate the enemy with hailstorms of lead.
The experience of war had wrought a radical shift in attitude. Only two years before its outbreak Lieutenant Cadmus Wilcox had published an encyclopedic volume entitled Rifles and Rifle Practice that could be regarded as the bible of the accuracy school. Hundreds of its pages were devoted to the scientific minutiae of various ballistical measurements and statistical comparisons and their impact on marksmanship. The army even purchased one thousand copies for general edification. But it soon fell into obscurity, victim to the slaughterhouses of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.147
More in keeping with real-world conditions was Major G. L. Willard’s exhaustive Comparative Value of Rifled and Smooth-Bored Guns, which in 1863 went so far as to call for the return of smoothbore muskets. On the grounds that rifles equipped with precise, elevating sights (which Wilcox had counted as one of the finest devices ever conceived by the wit of man) were too slow for use in battle, wise commanders, Willard advised, should tell their men to bash off their fiddly elevating sights and simply “wait until the enemy are within point blank range, where the old arms [begin] to act with real effect.”148
Willard was killed during just such a charge at Gettysburg—though a fragmented artillery shell ripping off most of his head was the cause, not a musket ball. Given the Civil War’s hundreds of thousands of other dead and maimed men, it was understandable if Ripley’s promotion of individual talent in the field of battle seemed a quaint throwback to the days of yore. Now the apostles of firepower, not the evangelists of accuracy, were the industrial age made flesh.
An early seventeenth-century matchlock in action. The sputtering “match,” which ignited the gunpowder, gave away one’s position at night and was useless in the wet. The arrival of the flintlock spurred demand for firearms among both colonists and colonized.
A fine example of German worksmanship adapted for the American wilderness: A “Kentucky Pennsylvania” rifle of the eighteenth century.
The magnificent weapon to which John Hall devoted his life: a breech-loader built on interchangeable principles, a