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the Civil War thus placed more inexperienced soldiers, with more firepower and with more individual responsibility for the decision to kill, into more intimate, face-to-face battle settings than perhaps any other war in history. Absent the reassurance provided by distance or controlling discipline or combat experience, many Civil War soldiers were likely to have struggled as they decided when and even whether to fire at men who were visibly very like themselves.17

For many soldiers, the horror of killing was exemplified by sharpshooters, whose work appeared simply to be “cold blooded murder.” Sniping was a fundamental reality of Civil War military life, and rifles made marksmen accurate up to a distance of almost half a mile. Other technological innovations, the telescopic sight and the breech-loading rifle, further enhanced the sharpshooter’s lethality. Confederate sharpshooters’ units required men to be able to hit a target at six hundred yards with open sights. A Vermont recruiting poster for “The Sharp Shooters of Windham County” announced, “No person will be enlisted who cannot when firing at the distance of 200 yards, at a rest, put ten consecutive shots in a target, the average distance not to exceed five inches from the centre of the bull’s eye to the centre of the ball.”18

Soldiers often described bullets whizzing by even as they sat composing their letters home. “Dear Brother, Wife and All,” Isaac Hadden wrote to his family in New York from Virginia in June 1864, “There was a man this moment shot in the belly 20 feet from me which is nothing unusual in this country. It is worth a man’s life to go to sh-t here.” To shoot a man as he defecated, or slept, or sat cooking or eating, or even as he was “sitting under a tree reading Dickens,” could not easily be rationalized as an act of self-defense. Soldiers in camp wanted to think themselves off duty as targets as well as killers, and they found the intentionality and personalism involved in picking out and picking off a single man highly disturbing. Union sharpshooting units customarily wore green uniforms to serve as camouflage, and Confederates came to refer to these marksmen as “snakes in the grass.”19

The cool calculation, the purposefulness, and the asymmetry of risk involved in sharpshooting rendered it even more threatening to basic principles of humanity than the frenzied excesses of heated battle. When twelve soldiers from a regiment of Union sharpshooters were taken prisoner in Virginia in 1864, a local Petersburg newspaper argued for their execution: “in our estimation they are nothing but murderers creeping up & shooting men in cold blood & should receive the fate of murderers.” After enduring twenty-four days of steady and debilitating sniper fire between Union and Confederate troops near Port Hudson, Louisiana, John De Forest confessed, “I could never bring myself to what seemed like taking human life in pure gayety.” Men who had displayed great courage in battle had broken down “under the monotonous worry” generated by sniper fire. De Forest judged it a “sickening, murderous, unnatural, uncivilized way of being.” Men who could kill others in this way were not men as De Forest had before the war understood them to be; they violated his assumptions about both human nature and human civilization; he believed they undermined what defined their human selves.20

“The Army of the Potomac—A Sharp-Shooter on Picket Duty.” Engraving from an oil painting by Winslow Homer. Harper’s Weekly, November 15, 1862.

Dehumanizing the enemy is a common means of breaking down restraints against killing. Military training and propaganda often explicitly encourage such behavior, and soldiers themselves are inventive at differentiating and demeaning those whom they are assigned to destroy—be they Krauts or Nips or Slopes, to cite three twentieth-century examples. In the mid-nineteenth century, racism served to place African American soldiers in particular peril. Even in the Union army the 180,000 black soldiers who enlisted beginning in 1862 faced degrading inequalities