The Army of the Potomac--A Sharp-Shooter on Picket Duty

As a result of the development in the 1860s of a far more accurate telescopic rifle, sharpshooters were first used extensively in the Civil War. A contemporary account noted: “Some of those Yankee sharpshooters . . . had little telescopes on their rifles that would fetch a man up close until he seemed to be only 100 yards away from the muzzle. I’ve seen them pick a man off who was a mile away. They could hit so far you couldn’t hear the report of a gun. You wouldn’t have any idea anybody was in sight of you, and all of a sudden, with everything as silent as the grave and not a sound of a gun, here would come . . . one of those ‘forced’ balls and cut a hole clear through you.”