Historical myth has long held that Buford’s troopers were armed with seven-shot repeating Spencer carbines on July 1, and credits the firepower of the Spencers with delaying the Confederate advance. In reality, the fighting that morning was between loosely deployed skirmish lines on both sides. The cavalry presence forced the Confederates, who did not know where the Union infantry was, to deploy into line of battle, which took up the time needed for Union infantry to arrive. Casualties were light on both sides. One cavalryman reportedly fired only a dozen rounds from his carbine all morning.

Spencer repeating rifles (not carbines, which would not be produced until October 1863) firing rimfire cartridges were indeed used in combat at Gettysburg, but not until the July 3 cavalry fight. General Gregg’s division included Brig. Gen. George A. Custer’s Michigan Brigade. The 5th and part of the 6th Michigan Cavalry had recently been issued Spencers, and the 6th had used them for the first time in the eastern theater of war in a skirmish at Hanover, Pa., on June 30.

When he encountered Gregg, Gen. Stuart ordered the 34th Virginia Cavalry Battalion to dismount and hold the Rummel farm. After two regiments with Sharps and Burnside carbines failed to dislodge the 34th, the Spencer-armed 5th Michigan was ordered to drive the Virginians out. The 34th was actually a mounted infantry outfit armed with a mixture of muzzleloading Enfield and Richmond rifle-muskets and shorter-barreled Richmond rifle-muskets purpose-built for such service, as well as revolvers. The outcome of the ensuing firefight between two approximately equal forces armed with old and new technology was ambiguous. The Wolverines had to withdraw when they ran low on ammunition, but the Virginians, though holding the field, suffered an astounding 75 percent casualty rate compared to the 8.7 percent rate suffered by the Michigan men—statistics that did not bode well for a Confederate future.

In the wake of the dismounted firefight, Stuart ordered a mounted charge and the subsequent series of wild melees saw sabers and cap-and-ball revolvers, mostly .44-cal. Colt Model 1860 Armies, used at point-blank range. One soldier remembered that handguns were “discharged … into the very face of the foe” as the horsemen slammed into each other. Most of the 7th Michigan Cavalry’s casualties that day were caused by sabers and revolver bullets. Confederate Brig. Gen. Wade Hampton was severely slashed in the head twice by troopers from the 1st New Jersey Cavalry before the Rebels retreated, ending the fighting for the day.

Artillerymen were issued a limited number of revolvers, mainly to dispatch mortally wounded horses, although they were used on occasion to defend a battery. Infantry officers usually carried personally owned handguns, more as badges of rank than offensive arms. At Gettysburg some of those handguns were indeed fired at the enemy, however. In the Wheatfield fight Capt. Garrett Nowlen of the 116th Pennsylvania used his revolver in close action, and Confederate Col. Franklin Gaillard of the 2nd South Carolina remembered that the fighting “was so desperate I took two shots with my pistol at men scarcely thirty steps from me.”

Although cavalry action at Gettysburg was extensive in comparison to previous major battles, the infantry bore the brunt of the fighting over the three days of combat. Blockade runner deliveries of British Pattern 1853 Enfield pattern arms coupled with captures at Chancellorsville and a small but steady domestic production, primarily at Richmond Armory, resulted in an Army of Northern Virginia that was, according to Confederate Col. Edward P. Alexander, 90 percent armed with rifled .54- and .58-cal. arms as it entered Pennsylvania. An even higher percentage of the Army of the Potomac’s soldiers were armed with imported Enfields and Austrian Lorenzes and Model 1861 Springfield rifle-muskets from vastly expanded armory production and deliveries from contractors.

With the exception of specialized units in the Army of Northern Virginia, marksmanship training had improved little in either army since the war began. Ironically, the 21st New York infantry, which took shooting practice seriously at ranges up to 500 yards, was mustered out of the service prior to the Gettysburg campaign. The 121st New York, 15th New Jersey and other regiments conducted some familiarization firing at various known distances in the spring of 1863, but ignored range estimation and marksmanship basics.

Occasional attempts at long-range fire by line outfits at Gettysburg, including a volley aimed by the 56th Pennsylvania at the 55th North Carolina at an undetermined distance on July 1, proved ineffective. Brigadier General Hobart Ward, commanding a brigade on Houck’s Ridge between the Wheatfield and Devil’s Den on July 2, ordered his men to hold fire until the Rebels were 200 yards away, which, following modern verification by range-finder at various spots on the field, turns out to be the average infantry engagement range at Gettysburg.

Although the rifle-musket was predominant on the Gettysburg battlefield, there were older .69-cal. smoothbore muskets in service in some regiments on both sides. When the 6th Minnesota infantry charged the railroad cut west of town on July 1, a number of the Badgers suffered buckshot wounds from smoothbore “buck-and-ball” rounds. One Yankee struggling with the 2nd Mississippi’s color bearer for that regiment’s flag had “a ball and three buckshot … through the skirts of my frock coat … .” Around 10 percent of the arms captured by the Union First Army Corps that day were smoothbores, reflecting the accuracy of Col. Alexander’s arms estimate.

The New York and Pennsylvania regiments of the Irish Brigade used their smoothbores to good effect when they closed with the enemy on the slope of a stony hill adjacent to the Wheatfield, but perhaps the most significant smoothbore story at Gettysburg was that of the 12th New Jersey Infantry. In their position on Cemetery Ridge, the Jerseymen disassembled their buck and ball cartridges on July 3 while awaiting Pickett’s charge, creating massive ad hoc charges of fifteen or more buckshot for their Model 1842 muskets. The men of the 12th laid low until Confederate infantry came within 50 yards of their position, then delivered a massive volley into the 26th North Carolina, a regiment already battered on July 1, virtually destroying what remained of the unit. Years after the war, when the veterans of the 12th erected their Gettysburg monument, it was surmounted by one large sphere and three small ones—and inscribed with the words “buck and ball.”

The combat role of Civil War sharpshooters is often confused with that of modern snipers. Although some were detailed to what could be called long-range sniping duty, most sharpshooters were intended to be expert skirmishers, deployed in front of a main line of battle in loose formation in advance or retreat. The Army of Northern Virginia formed a number of brigade sharpshooter battalions, selected from a brigade’s best shots, in early 1863. Those men were armed with rifle-muskets, but well trained to use them effectively, and did so in the Gettysburg campaign, delivering heavy harassing fire on Cemetery Ridge from the area of the Bliss barn and the town’s rooftops. A South Carolina battalion commander estimated that his men fired more than 200 rounds each on the morning of July 3.

Perhaps the most famous Gettysburg incident attributed to Confederate sharpshooters was the death of Maj. Gen. John Reynolds on July 1, but a close examination of that incident by Gettysburg scholar Dr. David Martin disproves several such claims and concludes that Reynolds, who was indeed too far forward for a general, was hit by fire from the opposing line of battle. The scope-sighted British Whitworth rifle is often associated with Southern sharpshooters, but despite the unsubstantiated postwar claim of one veteran, it is unlikely any were in use at Gettysburg. Likewise, the long-told story of a heavy New England-made target rifle allegedly discovered in a Confederate position at Devil’s Den after the battle, despite the fact that the gun was on display at the battlefield museum for many years, is also, to be kind, extremely suspect.

Although there had been proposals in the spring of 1863 to create sharpshooter battalions in the Union Army, the plan never materialized. There were, however, several regiments and companies of sharpshooters distributed unevenly through the Army of the Potomac. The two regiments of Berdan’s sharpshooters, both assigned to the Third Army Corps, were armed with Sharps rifles, with one heavy barrel, long-range rifle per company carried in the regimental supply wagons for retrieval in static combat situations. Parties of Berdan’s men did good work on the southern edge of the Gettysburg battlefield, particularly in the fight for Little Round Top. Interestingly, when four companies of Berdan’s First Regiment, supported by the 3rd Maine, encountered Brig. Gen. Cadmus Wilcox’s Alabama brigade on a reconnaissance in force into Pitzer’s Woods on the morning of July 2, the resulting 15-minute firefight, in which the sharpshooters expended 95 rounds per man, cost the Alabamans only 56 casualties.