The army’s two companies of Massachusetts sharpshooters had disposed of most, but not all, of their heavy state-supplied W. D. Langdon target rifles in exchange for Sharps rifles after Antietam, but also counted a few Merrill rifles in their ranks at Gettysburg. When Rebel sharpshooters firing from Gettysburg rooftops decimated a party of New York skirmishers, the First Company was deployed in response, and killed and wounded a significant number of their Confederate counterparts. Capt. Richard S. Thompson of the 12th New Jersey recalled watching some Massachusetts sharpshooters armed with scope-sighted target rifles firing from Cemetery Ridge at Confederate sharpshooters in the Bliss barn. Thompson’s description of their tactics, with a three-man team including a shooter and spotter, bears a striking similarity to modern sniper techniques.

Although many Confederates thought they had gained, at worst, a draw in the immediate aftermath of the battle, Gettysburg would prove, in retrospect, to indeed be the “high water mark” of the Confederacy. Lee withdrew his battered army south, with Meade tentatively following. Almost two years of bloody combat remained, but from then to the end of the war, the Army of Northern Virginia would remain on the defensive, hoping for a game-changing event that would never come.

In the years after the battle there were other contenders for first-round honors, but none seriously challenged Lt. Jones, who left the Union Army as a captain in 1865. For decades thereafter, until his death in 1900, Jones no doubt regaled the members of Grand Army of the Republic E.S. Kelly Post No. 513 in Prospect Park, Ill., with tales of his historic Sharps shot. At one point he and some comrades came back to Gettysburg and erected a small monument on the spot, then private property, now within the National Military Park boundary. It still stands.