6/18/2013

“Fight For The Colors” by Don Troiani; courtesy of Historical Art Prints; (203) 262-6680; historicalartprints.com

The lieutenant grabbed his sergeant’s Sharps carbine, dropped the lever, slipped a linen cartridge into the open chamber, closed the action, cocked the hammer and capped the nipple. Using a fence rail for a rest, he jacked up the sights to what he thought an appropriate height for the range and squeezed off a shot at the advancing Confederate infantry, some 600 yards away. The bullet hit the ground in a puff of dust halfway to the Rebs. He had miscalculated, but had accomplished what he set out to do. Forever after, 2nd Lt. Marcellus E. Jones of Milton, Ill., and the 8th Illinois Cavalry could claim the honor of firing the first shot of perhaps the greatest of American battles: Gettysburg.

Unlike most of the encounters of the first two years of the Civil War, including Manassas and Antietam, Gettysburg involved significant cavalry action at both its outset and its end. As dawn broke on July 1, 1863, Brig. Gen. John Buford’s cavalry division, including Lt. Jones’ regiment, was deployed on the ridgelines north and west of the little Pennsylvania town. Buford’s job was to seek out the Army of Northern Virginia while shielding his own Army of the Potomac from prying enemy eyes. That morning both armies, primed for a climactic, perhaps war-ending, fight, were converging via roads that radiated outward from a Gettysburg hub.

The campaign began in the wake of Gen. Robert E. Lee’s “perfect battle” triumph over Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker at Chancellorsville in May. As with Second Manassas the previous year, Chancellorsville provided Lee with a springboard for an invasion of the North. The Confederate commander intended to take the war out of ravaged Virginia, supply his army off the enemy’s land, encourage anti-war elements in the Union states and perhaps capitalize on unforeseen events. Hooker followed, too tentatively for President Abraham Lincoln, who, given an opportunity, replaced him with Maj. Gen. George G. Meade.

As battle drew nigh, both forces began to concentrate near Gettysburg, where, following Jones’ shot, Buford’s horse soldiers traded fire with Confederate infantry skirmishers. The Union cavalry managed a gradual fighting withdrawal, delaying the enemy while federal foot soldiers marched to the rescue. Union infantry, the First and then the Eleventh Army Corps, arrived in the nick of time, halting the Rebel advance. As the day wore on, however, more Confederates poured into the fight and the advantage swayed back and forth until the Union line broke and defeated Yankees streamed back through Gettysburg to the high ground on Cemetery Ridge, where they rallied and set up a defensive position.

During the night, reinforcements arrived for both sides and July 2 found the Army of the Potomac deployed in a “fishhook” line, anchored on its barb end at Culp’s Hill. That afternoon Maj. Gen. Daniel Sickles advanced his Third Army Corps from its position on the shank along Cemetery Ridge forward to the Emmitsburg Road, his left flank hanging in the breeze at an ancient glacial rock formation. Sickles, who thought he was improving his tactical situation by advancing, was unaware that Lee had planned an attack on the Union left. The assault, delayed by organizational difficulties, was launched late that day, and in heavy fighting at sites that would forever after be part of the American military iconography—Devil’s Den, Little Round Top and the Wheatfield—the stubborn federals were driven back to Cemetery Ridge, from where an exhausted Confederate force could push them no farther. An evening strike at Culp’s Hill failed as well.

July 3 opened without major combat, but an afternoon artillery duel preceded the disastrous Confederate infantry assault known forever afterward as “Pickett’s Charge” after Maj. Gen. George Pickett, who commanded one of the three divisions. A lesser known fight, of interest to students of firearm technology, occurred some three miles behind the Union lines as Maj. Gen. J. E. B. Stuart, moving his cavalry division to exploit any advantages gained by the infantry attack on the Union center, engaged a federal cavalry division under Brig. Gen. David M. Gregg in a series of dismounted firefights and conventional saber charges.

Gettysburg was a small arms watershed, with every type of firearm technology available during the war, from obsolete muzzleloading smoothbore muskets to more modern rifle-muskets, breechloading, single-shot rifles and carbines, revolvers, sabers, long-range target rifles, and state-of-the-art repeating rifles in action somewhere on the battlefield during the three days of fighting.

By mid-1863, the Union cavalry was a heavily armed force, with each trooper carrying a breechloading carbine, saber and cap-and-ball revolver. At first glance, dismounted horse soldiers, with their faster-firing shoulder arms backed up by six-shot handguns, might seem to have an advantage over infantrymen armed with single-shot muzzleloading rifle-muskets. In reality, however, Civil War cavalry did not engage in stand-up fights with infantry, as the mounted arm’s tactical role was quite different than that of foot soldiers. In addition to not being schooled in infantry tactics, a dismounted cavalry force immediately lost a quarter of its potential firepower, as every fourth man was required to hold horses behind the skirmish line.

Breechloading carbines had long been preferred for cavalry, as they could be fired and reloaded on horseback. Such use in the Civil War was rare, however, and carbines were primarily used for dismounted skirmishing. In addition to the Sharps, the men in Buford’s cavalry screen were equipped with a variety of carbines, including the Burnside, Sharps & Hankins, Gallager, and Smith and Merrill. The guns fired .50 to .54-cal. cartridges with 40- to 45-grain powder charges. All, save the Smith and Merrill, were operated by lowering a trigger guard lever to expose the chamber for loading. All but the Sharps & Hankins used semi-fixed ammunition—a cartridge containing powder and bullet with priming supplied by a percussion cap placed on an external nipple. Civil War carbines used a variety of non-interchangeable specialty cartridges of different shapes and materials, some of which acted as breech seals, although the Sharps and Merrill depended on mechanical breech sealing. Such ammunition diversity proved an ordnance officer’s nightmare, especially when, as was often the case, a unit was armed with several varieties of carbines.

The sturdy and accurate Sharps used a combustible .54-cal. linen cartridge (which replaced the old paper cartridge that allowed loose powder to migrate into places where it could explode), and was the most common and popular carbine. The Gallager chambered a .52-cal. brass cartridge that had to be manually extracted after firing, often with great difficulty, and was variously described as “inefficient” and “not equal to a bar of iron” in field evaluation reports by the men to whom it was issued.

The .54-cal. Burnside, as durable and accurate as the Sharps, fired a tapered brass cartridge loaded in a breechblock chamber that tilted upward and featured a primitive bump extractor that jarred the fired case loose on opening the action. The .50-cal. Smith employed a rubber cartridge that expanded to seal the chamber on firing, and then shrank for easy manual removal. A well regarded gun during the war, it has remained so in original and reproduction form among carbine shooters in the North-South Skirmish Ass’n. The .54-cal. Merrill used a paper cartridge which, like the Sharps paper rounds, was fragile and often broke up in cartridge boxes due to the “jouncing” effect conveyed by trotting horses. The majority of respondents to a late war survey of carbine effectiveness considered the Merrill “worthless.”

The most modern gun on the field that day was the Sharps & Hankins designed by Christian Sharps after he left the company that produced carbines bearing his name. It fired a .52-cal. rimfire cartridge with powder, bullet and priming compound all in one convenient water- and jounce-proof copper package. Most Sharps & Hankins carbines were purchased by the navy, but New York bought some as well, apparently including those carried by three companies of the 9th New York Cavalry at Gettysburg.