TOCWOC – A Civil War Blog

If you are familiar with the Revolutionary War and especially the battle of Saratoga you’ve probably heard of Timothy Murphy. According the story, Murphy, one of Daniel Morgan’s riflemen, shot British general Simon Frazier off his horse with a double-barreled rifle at a distance of 300 yards, thereby winning the battle and perhaps even saving […]

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Some time ago I did a post on the origin of the word “sharpshooter” – that it came into the English language by way of the German mercenary riflemen hired by the British crown in the late 18th Century. A couple of commenters, however, took issue with that analysis and insisted that it came from […]

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I’ve been reading a series of book on tactics from both the Napoleonic and Revolutionary wars as a background for my ongoing study of Civil War tactics. Part of this is to try to determine, as British military pundit Paddy Griffith had it, if the American Civil War was another Napoleonic war. How much, if […]

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Bill Adams sent me an interesting graphic he scanned from a period book and has agreed to let me post it. Widely published and commented on the time, it shows the results of a test conducted at the British musketry school at Hythe in the mid-1850s. Thirty riflemen who did not know the distances involved […]

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As a followup to my previous post about a present-day marksman in Afghanistan, I am posting (with his kind permission) Gary Yee’s article about a lone marksman at the Battle of New Orleans and the effect he had. Gary, who will be coming out with a sharpshooting book of his own shortly, is one of […]

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There’s a lot of ongoing controversy about the effect of the rifle in battle, but there’s no question that in certain times and places an individual rifleman can have a powerful effect. One such example comes to us from Afghanistan: During the battle, the designated marksman single handedly thwarted a company-sized enemy RPG and machinegun […]

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