Author: Sid Sidlo – The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable

The Sharpshooter and His Weapon

By Sid Sidlo
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2008, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: At the time this article was originally published in The Charger in the fall of 2001, Sid Sidlo was editor of the The Ramrod, the newsletter of the North Carolina CWRT.

Hitting a distant target with a bullet only looks easy. It takes a keen eye, steady hands, a great deal of training and practice, and a good firearm. Even with those qualifications and today’s high-powered rifles, it is difficult to hit a man-sized target at three hundred yards without resting the rifle securely. And the black powder of the Civil War era was not high power. Now imagine firing a rifle at a distant enemy on a battlefield covered with powder smoke, with shell fragments flying around, and with the enemy riflemen and artillery in turn finding you a very desirable target. It took cool nerves under those conditions to estimate carefully the distance to the target, determine the high trajectory needed at the time, and allow for any wind. But that was the task of the Civil War sharpshooter, both Union and Confederate.

Civil War Roads

By Sid Sidlo
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2008, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in The Charger in the spring of 2001. Its author, Sid Sidlo, was then the editor of the North Carolina Roundtable’s Ramrod newsletter and long-time friend of the Cleveland CWRT.

During the Civil War, almost all roads were of dirt that became quagmires of mud after heavy rains. Only a few hard-surface, all-weather roads existed. These hard-surface, all-weather roads were called “macadamized” roads after their inventor, Scottish civil engineer John Loudon McAdam, who in turn was indebted to the road builders of the ancient Roman empire.

Technology in the Civil War: COLD STEEL!

By Sid Sidlo
The Cleveland Civil War Roundtable
Copyright © 2008, All Rights Reserved

Editor’s note: At the time this article was originally published in The Charger in the winter of 2002, Sid Sidlo, a long-time friend of the CCWRT, was editor of the North Carolina CWRT’s newsletter, The Ramrod.

It is a truism that by the time of the Civil War, the bayonet had outlived its usefulness in combat. Yet like many truisms, it tells only part of the story. Certainly the bayonet was not used in the 1860s as it had been before then. Up through the war with Mexico, the last conflict fought with smoothbore muskets, the bayonet’s value was as a “shock tactic” to disorganize the defenders and take the ground, but not necessarily to win by killing. Men would often break and run from an attack of gleaming bayonets. Most, if not all, of the casualties would be caused by rifle fire, but in a sense the victory belonged to the bayonets.