"Our Aim Was Man": Andrew's Sharpshooters in the American Civil War ed. by Roberta Senechal de la Roche (review)

Given editor Roberta Senechal de la Roche's background as an expert in collective violence, a reader of "Our Aim Was Man": Andrew's Sharpshooters in the American Civil War might anticipate a reinterpretation of the sniper's role in mid-nineteenth-century death and killing. The editor acknowledges such issues—addressed elsewhere in Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York, 2008), Earl J. Hess's The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence, Kans., 1997), and Dave Grossman's On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston, 1995)—but instead she lets the soldiers themselves do the talking. The result is an edited collection of primary sources from Andrew's Sharpshooters, a company of Massachusetts marksmen attached to the Union Army of the Potomac. Senechal de la Roche's volume, annotated with insight and narrative, allows the reader to follow a handful of unique soldiers through the war's bloody eastern theater.

Senechal de la Roche offers many useful points in her commentary. She highlights, for instance, how ineffectively Civil War infantry commanders utilized snipers. By the end of 1862, Andrew's Sharpshooters had received orders to dispense with their specialized target rifles to adopt the more mundane Sharps for use in skirmish detail, an order that wounded the sharpshooters' pride and individuality. Two men in particular carry the weight of the story in illustrating such points. The first, Moses Hill, was a stonecutter in his late thirties who left behind a substantial letter collection documenting his service up to his return home and subsequent death in late 1862. The second, Luke Emerson Bicknell, left a promising academic career in Boston to fight with the company. He later penned a postwar memoir that Senechal de la Roche mines extensively.

Hill's letters, despite coming from a specialized marksman, are rather typical of an Army of the Potomac soldier in 1861 and 1862. He loves General George B. McClellan and hates the army's "Black Republickan" tormentors (p. 186). Hill gripes about food, illness, weather, and homesickness, and he expresses jealousy at the newspaper attention that Hiram Berdan's more celebrated sharpshooters receive. But Hill's account is also rich with the occasional insight into the world of the Civil War sniper, including his frequent target practice and exploits in combat during the Peninsula campaign.

Bicknell is another matter entirely. His wartime letters frequently sidestep military matters to offer lugubrious romance for his sweetheart back home. His 1880s memoir has eluded publication until now, and a glance at his postwar assertions might demonstrate why. The sharpshooter constantly strains credulity, claiming to have rebuked General McClellan about ineffective infantry tactics and Massachusetts governor John A. Andrew about state manpower policy, both face-to-face. And Bicknell's Gettysburg recollections are even more incredible; he supposedly marched up to General George G. Meade and convinced the army commander not to counterattack off Cemetery Ridge before accepting the personal effects of Confederate general Lewis A. Armistead after Pickett's Charge. This is not to dismiss Bicknell's writings entirely, as his description of fighting in the West Woods at Antietam is downright gripping. But historians would do well to acknowledge, as Senechal de la Roche wisely does, that many of his claims are "embellishment" (p. 202). Fortunately, then, "Our Aim Was Man" relies on more than Bicknell's account alone.