Anyone ever tried it?  Could it ever be done?
200 men, 3-4 companies, 3-4 buglers, 10 officers, 10 Sergeants, LOTS OF AMMO. Manuever by the bugle at a distance.....manuever quickly, sting like line infantry?  With 1 in 6 to 1 in 12 CSA infantryman involved in these elite units it certainly is PEC.

TAG featured line infantry only (no sharpshooter battalions) correct?

With only 491 names on the 'list' it would be hard to find the like minded cphers that could handle the tactical deployments and actually fight?

Chris Anders commanded a scaled down version of this at Cedar Creek the last 2 years.

It gave a new perspective to the fight.  Moving in open order and quickly to sting at the Federals.  I think I had found a quote somewhere from an account at the actual Cedar Creek of the NC Sharpshooter Bttn swarming some guns..

Union Captain James McKnight’s Regular Army battery had already been overrun once that foggy October 19, 1864, morning at Cedar Creek. Now, as part of Brigadier General George W. Getty’s division, they waited on a low hill outside Middletown, Virginia, as another Rebel attack materialized out of the mist. The gunners gaped at the Confederate skirmishers loping up the hill, howling their trademark yell. “I could not believe they were actually going to close with us:’ said one gunner, “until the men on the remaining gun of the left section abandoned it and retreated toward the old graveyard wall.

Their front line was not in order, but there was an officer leading them, and I distinctly heard him shout: ‘Rally on the Battery! Rally on the Battery!” The Yankee gunners managed to get off a last shot of double canister, but “as the Rebel veterans understood this kind of business they ‘opened out’ so that the charge did not hit any of them. "In a moment the Southerners were in among the gunners, “amid smoke, fog. wreck, yells, clash and confusion....man to man, hand to hand, with bayonet and musket butt on their side and revolvers, rammers, and hand spikes on ours!”

The Federal artillerymen’s confusion was understandable—skirmishers in the Civil War were just not supposed to assault a strongly defended position. Those Confederates, however, were no ordinary Skirmishers but the elite Corps of Sharpshooters of Maj. Gen. Stephen D. Ramseur’s division - the shock troops of the Confederacy They were, as one former member put it, “the spike-head of Toledo steel” that led the advance and covered the retreat of the army. The sharpshooters were, in fact, not skirmishers in the normal sense but powerful combat units in their own right. As a tactical innovation, they were 50 years ahead of their time, presaging both the open-order techniques of the late 19th century and the German Stosstruppen of World War I. Unfortunately, the Southern corps d’élite has received only a passing mention from historians.


This is the opening to an article in America's Civil War magazine from July 2002. The article "Shock Troops of the South" by Frederick L Ray. It has some nice background on the evolution of the sharpshooters.

RJ,

The CS sharpshooter impression has been a fad around the mid-Atlantic for a number of years.