Hello and welcome to “They Expect Wonders of Us,” a blog about the men of Berdan’s 1st and 2nd United States Sharpshooters in the American Civil War. I have been interested in the two regiments ever since I purchased a green reproduction forage cap at a re-enactment over half my life ago. It was a definite “what is this thing?” moment; the seller explained that it was a “sharpshooter” cap and that the two U.S. regiments were uniformed in green and carried special weapons. I ran to the library and checked out any and all books about the sharpshooters that I could, borrowed even more literature from my older history enthusiast friends, and over the course of a month I read everything I could get my hands on. I was hooked from the first paragraph of the 1892 regimental history by Charles A. Stevens.
Even more compelling were surviving photographs of the sharpshooters published in Stevens’. Something did seem special about those soldiers; their uniforms, weapons, equipment, even their demeanor and “look” in their wartime portraits piqued my interest and communicated to me. This was just a year or two after eBay went live so it wasn’t long before I was scouring that site hoping to buy an original sharpshooter photograph. The first one I found was an unsigned, crystal clear vignette carte-de-visite of 1st Sergeant William Churchill of Vermont’s Company H, 2nd U.S.S.S.. His tailored jacket with state seal buttons and giant muttonchops were immediately recognizable from a published image I had seen in sharpshooter Wyman S. White’s post-war memoir. I also recalled every detail that I had already read about him. I won the auction and congratulated myself for $40 well spent. Only two weeks later I found another original sharpshooter photo. And another, and another. The internet and trips to the local library yielded a vast wealth of information about the individual soldiers’ lives before, during, and after the war. I committed their stories to memory.
My first little collection of seven photos was later sold after I moved to Michigan and, turning my interests elsewhere, I stopped seeking out original images. The learning process continued, however. I still sought out and read everything related to the sharpshooters. After leaving a longtime restaurant job I began working in a full-time partnership with my friend Dan Wambaugh replicating Civil War uniforms. Esoteric, I know, but you’d be surprised at how busy a job it is. It certainly caters to both my artistic and technical sides and eventually allowed me to collect again. But back then after years of inactivity I was not too interested in photography. One day Dan and I were on a business trip to our weaver’s mill in Pennsylvania and had some downtime. We went to an antique store not far from the mill and Dan pointed out a box of cdv’s. I passed by uninterested but instead gravitated towards a big display of vinyl records in the back of the shop. A bit later I came out with a small stack of records I had been looking for and saw Dan chatting with an employee. Of course Dan had said “my friend wants to see those photos.” With the box sitting on the table I relented and began to quickly flip through the photos, more or less trying to humor everyone, not really paying attention, until a familiar face in the stack stopped me cold. It was a total recall moment: ‘Second Lieutenant Edward Dow, Company G 2nd U.S.S.S., but in civilian clothes?! And a Lawrence, Mass. back mark? Dow was an architect in Lawrence and split his time between there and New Hampshire! And only three bucks – GUH!’ I plucked Dow’s cdv from the box, set it on the table, and started looking through the images more carefully that time, inspecting the versos for signatures hoping perhaps to see a familiar name if not a face. My stack of vinyl was left right there on the table never to be seen again. I went home with not only a new photo but a completely rekindled interest in the sharpshooters and collecting.
That cdv of Dow would be the first of over 260 U.S. Sharpshooter images now in my current collection. Beyond the photographs I have added a number of related material culture items such as books, ephemera, weapons, equipment, & et cetera. And of course my research has not slowed in my quest to learn all that I can about these intrepid soldiers who served their “three years or to the finish.” A small measure of their daring was recalled by Lieutenant John Hetherington of Company D 1st U.S.S.S. in a July 6th 1863 letter to his mother. In it he described a pitched battle between only 100 men of his regiment and several full regiments of Alabamians at the battle of Gettysburg. Their previous excellent performance at the battle of Chancellorsville that May had set expectations high among the sharpshooters’ own commanders. As Hetherington himself put it “….we have done so much that they expect wonders of us.“
They Expect Wonders of Us 