I'm looking for any info on any air powered sniper rifles used during the American Civil War!!!   Thanks for the help,,, ken

What's a buff ??

A B-52.  If Lee had had them at Gettysburg, right now Jesse Jackson would be ... oh never mind.

A person who knows a lot about a subject.

That's a good question.  I remember from somewhere that the Austrian Army issued air long guns some time around or shortly after the Napoleonic Wars.  I don't remember if they were rifles.  Of course the War of Northern Aggression came after the invention of the Minie ball for use in a rifled musket.  Perhaps those had a longer range than the earlier air guns and so made the air guns obsolete.

What say you, real experts?

Most consider the South to have been in the wrong.

Lewis and Clark took air-guns on their expedition to the Pacific coast. If I remember correctly they were very slow to reload. I would think that the slow reload time would make them undesirable as a weapon of war. I could be wrong, and I'm sure if I am that someone will be along to correct me any moment.

  I used to have a book or a magazine that had a couple of of these rifles , I've looked everywhere and cant find it,  they had a round medium size air tank mounted just ahead of the trigger guard to propel the round , which I'm thinking was a .31 or .36 cal. round ball.

 They where used as sniper rifles,because of the low report it made when it was fired.. also mentioned that if any soldier was caught with one of these weapons, he would be immediately executed , most of the rifles that where found ,where laying along the road ,or in caves.

Thats about all I remember about the article I read about them ,I'm still looking for the book, maybe I'll find in one of these days  

short history of air rifles

I never knew about these.  I learned my useless fact of the day.

Which civil war












































sorry, I had too.

In before the grammer nazis catch on...

Never heard of an air gun then............dont mean Im right.



TIC

I've studied Civil War sharpshooter for nine years now and never came across an incident of an air power gun being used in Civil War combat (or sharpshooting).  The Austrians had the girandoni air gun, but that went out of service because it was hard to maintain. It is thought that the Lewis & Clark airgun was also a girandoni, but I haven't seen it (the VMI Military Museum was closed when I went).

Airgun range is very limited.  100 yards was about the reliable maximum of the Girandoni.   That's very close range considering the minie rifle could reach out to 500 yards. The Sharps rifle could reach out even further and the Whitworth could hit at 1880 yards (platoon sized target).

Check my sigline for some sharpshooting stories.


My book on the blackpowder sharpshooter should be out in a month's time.  It's 7 x 10, 856 pages, fully indexed and has over 150 maps, illustrations, photos.  The text is close to 400k words.

BTW, the incident you mentioned was the fable about Napoleon's order that any soldier armed with an airgun was to be executed immediately.  Arno Hoff proved it was false and his basis was that they were not in service by the time Napoleon fought the Austro-Hungarian empire.

It's covered in Chapter 3 of my book.