By Scott Longman
At the start of the Civil War, Jack Hinson was a prosperous farmer in his later fifties. He had a place in Stewart County, Tennessee.
When the war came, despite being a Southerner, he tried to remain neutral. But after the Union took nearby Fort Donaldson, their patrols in the area went way up. In response, bands of locals began “bushwacking,” what we would today recognize as insurgent ambush tactics.
In the Fall of 1862, two of his sons, George and Jack, were out deer hunting. The instant a Union patrol saw two young men with rifles in the woods, they arrested them. Determined to make a brutal statement, the patrol tied the boys to trees, shot them, dragged their bodies around the courthouse square, then decapitated what was left.
But then they took a further unimaginable step: they took the boys’ heads and impaled them on the gateposts to Jack’s farm. In so doing, they ensured that they weren’t just bringing implacable devastation upon themselves, but to their entire army.
The preeminent latter-day historian, Lt. Col. Tom C. McKenney, USMC (ret.), sets forth a first-rate scholarly analysis of the whole thing in Jack Hinson’s One-Man War: A Civil War Sniper.
The first action Jack undertook was a methodical intelligence/surveillance/reconnaissance operation. He got all gray-man, and learned Union routes and patrols and tactics and resupply. He learned leadership and personalities and capabilities. He learned them in town, and on trails, and on watercourses.
Then he saw to it that his surviving family got far enough away. Far west, past retribution.
His concurrent step was to get unconventionally armed. He commissioned a .50 caliber sniper rifle. The rifle itself survives, along with a chain of custody: it is enormous, with a staggering 41-inch heavy octagonal barrel and a weight of 18 pounds. While a custom rifle like that would normally have been heavily ornamented, Jack’s was not: it was the equivalent of Parkerized clean, with him no doubt concerned about reflective light discipline. It employed one of the most accurate bullet systems of the day, the Minie ball, which was launched by a further accuracy-enhancing set trigger arrangement. Contemporary sniper rifles not as extreme as Jack’s have been documented as being good for beyond 700 yards.
As you might well expect, he first directed his attention against the particular men who had killed his sons. If we had more space, we’d go into how he got them. But he didn’t stop there: he went on to kill as many Union soldiers as he possibly could.
One of his signature attacks was against steamboats. On the Tennessee River, there was something called the Towhead Chute, where a sharp narrowing tremendously increased the current. The Union used that river as a major supply line, so there was a constant flow of military traffic. When heading upcurrent, the boats slowed to a crawl, often for as long as 45 minutes.
Jack had scouted and found a ledge far up a mountain with a perfect overview of the Chute. Besides perfect sniping vantage, there was heavy concealment of foliage, it was almost impossible to land a counter-attack party below the site, and the site offered several good escape routes behind him. The account of his first kill that way was of an officer. The exact ledge is known, and has been documented by modern historians. While the river has since been dammed up, the original navigation channel is the same: a modern channel marker has been ranged from Jack’s hide at 529 yards. Iron sights. Blackpowder.
In the most legendary of such attacks, Jack once relentlessly set upon a Union gunboat, complete with cannon and riflemen on its decks. Jack so methodically decimated them that the captain ordered a tablecloth be run up the flagpole in surrender. Of course, lone Jack, with one, single-shot rifle, could not descend from his position to accept surrender. But, ever the man of honor, he could not continue fire upon them, either. He watched, until they finally moved on. It is the only time in all of naval history that a single rifleman secured the surrender of a gunboat.
So, how did it all end? Despite the massive manhunts out to get him, Jack out-tradecrafted them all, to survive the war and to live to, what was at the time, the ripe old age of 67, where heart failure finally did what Union forces couldn’t. And as to the other side, what were the Union total KIA’d? While nobody knows for sure, there’s no shortage of evidence and theories. Jack’s rifle bears 36 “O” stamps. Some sources say that’s a big undercount, because it only stands for officers. The rifle also bears four more linear notches near the muzzle, which are said to be for the four soldiers who killed his sons. But sometimes, those being shot at keep better records than those doing the shooting, and given Jack’s localized AO, his particular tactics, and his unusual weapon, it doesn’t seem unreasonable that the Union might have figured out who was killing them. Their total for Jack is a staggering 130 dead.
If only they’d left his family alone.
