Sharpshooters, the elite troops of both armies, screened flank marches, led advances, and covered retreats. In the Shenandoah Valley in 1864, Confederate Lt. Gen. Jubal Early's army maintained an organized corps of designated sharpshooters drawn from the best riflemen in each regiment and formed into separate units when combat was expected. At the Second Battle of Kernstown, they effectively led the Confederate advance. Maj. Gen. Stephen Ramseur's North Carolina and Virginia sharpshooters maneuvered across the field and hills west of here to engage Union forces under Col. Joseph Thoburn, whose journal recorded that "our pickets were suffering severely from enemy sharpshooters." At about the same time, Maj. Gen. John B. Gordon's Georgia sharpshooters pressured Col. James Mulligan's men defending the center of the Union line around Opequon Church. Mulligan's men were eventually forced back to Pritchard's Lane, where they saw an approaching force in blue uniforms moving toward them from the right. Alerted to this movement by the 10th WV commander, Mulligan ordered the Mountaineer soldiers to hold their fire because he thought the force was part of Thoburn's division on his right flank. He soon realized his mistake when the approaching soldiers proved to be Ramseur's sharpshooters, who quickly opened a withering flanking fire on his men behind the stone fencing along Pritchard's Lane. By then, Gordon's sharpshooters had reached Hoge Run and, together with Ramseur's sharpshooters, inflicted heavy casualties on the Union, mortally wounding Mulligan and killing several troops as they tried to carry him from the battlefield. Early's use of sharpshooters was a key factor in the overwhelming Confederate victory and directly contributed to his army's surprisingly low casualty rate of just a few hundred soldiers in a battle involving over 20,000 troops.