There are at least four men who have been credited with Sedgwick's death, but according to TOCWOC,(The Order of Civil War Obsessively Compulsed), the most likely is "Kansas Tom" Johnson, who seems to be a member of an independent band of sharpshooters in Longstreet's corps. At the time of the shooting, Johnson was with or near the 10th Georgia (Bryan's Brigade).
The First Corps had spent the previous fall and winter in the Western Theater, participating in the campaigns at Chickamauga and in eastern Tennessee, and had evidently adopted a somewhat different organization based on that of the Army of Tennessee. There, influenced by Maj. Gen. Patrick Cleburne, the Whitworth sharpshooters had been grouped together in a separate company at division level. Thus, in the spring of 1863, Cleburne had organized a "Corps of Whitworth Sharpshooters" 46 strong, to be deployed at his personal direction, and Longstreet appears to have formed a similar group of riflemen at the corps level that fall. Just how strong this outfit was we don't know, but if it was allocated the same number of rifles as the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia (one or two Whitworths or the equivalent for each of its nine infantry brigades), then Longstreet's corps of sharpshooters may have had as many as 18 of these long-range rifles. Laurel Hill would have been the logical place to employ them, and it would explain the intense fire under which the Federals found themselves. Unfortunately no roster and only a few references to this shadowy unit have survived, one being the 1901 account of Colonel A.J. McBride, an officer in the 10th Georgia (Bryan's Brigade), who described "a band of sharpshooters composed of the best shots in the [First] corps." McBride credited one of these men, "Kansas Tom" Johnson (who was himself killed a few days later), with shooting Sedgwick. McBride gives no details, but if Johnson was in such a "band" he probably had a Whitworth and would have been in the right area.
Another man said to have shot Sedgwick was Thomas Burgess of the 15th South Carolina (part of Jenkins' Brigade). In a 1908 article in Confederate Veteran, V.M. Fleming gave an accurate description of the terrain at Laurel Hill, where the brigade commanded by Bratton would have been on the left. Burgess, according to the account, was a picket who fired at a group of mounted men who rode out in front of the Federal lines, killing one of them. Burgess himself was always reluctant to claim having killed Sedgwick—like many other men in the 19th century he regarded this method of warfare as "something akin to murder." Burgess, whose weapon is unspecified, was certainly in the right place at the right time to have shot Sedgwick. However, the account is second hand and the victim a mounted man, which would fit for Brig. Gen. Morris but not Sedgwick, who was on foot.
The writer of the section on the 4th Georgia in Henry W. Thomas's 1903 History of the Doles-Cook Brigade gave credit to Sergeant Charles Grace of that regiment. "General Sedgewick [sic] was superintending the construction of some redoubts, and, as he was more than half a mile from our picket line, considered himself perfectly safe. Sergeant Grace was a fine shot and was armed with one of the few Whitworth rifles in our army, which made the deed not only practicable but simple." While there is ample evidence of Grace's service as a sharpshooter, his regiment was part of Doles' Brigade, which was with Rodes' Division of the Second Corps. On May 9, the Georgians were at the base of what came to be called the Mule Shoe, separated from Sedgwick's position by roughly a mile of densely wooded terrain. While a shot from a Whitworth might have accurately traversed that distance, it seems unlikely that it could have avoided the trees.
A final claimant was Ben Powell, a sharpshooter with the 12th South Carolina in McGowan's Brigade. Powell's service as a sharpshooter is well attested, as is the fact that he was one of the unit's two Whitworth marksmen. Powell made his claim personally in a 1907 letter to his wife, and both his fellow sharpshooter Berry Benson (in a 1917 article in Confederate Veteran) and the former commander of his sharpshooter battalion, Major William Dunlop, backed him up. In his 1899 book Lee's Sharpshooters, Dunlop describes the incident:
We discovered towards the right of the battalion, which brought a four gun battery with its infantry supports placed there for the defense of the salient, barely within reach of our long range rifles. And to these Ben Powell with his 'Whitworth' and a few files on the right paid their respects. Presently an officer of rank with his staff approached the salient, and adjusting his field glasses began to take observations of the front. A few shots only had been fired at the group, when the ringing peal of Powell's "Whitworth" was heard some distance to the right; the officer was seen to stagger and fall; and the brilliant career of that gallant and distinguished soldier, Maj. Gen. Sedgwick, commandant of the fifth [VI] Federal army corps, was closed and closed forever.
A minor problem with this narrative is that Sedgwick was not using field glasses at the time; a very major one is that Dunlop's sharpshooter battalion was nowhere near the scene on May 9. Dunlop's battalion was part of McGowan's South Carolina brigade of Wilcox's Division, which was in turn part of the Confederate Third Corps. Its commander, Maj. Gen. Cadmus Wilcox, makes it clear in his report that the division marched past Laurel Hill to Spotsylvania Court House, then took up positions just east of it. This would have put Dunlop, Powell et al. probably more than two miles from the site of Sedgwick's death. The sharpshooter battalions were integral to their parent brigades, provided for their security, and were seldom separated, nor does Wilcox make any mention of this having been done.
Could Grace or Powell have gone to Laurel Hill on their own? Berry Benson, himself a sharpshooter, stated that the Whitworth-toting Powell and his comrade Oscar Cheatham "now became independent sharpshooters, to go where they pleased and carry on war at their own sweet will." Laurel Hill was after all the hottest sector on May 9, and Powell could have walked the distance in well under an hour, Grace in half that. Still, the Whitworth sharpshooters were not so footloose as Benson makes it sound, and it seems very unlikely that these two men would have been shifted all the way to another corps area absent the kind of dire emergency that befell the Confederates on May 12. Thus, while Grace and Powell can't be entirely ruled out, they are less likely candidates than the men who were actually in the Laurel Hill sector.
It is also worth considering all these claims were made 35 to 50 years after the fact, many were secondhand and none provide a clear picture of events that can be squared with Colonel McMahon's eyewitness account, which appeared as part of the Battles and Leaders series in 1887. It is also quite possible that the shooter, like "Kansas Tom" Johnson, failed to survive the war or died soon after. By then, too many men, like Burgess, were reluctant to boast about their exploits as sharpshooters, which went against Victorian attitudes of gallantry, or they may have feared retribution after the war. Thus, unless new evidence comes to light, the shooter's identity cannot be established with any certainty.
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