American Gun: A History of the U.S. In Ten Firearms (3 page)

Finally, while they were shorter, muskets generally had the advantage of being outfitted with bayonets. Rifles, originally designed for an entirely different type of job, did not. In many if not all battles, bayonet charges proved more deadly and more decisive than several rounds of gunfire.

But used in the right circumstances, a precision weapon like the rifle could be quite important. Traditionally, snipers have been deployed to take high-value targets at long range. And that’s exactly how they were employed in the Revolutionary War.

Which brings us back to our friend Sergeant Murphy, up there in that tree.

Murphy was a member of an elite brigade of riflemen under the command of Daniel Morgan. Colonel Morgan’s unit specialized in picking off British officers while they mustered their men on the battlefield. The idea was pretty simple: cut off the enemy’s head, and he floundered. The massed firing tactics that were so favorable to muskets depended on good coordination, which generally could only be provided by the officers in the field.

A member of Morgan’s Riflemen, with his tool: the American long rifle.

Don Troiani (www.historicalimagebank.com)

Throughout the war, British officers were horrified to see American riflemen like Timothy Murphy intentionally aiming at them. This went beyond even the guerilla tactics that had so decimated the British supply lines down from what is now Canada. To many British officers, deliberately aiming at them rather than firing generally at the mass of men on the front line was nearly akin to a war crime. The upper class that filled the officer ranks had never heard of such behavior before, and they were astounded. To them it seemed repulsive, very un-European tactic.

But it was definitely effective. The British feared the colonial riflemen so much they called them “widow-makers.” The best picture of the American long-riflemen comes from the unfortunate British troops who had to face them in battle. British Army Captain Henry Beaufoy wrote that his combat-hardened troops, “when they understood they were opposed by riflemen, they felt a degree of terror never inspired by general action, from the idea that a rifleman always singled out an individual, who was almost certain of being killed or wounded.” Another British officer reported that an expert rifleman could hit the head of a man at two hundred yards, and if he “were to get perfect aim at 300 yards at me, standing still, he would most undoubtedly hit me unless it were a very windy day.”

But their leaders had not fully absorbed the implications of the tactic, and on this day on the battlefield at Saratoga, several were sitting ducks out in the open, mounted on horses where they could be easily targeted. The most important of them was Simon Fraser, a Scottish aristocrat and British brigadier general who was massing his troops for a fresh charge on what would become known to historians as the Battle of Bemis Heights. Fraser’s commander, General Burgoyne, had launched a desperate attempt to break himself free of the rebels surrounding him. Hoping to lure the Americans into a trap, he sent Fraser against the left side of the American line. If Fraser’s troops could break the Americans’ will, the British might escape westward, and live to fight another day.

The battles at Saratoga have become the subject of legends and not a little propaganda on the part of the participants. But there’s no doubt that Murphy was up in the tree, and it’s more than a little likely that he and a few of his brothers-in-arms spotted General Fraser on horseback as he began rallying his troops for a charge. Murphy would have been about three hundred yards away—a good distance in those days, and probably far enough that Fraser didn’t feel in any danger at that early stage of the war.

As his rifle hammer dropped, Murphy’s firearm’s complex process of ignition unfolded, a fragile procedure that is nowhere near as fast as the firing of a modern cartridge arm. Murphy held steady throughout that long second and a half. He handled the gun like it was an extension of himself, and when loading it would have made sure to use the most efficient charge possible. The bullet would have made a sharp crack as it flew, its sonic reflections echoing against the nearby trees and ground.

It missed, though. Instead of hitting the general, it lightly nicked his horse.

Sergeant Murphy pulled a catch to flip up the preloaded bottom barrel. He performed a quick series of complex mental calculations, trying to adjust his aim for wind, altitude, and for the inevitable vertical and lateral drift of the bullet, which at this far distance could be severe.

Then he fired again. The second bullet missed, this one also barely clipping the general’s horse. I imagine he had some choice words going through his head. Nothing bad on Murphy—we all miss sometimes.

At this point, Murphy either would have paused to begin the time-consuming process of reloading his flintlock long rifle, which even for a crack shot like Murphy could have taken as long as thirty seconds, or more likely, someone would have passed him up another, preloaded long rifle.

In any event, Sergeant Timothy Murphy sighted down his barrel for a third shot, then squeezed the trigger. The bullet flew. Legend has it that this one found its target, squarely hitting Fraser in his midsection. In those days, a gut shot was both painful and nearly always fatal. Fraser slipped from his horse, mortally wounded.

Although it’s difficult if not downright impossible to definitively know whether it was Murphy’s bullet that struck the British general, one person above all apparently credited him with the kill: Fraser himself. Taken away to safety too late by two of his aides, the British officer spoke of seeing the American rifleman who shot him, far off in the distance, sitting in a tree.

Fraser’s death marked the final turning point of the battle. It deprived Burgoyne of his best lieutenant, and shortly after he was shot, the British troops fell back in retreat. Burgoyne’s position was now hopeless. Ten days later, he and six thousand British troops surrendered to the Americans, handing them a critical victory. Impressed, the French soon pitched in to offer crucial help to the Americans.

Sergeant Murphy’s boss, Daniel Morgan, is probably a guy you never learned about in history class, but he is one interesting character. He quit the Army after Saratoga because he felt he was passed over for a promotion. But he was soon back in action, and finally received his appointment to brigadier general in 1780. A short time later, he became one of the Revolution’s most important generals, one of the guys we probably couldn’t have won independence without.

British General Burgoyne surrendering to George Washington at Saratoga, October 1777. Daniel Morgan, whose riflemen emerged as the heroes of the battle, is depicted at center in white.

Library of Congress

Morgan wasn’t the only commander of riflemen in the war, and he didn’t just lead riflemen, but he did both very well. Credit where credit is due: individual riflemen played a small but important role in skirmishes and battles all across the continent. And employing what we would now call guerilla tactics, their hit-and-run raids kept the British off-balance throughout.

But let’s focus on Morgan and his crew. He had a bunch of riflemen besides our friend Murphy, who was back home north when Morgan returned to action down south. One of Morgan’s troops was a fella you may
think
you’ve heard of, namely Sam Houston.

No, not
that
Sam Houston—this was his dad. Major Samuel Houston Sr. was an officer in Morgan’s rifle brigade.

He was also my seventh great-grandfather on my mom’s side. My dad’s ancestors served in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. They were rebels in the first, but picked the wrong side in the second.

By the winter of 1780–81, Dan Morgan had amassed a force of at least 1,900 Continental regulars, state troops, and militiamen, plus a small cavalry unit. His men hailed from South Carolina, Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, Georgia, and Delaware. They had been given a simple task: raise as much hell among the British as they could in the Carolinas.

British Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis had invaded the states in 1780 in an attempt to crush the rebellion in the South with the help of friendly American Tories and Native Americans. He did well at first, trouncing a rebel force under Horatio Gates and taking effective control of South Carolina. But as he expanded his campaign into North Carolina, the Revolutionary Army was able to regroup and slow his progress. In the meantime, small groups of rebels bit away at his supply lines, continually harassing him. The war behind the lines was ferocious in the South, just as it was in parts of the North; American Tories and American patriots massacred each other in small hand-to-hand encounters. Gruesome atrocities were the order of the day: scalping, hatcheting, spontaneous summary hangings, the slaughter of prisoners, you name it. It was a no-holds-barred kind of war.

As dirty and bloody as it may have been, the actions of one British commander in the south stood out as truly outrageous. Colonel Banastre Tarleton led the elite British Green Dragoons cavalry force, a small but highly effective unit of horsemen who moved with explosive speed and struck terror in American soldiers and civilians alike. By 1781, he was arguably the most hated man in America, a cold-blooded killer rebels called “the Butcher.” The title wasn’t propaganda. In his most notorious and controversial act, he had either ordered or stood by as his men slayed Americans attempting to surrender at Waxhaw Creek on the border of the Carolinas. Word of the massacre spread throughout the states; ironically, it helped turn the tides against the British, outraging many who’d been neutral in the war.

Whatever his morals, Tarleton was bold and audacious—and effective. At one point, in a daring raid deep behind American lines, he came within a whisker of capturing Thomas Jefferson and the entire Virginia legislature.

All this made him the perfect opponent for Morgan. Occupied in an ill-fated attempt to extend the Southern campaign to Virginia, Lord Cornwallis tasked Tarleton to find and destroy Dan Morgan and his unit operating in South Carolina.

For his part, Morgan was under orders only to harass the British with hit-and-run tactics, and to avoid the risks of an open battlefield confrontation. But Morgan knew the Butcher was hot on his trail, thirsting for blood, and about to catch up with him. So on January 16, 1781, with Tarleton closing in a few miles away, Dan Morgan decided to dig in to stand and fight in a field (or “cowpens”) near Burr’s Mill in South Carolina. That night, Morgan cooked up one of the most brilliant battle plans in American history, a masterpiece of combined arms, fire, and movement that featured the American long rifle in a starring role. It would go down in history as the Battle of Cowpens.

Dan Morgan’s men likely were armed with a mix of muskets and frontier rifles, personal guns the militiamen would have used in their regular jobs as hunters, trappers, and farmers. That night, Morgan delivered an inspiring speech to his troops. One soldier recalled, “It was upon this occasion I was more perfectly convinced of Gen. Morgan’s qualifications to command militia, than I had ever before been. He went among the volunteers, helped them fix their swords, joked with them about their sweet-hearts, told them to keep in good spirits, and the day would be ours. And long after I laid down, he was going about among the soldiers encouraging them, and telling them that [he] would crack his whip over [Tarleton] in the morning, as sure as they lived.”

Folklore paints a rosy picture of the American militia, the part-time army of local farmers and the like. But truth be told, the militia’s record through the Revolution was, to be polite, mixed. The majority of the American militia troops were ragtag, volunteer part-time soldiers who might panic, break, and run at the sight of a thousand enemy troops charging them with muskets, bayonets, and cavalry. Few had been trained to any degree of professionalism. Many didn’t necessarily want to be on the battlefield in the first place, only answering the summons to serve out of a sense of duty, pride, and in a few cases, fear. Their time in the field was generally supposed to be measured in months, and even if they stayed on, their homes, farms, and families were never far from their minds.