American Rifle - Alexander Rose [19]
Washington, almost uniquely among officers of his upscale social background, had been a rifle aficionado from at least the moment he returned from his initial baptism in frontier warfare, which actually occurred a year before the slaughter at Monongahela. In July 1754, during a fruitless expedition to oust the French from the forks of the Ohio, the twenty-two-year-old commander was humiliatingly forced to surrender at Fort Necessity (at Great Meadows, Pennsylvania) but was allowed to return to Williamsburg with his four-hundred-man force (including about one hundred South Carolina regulars under Captain James Mackay). Among the weapons confiscated by the French were “7 rifled guns” valued at £6 each and belonging to John Frazier, the expedition’s armorer.132
None of these weapons belonged to Washington, but he had lost his own anyway. Nearly two months after the surrender, following up on an inquiry from his comrade-in-arms, Mackay informed Washington that “I shall take care that you shall have your rifle.”133 It seems another man had it and hoped that Washington would exchange another rifle for it. How this fellow came by it remains a mystery, but because Mackay noted that Washington himself had ordered that every soldier should carry his own weapon, the letter suggests that the man had been present at Fort Necessity. It’s likely that during the desperate defense of the fort, Washington had lent his rifle to a soldier whose own weapon had misfired and had asked Mackay to get it back.134
Washington was virtually alone in the officer corps in carrying a personal rifle in the hinterland, and this particular weapon was special to him. It is a pity, then, that he doesn’t seem to have reacquired it, for we find him three years later purchasing another rifle, this time from Aaron Ashbrook, for £4 and 15 shillings on February 22. Perhaps it was a secondhand one, for later that year he brought it in for repair to Joshua Baker, an upmarket gun-maker in Frederick County, Virginia, who specialized in the rifle business and often worked as armorer for the Virginia Regiment.135
In 1758 Washington’s efforts with his Virginians at last paid off. That year the British, now under General John Forbes, set out to avenge Braddock’s defeat by conquering Fort Duquesne—Braddock’s original objective. Forbes, now in his late forties, had won his spurs fighting guerrillas during the War of the Austrian Succession (1742–48) before becoming adjutant general to John Campbell, Earl of Loudoun in Nova Scotia in 1757. Loudoun himself had been blooded in counterinsurgency fighting during the Jacobite uprising in the Scottish Highlands a few years previously. The earl was among the few senior officers in North America who understood the need for light troops, or regular troops who were more agile, and less encumbered with accoutrements, than the typical soldier, so that they could scramble up ridges and skirmish with enemy scouts in the woods.136
Forbes was less enamored of imported light troops, and, believing that he could benefit from the presence of both bayonets and rifles, he preferred to rely on regulars backed up by frontiersmen and native American allies. Adamant that “we must comply and learn the art of war, from enemy Indians or anything else who have seen the country and war carried on in it,” in the woods Forbes employed frontiersmen to screen his regulars and Indians to scout ahead of the army; in battle the redcoats would fix bayonets and bring the