American Rifle - Alexander Rose [21]
The Forbes expedition, ironically, also marked the end of that career—for the next twenty-odd years. That fall, with a marriage in the works, Washington was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses as the representative of Frederick County and resigned his command of the Virginia Regiment. Which brings us back to the mystery and history of Washington’s rifle.
In the 1770s, for those staid Virginian planters sitting in the clubby House and reluctantly steeling themselves for the final showdown with London that would erupt at Lexington and Concord, that rifle in the Peale portrait symbolized something meaningful. Washington’s rifle was carefully calculated to prompt a certain reaction. It was a deliberate effort to capture the image of the frontiersman, then as now a halcyon icon of very American—or in the political context of the 1770s, anti-British—traits: doughty individualism, rugged self-reliance, and an independent spirit determined to defend hearth and home against the predations of outsiders.
The uniform of the Virginia Regiment that Washington wore could only cement this impression. Here the burgesses had before them a master of war, the only American who had turned a ragtag provincial outfit of “broken innkeepers, horse jockeys, and . . . traders” into the equal of the finest fighting soldiers on earth—the British infantryman and the Indian warrior.142 By identifying himself simultaneously with the American frontiersman and with the professional soldier, Washington succeeded in squaring an obstinately round circle. One day, and that day was fast approaching, this feat would lead to his unanimously approved elevation to commander in chief of the American forces for a war of independence.
The Kentucky Rifle
The Kentucky Rifle
Chapter 2
THE RIFLE AND
THE REVOLUTION
The riflemen were coming! That August of 1775, among the dispirited American troops besieging the British in Boston, exciting rumors spread of the imminent arrival of these mythical creatures from the backwoods and the frontier. Few, if any, of the New Englanders had ever before glimpsed one, but their fighting powers were considered to exceed those of any mortal, at least according to the newspapers and popular gossip.
A correspondent for the Pennsylvania Packet wrote that in Lancaster he had seen a force of frontiersmen “bear[ing] in their bodies visible marks of their prowess, and show[ing] scars and wounds, which would do honor to Homer’s Iliad.” One in particular “show[ed] the cicatrices of four bullet holes through his body”—a fact that would have impressed the young, unblooded volunteers camping in Massachusetts. “With their rifles in their hands they assume a kind of omnipotence over their enemies,” he added.1
Indeed, the frontiersmen well knew the image they projected. Their appearance alone inspired fear and wonder in their foes: one witness noticed them passing by “painted like Indians, armed with tomahawks and rifles, dressed in hunting-shirts and moccasins.”2 During their march they invited locals to come watch them in action. They propped up a board five by seven inches and tacked a piece of white paper in the center as a bull’s-eye. Then “they began to fire off-hand, and the bystanders were surprised, few shots being made that were not close to or in the paper. When they had shot for a time in this way, some lay on their backs, some on their breast or side, others ran twenty or thirty steps, and firing, appeared to be equally certain of the mark.”3 For the finale, one of them placed the board between his thighs while his brother shot eight