American Rifle - Alexander Rose [219]
Perhaps it will happen this time, perhaps it will not, but the likelihood is that for some years to come the rifle of the future will be the rifle of the past.
Note on Sources
As I wrote this book, the number of books and articles listed in the bibliography rose remorselessly. Between cataloguing primary sources, secondary volumes, scholarly articles, historical newspapers, old magazine pieces, government reports, and technical manuals I eventually hit the 40-page mark in Microsoft Word. Though subsequently winnowed down for publication, the bibliography remained resolutely long and we decided to excise it from the manuscript and make it freely available and downloadable as a PDF on my website:
www.alexrose.com
Endnotes, however, remain in place and the first mention of a given work in each chapter is cited in full–so if you’re hankering to know the source of a quotation or fact you’ll be able to find it without having to consult the bibliography.
Notes
Chapter 1
1. “[I am] in so grave . . . a mood [that] I fancy the skill of this gentleman’s [Peale] pencil will be put to it in describing to the world what manner of man I am.” Washington to Jonathan Boucher, May 21, 1772, quoted in D. S. Freeman, George Washington: A Biography (New York: Scribner’s, 1948–57), p. 3:292. Unless otherwise noted, as in this case, references to Washington’s correspondence pertain to letters kept in the Library of Congress.
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2. This was the second day of a three-day exercise. On May 20 Washington had sat “to have my picture drawn,” and the morning of May 22 he would be occupied having “my face” finished. See his entries in D. Jackson and D. Twohig, eds., The Diaries of George Washington (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976–79), pp. 3:108–9.
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3. On the artist, see J. J. Ellis’s “Charles Willson Peale: Portrait of the American Artist as Virtuous Entrepreneur,” in Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), pp. 41–71. Also C.C. Sellers, “Charles Willson Peale’s Portraits of Washington,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 9, no. 6 (1951), pp. 147–55.
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4. Freeman, George Washington, 3, p. 292. M. F. Perry, “Firearms of the First President,” American Rifleman 104, no. 2 (1956), p. 34, says it was a musket but concedes that “identification is difficult.” Given Washington’s experience with rifles on the frontier and his exacting specifications—in the picture the weapon, with its trumpet-shaped ramrod and brass thimbles, certainly looks customized—it seems much more likely to me that it is a privately commissioned rifle and not a standard “military musket” (as Perry claims). Regarding the preferences of other military worthies of the time, compare a picture of General John Sullivan from about 1777. He’s almost identically dressed, yet is wielding a spontoon, a type of halberd. He wears no firearms at all. See the picture in B. Dean, “On American Polearms, Especially Those in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Metropolitan Museum Studies 1, no. 1 (1928), p. 35.
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5. Jackson and Twohig, Diaries of Washington, p. 2:219, entry for March 5, 1770; Perry, “Firearms of the First President,” p. 32; M. L. Brown, Firearms in Colonial America (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1980), pp. 310, 324. Information on John Jost (Yost) is sparse. In 1785 a Caspar Jost—a relative, presumably—was working as a gunsmith in Lebanon, in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. See H. J. Kauffman, The Pennsylvania-Kentucky Rifle (Harrisburg, Pa.: Stackpole, 1960), p. 272, but for a “John Yost,” see p. 365.
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