American Rifle - Alexander Rose [230]
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53. R. Lamb, Memoir of His Own Life (Dublin: J. Jones, 1811), p. 198. Robert Graves, author of I, Claudius, wrote an entertaining novelization of his story, Sergeant Lamb’s America (New York: Random House, 1940).
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54. Higginbotham, Daniel Morgan, pp. 69–70; “Journal of Lieutenant William Digby,” September 19, 1777, in Commager and Morris, Spirit of ’Seventy-Six, p. 580.
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55. Washington to Gates, September 24, 1777; Gates’s reply, October 5, 1777.
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56. J. R. Bright, “The Rifle in Washington’s Army,” American Rifleman 95 (August 1947), p. 10.
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57. Quoted in Billias, “Horatio Gates,” p. 95.
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58. Quoted in D. Higginbotham, War and Society in Revolutionary America: The Wider Dimensions of Conflict (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988), p. 142.
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59. Letter from Morgan, November 28, 1781, in anon., “A Recollection of the American Revolutionary War,” Virginia Historical Register and Literary Companion, 6, no. 4 (1853), pp. 209–11. See also J. J. Graham, ed., Memoir of General Graham with Notices of the Campaigns in Which He Was Engaged 1779–1801 (Edinburgh: R. & R. Clark, 1862), p. 70.
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60. Higginbotham, Daniel Morgan, p. 73. On Murphy’s singular scalping achievement, see Higginbotham, War and Society, p. 139.
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61. “Recollections of Samuel Woodruff,” in Commager and Morris, Spirit of ’Seventy-Six, p. 593.
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62. Bright, “Rifle in Washington’s Army,” p. 9.
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63. Quoted in C. Chenevix Trench, A History of Marksmanship (Chicago: Follett, 1972), p. 135n.
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64. Hanger’s interest in American affairs did not stop at its weapons. In his memoirs, published in 1801, he predicted that “one of these days the northern and southern powers of the States will fight as vigorously against each other as they have both united to do against the British.” Quoted in Hanger’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography (1890 edition), which calls his memoirs “unsavoury.”
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65. Hanger, To All Sportsmen, pp. 122, 207–9, 210.
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66. Thus, as he ironically put it, “the Americans . . . still continue to act in what we are pleased to call a cowardly manner, witness the efficacy of that matter on Bunker’s Hill and the inaction of our troops have been obliged to preserve since that day.” Quoted in A. Starkey, “Paoli to Stony Point: Military Ethics and Weaponry during the American Revolution,” Journal of Military History 58, no. 1 (1994), p. 15. See also R. Lamb, An Original and Authentic Journal of Occurrences During the Late American War from Its Commencement to the Year 1783 (1809; reprint New York: Arno Press/New York Times, 1968), pp. 27, 159.
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67. Starkey, “Paoli to Stony Point,” p. 13.
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68. M. Van Creveld, Technology and War from 2000 B.C. to the Present (New York: Free Press, 1989), p. 17.
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69. See illustrations printed in B. P. Hughes, Firepower: Weapons Effectiveness on the Battlefield, 1630–1850 (Staplehurst, U.K.: Spellmount, 1997), pp. 86–91. There were another fourteen steps to perform after one had “given fire.”
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70. Hicks and Todd, “United States Military Shoulder Arms,” p. 32n10 and 11; M. Urban, Rifles: Six Years with Wellington’s Legendary Sharpshooters (London: Faber and Faber; 2003), p. 19. Dr. William Gordon, who described the battle in a missive from Roxbury (August 15, 1775) and printed it in his The History of the Rise, Progress, and Establishment of the Independence of the United States of America . . . (New York: Samuel Campbell, 1794), p. 1:352, noted that “the provincials have not a rifleman among them, not one being arrived from the southward; nor have they any rifle guns; they have only common muskets, nor are these in general furnished with bayonets; but then they are almost all marksmen, being accustomed to sporting of one kind or other from