American Rifle - Alexander Rose [25]
The riflemen were only too happy to play along, even after the regulars lost their initial amazement at their sharpshooting and morale became as sodden as before. Admiration had given way to revulsion and envy: not only was the riflemen’s camp kept a hundred yards apart from everyone else’s, but they were paid more than ordinary soldiers, were excused from “all working parties, camp guards, and camp duty,” and “were under no restraint from the commands of their officers, but went when and where they pleased, without being subject to be stopped or examined by any one.”29
Heedless of their comrades’ chagrin, by the end of the summer of 1775 the riflemen’s reputation had been bloated by so much hyperbole that between their own egos and the impersonal force of hubris, they were heading for a major fall. Even Washington acidly commented that “there is no restraining men’s tongues, or pens, when charged with a little vanity, as in the accounts given of, or rather by, the riflemen.”30
Telling tall stories had been a soldier’s pastime since time immemorial, so Washington was reluctant to chastise the riflemen, at least until their antics became too flagrant to ignore. At first he privately reminded their captains to control the men: this was not the frontier, after all, but a respectable war. When he ordered one rifle unit to Cape Ann to “do [their] utmost to distress and annoy any detachment from the ministerial Army that may be sent from Boston, to plunder, or destroy that settlement,” he made sure to tell its chief that “upon your march, and during your residence at Cape Ann, as well as upon your march back to camp, you will observe strict discipline and on no account suffer any under your command to pillage or maraud.”31 Clearly there had already been some problems with looting.
By mid-September some of the riflemen had sunk to acting like children, or worse, if their whims weren’t satisfied. Disliking camp regulations and tempted by the rich bounty that the British were offering for turncoats who brought “their rifled barrelled guns,” quite a few deserted to the enemy. Scarcely a night passed, said one soldier, without at least one sneaking past the American sentries—no difficulty for those accustomed to Indian warfare—and demanding to be taken in by their redcoated opposites in Boston and Charlestown.32
Those malcontents who stayed were often little better. Sergeant James Finley of Captain Thomas Price’s Maryland company was found guilty by a court-martial of “expressing himself disrespectfully of the Continental Association, and drinking Genl Gage’s health.” (Gage was the soon-to-be-replaced commander in chief of British forces in North America.) For once, and much to the satisfaction of the regulars, a spoiled rifleman discovered the meaning of army discipline: Finley was “put in a horse cart, with a rope around his neck, and drum’d out of the Army and rendered forever incapable of serving in the Continental army.”33
Worse was the mutinying. Jesse Lukens, a rifleman, conceded that indulging his comrades had “rendered the men rather insolent for good soldiers.” Not once but twice had Virginia riflemen broken into the guardhouse where their friends were being held on minor charges and released them. The colonel, William Thompson, had done nothing to punish the miscreants; indeed, he went so far as to pardon one serious offender who had been sentenced to a flogging. Then, one Sunday in early September, the company adjutant (“a man of spirit”) actually dared confine a popular sergeant for “neglect of duty.” When the men began “murmuring” and threatening to again storm the guardhouse, the adjutant forthrightly clapped irons on the chief mutineer and sent him to join his friend in jail. When the adjutant reported the matter to the colonel after dinner, they heard a “huzzaing” outside and found that the riflemen had sprung the mutineer. Now forced to act, the colonel and several of his officers seized the rebel again and conveyed him to the Main Guard at Cambridge under escort. They managed