American Rifle - Alexander Rose [26]
When Washington was informed of the matter, he “reinforced the guard to 500 men with fixed bayonets and loaded pieces.” For all he knew, the rebellion might spread throughout the rifle companies and even infect the army if it were not put down with overwhelming force. The mutineers, in the meantime, had become frightened at what they had started and hid in the woods. Washington ordered them to down their weapons, and all immediately did so.
“You cannot conceive what disgrace we are all in,” confided an embarrassed Lukens. Even so, the punishments handed down were (considering that the penalty for mutiny was death) absurdly benign. The ringleader John Seamon cooled his heels in prison for six days, but the men were each fined just 20 shillings, an amercement, thought Lukens, mitigated “on account of their having come so far to serve the cause and its being the first crime.” The money didn’t matter so much anyway, for the men “seem exceedingly sorry for their misbehavior and promise amendment.” They were made still sorrier when they discovered that Washington had revoked their comfortable exemptions from fatigue, guard, and camp duties and had ordered the separated riflemen’s camps to be integrated with those of the regulars.34
Most important, Washington had learned that riflemen were almost uncontrollable when left to their own devices. The catalog of minor infractions, the spate of spiteful desertions, and the breathtaking arrogance of the mutineers persuaded him that rifle units had to be leashed to regular army formations, so as to benefit indirectly from their good officering and steady discipline. Moreover, keeping the riflemen cooped up around Boston was dissipating their powers of mobility, stealth, and marksmanship. To be sure, the riflemen had proved their utility on several occasions: in one covert operation they had crawled forward on their bellies, Indian style, toward the enemy’s positions at Charlestown and captured two prisoners for interrogation. But their special skills were not being fully exploited.35
A late eighteenth-century print, German in origin, illustrating the differences between an American rifleman (left) and his musket-armed equivalent in the regular infantry. Even at this early date, riflemen were distinguished from the army’s disciplined ranks by their idiosyncratic dress and manners—to the annoyance of many generals.
A jaunt up north was just the thing. That September Washington dispatched three rifle companies under Morgan to aid Colonel Benedict Arnold on his expedition to Canada, the plan being to harry the British deep behind their front lines. Ultimately the campaign failed, despite Arnold’s best efforts. Morgan himself ended up a prisoner. But his rifle-men (and one woman, Mrs. Warner, who, when her husband fell ill, borrowed his rifle and came along in his place) acquitted themselves honorably in the territory’s wet, then snowy, but endlessly forested expanses. Washington, pleased with their improvement, told Congress on April 22, 1776, that this “valuable and brave body of men” now formed “a very useful Corps.”36
Quite so. In Quebec the riflemen’s prowess had astonished the Old English as much as it had the New Englanders. One time a squad of redcoats managed to kidnap George Merchant, one of Morgan’s boys. He was taken to London as a kind of traveling exhibition of The American Frontiersman. A British newspaper of the time gasped that he “is a Virginian, above six feet high, stout and well-proportioned . . . He can strike a mark with the greatest certainty, at two hundred yards distance. He has a heavy provincial pronunciation, but otherwise speaks good English.”37
Having been exchanged by the British, Captain Daniel Morgan was released from prison and returned home in January 1777. He was soon promoted to colonel and