American Rifle - Alexander Rose [28]
His key insight was that the ultimate success of each style of warfare—traditional European in-line formation and dependency on fire volume, and the Indian reliance on guerrilla fighting—partly hinged on its geographical context. In the eastern states set-piece battles of army versus army would necessarily be the rule owing to the preponderance of open fields, cities, sufficient supplies, adequate communications, and good roads. In these surroundings small, dispersed parties of riflemen would be easy pickings for the columns of bayonet-armed soldiers and cavalry units sweeping the terrain. Musket fire would have to be fought with musket fire.
In the forested West and North, however, regular armies would be as vulnerable as Braddock’s had been back in the French and Indian War. In those verdant landscapes, however, homegrown riflemen would be in their element. And in the swampy South, though it would become horrifically apparent only after 1780, unbridled guerrilla warfare would find its zenith.
Soldiers from the East cried out for muskets; irregulars and troops drawn from frontier provinces wanted to stick with their rifles.45 Accordingly, at the beginning of the war, when the army was preponderantly populated with New Englanders, Washington was besieged with requests from senior officers to replace their new recruits’ rifles with muskets.46 Thanks to the newly arrived Charlevilles, the solution in 1777 was a straightforward exchange.
First, Washington assured those officers who had begged him to convert their regiments from rifles to muskets that he had “determined to have as few [of the former] used as possible. He will put muskets into the hands of all those battalions that are not very well acquainted with rifles.”47True to his word, Washington then ordered that “such rifles as belong to the States, in the different brigades, [are] to be immediately exchanged with Col. Morgan for muskets.”48
With Morgan’s weapons problem solved, in mid-June Washington commanded the colonel’s riflemen to “gall” General William Howe’s troops “as much as possible” by worrying at their flanks and rear as they traveled through New Jersey on their way to draw out Washington to open battle in Pennsylvania. Knowing that many of Howe’s soldiers were new to America and green to boot, Washington advised Morgan—in inimitable frontier fashion—to “dress a company or two of true woodsmen in the right Indian style and let them make the attack accompanied with screaming and yelling as the Indians do,” because “it would have very good consequences.”49 It did. Morgan’s riflemen, in combination with General Anthony Wayne’s brigade, attacked the British rear guard and drove it across the river to seek cover.
Not long afterward Washington transferred the regiment to the north—the perfect hunting ground for Morgan’s riflemen—this time to blunt General John Burgoyne’s thrust southward from Canada through the woods in the (forlorn) hope that Howe’s forces in New York would advance north. Once they met halfway, they would amputate the upstart New England states from the rest of the country and cause the rebellion to collapse.
On August 16 Washington instructed Morgan to proceed with all haste to Peekskill and thence to Albany, as “the approach of the enemy, in that quarter, has made a further reinforcement necessary, and I know of no Corps so likely to check their progress in proportion to their number, as the one you command.” By now, as is evident from his warm words and his happily confessed “great dependence on you, your officers and men,” Washington regarded Morgan’s riflemen as his joy and pride.50 To him, they were the Virginia Regiment resurrected.
In the runup to the Saratoga campaign, Morgan rapidly aligned himself with an old Monongahela comrade, General Horatio Gates, who had commanded an independent company under Braddock (and had been severely wounded in the fighting).51 In order to protect Morgan’s vulnerable riflemen from a redcoat assault, Gates took the precaution of assigning an additional