American Rifle - Alexander Rose [29]
The country was absolutely perfect for frontier fighting: forest-shaded creeks wended through it, the lush undergrowth disguised movement, there were deep ravines, and the hills provided excellent cover for skilled marksmen. At the battle of Freeman’s Farm Morgan’s riflemen hid in the bushes and climbed trees in order to target Burgoyne’s infantry officers as well as known Tories (there were about 150 of them), a practice that, as a British sergeant drily noted, “accelerated their estrangement from our cause and army.”53
At the end of that bloody day, September 19, Burgoyne had lost 600 men, compared to Gates’s 320. Of the American dead, just four were riflemen (another eight were wounded, and three were missing), even though Morgan’s force had been involved in the very thickest of the battle. Morgan’s unit had disproportionately killed officers, and by pinning down the enemy while the infantry attacked, it had been responsible for reducing the once-proud 62nd Regiment, the rock holding the British center, down to a mere sixty men, and had killed or wounded every officer but one of the 53rd Regiment.54 It was an incredible performance by any standard, demonstrating the devastating effect of the rifle when properly protected by regular infantry. When Washington asked Gates to send Morgan’s riflemen south to aid him, the general demurred by stating that “Your Excellency would not wish me to part with the Corps the army of General Burgoyne are most afraid of.”55 On that note a Hessian officer serving with Burgoyne wrote that “in the open field the rebels do not count for much, but in the woods they are formidable. Thus far, however, we still live, walk, dwell, and march in the woods. There they lie like bacon hunters behind the trees and slip from one tree to the other.”56
The same lesson was applied on October 7, when the two armies again clashed. “Order on Morgan to begin the game,” Gates directed his aide.57 Morgan this time led his riflemen to the left and inflicted casualties, while Dearborn’s troops rushed past them and drove Lord Balcarres’s infantry back at the points of their bayonets. “Morgan, you have done wonders,” exclaimed Gates.58 During this battle rifleman Tim Murphy famously shot General Simon Fraser of the 24th Regiment. Many years later Morgan described what happened in his own rough-hewn way. He boasted that his riflemen had “whopped” Burgoyne’s redcoats “tarnation well” back in September, then recalled that “me and my boys” were getting whopped themselves on October 7 until “I saw that they were led by an officer on a grey horse—a devilish, brave fellow.” So “says I to one of my best shots [Murphy], says I, you get up into that there tree, and single out him on the . . . horse. Dang it, ’twas no sooner said than done. On came the British again, with the grey horseman leading; but his career was short enough this time, I jist [sic] tuck my eyes off him for a moment, and when I turned them to the place where he had been—pooh, he was gone!”59
Murphy, an experienced Indian fighter with twenty unfortunates’ scalps to his name, seems to have owned a rare piece indeed: a double-barreled, probably double-triggered rifle, the kind of advanced sniping weapon that only a frontiersman would have commissioned.60 And proving that a rifleman’s aim was superb but not unerring, it took him three shots to wound Fraser fatally: the first hit the back of his saddle, the second blazed through the horse’s mane (a little behind the ears), and the third struck Fraser in the breast.61 Even so, it was a magnificent kill, considering that all three bullets landed within a yard of each other at no little range and that Fraser’s horse was moving at some speed.
One British soldier who surrendered to Gates alongside his chief, General Burgoyne, on October 17 was the eccentric Major George Hanger—a creature of such odd habits that he could not find a female willing to put up with them and he would die unmarried in 1824.62 Hanger,