American Rifle - Alexander Rose [30]
Despite the triumph over Burgoyne, military opinion by no means universally condoned Morgan’s tactic of targeted assassinations, just as it harshly condemned the Americans whose fine shooting had killed so many at the Battle of Bunker Hill in what was, as one Briton enviously had to admit, an impressive display of martial vigor.66 Even on the American side, the so-called “Indian” habit of taking shots at officers to sow confusion in the ranks was thought to degrade the Continental Army, which some commanders wanted to act in a more “European” manner.
General Anthony Wayne epitomized these apprehensions and strove hard to prove that the American army was worthy of the name. In Wayne’s eyes, the frontiersmen’s uncivilized practice of shooting generals out of their saddles did not improve the army’s respectability; moreover, it handed ammunition to the Tory newspapers that identified the Continentals as drunken, irreligious brutes who did not abide by the accepted laws of war. Indeed, of all the weapons employed by either side during the Revolution, just one—notwithstanding its effectiveness—was “singled out as intrinsically inhumane” by participants like Wayne: the rifle.67
Many officers, British and American, regarded the practice of taking aim and deliberately shooting an officer or even a sentry, as opposed to firing randomly into an undifferentiated mass, as tantamount to murder. This view stemmed from an aristocratic suspicion of projectile weapons that dated back to at least the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans: their nobles killed man to man, with swords and thrusting spears, while the poor and the barbaric murdered from afar with their cowardly bows and slings.68 By the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the snobbery was directed more toward bullet-launching firearms than toward longbows, which had by then won so many battles for the English that they were exalted as a national symbol. Shakespeare nicely captured the prevailing ethos in Henry IV, Part 1, when “a certain lord, neat and trimly dressed” who has hitherto avoided having to fight claims that “but for those vile guns, he would himself have been a soldier.”
Barons and gentlemanly knights particularly disliked guns, mostly because commoners proved themselves dab hands at piercing their extremely expensive armor with bullets, necessitating ever thicker steel and thereby limiting their usefulness on the battlefield. These lumbering metal behemoths eventually became so cumbersome that while they could suffer no wounds, they could not inflict them either.
As muskets became more common (so to speak) and remained instruments designed for indiscriminate use against faceless masses one hundred or more yards distant, the commanders’ mental link between unsoldierly conduct and the use of firearms was transferred to the rifle exclusively. Indeed, quite a few commanders were adamant that their men, even those armed with muskets, should not aim at all for fear of appearing unsporting. For decades training handbooks insisted that soldiers should merely “level” their muskets and “pull the trigger briskly” or “jerk the trigger smartly”—a habit that would cause many a bullet to overshoot the heads of the enemy. They even admonished the British soldier to close his eyes as he fired. Instead of teaching men how to hit the target, they made them memorize the precise chronology of the movements for loading and ramming a bullet into the chamber. One English manual printed detailed instructions for the twenty-nine steps this action required but left number thirty