American Rifle - Alexander Rose [31]
The image of the rifle as the chosen weapon of low-born cheats prompted all sorts of atrocity stories about the craven practices of their owners. The London Chronicle shocked its readers by alleging that Americans used “rifles peculiarly adapted to take off the officers of a whole line as it marches to an attack,” pointing out that “this is the real cause of so many of our brave officers falling, they being singled out by these murderers, as they must appear to be in the eyes of every thinking man.”71 Hearing that the Americans were planning to post sharpshooters to target officers in Boston, an enraged British lieutenant sputtered, “What a set of villains must they be to think of such a thing!” It only went to show that there was nothing “these people will stick at to gain their ends.”72
This distaste for the rifleman’s trade meant that after they surrendered, a higher proportion of them than regular soldiers were executed.73 The same principle had once applied to Indian raiders who sniped at their targets: for this reason in 1759 Colonel Thomas Gage informed Major James Clephane, commanding Fort Stanwix, that “I look upon these partys as so many assassins, not soldiers, therefore they have no quarter.”74
During the Battle of Long Island in the summer of 1776, the Hessian Colonel von Heeringen witnessed the corpses of riflemen “pierced to the trees with bayonets” and left there as a warning.75 On the last day of 1776 the Middlesex Journal quoted a British officer as saying that those carrying Kentuckys often “find themselves run through the body by the push of a bayonet, as a rifleman is not entitled to any quarter.”76 Eleven months later some of these contemptible Americans still had not learned their lesson. Near Philadelphia in mid-November 1777 Lord Cornwallis and the 33rd Regiment were advancing through the town of Darby when his trusted sergeant-major suddenly collapsed. One of a team of presumably Pennsylvanian snipers had shot him from their hiding place in a nearby house. “The troops entered it and bayoneted the whole,” noted Captain John Montrésor of the Engineers.77
Morgan, blooded on the frontier, cared nothing for European niceties. To him, killing officers was like killing Indian troublemakers: it shortened a conflict’s duration and so saved thousands of men’s lives. Many other American officers, however, were not so immune to the temptation to make themselves “respectable” in the eyes of their enemy.
The issue of weaponry even had implications for the kind of society that Americans wanted to build after the war. Those officers—usually social and political conservatives—who were keen to keep the fighting strictly between armies along European lines tended to plump for muskets-and-bayonets and backed the creation of a British- or Prussian-style professional force equipped with those arms.78 They saw rifles as relics of an embarrassing frontier past, to be discarded as America joined the civilized present.
To that end, General Anthony Wayne insisted that he had “an insuperable bias in favour of an elegant uniform and a soldierly appearance,” so much so that he would prefer to lead troops armed “merely with bayonets and a single charge of ammunition” than to command unkempt backwoodsmen with sixty rounds apiece.79 Bayonets in particular were believed to be conducive to fine soldiering: in the Paoli Massacre of September 20, 1777, British infantry had surprised an American force (commanded, embarrassingly, by Wayne) who were sleeping by their fires and bayoneted 150 of them without a shot being fired. Notwithstanding its moral questionability, the massacre was a testament to brilliant discipline, untold hours of training, and firm officering.80 In 1781 Wayne—by now