American Rifle - Alexander Rose [33]
That weapon was, more often than not, the rifle and the two factions split bitterly over its role in the war. Jefferson was convinced that American success could be ascribed to “our superiority in taking aim when we fire; every soldier in our army having been intimate with his gun from his infancy.”89 Likewise, Charles Lee avidly favored rifles and was a stout proponent of riflemen adopting unconventional guerrilla tactics. Naturally, he also loathed Alexander Hamilton, whom he called a “son of a bitch,” and Anthony Wayne, whom he regarded as a reactionary crypto-monarchist.90
As blunt as Lee was sharp, Wayne replied, “I don’t like rifles—I would almost as soon face an enemy with a good musket and bayonet without ammunition.”91 The general, during his extraordinary 1779 storming of Stony Point, proved as good as his word when he had his men advance with bayonets fixed and muskets unloaded. Observed General Nathanael Greene, Wayne’s method was “the perfection of discipline.”92
Quite aside from its utility as an assassination device, what offended Wayne and his allies was not the existence of the rifle per se but how it was used: to be a successful rifleman, one needed coolness under fire, calm nerves, independence of mind, a personal desire to improve oneself through intense individual training, and a honed ability to evaluate external factors objectively (i.e., weather, distance, ballistics) in order to judge their potential effect on the shot. The rifleman had no practical need for an officer to tell him what to do. All these features were precisely the opposite of the martial values and practices espoused by traditionalists like Wayne.
At heart, the rifle-versus-musket controversy was a conflict between the heralds of self-discipline and the advocates of imposed discipline, a debate representative of the greater one raging between the apostles of individual liberty and the pharisees upholding traditional government authority. The seismic political, economic, and social reverberations of this very eighteenth-century divide are with us still. At the time, however, the antirifle military traditionalists would gain the upper hand once the initial fervor of 1776 wore off.
Their success was owed partly to accident. Wayne’s and Hamilton’s Europhile views eventually dominated the officer corps not because of their inherent value but because of their antagonists’ failures and weakness. Wayne too was immensely aided by the good fortune of having on hand Baron von Steuben, the German officer who, during the dismal winter at Valley Forge, forged Washington’s battered, miserable collection of barkeeps, schoolmasters, farmers, and fishermen into the Continental Army. Steuben had been a captain in the Prussian army during the Seven Years War before serving on the general staff of Frederick the Great. Departing the Prussian court under a cloud—a bout of unsavory conduct was to blame—he was hired by Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane (both agents of the U.S. government in France) and arrived in America in December 1777. Though in reality he was just a disgraced captain in desperate financial straits armed only with a dodgy pedigree, Steuben quickly went to work by incessantly drilling and disciplining the buff-and-blues. He was particularly disgusted to discover that their bayonets had turned rusty with lack of use. So successful was he that during the three most dire months of deprivation, just once (when two brigades refused to march against the enemy unless sufficient supplies were secured) did the soldiers turn insubordinate.93
Steuben’s reforms were indispensable to American victory. His star spectacularly rose with the incompetent failure of Charles Lee at the Battle of Monmouth and the fall of Horatio Gates at the Battle of Camden—which proved to military observers that the revolutionary radicals were responsible for a lengthening series of defeats.94 Despite his long-standing affection for his riflemen, Washington in particular was persuaded that over-reliance on them and on militia,