American Rifle - Alexander Rose [34]
During the September 1781 prelude to the Battle of Yorktown, the army’s increasing reliance on shock attack and volume of fire became so total that Washington specifically ordered that “the troops [are] to place their principal reliance on the bayonet, that they may prove the vanity of the boast which the British make of their particular prowess in deciding battles with that weapon.”96 The Continental Army had come a long way from that summer of 1775 outside Boston, but it’s interesting to speculate whether the rifle would have been integrated earlier and more completely into America’s armed forces if Lee and Gates had been more effective generals—or Wayne less of one.
It was October 7, 1780, an overcast day with an occasional light, misty rain falling. Major Patrick Ferguson, an ambitious British officer, was spoiling for a fight. That day he got one: at King’s Mountain rifle-armed (many made by Deckhard, a well-known German smith in Lancaster) frontiersmen and mountain men from Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee would besiege his force of 1,125 Tory loyalists and British regulars.97
Unlike Yorktown and Saratoga, King’s Mountain is today, alas, not numbered among the great or famous battles of the Revolution. But it was remarkable in one particular respect: it was the single significant clash in which rifles alone were pitted directly against musket-and-bayonet.98
The “mountain” was actually a narrow, stony ridge, 500 yards long and between 70 and 120 wide, and raised 100 feet higher than the land surrounding it. Its sides, however, were rugged and steep. Ferguson, knowing that at least five units of Americans were closing in, declared himself king of King’s Mountain and “defied God Almighty and all the rebels out of Hell to overcome him” atop his densely forested fastness.99
So they did. Ferguson had miscalculated, possibly because his attention had wandered after a night gallivanting with two amours (a talented buxom redhead named Virginia and her pleasing friend, also named Virginia).100 The frontiersmen and mountaineers fanned out, shouted Indian war whoops and climbed the hill, took cover behind the trees and boulders, and loosed rounds into Ferguson’s closely packed platoons. (The redheaded Virginia was shot and killed at this point.) Whenever a body of Americans hove into sight, the British charged time and time again with fixed bayonets, but the riflemen simply retreated, firing all the time, and melted away into the landscape.
The enemy’s return musket-fire proved impotent. Trained to fire over flatland at greater distances, the British tended to raise their muskets slightly to compensate for gravity pulling the ball downward and for their lack of adjustable sights. A soldier fighting on flat terrain, advised a manual of 1800, should “strike a man in the center of his body, up to 100 meters aim at his chest, 100–140, at the height of his shoulders; 140–180, at the height of his head; 180–200, at the top of his head-dress; over 200, aim over the head-dress.”101 Hence, owing to the mountain’s steep slope, “they overshot us altogether, scarce touching a man, except those on horseback,” said one American participant.102
Surrounded, hemmed in, and losing men one by one from the “constant and well-directed” rifle shots that emerged from the forest, the hapless Ferguson retreated to one end of the ridge, but it