• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1965 0

was all for naught.103 As the Americans tightened the noose, James Collins, a seventeen-year-old American new to fighting who had briefly considered deserting before the battle (“my feelings were not the most pleasant . . . but I could not well swallow the appellation of coward”), was thrown into the battle’s epicenter and saw a mounted Ferguson encouraging his men to stand fast. Ferguson soon fell and disappeared from view.104 With some four hundred of their comrades already dead and wounded, the British and Tories, seeing their chief downed, threw down their arms and called for quarter. Of that there was little. As they pleaded down on their knees, scores were shot, and nine more—who were found to be the most egregious war criminals—were hanged after a court-martial. (One of them was a captain who had recently knocked on the door of a local Whig and shot the man’s young son in the head with a pistol when he said his father wasn’t home.) American losses amounted to 30 dead and about 50 wounded.105 The rifle’s devastating accuracy had just been demonstrated in the most violent way possible.

Shortly after the British surrender, Collins—who had fired his rifle six times, though he saw others do so nine or ten times—stumbled over the slaughtered to see the “dead body of their great chief.” “It appeared,” he remembered, “that almost fifty rifles must have been leveled at him, at the same time; seven rifle balls had passed through his body, both of his arms were broken; and his hat and clothing were literally shot to pieces.”106 Others found the bodies of at least twenty Tories, each with a rifle bullet hole in his forehead—they had been shot as they poked their heads above the rocks shielding them.107

King’s Mountain aside, the rifle played a marginal military role during the War of Independence. But the reverberations of its cameo appearances could still be felt generations later. The legend of the American Rifleman, the bitter divide between officers enamored of disciplined musketry and those of independent riflemanship, the cult of accuracy versus faith in firepower: these legacies would be repeatedly resurrected down the ages.

The Model 1803 Rifle

The Model 1803 Rifle

Chapter 3

THE RISE OF THE

MACHINES

Amillion square feet of floor space. Thirteen thousand exhibits. A unique building 1,850 feet long and 450 feet wide constructed entirely of glass and iron, with a central, barrel-vaulted transept and a mammoth nave lined with chapel bays along its sides. A cathedral dedicated not to an ethereal God but to the thrusting new religion of commerce. This was the Crystal Palace in London, site of the 1851 “Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations,” a world’s fair demonstrating the majesty of empire and the contribution of free trade to the emancipation of all mankind.

More than six million people visited, all curious to see the wondrous things that twenty-eight countries had dispatched, almost as tribute, to London, the Victorian era’s Rome. Americans, recognizing a commercial opportunity when they saw one, devoted a herculean effort to creating their country’s pavilion.

Proclaimed the New York Herald, “We are as yet unknown in the market of Europe as the producers of raw material. Now we can show them that we not only produce cotton, iron, coal, copper and gold in greater abundances than any other nation, but that we can work them up into manufactures often equally, sometimes surpassing the oldest nations in a perfection and with a facility unknown to them.”1

The call was answered. Of the many thousands of proposals that deluged the government, 599 were chosen for inclusion in the American pavilion, a two-story affair lorded over by a gigantic golden eagle and a mighty organ that put to shame anything even Bach, the instrument’s maestro, could ever have conceived. Most of the exhibits were either agricultural or industrial in nature—a result of the tug-of-war between rural southern interests and northern manufacturers. Innovative plows, scythes, and reapers were popular attractions,