American Rifle - Alexander Rose [44]
Given Jackson’s favorable defensive deployment, Pakenham had been forced to mount a frontal assault (with a small flank attack) using his troops in compact formations, bayonets at the ready to storm the wall. The task of his subordinate commanding the van, Colonel Thomas Mullins, had been to ensure that ladders were available in the ditch so the regulars could climb the sides; Mullins, however, failed miserably (for which he was ignominiously cashiered after the war), leaving the redcoats and the doomed Pakenham stranded helplessly at the mercy of the American artillery, musket fire, and rifle shots.
The most deaths, as well as the most hideous wounds and gaping maws, were caused by the cannons firing grapeshot into the dense, writhing ranks. After the battle, however, observers noticed that many of the fatalities had been shot precisely in the forehead and that scores more had been shot at least twice in the head.34
A contemporary engraving of Andrew Jackson’s victory at the Battle of New Orleans.
These were the unmistakable calling cards of Jackson’s rifle-armed, camouflaged militiamen, the same ones who in the weeks previous had made a specialty out of shooting British sentries. One of them, from Tennessee it is said, had crept through the long tall grass and underneath bushes to a place where he succeeded in shooting a guard, then his replacement, and then the replacement’s replacement. After that the outpost was abandoned.35 Reflecting contemporary opinion of down-and-dirty sharpshooting, George Gleig, a British observer, contrasted the American behavior with European manners. Whereas European armies, when they weren’t shooting at each other, kept a civil truce—he himself had seen French and British soldiers standing guard just twenty yards away from each other—“the Americans entertained no such chivalric notions. An enemy was to them an enemy, whether alone or in the midst of five thousand companions.”36
Before the battle, it was reported, a British officer out reconnoitering the American line had been hailed by a Tennesseean and directed to surrender. Rapidly weighing his options—a running retreat was still possible—the officer raised his hands. When asked why, he said that ultimately “I had no alternative; for I have been told these damned Yankee riflemen can pick a squirrel’s eye out as far as they can see it.”37
Immediately after the battle Jackson’s riflemen were lauded as heroes across the land, and their peculiar weapon suddenly (if temporarily) became the darling of Washington. So when John H. Hall wrote to the Ordnance Department in June 1816 proposing to build a factory on the interchangeability principle that would produce rapid-loading rifles en masse, his timing was impeccable. The Ordnance Department quickly seized the opportunity to investigate this promising arms-maker and his intriguing invention.
In January 1817 Wadsworth informed Hall that he should send one hundred rifles and bayonets (quoted at $25 each) by year’s end—an order Hall fulfilled, much to Wadsworth’s surprise, by October. The weapons were quickly issued to a rifle unit based in Missouri for testing under actual field conditions. Wadsworth was also pleased to hear from one of his deputies, Captain George Talcott, who had initially been skeptical of the breech-loading mechanism but was converted to its advocacy after a careful examination.38 In April 1818, while the rifles were still being tested, Wadsworth raised the cheering possibility that Hall might transfer his operations to Harpers Ferry and run an autonomous factory under government aegis. The offer was most tempting, for under the wing of the Ordnance Department, Hall would be forever protected from the predations of Dr. Thornton.
Two issues,