First Freedom

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  CONTENTS

  Epigrapg

  PROLOGUE: From Prey to Predator

  PART I

  NEW WORLDS

  1: First Contact

  2: Pilgrim’s Progress

  3: Powder Alarm

  4: “Fire!”

  5: The Finest Marksmen in the World

  6: Liberty’s Teeth

  7: Freedom’s Guarantee

  PART II

  DISCOVERY

  8: Go West

  9: Peacemaker

  10: Bullet

  11: Those Newfangled Gimcrackers

  12: Fastest Gun in the West

  13: The Showman

  PART III

  MODERNITY

  14: Hellfire

  15: An American in London

  16: American Genius

  17: The Chicago Typewriter

  18: Great Arsenal of Democracy

  19: Fall and Rise of the Sharpshooter

  20: Peace Dividends

  21: The Great Argument

  CONCLUSION: Molon Labe

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  List of Illustrations and Credits

  To those who serve

  The Struggle on Concord Bridge

  “Without sulfur and saltpeter . . . there can be no freedom.”

  –Eighteenth-century German-American saying

  PROLOGUE

  FROM PREY TO PREDATOR

  “You come against me with sword and spear and javelin, but I come against you in the name of the Lord Almighty, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied.”

  —David to the Philistine

  A samurai shooting an early firearm in the mid-1600s

  The future king of Israel wasn’t entirely forthcoming. After all, in addition to the blessing of the Lord Almighty—or, perhaps because of it—David was also in possession of a major technological advantage. By the time he faced the Philistine giant in the Valley of Elah, the sling had emerged as one of the most potent projectile weapons of the ancient world. The meager sword was no match for David. Not when he was armed with a missile launcher that held a stopping power equivalent to a small-caliber bullet. If for some reason Goliath had been unacquainted with the sling’s capability, he would soon learn, as would millions of others in the coming millennia, that superior size meant little when facing superior firepower.

  Inventing and perfecting weapons that could kill others from afar was a concern nearly as old as human existence itself. From almost the beginning men had been throwing things at each other. Lethal things—projectiles that could slice through his enemy’s skin, pierce through his armor, burn his foes, and, ultimately, blow them up. David’s weapon was a mere blip in an arms race that spans tens of thousands of years, from rocks, spears, slingshots, bows and arrows, javelins, catapults, and cannons, to the predominant guns of American colonial life, the musket and rifle, and, finally, the automatic weapon.

  To hit Goliath square in the forehead, David had been incredibly proficient with his weapon. As a shepherd protecting his flock from predators and thieves, David, who was also likely a soldier, had an intuitive understanding of his release point—a skill mastered only through years of experience. Attaining proficiency with a handheld missile launcher was no mere hobby for a man of his era or those of any another. It was a means of survival. For most of history, in fact, men lived their entire lives under the unremitting threat of violence.

  Despite the tendency in contemporary culture to envision prehistoric man meandering on breezy plains with fellow villagers or cohabitating in serene villages, most humans pursued a policy of proactive martial violence against other members of their species. Man has habitually been in a state of war. Evidence of this bellicose disposition is strewn across the ancient and prehistoric world. “Peaceful pre-state societies were very rare; warfare between them was very frequent and most adult men in such groups saw combat repeatedly in a lifetime,” Lawrence H. Keeley, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, recently observed.1 Early man had an astronomically high chance of being killed by the ax, spear, stone, fist, or arrow. According to Keeley, around 65 percent of tribes engaged in perpetual warfare, and 87 percent fought in a battle at least once a year.2

  In this environment, a human could best defend himself by creating space between himself and his enemy. Man probably developed “ranged weapons”—arms that could hit targets at distances greater than hand-to-hand combat—around 71,000 years ago in Africa. Not only did the ranged weapons hold a significant advantage by lowering the risk of injury, but, as the historian Alfred W. Crosby has pointed out, it transformed those who used them from “prey to predator.”3

  The first ranged weapons were probably made of long, thin blades of stone that were blunted on one edge and then glued into slots that were carved in wood or bone, creating a light arm that could hurl projectiles.4 The sling itself has been in use for around 10,000 years, if not longer. Ancient warriors and hunters typically made their pouches from animal hides and used hair or sinews to make a cord. The earliest ammunition, the kind of smooth stones that David relied on to slay the giant, were abundant around the many streams, lakes, and rivers that humans first gathered around to form their societies.

  The equipment David used to smite Goliath was certainly not new to the Jews, who had exploited slingers to expand their small kingdom—and would continue to do so in the coming century. Archaeologists have found slings in Egypt dating to around the time of David. The ability to fire projectiles in an arching trajectory over the walls to strike defenders was a significant upgrade in ancient warfare, which typically pitted men against each other in feats of strength, making it indispensable for armies well into the Iron Age.

  As effective as the sling was, however, for most of human history one weapon ruled them all. The earliest evidence of bows and arrows date back to 20,000 BC, in cave paintings in La Valltorta Gorge, Spain, in which hunters are depicted aiming their bows at game with arrows jutting out of their hides. Sometime over the subsequent thousand years, we began to see feathers added to improve aim and flight, and flint points bound by sinew to add deadliness. Man would figure out ways to make their projectiles increasingly lethal, from daubing arrows in poison to dipping them in excrement to cause infections.

  Holmegaard bows, found in the bogs of northern Europe and made from single pieces of wood, have been dated to 9,000 BC and were long, stiff weapons that used the outer limbs as levers; their efficiency was comparable to today’s high-performance bows. To put such bows and arrows in perspective, it’s fair to say that in terms of range, accuracy, and rapidity, these were preferable to most early guns. As we’ll see, even after hundreds of years of propelling objects with gunpowder in Europe, the bow was still the weapon of choice.5 “In 1595, by order of the Privy Council, the English armed services abandoned the longbow and fought with muskets for the next two centuries and more,” noted the American historian Edmund S. Morgan. “Nobody is sure why.”6

  The next step in range warfare was, naturally, trying to light your enemies on fire from afar. As with many discoveries of the ancient world, we will never have a firm date
or definitive names attached to the discovery of gunpowder, but at some point between the years 600 and 900 CE, Chinese alchemists searching for an elixir for immortality combined saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal and inadvertently stumbled upon a man-made recipe that would cause more premature death than any other mixture in history.

  In the eleventh-century Song dynasty book called the Wujing Zongyao, a Chinese military compendium of techniques for war, the unknown author mentions incendiary bombs being thrown by siege engineers on catapults, as well as fire lances, which shot flames and debris out of bamboo tubes attached to spears and can probably be considered the first “guns” ever invented. An abundance of bamboo offered a convenient cylindrical container to stuff gunpowder into, making it easy to create fireworks. Innovators with deadly intent figured out that a larger amount of gunpowder could launch broken porcelain and various other fragments at people they didn’t like. Soon the military appropriated the idea and began replacing wood with metal tubes and pottery with a fatal mix of flames and shrapnel.

  These firearms would get a lot bigger before they got small again. By the early 1300s, the Chinese were constructing heavy bronze handheld cannons that were about a foot long. Then they made iron barrels with two-foot stocks and stuffed them with stone, metal, and other debris to spray at their enemies. The weapons continued to grow until two-man teams were needed to lug them around. The Chinese also gave their devices wonderfully descriptive names like “Heaven-Shaking Thunder-Crash Bomb,” “Dropping-from-Heaven Bomb,” “Match-for-Ten-Thousand-Enemies Bomb,” and “Bandit-Burning Vision-Confusing Magic Fire-Ball.” One particularly nasty device was dubbed a “Bone-Burning and Bruising Fire Oil Magic Bomb.” But, in truth, the Chinese had not realized the full potential of the formula they had invented. Others, however, would.

  By the end of the thirteenth century, the invading Mongols procured Chinese gunpowder knowledge and applied it to their own siege-making efforts. Through a policy of aggressive expansionism, the Mongolians would export the idea of gunpowder across Asia. The knowledge was soon being used on the Indian subcontinent, where gunpowder was integrated into siege warfare by the end of the 1300s. Some modern Indian historians argue that gunpowder was one of the major contributing factors that accelerated the formation of states in southern Asia in the fifteenth century, playing a defining role in the region for centuries.7 The Japanese, who already boasted some of the best metalsmiths in Asia, were also quick adapters of the new technology.

  By 1200 we see nebulous, and perhaps far-fetched, references to cannons and handguns in Europe. Many historians dispute the veracity of these early accounts. But the first documented case of gunpowder being used in a war in Europe can be found in a statement from Bishop Albertus Magnus from 1280: he describes cannons at the Siege of Seville, a more-than-yearlong Reconquista effort led by forces of Ferdinand III. As was quite often the case in medieval European conflicts, famine and disease, rather than gunpowder or any other weaponry, finally brought down the city. Other sources retroactively claim that Europeans had encountered gunpowder and various firearms in the Battle of Mohi in 1241, a decisive Mongol victory against the Christian kingdom in Hungary. According to Arab historian Ahmad al-Hassan, Muslim Mamluks had employed the “first cannon in history” against Mongols in the southeastern Galilee during the Battle of Ain Jalut in 1260.

  What we are more certain about is that in 1346 the ill-fated Genoese mercenaries fighting for Philip VI in the muddy fields of northern France during the Hundred Years’ War would come under fire from England’s Edward III’s armies at Crécy, facing two of the most important advances in warfare in hundreds of years: the deadly longbow and the cannon. The battle is often referred to as “the beginning of the end of chivalry” due to the armies’ focus on peasant infantry and the decline of the mounted knight in European warfare. The role of the cannon in the victory has long been debated by historians, though recent archaeological digs in the area confirm that some rudimentary guns had helped the English.8

  In the coming century, the longbow became one of the most devastating weapons of European war. Some suggest that trained archers of Edward III’s armies could reach as far as four hundred yards. The gun, on the other hand, still had a way to go. The cannon used in Crécy was probably a pot-de-fer. As the French name suggests, these weapons were quite literally a big iron pot packed with gunpowder. An iron arrow-like bolt was inserted through the narrow opening at the top and a slow-burning fuse was lit with a linstock through a hole in the side. We know what this primitive cannon probably looked like because of an illustration included in a manuscript, De notabilibus, sapientiis et prudentiis regum (Concerning the Majesty, Wisdom, and Prudence of Kings), written by Walter de Milemete, which was presented to Edward III on his accession to the throne of England in 1326.9 De Milemete’s portrait, the first of any European gun, was offered without accompanying text or explanation, which leads historians to believe it was known to the British before defeating the larger army of French and Genoese led by Philip VI of France at Crécy.

  This was not a precision weapon by any stretch of the imagination, although armies made various alterations with leather straps and weights to help aim it. It’s unlikely these cannons inflicted any significant casualties. The dominant weaponry of war was still the lance, bow, and sword. It is more likely that the cannon created a psychological advantage, a horrifying noise and smoke that incited both confusion and fear in the enemy. As Giovanni Villani, a chronicler of the time, described the guns at Crécy: “They made a noise like thunder and caused much loss in men and horses.”10

  Others had been playing with this deadly idea as well. In 1338, the French used the pot-de-fer and fire bolts with iron feathers against the English near Southampton.11 The castle of Burg Eltz, in Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany, holds surviving examples of these iron arrows that date back to circa 1332. In 1350, Petrarch, the famous chronicler of his age, claimed that cannons on the battlefield were “as common and familiar as other kinds of arms.”12 By 1375, the French were firing hundred-pound stone balls at the English, and Ottomans used cannons at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389. By the end of the fourteenth century every European arsenal had some form of weapon using gunpowder.

  To whatever extent cannons lost or won battles, by the fifteenth century Europeans were quickly mastering gunpowder and fabricating weapons that would make lethal use of it. Big artillery became the most coveted kind of gun, as it could break through walls and end sieges. As the years progressed, not only did cannons become more fearsome, they became more durable and less likely to blow up. Gunmakers dispensed with pots and began to construct large bars of iron that they manipulated into cylinders like barrels. As the hot iron tubes were put together, they cooled and shrank around crossbars, making them stiffer, with the ability to project larger ammunition.13 The musket would soon be born.

  • • •

  The first European “handgonnes” were essentially miniature cannons designed to be held by hand or attached to a pole for use by individual soldiers. These earliest firearms probably had barrels made of iron with wooden handles. Since the gunpowder had tremendous recoil, infantrymen attached the small cannons to poles that they stuck in the ground. The guns were fired from fixed positions. In Bellifortis (Strong in War, 1405), the continent’s first fully illustrated manual of military technology, there is a picture of a gun being fired in this manner. Not long ago, archaeologists discovered fragments of metal propulsion weapons, evidence of the use of firearms in the 1461 Battle of Towton, in Yorkshire, northern England, one of the bloodiest ever fought on English soil. On the battlefield fragments of shattered guns were unearthed, suggesting close fighting in volleys of gunfire that was more dangerous than ever.14

  By 1468, military illustrations show infantry discharging guns in much the same way later muskets or rifles were fired.15 The guns were loaded exactly like full-size cannons, with holes drilled in the backs, or breeches. The differentiation between handguns and cannons was soon evident, w
ith the former often featuring metal barrels and rudimentary stocks.

  For our story it is important to note that the proliferation of black-powder weapons also opened the door to another movement in Europe: the populist revolt. Many factors fueled the democratized use of handheld guns. The recipe and process for making effective gunpowder were widely known by the fifteenth century. Nearly anyone could make it. The weapon itself was an effective tool that could be employed with very little training. The cost of a gun was far less than a crossbow, much less the armor of a knight. A simple working handgun could be constructed by a middling blacksmith if he put his mind to it. All he needed to do to create one was to flatten some iron and then roll it into a tube, drill a pan and touchhole into it, and make some kind of hammer or match.

  By the early fifteenth century, locally made handheld guns were the weapon of choice of the peasant Hussites who rebelled against the Holy Roman Empire. They would not be the last people to use this populist weapon as a means of societal upheaval. In fact, by the fifteenth century guns had become commonplace in nearly every European kingdom—among the military and among the people. The efficacy of the gun lay in its mobility, power, and affordability. It could easily be taken to war and to sea. It could soon be bought and built by the common man, the soldier, the explorer, the apostate, and the colonizer.

  PART I

  NEW WORLDS

  First Blow for Liberty

  1

  FIRST CONTACT

  “I had come with no other intention than to make war.”

  —Samuel de Champlain1

  Musketeer from Jacob de Gheyn’s Wapenhandelinge van Roers, 1608

  On the muggy summer afternoon of July 30, 1609, an army of Huron and Algonquian warriors readied to face off against the mighty Iroquois on the southern shores of what would later be known as Lake Champlain. The Iroquois force, numbering somewhere around two hundred Mohawks, had emerged from the wilderness and marched toward their enemies behind three ostentatiously garbed chiefs festooned in high plumes of red and blue feathers and equally colorful robes. These fighters had prepared to battle their longtime foes armed with weapons they had used for centuries: bows and arrows, tomahawks, and clubs and other blunt instruments. What the Iroquois could not have known was that the Huron had recently made a new ally, a French explorer named Samuel de Champlain. And as the two armies began to move toward each other, the man who would be known as the founder of New France was hiding in the brush, holding a weapon that would soon redefine life on their continent forever.