First Freedom Read online

  Until Champlain introduced the musket to Indian warfare, guns had virtually no impact in North America. On his first voyage to the New World in 1492, Columbus’s three ships probably carried only a single firearm among them, the clumsy and heavy hand cannon. Although the name might conjure up thoughts of Dirty Harry’s famous Magnum revolver, his gun was nothing more than a small mortar mounted on a pole. As it turned out, its most devastating feature was the loud boom it created when fired, a noise that led many natives to believe the Spanish could conjure thunder.

  Which is not to say firearms hadn’t been used at all by the first explorers. The earliest known gunshot victim in the Americas is a five-hundred-year-old Inca man found in a mass grave in Peru.2 In 2004, while excavating hundreds of mummies and other bodies in the suburbs of Lima, archaeologists discovered a man who they believe was killed by a musket during an uprising against the invading Spaniards in 1536. Yet, while the swift and devastating defeat of the native populations of South America by the explorers and warlords was contingent on numerous technical advantages, firearms were far from the most important one. Almost all of the Inca bodies uncovered near Lima bear signs of violent hacking and tearing caused by the advantage of iron technology: weapons like swords and lances. Only a single body presented any evidence consistent with a shooting victim. It’s not surprising that the first conquistadors, hard-boiled veteran soldiers and mercenaries searching for gold, used horses and the far more reliable crossbows in their conquests. Cortés’s entire bloody subjugation of the Aztecs in the 1520s was accomplished with a mere five hundred soldiers who carried only twelve guns among them.3

  With the ability to pierce armor and take down heavy cavalry from close range, the musket fired that day had in many ways revolutionized European warfare. What was a devastating weapon in the pitched battles of Europe, however, often became useless in the unpredictable environments of the New World. The gun, weighing fifteen to twenty pounds, was unwieldy in sparse or chaotic skirmishes. Its barrel usually had to be placed on a forked stand to be fired. It could be easily spotted at night. Since these guns were all handcrafted from iron, it was still expensive or unfeasible to maintain in a place lacking blacksmiths and raw material.

  Throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, firearms had been upgraded. The shapes of the stocks became narrower and started to resemble those on modern rifles. Inventors created and improved “locks” that allowed shooters to pull triggers and ignite the gunpowder rather than lighting the propellant with linstocks. These changes sparked a technological revolution that improved both the precision and the deadliness of the gun. Gradually, the musket began to supplant the crossbow as the projectile weapon of choice in Europe and America. This evolution would help make the North American continent inhabitable for the newcomers and often have a devastating impact on the people who were already living on it.

  It was one of these weapons that Champlain aimed at his new enemy by the lake that day. The explorer, who had spearheaded the French efforts to establish colonies along the St. Lawrence River, was an expert musketeer who fully understood the power potential of the gun. Unlike the British, the French were less concerned with the long-term colonization of America and more interested in creating economic hubs for the exchange of furs and other goods. With this mission in mind, Champlain’s diplomatic acumen served him well. He quickly cemented trading ties with the Montagnais, the Algonquian, the Huron, and other local tribes. Some of the deals he made were predicated on the promise that France would not do business with the hated Iroquois—in particular, the promise not to arm their hated rivals with European weapons. That promise soon grew, and the great European power joined in a military alliance against the Five Nations (later six).

  In the summer of 1609, Champlain gathered a handful of soldiers and headed south from Canada to what is now upstate New York. Along the way, he coaxed a number of local Indians to his cause. In one colorful scene, Champlain encountered two chiefs, Algonquian and Huron, who demanded the Frenchman fire his harquebus before engaging in negotiations. When Champlain obliged, the dozens of Indians who had gathered shouted appreciation and promised to provide even more warriors for the cause. Often, when Native Americans heard a musket for the first time, it was the noise and smoke of these curious contraptions that impressed them the most. That was about to change.

  When evenly matched Huron and Iroquois met on the shores of Lake Champlain, the sides participated in conventional North American combat, exchanging hails of arrows and defending themselves with tree-trunk ramparts. That was before Champlain stepped into the fray. His gleaming armor and alien appearance so shocked the Iroquois warriors that they stopped momentarily and stared in bewilderment. As they did so, the French explorer and his two European cohorts aimed their harquebuses at the Iroquois line and fired. As the plumes of smoke drifted upward, two of the chiefs had already fallen to the ground dead, and a third would be critically wounded. “As I was loading again,” Champlain noted, “one of my companions fired a shot from the woods, which astonished them anew to such a degree that, seeing their chiefs dead, they lost courage and took to flight, abandoning their camp and fort, and fleeing into the woods, whither I pursued them, killing still more of them.”4 The battle was over.

  This moment had wide-ranging consequences. As France’s involvement in the tribal conflicts against the Iroquois would soon illustrate, the gun didn’t change merely how Europeans interacted with Indians but how Indians interacted with each other. The desire for firearms became a dominant concern of tribal leaders beginning in the late seventeenth century. For the Iroquois confederacy, the new reality meant ramping up the fur trade and becoming a proxy in the European wars of North America.

  And as intra-Indian conflict modernized, it became consequently more devastating, as the gun exacerbated long-standing animosities and ultimately led to the devastation of the Huron by the Iroquois, who would be armed by the British and Dutch. The Iroquois ended up decimating many other tribes, with their influence ranging from the Ohio River Valley to modern Wisconsin, South Carolina, and into Canada. With the emergence of the gun, the way locals hunted, fought wars, defended their homes, and interacted with others was dramatically altered.

  For the French it meant conquest. Champlain’s book The Voyages of 1613 features the only surviving contemporary likeness of the explorer, a self-flattering drawing titled “Deffaite des Yroquois au Lac de Champlain.” It depicts Champlain, unflustered in his armor, standing between two Indian armies, steadily aiming his heavy harquebus despite the barrage of arrows flying around him. The drawing relays the kind of fearlessness that was expected of the seventeenth-century musketeer. Keeping your wits about you in the midst of combat is indispensable for the soldier, but, as we’ll see, hardly simple.

  The harquebus Champlain aimed at the unsuspecting Iroquois was one of the widely used smoothbore “matchlock” muskets of the time. Since there was no mass production of weapons yet, every musket was somewhat unique, although the apparatus all worked basically the same.

  The harquebus was a long, heavy gun that often required a fork rest. On the outside where the butt met the barrel was the gun’s “lock.” (The device that allowed the gun to fire was called the lock because, as the theory goes, the early mechanisms resembled door locks.) Attached to the lock was a forked holder known as a serpentine that held the fuse, or “match.” The match was a long braided cord that was sometimes soaked in a solution of saltpeter that burned slowly at around four to five inches an hour. The serpentine was attached on the inside of the lock to a lever called the “sear.” The trigger acted through the sear, pushing the lighted match in an arc toward the flashpan that contained the priming powder. The match ignited the powder in the pan, which in turn set off the charge in the barrel through a small hole in the pan that led to the interior of the barrel and fired the gun.

  Although, mechanically speaking, the matchlock utilized a relatively simple design—one that had probably been aroun
d in one form or another for two hundred years—the loading and shooting of the gun was a dangerously long and clumsy process. What the Iroquois at Lake Champlain didn’t understand after facing the first volley from the French guns was that they probably could have turned around and slaughtered their new European enemies with relative ease once the barrage had been fired.

  The first firearms in North America could be powerful and overwhelming, but they could also be frustratingly ineffective. Imagine the scene a musketeer like Champlain might encounter: standing in the center of dense foliage or on a sand-strewn beach, facing hostile Indians, a shooter would first have to remove his match from the serpentine so that it would not accidentally ignite the powder for the next round. (Unintentional bursts of fire were a perpetual fear of the musketeer. In September of the same year, a stray match ignited John Smith’s powder bag, setting off an explosion that lit the Jamestown colony founder’s clothing ablaze, badly burning him.)5 Champlain had probably first opened a smaller flask, containing a finer grain of gunpowder, with which he filled his flash pan. He then blew away any loose powder to avoid unwanted ignition and closed the pan. Next, holding the match with one hand, he pried open a cylinder containing his charge powder and poured the contents down the barrel with his other hand. After this was accomplished, Champlain grabbed a lead ball and a wad from a pouch on his belt and forced all these elements down the barrel of his weapon with a long rammer that was typically attached to his barrel. (Champlain claims to have loaded four balls into his musket before firing his fateful shots at the Iroquois chiefs.)

  The simplicity of the musket design allowed it to fire a variety of ammunition. Most often the ammunition for a musket was a round ball of lead, a malleable metal. Round balls were intentionally loose fitting in the smooth barrel so that they could quickly be loaded even after the inside of the barrel had been fouled by numerous previous shots.

  Once all the preparations were completed, the cinder at the end of the match once again needed to be blown to ensure striking the pan would ignite the powder. Sometimes the priming powder flashed without igniting the main charge; the phrase “flash in the pan” originated from this frustrating event. Then again, sometimes the fuse went out completely, which was why the musketeer burned his fuse at both ends. If the fire was properly lit, the match would be returned to the serpentine and adjusted to ensure it hit the pan properly. It was only then that Champlain could take his aim, shoot, and, of course, pray that his firearm did not misfire (a regular occurrence) and hit its intended target (a rare one). If wind happened to be blowing, the shooter had to contend with sparks and fire flying back into his face. Perhaps in the least hazardous conditions the best-trained musketeer might be able to reload within forty seconds. For the shooter those seconds probably seemed like an eternity as he wondered whether a poison-tipped arrow or hatchet might find its intended target.

  Along with the clunky loading, there were other drawbacks to the matchlock gun that put the Europeans who first explored and colonized America in constant mortal danger. Since one never knew when they might need one’s musket, a fire was kept lit as a way to light matches, which in turn meant the newcomers made themselves more susceptible to ambushes by Indians or their European adversaries. Then again, oftentimes the elements could make it impossible to keep the matches lit anyway.

  Why, then, with all these numerous drawbacks, would firearms be more instrumental in transforming Native American society than any other item brought to the New World by the Europeans? Well, as it had done for the Europeans who first encountered it, the guns’ sheer energy and noise created a psychological advantage that natives admired, feared, and wanted to emulate. “The Iroquois were much astonished that two men should have been killed so quickly . . . ,” Champlain later wrote, “although they were provided with shields made of cotton thread woven together and wood, which were proof against their arrows. This frightened them greatly.”6

  Unlike arrows, if a harquebus hit its target, as the French explorer’s gun did that day, it was likely to create a shockingly bloody and deadly result. Even from close ranges, arrows often merely wounded their intended targets. Champlain’s shot went right through the cotton and wood shields carried by the Indian chiefs to repel the arrows of their enemy. If one of the primary purposes of a weapon was to inflict the most damage and fear possible, even an awkward gun was an invaluable tool. What the Indians of the Northeast did not yet know, however, was that the booming firearm they had encountered would soon be antiquated technology. The new guns the Europeans carried would be more dangerous and more enduring—as would the ideology they brought with them.

  2

  PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

  “Loud over field and forest the cannon’s roar . . .”

  —Longfellow

  Samoset comes “boldly” into Plymouth settlement

  On the second night exploring the area around Plymouth Bay for a suitable spot to begin building their permanent settlement, a group of hungry, scurvy-ridden Pilgrims were awakened by harrowing shrieks emanating from the woods outside their camp. It was, as Governor William Bradford later described it, a “hideous and great cry” that reminded him of “a company of wolves or such like wild beasts.” And as a traumatized scout ran toward the camp from the woods yelling, “They are men! Indians! Indians!” feathered arrows—most of them over a yard long—rained down on the newcomers, who would fortify themselves as best as they could behind makeshift barricades and peek out to try to discern who was attacking them.1

  These radical Puritans hadn’t landed on Cape Cod in December 1620 looking for trouble. Rather, they were looking to escape it. For that matter, despite fashionable thinking in many quarters of contemporary American life, neither the first English, German, Dutch, nor Scandinavians who journeyed to North America landed with the goal of conquering, displacing, or subjugating the locals. They had yet to imagine themselves expanding thousands of miles westward; in fact, most of these early colonizers had no idea who or what was beyond the wilderness right outside their settlement. More often than not, they were prepared to farm, trade, and proselytize, viewing their story in sweeping biblical terms. Rarely did the first settlers initiate violence.

  Which is not to say that the newcomers didn’t contemplate the prospect of hostility in this new land. To avoid disagreeable incidents, the Pilgrims had hired a stout and ginger-haired English officer named Myles Standish, who had befriended the group and their pastor, John Robinson, while stationed in the Netherlands. With him they brought a small armory and plenty of muskets. These guns, as it turned out, probably saved their lives on the beach that early morning. As the arrows fell around them, the English lit their matches and shot their muskets into the trees until Standish could organize a concerted defense and an escape. Judging from the noise, the Pilgrims guessed that there were around thirty or forty Indians (perhaps Wampanoags, though we can’t say for certain). Soon the locals retreated back into the unknown. By the time it was all over, it seems that the Europeans were just as horrified by the shrieking of the Indians as the Indians were by the racket the muskets produced.2

  This first short and bloodless battle with the native population helped instill an urgency into the newcomers as surely as it did the Indians. Danger loomed in the wilderness. Once a colony was established—after a hastily written document of self-governance was produced—Standish quickly organized the militia to secure it. The Pilgrims needed to concern themselves with the potential threat of not only local Indians, whose intentions were still uncertain, but also well-armed Old World antagonists like the French and Dutch who had stakes in lands not far from them. To deal with this menace, the Pilgrims relied on more than just handheld firearms. They had brought some dangerous firepower: wheeled cannons—one, a 1,200-pounder that could shoot a 3.5-pound cannonball—and placed them in a two-story fort overlooking the harbor.3

  Without any formal military protection, necessity drove Americans, from the Pilgrims forward, to rely on militias even mo
re than their relatives in England. As the historian Daniel J. Boorstin once noted, “In America the profession of arms was being dissolved into communities of citizen soldiers—not through force of dogma, but through force of circumstances.”4 These circumstances spurred the evolution of independent units that would one day have a profound effect on the prospects of a new nation.

  While the Christian nonconformists may have been escaping King James’s repressive policies back home, self-defense was predicated on secular traditions they had brought with them from the European continent. One of the most important and consequential was civil defense. The idea was not unique to the newcomers, even if it would take on more urgency and importance in North America. In early fifteenth-century England, most male citizens were already trained to serve in a military reserve and knew how to use a musket. From the ages of sixteen to sixty, reservists gathered in town squares across England four or five times each year and local military leaders inspected their weaponry and equipment—which they most often personally owned. The Pilgrims reproduced this tradition in their own towns.5 Local officers were tasked with training blacksmiths, farmers, and carpenters from every locality in New England to use their pikes and muskets against possible threats against their families and livelihood. A 1650 militia statute in Connecticut, for instance, dictated that “all persons that are above the age of sixteene yeares except magistrates and church officials shall beare arms.”6 This commitment to self-defense most often meant that the head of the household was obligated to buy arms for the eldest son or a servant, who would then serve in the local militia.