First Freedom Page 6

  Few among the British high command believed the colonialists possessed the will or ability to follow through on their threats. A notion calcified among some British that the inherent disposition of the American soldier was cowardly and lazy. “The Americans are in general the dirtiest, the most contemptible, cowardly dogs that you can conceive,” wrote Colonel James Wolfe in a dispatch during the French and Indian War.8 “There is no depending upon them in action. They fall down dead in their own dirt and desert battalions, officers and all.”9 General Braddock had thought the Americans under his command of a “Slothfull and Languid Disposition,” rendering them “very unfit for Military Service.”10 As tensions rose, the British governor of Georgia, Henry Ellis, assured England that the colonists were a “poor species of fighting men” given to “a want of bravery.” Another colonel remarked that the American soldier was “an effeminate thing, very unfit for and very impatient of war.”11 An MP thought that “good bleeding” would “bring those Bible-faced Yankees to their senses.”12

  So, after the Americans had acted up again during the Powder Alarm, William Legge, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth, secretary of state for the colonies, suggested to General Gage that he should contemplate disarming all of New England. At the time, it was assumed by many of the British that the rebelliousness was a factional problem contained in Boston. The jumpy but prescient general, who knew well of the widespread use and ownership of firearms in colonial America, responded that the only way to do so was by massive force. “Your Lordships Idea of disarming certain Provinces, would doubtless be consistent with Prudence and Safety; but it neither is nor has been practicable, without having recourse to Force and being Masters of the Country,” Gage wrote.13 This interaction was made public in the House of Commons, and soon Benjamin Franklin was disseminating it among the patriots to great effect.14

  It wasn’t the first time Gage, who better comprehended the size and scope of the problem than most, had cautioned that he would need a substantial army to quell the upstart locals. Back in 1765 the general had written his superiors amplifying the fact that “nothing but a very considerable Military force” would allow him “to grasp control of the American situation.”15 In November 1774, Gage again wrote home requesting an additional 20,000 troops to secure the British presence in North America. This was larger than the standing peacetime army of all of Great Britain at the time.

  Gage’s superiors sent him four hundred auxiliary marines.

  European powers were not used to being out-armed by their subjects. One of the problems for the British was that New England was teeming with weapons at the dawn of the revolution. “The Colonists were the greatest weapon-using people of that epoch in the world. Everywhere the gun was more abundant than the tool,” wrote historian Charles Winthrop Sawyer about colonial times.16 For the most part, the muskets were older, bought through trade from Britain and other European powers, or made by local blacksmiths to resemble those guns. But a good musket, properly cared for, could be operational for many decades.

  In 1774, Richard Price, the Welsh philosopher and intellectual who championed the American cause in Britain during the Revolution, pointed out that in the colonies “every inhabitant has in his house (as part of his furniture) a book on law and government, to enable him to understand his civil rights; a musket to enable him to defend these rights; and a Bible to enable him to understand and practice his religion.”17 In that same year, an Englishman visiting New England wrote home that there “is not a Man born in America that does not Understand the Use of Firearms and that well . . . It is almost the First thing they Purchase and take to all the New Settlements and in the cities you scarcely find a Lad of 12 years that does not go a Gunning.”18

  There have been sporadic attempts by politically motivated historians—most notably by the now-discredited Michael A. Bellesiles19—to embrace a history that comports with political antagonism toward the Second Amendment. These revisionists have argued that it wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century, with the rise of industrial manufacturing and affordable weapons, that American “gun culture” became pervasive. Yet, in recent years, historians have examined probate inventories (appraised lists of assets after death) and contemporaneous accounts and come to the conclusion that there was widespread ownership of firearms in the colonial era.

  Two professors at Northwestern University Law School, James Lindgren and Justin Lee Heather, for instance, found that guns were owned by 50 to 73 percent (depending on the county) of male estates in North America. To put this in some context, guns were more abundant in these homes than other common items of the time. In one itemized 1774 inventory of hundreds of estates, firearms were more common than books (62 percent); only 30 percent of these estates had any cash, only 25 percent owned Bibles, and only 14 percent owned swords or knives.20

  Another study calculated that, among the wealthiest 10 percent of estates, around 74 percent featured at least one gun in the largest Virginia counties of the era. None of the other five items that were measured—tables, seating furniture, hoes (despite tobacco being the primary means of making a living), axes, and sharp knives—were as common as guns, which appear to have been present in 50 percent of estates overall. In another study of pre-revolutionary Maryland, probate records show that estates had more firearms (78 percent) than chairs (63 percent), hand mills (53 percent), books (40 percent), pictures and curtains (24 percent), chamber pots (22 percent), or personal ornaments (20 percent). Any deep dive into the probate inventories around the country lands on similar findings.21

  The number of guns, valued and transferable commodities, owned by Americans was likely even higher than these records show. As we noted earlier, from the 1600s on, militia duty was common in the colonies. Men needed guns to perform this duty, and so weapons were handed from one relative, friend, or neighbor to another, without any record of the transfer. In some Virginia counties, firearms were not even subject to inheritance laws.22

  Many poorer colonial Americans likely aspired to own muskets and pistols—or more of them—but did not have the means to do so. In the mid-1700s, a musket could cost around two pounds and four shillings, no small amount in those days. The firearms that were tallied in probate records were often in good condition, signaling that the firearms were important to households, that the armory was replenished, and that the weapons were cared for and used. Of the 87 percent of itemized male estates with guns listed, at least one gun was not listed as old or in poor working condition.23

  Then as now, guns were more common in rural areas—which makes sense, when one considers that urban dwellers often rely on the protection of numbers and are insulated from frontier violence by professional soldiers and other law-keepers in their towns. Rural Americans, on the other hand, were often impelled not only to hunt for their own food but to repel unfriendly marauders and Indians. (Native Americans, by the way, were also armed by the mid-1700s. There are numerous contemporaneous accounts of tribal warriors fighting, raiding, and hunting with an array of muskets during this era. As we’ve noted, the British, French, and Spanish had been equipping and trading with Indian tribes for more than a century by the time the Revolutionary War broke out. Guns had become an essential factor in Indian life and conflict. The archaeological record shows that Indians not only possessed weapons for hunting and war but had some rudimentary knowledge of how to fix them and build new parts.)24

  As a practical matter, then, the situation the British faced made confiscation nearly impossible. As a philosophical matter, it meant war. Whether it required repelling hostile Indians, the French, the Dutch, or ultimately the British, for America’s founding generation self-defense was the principal manifestation of natural rights—universal and inalienable. Contemporary cynics might discount this kind of idealism, but the many letters and articles written by Americans in those days illustrate an unvarnished commitment to the principles that would soon be codified in the Constitution. Few were more stressed than the right to self-defense.

 
• • •

  So war it would be. Five days after the Powder Alarm ended, the colonial leader Dr. Joseph Warren—a man who would be yelling, “By Heaven, I hope I shall die up to my knees in blood!” on Breed’s Hill (he did)—introduced a draft of the Suffolk Resolves, named after the county he represented, which included Boston. Across Massachusetts, other county conventions drafted similar declarations of opposition to the Intolerable Acts, officially signaling that Americans were prepared to take up arms against the king.

  Among other actions, the resolutions promised to boycott British imports, to ignore the Intolerable Acts until they were repealed, and to see those who had attempted to enforce them removed from their royal positions. The most consequential resolutions were the ninth through twelfth, which urged the colonies to raise their own militias, free of British control, and defend themselves through violence if necessary. For colonists who were already likely the richest and freest subjects in the British Empire, to make such a declaration was tantamount to sedition.

  The mood of the people was bellicose, and Warren’s warning came true soon enough. In April 1775, Gage received word that the colonists had a stockpile of munitions in Concord, a small town northwest of Boston. All year Gage had continued to confiscate black powder and seize colonial arms in an effort to undermine preemptively any organized colonial insurgency. Gage knew that the local committee of safety in Concord had made considerable deposits of powder and munitions in its military store and was determined to guard and then move it as quickly as possible. The general had already dispatched spies to the area to sketch local roads in anticipation of taking them.

  The Americans, of course, had their own spies. On April 18, 1775, Dr. Warren was informed by a source inside the British high command that troops would march to acquire the gunpowder and muskets that night. It was then that the doctor famously dispatched the silversmith Paul Revere and, less famously, the tanner William Dawes Jr. (another rider, Dr. Samuel Prescott, soon joined them) to alert Americans of the arrival of the British soldiers. The first task of the messengers, who traveled on different routes toward Concord under moonlight, was to alert Samuel Adams and John Hancock that they were to be apprehended. The two revolutionaries went into hiding. Then the riders went on to alert the militias. When a local sergeant cautioned them against unnecessary noise, Revere prophetically rejoined, “You’ll have noise enough here before long: the regulars are coming out.”25

  With an easy victory against the colonial militia seemingly in hand, the British who left Concord must have been confident in their ability to deal with rebels. Soon the real consequences of attempting to disarm a heavily armed and trained population would be upon them.

  As we’ve seen, by the time of the Revolution, Americans had at least a century’s worth of experience with militias in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, a tradition of local defense that began with the first Puritans and had its roots in England. Some of these militia units, armed initially with matchlocks and pikes, had been able to gather within half an hour of being warned to deal with Indian uprisings, wars with foreign powers like France, or even threats of local insurrection.

  At first these militia units were called “Snowshoemen,” as each was to “provide himself with a good pair of snowshoes, one pair of moggisons, and one hatchet” and be ready “to hold themselves to march on a moment’s warning.”26 By the time of the French and Indian War, they began referring to themselves as the “Minutemen.”

  Each municipality would have to decide the size and consistency of the units. Membership was voluntary, but there was certainly communal pressure to participate. In some units there were no ranks and in others men voted for their leaders. They met in reserved fields outside their towns to conduct military exercises, which most often entailed shooting practice and very little else. Any trained solider witnessing these drills likely found the scene amateurish at best. “It is a curious masquerade scene to see grave sober citizens, barbers and tailors who never looked fierce before, strutting about in their Sunday wigs with muskets on their shoulders,” one Englishman visiting Massachusetts in the early 1700s observed.27

  It is true that militia would not be able to stand up to hardened military forces over an extended war. Yet, as the British learned outside Boston that day, there were a couple of things the militiamen did excel at: speed and marksmanship. During the extended march back to Boston, the strung-out British columns were continually stalked by militiamen who hid in the woods and behind fences, houses, and large rocks. By the time the British had gotten back to the safety of Boston and the naval support at Charlestown Neck, 273 of their troops had been killed or wounded, and thousands of Minutemen had been summoned.

  The battle also taught Americans lessons about the limitations of guerrilla warfare. For one, without any centralized command or leadership, they would not be able to fight a war. Many of the local units stopped pursuing the retreating British once they left the vicinity of their hometowns. Even open rebellion did not dissuade the British from their confiscation efforts. Three days after Lexington, Gage warned elected Bostonians that meetings amounted to “a large body of men in arms” and that there would be more bloodshed. A committee of locals met with Gage to work out a deal that allowed those who handed over their weapons to leave the besieged city. After debating the arrangement in Faneuil Hall, the Americans agreed. In the days ahead, colonial city dwellers—the ones who some modern historians tells us supposedly owned very few weapons—handed over another 1,778 muskets, 634 pistols, 973 bayonets, and 38 blunderbusses.28

  Americans took up positions in Charlestown and Dorchester, surrounding the British in Boston and in full rebellion. Massachusetts fielded twelve regiments, Connecticut added a force of around 6,000 men, and within the week there was an army of 16,000. As the war dragged on, enthusiasm waned. Washington had predicted as much early on. “When Men are irritated, & the Passions inflamed, they fly hastily, and chearfully to Arms,” he wrote John Hancock in September 1776, “but after the first emotions are over to expect, among such People as compose the bulk of an Army, that they are influenced by any other principles than those of Interest, is to look for what never did, & I fear never will happen; the Congress will deceive themselves therefore if they expect it.”29

  Soon the states had to entice prospective soldiers with cash, land, and various goods. Congress mandated that men who enlisted must sign on for three years or the duration of the conflict, whichever came first. General Washington had urged conscription, stating that “the Government must have recourse to coercive measures.” In April 1777, Congress recommended a draft to the states and within a year most states were conscripting men.

  Although Americans often struggled to maintain the kind of discipline necessary to excel at this brand of warfare, they invented and excelled at others. Those who believed in the dangers of colonial resistance rested their argument on the population’s size and proficiency with guns, which even most skeptics admitted was superb. The Duke of Manchester, a moderate member of Parliament at the time of the Revolution, warned his countrymen to move forward judiciously, as Americans “had now three million of people, and most of them were trained in arms . . .” One correspondence from England, reported in the Boston Evening Post in late 1768, put it more bluntly, noting that “the total number of the militia, in the large province of New-England was likely to be in upwards of 150,000 men, who all have and use arms, not only in a regular, but in so particular a manner, as to be capable of shooting a Pimple off a man’s nose without hurting him.”30

  This contention wasn’t far from the truth.

  5

  THE FINEST MARKSMEN IN THE WORLD

  “I never in my life saw better rifles (or men who shot better) than those made in America.”

  —British colonel George Hanger

  Maryland Rifleman

  On October 7, 1777, a child of Irish immigrants named Timothy Murphy perched in a sturdy tree on the edge of the Second Battle of Saratoga (also known as th
e Battle of Bemis Heights) and took in the scene around him. From the brush-covered hillside just beyond the battle, he was situated opposite the right flank of General John Burgoyne’s army of red-coated British soldiers, who marched in the conventional formations of European battle. There, for the first time in history, a mere soldier was able to aim his gun—in Murphy’s case, a unique double-barreled long rifle invented by German immigrants of Pennsylvania—and kill another man from around 350 yards. Not just any man, but a British brigadier general.

  The twenty-six-year-old Murphy, who had grown up on a wilderness farm along the Susquehanna River in central Pennsylvania, enlisted in the Continental Army in 1775, serving in the Siege of Boston and the Battle of Long Island before making a name for himself sniping at the British in Westchester. A rifleman who could regularly hit a seven-inch target at 250 yards, Murphy was transferred to “Morgan’s Kentucky Riflemen” in July 1777 and within a month joined five hundred of his brethren marching upstate to reinforce the Continental smoothbore musket troops opposing Burgoyne’s invasion of northern New York. The British were hoping that General Howe’s march up to Albany would effectively split New York, ending the war. By the time Murphy was heading toward Saratoga, the rifle companies had been turned into light infantrymen units that used the forested land to scout, pester, stalk, and confuse the British.

  Henry Knox, the future secretary of war, would refer to Morgan’s Kentucky Riflemen as “the most respectable body of Continental troops that were ever had.”1 In his 1856 book, The Life of General Morgan of the Virginia Line of the Army of the United States, James Graham writes, “After examining all the sources of information within my reach, I became convinced that few, if any, of the heroes of that day furnished larger contributions than he did to the glory of our arms, or surpassed him in the amount and value of their services.”2