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  Whether or not that sort of exuberant praise is warranted, there is little argument that the leader of the riflemen, Daniel Morgan, was a uniquely American figure—brave, brash, and independent. Born in New Jersey, the sturdy and often belligerent Morgan was the sort of person contemporary Americans might consider an adrenaline junkie. After leaving his family at the age of sixteen in search of fortune, Morgan took various jobs in sawmills and farms in the Shenandoah Valley before settling in as a professional merchandise hauler making his trips back and forth from Virginia’s mountains and bustling seaports. “The Great Wagon Road” opened Philadelphia and went through the great rifle center of Lancaster, down to Frederick, Maryland, and to Winchester, traversed the eastern and middle parts of the Valley of Virginia, and ended up at the Yadkin River in North Carolina.

  As an independent wagoner, he was well acquainted with both the Kentucky rifle and the violence of frontier life. So it was not surprising that Morgan would take to soldiering quickly when war broke out between the French and English in 1756.3 Using Winchester as his base, Morgan became a Virginia militia leader. Spurred by tales of Indian atrocities, some real and many others imagined, he headed to the frontier and Fort Edwards. A short time after his arrival the fort was attacked by a formidable army of French and their Indians allies. Morgan acquitted himself bravely, displaying the brand of leadership that would repulse the enemy, and as they retreated, Morgan is said to have yelled at the top of his voice, “Let us follow the red devils!”4

  The defense of Fort Edwards brought Morgan to Washington’s attention, and the two became lifelong friends. When the Revolution broke out and the call for riflemen arrived, Morgan was one of the first to answer, conducting shooting trials to build a regiment and anticipating the rise of the rifleman. Yet one of the ironies of American history is that while the Pennsylvania rifle would later be mythologized and beloved by so many, often credited for winning the Revolutionary War, in reality it was underutilized and misunderstood. In many ways, expectations were simply too high for the riflemen. Some leaders in the budding American rebellion believed the rifleman could counterbalance the imposing if thinly spread military of the world’s reigning superpower.

  John Hancock, president of the Second Continental Congress and the first signer of the Declaration of Independence, claimed that riflemen “were the finest marksmen in the world,” and because they could shoot “their Rifle Guns at an amazing distance,” the Continental forces should make extensive use of them.5 The future president John Adams concurred, noting that the riflemen could fire their weapons with “great exactness to great distances.”6 Washington, no doubt recalling his days with Braddock in the French and Indian War, believed that the riflemen could become highly effective modern soldiers, perhaps even forming the core of the entire Continental Army. Colonel George Hanger would have similar dreams for the British forces. The thinking was both premature and unrealistic, as the rifle had yet to be tested in large-scale conventional warfare.

  In one of its first acts in June 1775, Congress authorized the raising of six companies of “expert riflemen” with an enlistment period of one year. Soon hundreds of peculiar characters began emerging from the backwoods to take their places in the forefront of the uprising. The response in Pennsylvania’s outer counties, where the most riflemen were based, was overwhelming. The colony’s quota was increased from six to eight companies—and then from eight to twelve. In July, the Virginia Gazette reported that so many frontiersmen had volunteered for the colonial cause that shooting tests were needed to ensure the integrity of the regiments. Judges drew noses on a board with chalk and sixty men riddled the targets from 150 yards to test their aptitude.7 This soon became common practice in the effort to recruit riflemen.

  The colonists treated the new soldiers as celebrities. And as the frontiersmen marched to meet the English forces in Boston—some of them traversing five hundred miles before they could do so—people emerged from their homes and farms to gawk and cheer at these unusual men. In turn, the image-conscious riflemen were not above preening for the cheering locals. One witness described them as “painted like Indians” and another portrayed them as “remarkably stout and hardy men, many of them exceeding six feet in height. They are dressed in white frocks, or rifle-shirts, and round hats.” Some of them carried Indian tomahawks. Others wore buckskin breeches. Many wore moccasins and were decked in ornately decorated outfits with porcupine quills. Believing the garments generated a psychological advantage as well as highlighting the egalitarian ethos of the colonial troops, Washington turned into a fan of the Indian-style garb and “rifle shirts.” The general noted that the cheap and utilitarian wear might undermine any “Provincial distinctions which would lead to jealousy and distractions.”8

  Local eyewitnesses also marveled at the potential self-sufficiency of such a fighting force. How, one Marylander wondered, could the British possibly stop a thousand of the men who “want nothing to preserve their health and courage but water from the spring, with a little parched corn, with what they can easily procure in hunting; and who, wrapped in their blankets, in the damp of night, would choose the shade of a tree for their covering, and the earth for their bed”? The Boston Gazette saw them as “heartily disposed to prosecute, with the utmost Vigour, the Noble Cause in which they are engaged.”9

  The frontiersman was more particular about choosing the rifle he carried, one European commented, “than choosing his wife.”10 “A well grown boy at the age of twelve or thirteen years,” one settler observed in the Valley of Virginia in the 1760s, “was furnished with a small rifle and shot-pouch. He then became a fort soldier, and had his port-hole assigned him. Hunting squirrels, turkeys and raccoons, soon made him expert in the use of his gun.”11 For most frontier families, there was no choice.

  Although the ability of these men to survive in the wilderness of North America was impressive, nothing captivated the imagination of the locals more than a rifleman’s exactitude with his weapon. While other armies soon endeavored to adopt the techniques of the American riflemen, nowhere in the world did anyone have a fixation on firearm accuracy quite like Americans. Their displays of shooting so impressed General Washington that he ordered a demonstration of their skill to a crowd that turned out in Cambridge. The men hit poles of seven-inch diameter from 200 yards without much effort—some from 250 yards. They did it lying on their backs and on their sides, and sometimes while in a quick march.

  One onlooker later recounted how shooters set up clapboards “with a mark the size of a dollar” as a demonstration of their trick shooting. One young marksman picked up the target and held it in his hand while his brother “very coolly” shot it from some distance. The brothers then switched roles, one picking up his rifle and the other the clapboard, and they performed the trick again. It didn’t end there. “But will you believe me, when I tell you that one of the men took the board, and placing it between his legs, stood with his back to the tree while another drove the centre,” the astonished letter writer relayed.12

  These public displays of accuracy only buttressed the mythology surrounding the rifleman, and the expectations. By the middle of August around 1,400 of them, decked out in their peculiar outfits, were facing the professional British Army in Boston. Soon, the colonial army pulled together 82 of the very best of these riflemen and began sniping at British lines. No European army had ever experienced anything quite like it. The American sharpshooters were able to exact a steady toll on the redcoats, targeting officers in particular.

  Targeting individuals was a tactic largely unknown in European warfare, as marksmanship was neither practiced nor taught by the English.13 One British soldier noted that the American riflemen “conceal themselves behind trees etc till an opportunity presents itself of taking a shot at our advance sentries, which done they immediately retreat. What an unfair method of carrying on a war!”14 Soon, General Howe was writing back to England about “the terrible guns of the rebels” who not only terrorized sentries but
, more barbarically, deliberately picked off officers. British general James Murray, in a letter detailing the fears of many English officers, did not merely point out the superb marksmanship but the ability of the riflemen to excel at guerrilla combat:

  The reason why so many officers fell is that there are amongst the provincial troops a number of enterprising marksmen, who with rifle guns, and I have been assured many of them at 150 yards, will hit a card nine times out of ten . . . [T]hough these people in fair action in open field would signify nothing, yet over breast works, or where they can have the advantage of a tree (or a rock) and that may have every 20 yards in this country, the destruction they make of officers is dreadful.15

  The claim that North America had a tree every twenty yards might be only a slight exaggeration, yet the tactics of the American upstarts became a real concern for the British. To better comprehend what he was up against, General Howe successfully kidnapped one of these colonial snipers and his rifle; the American marksman was then sent to England to be exhibited and perform for crowds.16 A London periodical described the soldier as “a Virginian, above six feet high, stout and well-proportioned . . . He can strike a mark with great certainty, at two hundred yards distance. He has a heavy provincial pronunciation, but otherwise speaks good English. The account he gives, is, that the troops in general are such kind of men as himself, tall and well-proportioned.”17

  • • •

  It was Morgan’s men who gave cover to smoothbore-carrying regulars in one of the most pivotal deployments of the American Revolution and perhaps the most important for the riflemen in Saratoga. Burgoyne, who in 1775 had noted that the chances of “untrained rabble”18 beating a conventional European force were somewhere around “nil,” marched down from Canada with a force of around 6,000 British, Hessians, Loyalists, and Indians, hoping to cut away New England along the Hudson River Valley and quickly put an end to the war. As Burgoyne’s army descended into the dense forests of New York, sharpshooters who employed many of the same guerrilla tactics advanced to meet the Americans.

  Burgoyne brought with him a number of Indian scouts and a sharpshooter specifically trained in wilderness combat. Chosen “for their strength, ability and being expert at the firing of ball,” their mission was “to act on the flanks of the advance brigade and reinforce by what number of Indians the General may think fit to employ.” All of which likely offered Burgoyne a false sense of security as some 2,000 British troops—a third of Burgoyne’s entire army—headed into the thick New York woods. The force was led by Brigadier General Simon Fraser, a Scottish aristocrat, his most capable subordinate.

  When Benedict Arnold, then considered one of the finest generals in the Continental Army, noticed the British general marshaling his troops for a pushback, he called out to Morgan: “That man on the grey horse is a host unto himself and must be disposed of—direct the attention of some of the sharpshooters amongst your riflemen to him!”19 Many recollections of the incident then have Morgan instructing Murphy, one of his finest marksmen, to shoot down that “gallant officer . . . General Fraser. I admire him, but it is necessary that he should die. Do your duty.”20

  This scene seems to inject a level of chivalry into the unconventional targeting of officers. Morgan, who never mentioned Murphy by name, would later offer a more down-to-earth reminiscence of the event in 1781: “Me and my boys,” explained Morgan, were pinned down by British fire until “I saw that they were led by an officer in a grey horse—a devilish brave fellow.” Then “says I to one of my best shots, says I, you get into that there tree, and single out him on the . . . horse. Dang it, ’twas no sooner said than done. On came the British again, with the grey horseman leading; but his career was short enough this time.”21

  Murphy purportedly went about his duty, the first bullet missing its target and nicking Fraser’s horse. His next shot missed as well, clipping the general’s horse a second time. However, his third attempt was lethal, hitting Fraser, supposedly more than three hundred yards away, in the stomach. When the British forces saw Fraser fall from his horse and dragged off the battlefield, they broke ranks and the defense fell back in retreat. The tide of battle was reversed. Even Burgoyne admitted that the loss of Fraser “helped to turn the fate of the day.” By the end of the battle, his 62nd Regiment was decimated. Of forty-eight artillerymen in one battery, Morgan’s sharpshooters killed or wounded all but twelve. A British officer wrote, “The only shelter afforded to the troops was from those angles which faced the enemy as the others were so exposed that we had several men killed and wounded by the riflemen, who were posted in trees.”

  As before, the British were horrified by the targeting of their officers. Burgoyne wrote of the sudden deadly impact of the American riflemen: “The enemy had with their army great numbers of marksmen, armed with rifle-barrel pieces; these, during an engagement, hovered upon the flanks in small detachments, and were very expert in securing themselves, and in shifting their ground. In this action, many placed themselves in high trees in the rear of their own line, and there was seldom a minute’s interval of smoke, in any part of our line without officers being taken off by a single shot.”22

  Ten days later, around 6,000 British troops surrendered to the Americans, saving the cause. Moreover, the colonial victory over Burgoyne in October 1777 changed the complexion of the war. As a military matter, it demonstrated that the Americans could beat a British field army. It illustrated that riflemen could be an important factor in battle, if deployed correctly. In political terms, it showed European powers that Americans could launch a formidable rebellion. The victory was used by American diplomats as leverage to cement the colonies’ relationship with Louis XVI. The sides would sign a formal alliance by February 1778, and by June, France declared war on the British (with Spain and the Netherlands soon joining them). This widening of the war helped the Americans prevail by offering them naval support and ground troops needed to win the war.

  Murphy continued to fight on the frontier and serve as a sharpshooter right through the end of the war, by which time he had accumulated forty-two confirmed kills.23 For the American riflemen, underdogs in the war, guerrilla warfare was often a means of survival, and the targeting of officers was a means of evening the odds.

  But their heyday was still to come.

  One question emerges: Would the Revolution have been won more quickly if Washington had figured out how to better deploy his sharpshooters? Alternative histories are always frustratingly inconclusive, but there are many reasons why the rifle was not ready. For a new weapon to be effective in war, no matter how modern, there need to be policies dictating its broader use. In the end, the American Revolution was fought on late nineteenth-century European terms, which is to say in linear battle formation, often in open fields. And so smoothbore muskets were used by most regulars because they were far easier to load, and with lines of soldiers alternating volleys, they were far more effective in open battle.

  Even if Washington had come up with more successful ways to deploy riflemen, the general would have found it difficult to make them a major component of his forces. For one thing, there was no industrial sector capable of mass-producing a new rifle. As it stood, every rifleman owned a unique weapon, each one the result of specialized work by blacksmiths and gunmakers. What they did produce was often of inferior quality and would break down easily in combat. The widespread manufacture of this new rifle necessitated the production of specialized parts and meant training gunsmiths around the country in new techniques.24 This couldn’t happen overnight.

  When the rifle was deployed—which, as we’ve seen, was not often—it was hampered by a number of technical problems. For one, it took an excruciatingly long time to reload a rifle—often almost two minutes due to the difficulty of forcing the ball down a constricted, rifled bore. Moreover, the residue from the cheap, coarse gunpowder that was used during the war quickly fouled the grooved barrels, making the gun difficult to maintain. Speedy reloading was an obsession of lat
e eighteenth-century armies, for a good reason.

  Unlike modern-day snipers, colonial-era marksmen were in immediate danger after firing. No matter how hidden the shooter’s position, no matter how pristine his aim, once the gun went off, a plume of smoke would rise and immediately betray his position. On numerous occasions American riflemen were tasked with fighting off bayonet-wielding British soldiers. For the most part, this contest did not go well for them. The lack of a bayonet rendered the riflemen even more vulnerable in pitched battles. In the Battle of Long Island, one Hessian remarked that “these frightful people deserve more pity than fear.” In 1778, General Anthony Wayne, commander of the Pennsylvania Line, asked the state board of war to trade in rifles for muskets, because “I would almost as soon face an enemy with a good musket and bayonet without ammunition—as with ammunition with a bayonet.” Colonel George Hanger, for instance, wrote of a skirmish with Morgan’s riflemen: “Not one in four [riflemen] had time to fire and those that did had no time to reload again; the infantry not only dispersed them, but drove them for miles over the country.”

  The riflemen, it should also be mentioned, were often free spirits who were unable to function under the discipline of army life. “They do not boast so much of the Riflemen as heretofore,” General Artemas Ward wrote to John Adams in October 1775. “Genl. Washington has said he wished they had never come. Genl. Lee has damned them and wished them all in Boston. Genl. Gates has said, if any capital movement was about to be made the Riflemen must be moved from this Camp.”25