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  When the delegation from Maryland offered to raise more rifleman units in October 1776, the congressional secretary wrote that “if muskets were given them instead of rifles the service would be more benefitted” and if it were up to him he “would speedily reduce the number of rifles” and replace them with more manageable muskets, “[a]s they are more easily kept in order, can be fired oftener, and have the advantage of bayonets.”

  For these reasons, by 1778, Washington sent what was left of the rifle corps to missions on the frontier and disbanded the rest. By this time, the war board would not accept any new rifle regiments—and was looking to replace the ones they did have with muskets. As a result of Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben professionalizing the American forces during the spring of 1778, a wholly traditional European-style army came down from the hills of Valley Forge. He taught the manual of arms, platoon volley fire, and proper use of the bayonet to a musket-equipped army. The rifle’s time had not yet come.

  6

  LIBERTY’S TEETH

  I saw the plundering British bands,

  Invade the fair Virginian lands.

  I saw great Washington advance

  With Americans and troops of France;

  I saw the haughty Britons yield,

  And stack their muskets on the field.

  —Joseph Plumb Martin

  The Death of General Mercer at the Battle of Princeton, January 3, 1777

  Even as they were digging trenches in the Virginia soil, Joseph Plumb Martin and his men could make out two of the redoubts held by the British surrounding the fort at Yorktown. All the men were also aware that at some point soon their commander, Alexander Hamilton, would order the bloody march to seize the fortifications. “I mistrusted something extraordinary, serious or comical, was going forward,” Martin later wrote, “but what I could not easily conjecture.”1 The situation soon became clear to them as the sun began to fall and Martin was ordered to move his detachment of colonial infantrymen beyond the trenches they had just built and lie down on the ground to await the signal for an attack on the fortification. General Washington had planned on taking a number of positions using the elements of surprise and darkness. Martin’s troops quietly crawled to within around one hundred yards or less of the British carrying unloaded muskets, or “cold steel,” only to be loaded once the battle began to limit the amount of noise. Once artillery began pounding the redoubts, Martin’s men quickly rose to form lines and rushed toward the enemy, whom they could see in the moonlight.

  It had been an arduous journey for Martin. Like many of his friends, the fifteen-year-old had enlisted in the Connecticut state militia after hearing about the exhilarating events in Lexington. After his six months of militia duty were up, Martin enlisted in the Continental Army and served seven more years fighting the British up and down the East Coast. By the time he’d reached his mid-twenties, Martin was a sergeant who had participated in the Battle of Brooklyn, the Battle of White Plains, the Siege of Fort Mifflin, the Battle of Monmouth, and the Siege of Yorktown. What makes Martin’s story unique is that it was only in 1830, at the age of seventy, that he would publish a firsthand account of his time during the war, titled A Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Dangers, and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier; Interspersed with Anecdotes of Incidents That Occurred Within His Own Observation. Although it almost certainly was embellished in places, the book was culled from journals Martin kept during the war, and it would offer insights into the everyday lives of the average soldier during the American Revolution.

  Although Martin relays astonishing stories of colonial shooting competence—in one unlikely tale, a light infantryman snipes a British guard who was mocking him from over three hundred yards away—he never mentions the American rifle, because for most of the men who fought for American independence, there was no real sight for aiming, and any success in long-distance shooting was often luck. “A soldier’s musket, if not exceedingly ill bored, will strike the figure of a man at 80 yards; it may even at 100,” the British marksman George Hanger once noted, “but a soldier must be very unfortunate indeed who shall be wounded at 150 yards.”2

  On the battlefields, as Martin relays on numerous occasions, American and British soldiers met each other in two or three lines of musketeers. Right behind these lines was where the reserves marched, ready to step in the place of casualties. Martin and other infantrymen of the late eighteenth century were drilled in quick loading and firing, on command. These linear formations steadily moved to within an uncomfortable forty to fifty yards of the enemy and delivered volleys of musket balls in succession. While one fired, the other line busied themselves with reloading. The formations proceeded forward at intervals until the lines were close enough to charge with their bayonets and engage in hand-to-hand combat. Thus, the art of speedily loading was more vital than the art of aiming.

  Brown Bess

  The guns the two major participants of the war fired at each other were remarkably similar—sometimes, in fact, the very same models. Since most of what the revolutionaries knew about warfare, and almost all of their military-grade equipment, had come from the British, it’s unsurprising that the famous “Brown Bess,” one of the most reliable and long-serving firearms in history, became one of the most prevalent weapons used by the American soldiers early in the war.

  At various points in the early eighteenth century, the British had attempted to standardize musket parts to make it simpler to produce them and train armies to use and maintain them. In 1715, King George’s government created the Board of Ordnance, which established the “system of manufacture” to set standards of production for weapons. The effort both reduced British dependence on foreign firearms makers and improved the quality and capacity of domestic musket manufacturing. This entailed developing a network of domestic contractors who supplied the government with musket parts, which were then delivered to gunmakers to assemble into finished muskets.

  One outcome of this system was the Long Land Service musket, known alternatively as the King’s musket, the Tower musket, and most famously, the Brown Bess. It was a flintlock, .75-caliber barrel-loading musket, and it became the standard firearm for British soldiers in 1722 and remained so for over a hundred years. The gun would be continuously tweaked over the next century—the British toyed with the length, locks, and material—but the basics remained the same: the Brown Bess was most often made of walnut stock, it had a banana-shaped lock plate (the elongated piece of metal serving as a mounting for the lock), and it used brass. The barrel was forty-six inches long, and the gun weighed a little more than ten pounds. Its flintlock mechanism was attached with just two screws. It was simple and trustworthy, and, most vitally, the parts were now easy to replace and produce.

  Why the name “Brown Bess”? The etymology has been debated for a century, with a seemingly endless number of theories. Some claim the “Brown” in Brown Bess comes from the brown anti-rusting agent that was smeared on the metal. But the gun had its moniker long before the browning of the gun. Some claim that “Bess” came from the old harquebus, or that the gun’s name derived from the German or Middle Dutch terms for “brown” and “barrel,” or that it was due to the brown of the rifle stock; or perhaps “Bess” referred to Queen Elizabeth I. All of it seems unlikely. It was not unusual for men of the age—or any era, for that matter—to refer to their guns using women’s names. One theory is that the word “gun” itself had been derived from the Norse woman’s name “Gunnildr,” which became “Gunna,” which became “gonne.” The word is used by Geoffrey Chaucer, who for a time served in the administration of Edward III, the victor at Crécy, perhaps the first battle using firearms in Europe. Chaucer wrote in 1384: “As swifte as pelet out of gonne, / Whan fire is in the poudre ronne.”3

  Whatever the source of the nickname, men like Martin needed to get their hands on many if they wished to succeed. Once war broke out, American “committees of safety” had gone about the business of acquiring existing firearms by c
ontrolling local armories, but the colonists also purchased, and on occasion confiscated, Loyalist firearms. They would also engage in ongoing efforts to procure older Dutch, Spanish, and Prussian weapons, with only modest results at the start of the war.4

  The muskets that were useful in hunting and personal defense were rarely durable enough for wartime conditions, and soldiers often complained about their weapons in the early years of the conflict. “The arms were in horrible condition, covered with rust, half of them without bayonets, many from which a single shot could not be fired . . . [M]uskets, carbines, fowling pieces and rifles were seen in the same company,” wrote General von Steuben, the Prussian who had modernized the military tactics and brought a modicum of discipline to the Continental Army at Valley Forge in 1778.5

  There would also be concerted efforts to create new muskets. There were perhaps a couple of thousand colonial gunsmiths working on the continent during the Revolutionary War, and not all of them ended up laboring for the cause of liberty. Many had been trained to repair British muskets, and so they might well be employed by the Crown. Although the British had relied on the raw materials found in the colonies to produce weapons for decades, they had prohibited any large-scale manufacturing facility for guns in the colonies, leaving Americans at a disadvantage.6

  So blacksmiths supporting the colonial cause would be relegated to assembling a hodgepodge of mixed parts from antiquated muskets and various foreign guns. When ambitious craftsmen created usable firearms, they were often made to broadly feel, work, and look like the Brown Bess, although few could match its dependability. One such surviving firearm, purportedly used by a man from Wrentham, Massachusetts, featured an American-made stock using a Dutch lock, a French iron side plate, a British brass butt plate, and a Queen Anne ribbed pattern ramrod. American gunmakers avoided putting their names or insignias on the firearms so that there remained few clues that might lead to retribution should the American experiment be squashed by the British.

  In March 1776, Silas Deane, a Connecticut delegate to the Continental Congress (who would later be accused of embezzling), left for France to press the Americans’ need for arms, equipment, and financial aid against the British. Deane, with the help of the Marquis de Lafayette, assured the French that the colonists were interested in “total separation”—not that France needed a whole lot of prodding when given the chance to undermine British holdings in North America. It was not until 1778 that the French and British were officially at war. But in the meantime France continued to smuggle muskets, ammunition, tents, cannons, and other supplies to the colonies, many routed through the West Indies.

  The best-known and most widely used of these firearms—and the one that Martin’s men almost certainly held when charging the Yorktown redoubts—was a musket that not only helped win the war but became the template for American postwar arms. The Charleville musket was first introduced in 1717. A smoothbore, it used a smaller, .69-caliber barrel, making it a lighter gun—and a bit more accurate—than the Brown Bess.7 Like the Brown Bess, it was the first gun the French army built with standard parts and to use standard ammunition to better facilitate production and repair. Also like the Brown Bess it was used into the mid-1800s until the flintlocks were replaced with percussions caps. (More on that later.) The gun was made in cities across France—Charleville, Saint-Étienne, and Maubeuge—but since most of the American arms had been produced in Charleville, the colonial soldiers simply started calling it by that name.8 The Americans, as we’ll see, would copy the contours of the Charleville when creating their first official muskets at the United States armory in Springfield, Massachusetts.

  Charleville lock

  While the men at Lexington fought with makeshift versions of the Brown Bess—though some had probably held locally produced unreliable muskets—by the time Martin’s unit was crawling toward the British regulars and German mercenaries who fortified Yorktown, they were holding the most sophisticated and reliable muskets available in the world. In the two hundred years preceding the Siege of Yorktown, gun technology had made a number of impressive technological leaps. Along with developments in design and balance, at least three basic ignition systems had been invented during this period. The firearm had gone from being little more than a small, clumsy, loud cannon to a sleeker, lighter, considerably better-balanced gun that a man could shoot faster and farther, and with better and better accuracy. A weapon primarily deployed in sieges, as a way to rip through armor, or as a tool of psychological warfare was now the predominant weapon of combat.

  As soon as Martin ordered his unit to charge the redoubt, the British fired their Brown Bess muskets and “seven or eight men belonging to the infantry were killed, and a number wounded.” Once the Americans rallied and loaded their own Charlevilles and English muskets, they quickly outgunned the defenders in the fortification and Martin’s war came to an end. By the end of the next day, Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis and the British Army had surrendered to Washington. The British government was impelled to negotiate an end to the conflict that had broken out near Boston seven years earlier between trained redcoats and American militia.

  “The next day we were ordered to put ourselves in as good order as our circumstances would admit,” Martin wrote, “to see (what was the completion of our present wishes) the British army march out and stack their arms.”9

  7

  FREEDOM’S GUARANTEE

  “To disarm the people; that is the best and most effectual way to enslave them . . .”1

  —George Mason

  George Washington presiding over the Philadelphia Convention

  What could induce seventy colonial Americans—most of them farmers—to stand against seven hundred highly trained British fighters in the town square in Lexington? For that matter, what induced the wealthy and intellectual classes of the colonies, men and women with so much to lose, to support an all-out war against what was considered the most powerful empire in the world? What drove Joseph Plumb Martin and another approximately 200,000 British subjects in North America to enlist in an insurrection against the Crown over the next seven years?

  As with any conflict, there was an array of factors, but one thing was clear: the American colonialists were more religious, puritanical, zealous, and hyper-idealistic about their natural rights than any other people in the world. And the most vital and practical right they knew was the one that would allow them to protect all the others: the right to self-defense.

  In the writings and speeches of the American Founders, the threat of disarmament was always a casus belli. Which makes some ironic sense when we consider that of all the natural rights codified in the Constitution, none—not freedom of speech, press, or religion, or the ability to vote or to demand due process—had a longer or deeper history in English common law and tradition than the right to defend oneself. Not even government officials or Loyalists who had hoped to disarm rebellious colonists in order to avert that war would ever offer a broader philosophical argument for depriving the common man of his right to own weapons.

  In some sense, these colonists’ understanding of the right to bear arms was forged by their violent history, sparse population, inhospitable environment, and geography, but the ideological foundations for the Second Amendment had been well established by the time the first English landed in Massachusetts. And as Alexander Hamilton later noted, “We think in English.”2

  The historian Joyce Lee Malcolm, in her classic study of the origins of the Second Amendment, To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right, points out that the “colonists were men and women steeped in English laws, English customs, English prejudices, and English habits of mind.”3 One of the reasons the British had been more successful than their European rivals in enticing their countrymen to colonize North America was the promise that their rights and customs continue to be honored and flourish. It was within this framework that British subjects staked their claim to revolt when the king came for their weapons.

&nb
sp; The idea of personal arms and collective militias goes back to at least the days of King Alfred I, who called on all subjects to arm themselves for service in the late 800s. In 1181, King Henry II issued the Assize of Arms, calling on all freemen to own weapons in the service of the king—or else. The arms these men were required to provide depended on their wealth and status, but nearly everyone contributed. The citizen army was rooted in English life for centuries. Correspondingly, so was the idea of having a weapon in the home. Henry VIII would decree that all fathers had a responsibility to purchase longbows for any sons between the ages of seven and fourteen years and teach them to shoot. Anyone from the age of fourteen to the age of forty was obligated to practice and be able to show that they were owners of bows and arrows “contynually in hys house.”4 Anyone who failed to own and use a longbow was subject to a fine. To make the longbow even more widespread, the king banned the ownership of crossbows and “handgonnes” and instituted price controls, but the idea was soon abandoned as both weapons gained in popularity.

  It is difficult to pinpoint with any certainty the number of arms the average person possessed in England in the 1500s and 1600s, but records illustrate that criminals had easy access to guns during this time, engaging in everything from poaching to illegal hunting to highway robbery. This suggests that guns were plentiful. Even in times of confiscation, usually during civil and religious strife, it is likely that a discreet person could own a firearm or a crossbow without much worry.5

  In Elizabethan England, the idea of the local militia grew. Many towns were tasked to create and train men to be prepared for invasion and domestic discord. Some of these groups were afforded special training and provided firearms purchased by the Crown, while others were on their own. These traditions, as we’ve seen, endured in America, culminating in the Minutemen and other Continental militia. During the subsequent upheaval, civil war, and religious violence, those in power might occasionally attempt to disarm the citizenry. The Game Act of 1671, perhaps the most well-known instance of the Crown severely limiting the ownership of weapons by the average citizen, made possession of a firearm by anyone not qualified to hunt illegal and provided for confiscation of the weapon.