Posted on 02/12/2004 5:18:10 AM PST by Pharmboy
Kimberley Strassel (de gustibus, Taste page, Weekend Journal, Feb. 6) reminds us of historian Michael Bellesiles's discredited claim that many fewer colonists had guns than previously supposed.
In Page Smith's "A People's History of the American Revolution" we learn that close to 90% of the rebel soldiers came from farms, where hunting was part of daily life. But even in towns people were armed. A British soldier looting Cambridge wrote that "even women had firelocks. One was seen to fire a blunderbuss between her father and her husband from their windows. . . ." Boston patriots, ordered to surrender their firearms, "turned in 1,778 muskets, 634 pistols, 973 bayonets, and 38 blunderbusses" -- this "in a city of some 16,000." Mr. Smith writes that, with a number of weapons already taken out of the city by patriots, "it is probably not far off the mark to say that every other Bostonian over the age of 18 possessed some sort of firearm."
Nancy Ann Holtz Beverly, Mass.
Bless the Wall Street Journal, and nice letter Ms. Holtz. So there ARE some sane people left in Taxachussets after all...
For what? For the use of the army, or just to disarm them?
...Such, in its weak points, was the American army: but it had merits even more peculiar than its imperfections; and those imperfections care and time might remedy, while its more valuable attributes were of a kind no mere military training could create. In many of the infantry regiments two companies, out of every ten, were armed with rifles (as opposed to smooth bore muskets. comment mine);and from almost every homestead along the western border came a backwoodsman carrying a weapon which was the pride of his eyes and a main impliment in his industry.
...All of these appliances were of the very best; because the sustenance of the family, and, (when the indians were about) its existence and its honour, depended upon straight shooting. A boy of the wilderness, at an age when in England he would have been scaring crows, was sent to kill squirrels, under penalty in case the number of squirrels did not tally with the number of bullets he expended. So soon as he passed his twelfth borthday, he was recognized as a part of the garrison of the farm, and was alloted his loophole in the stockade which encircled it. In the more settled districts, many of which were wild enough, the country folk spared no pains to keep up with the standard of marksmanship that ruled among their grandfathers when their township was still a frontier district.
...The deadly and personal character of the American sharpshooting was for the British and unexpected and disconcerting phenomenon, and would have altogether daunted less brave troops than those against whom it was directed. "This war," said one English officer, "is very different to the last in Germany. In this the life of the individual is sought with as much avidity as the obtaining a victory over an army of thousands."
Nothing like it had ever been witnessed on the other side of the Atlantic...
The slaughter in the commissioned ranks at Bunker's Hill, as is sure to be the case with an unpleasant novelty, excited moral disapprobation in English circles. "How far," one gentleman wrote, "the Bostonians can justify taking aim at officers with rifled muskets, I am not military jurisprudent enough to determine. It seems to be contrary to justice." There was no question of justice, but of physical and mental custom which had become an engrained instinct. Many a colonist had never fired off a charge of powder without singling out something or somebody, whether it was the chief with the largest bunch of feathers in a rush of indian warriors, or the drake in a string of wild fowl.
But... but...Bellesiles is the modern Galileo!
Either way, this is about as unbiased an account of the revolution as I have ever read. I bought it at a used books sale at a library. If you can find a copy somewhere, it's well worth the read. I would not trust a modern condensed reprint. The libs may have convieniently edited out the good stuff. I would look for an original volume from 1903 which is what I have. It cost me $5 I think.
From The American Revolution, by Sir George Otto Trevelyan, Longmans, Green and Company, 1903:
That habit did something to supply the want of a professional training in the American artilleryman. When the British fleet bombarded the Charlestown forts on the 28th of June, Carolinian officers laying down their pipes to point the guns, waited patiently for the smoke to clear away that they might aim with more precision. Seldom, in so fierce and engagement, was so little powder consumed by the victors, or so much tobacco. When the fire opened, the colonists had less than thrity rounds per cannon; and only seven hundred pounds of powder were sent to the batteries during the conflict. And yet the British flagship was hulled no less than seventy times; the squandron lost over two hundred killed and wounded; and the two largest men-of-war were reduced to little better than a couple of wrecks.
Son, I do believe some country feller has succeeded in retailing you a tall tale! Can you imagine how flat that bullet would be, after only 20 hits? Never mind 40.
Good find, thanks for quoting to us. Love the British understatement; it helps raise the profile of the emphases.
BTW, when I went looking for some reference works on homosexuality, I didn't look at anything later than about 1970, which was just a couple of years before the homosexual political activists (who'd been tremendously busy in California since about 1956) managed to capsize the entire psychiatry profession on the subject of paraphilias, and took the psychologists with them as a bonus. New work is usable, but for a long time PC prevailed.
Forget the Bambino -- there's your Beantown Curse.
This, I heard in a lecture once, was a result of the beginnings of industrialization in Germany and the rationalization of the crafts.....a horde of clockmakers and gunsmiths were "made redundant" in Germany, as the British would say now, by the beginnings of mass production of goods, so they emigrated to the New World, bringing with them their tools and their knowledge of how to rifle a gun barrel.
Interesting datum, that 20% of the long guns in use in the colonies in 1775 were already rifled.
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