...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.
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.
The Minute Men by John R. Galvin, Brassey’s 1989 p.220-221.
Thanks for thse references.
BTW, I am the direct descendent of a Lexington Minuteman, John Gibson, who was there with his four sons. We tend toward red-heads, so we remain convinced that it was one of our hot-headed ancestors who "fired the shot heard round the world."