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While the frontier riflemen were among the most able of George Washington’s forces in 1775 and 1776 (if not the best behaved), they were few in number and the skill levels in marksmanship and field craft they brought with them couldn’t be sustained as their ranks were thinned by casualties and expiring enlistments.(Note 4) Soon many rifle companies would devolve into units with less unique skills armed largely with muskets. By early 1778 even volunteers were hard to find, and colonies instituted a draft for militia service.(Note 12) Despite their lack of formal military training, in their original form the frontier rifle units were formidable. The British complained bitterly about their officers being targeted by snipers. In November, 1775, “20 boats” containing British regulars supported by three artillery batteries and the guns of a frigate raided Lechmere Point during the siege of Boston to seize cattle. Opposed by only six riflemen from Thompson’s Battalion who were there to tend the livestock, the result was 17 British killed to only one American, and no cattle taken. (Note 13) Hessian diaries from the New York battles in 1776 describe officers cutting the rank insignia from their uniforms so as not to become early casualties. Hessians arriving on Staten Island in July were forced to change their bivouac plans when they rudely discovered the Kill Van Kull channel, 350-500 yards wide, was no obstacle to the reach of Colonel Edward Hand’s riflemen. A rifleman named George Merchant, a “tall and handsome Virginian” (Note 5), was captured in Quebec and sent with his weapon back to England to give demonstrations intended to aid recruiting by showing what formidable antagonists British forces were facing in America. Merchant’s demonstrations had exactly the opposite effect. Twenty five riflemen under Colonel Hand stopped a 10,000-man British landing force in its tracks at Throg’s Neck in October, 1776, delaying their offensive a week by forcing them to land elsewhere, the delay allowing Washington to evacuate the bulk of his forces from Manhattan. Hand’s riflemen would do similar on multiple occasions at Trenton and Princeton in December and during the winter battles over forage and rations in northern New Jersey in early 1777. “Nest of American hornets”… “galled by fire”… “officers taken”… and men “dropping fast” became common phrases in British and Hessian correspondence. In spite of the disaster at Long Island in 1776, by the following spring the myth of British invincibility was permanently broken, with frontier riflemen and their distinctly American rifles playing a role far disproportionate to their numbers (Bolton 110; Field 131; Fischer Washington’s 22-25, 109, 237, 246, 294-96; McCullough 38, 51, 229; Smith 67; Stroh Thompson’s 20, 22, 28, 42).
End Notes:
Note 4: The two companies of Thompson’s Rifle Battalion selected for the Quebec Campaign were not chosen because they were uniquely skilled, but because they were behaving badly in camp at Cambridge. These were Captain William Hendricks’s company from Cumberland County and Captain Matthew Smith’s company from Lancaster County. There had been several incidents of fighting between the back country riflemen and the coastal New England regiments composed largely of fishermen, with one later melee reportedly broken up by George Washington personally (Fischer Washington’s 25; McCullough 38, 51; Stroh Thompson’s 22).
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Today most infantrymen are “riflemen”, and we use the term casually, with occasional sources extending it to the writing of history in error. There were never many true riflemen or rifle units serving in the war; most soldiers were armed with smooth-bore muskets, fusils (a lighter, shorter musket), or fowlers (shotguns) shooting ball, buckshot, or a combination called “buck and ball”. In 1775, Pennsylvania raised nine companies of true frontier riflemen; Maryland two, and Virginia two, with strengths ranging from 60 to 90 men each. New England had few rifles in 1775. Then in early 1776, Pennsylvania raised an additional 12 companies of 72 or more riflemen each under Colonel Samuel Miles, and Virginia and Maryland six more under Colonel Hugh Stevenson. There were certainly rifles here and there in the militia regiments where men often owned their own firelocks, with the southern militias and units raised from frontiersmen probably having a higher percentage of rifles. The ratio of 350 rifles to 1500 muskets confiscated from 2000 Scottish settler households after the 1776 Battle of Moore’s Creek, North Carolina was probably representative of the region (Russell 83). Colonel Peter Kachlein’s Northampton County Militia (Kachlein was from Easton) is also an example. Battle histories refer to them as “Kachlein’s Riflemen”, although likely under half were armed with rifles. The “overmountain men” from Appalachian frontier settlements at the 1780 Battle of King’s Mountain are another example; they certainly had a high percentage of riflemen. But the major rifle units available to Washington in 1775-6 were only the units I list – approximately 2300 riflemen in a force larger than 20,000 (PA Archives Series 2 Vol X; Russell 83; Stroh Thompson’s 13-15).
Note 5: Charles Bolton in his 1902 book identifies the “tall and handsome Virginian” rifleman who was captured at Quebec and sent to England to give rifle demonstrations as a man named “Merchant”. Surviving roster fragments of Daniel Morgan’s Virginia Riflemen based on British prisoner lists contain a man named George Merchant, but more intact Pennsylvania Archives and Oscar Stroh in his 1975 book on Thompson’s Battalion based on those archives list “George Merchant” as a member of Captain Matthew Smith’s company from the Lancaster area, who was probably the same man. Merchant was from Pennsylvania, specifically Donegal on the Susquehanna River in Lancaster County. A head count of archived rosters and roster fragments show 743 in Thompson’s Battalion with 189 of those having German names, and 93 in Morgan’s Riflemen with 21 German-Americans (Bolton 110; Roberts 375; Stroh Paxton 39, Thompson’s 20, 42).
Note 12: War weariness wasn’t limited to the Americans. While the colonies were forced to institute a draft for militia in 1778 after almost three years of war, the supply of recruits became so low in Britain that parliament enacted the Army Press Act the same year (Fischer Washington’s 39).
Note 13: The marksmanship of the frontier riflemen was notable. The arguments used against targeting officers were there would be no one to control the soldiers’ blood lust once the fight was won, or to surrender if the fight were lost. These were rationalizations that relied heavily on the beliefs that soldiers came from the dregs of society, that their ranks included a significant percentage of criminals, and that their corporals and sergeants couldn’t think for themselves or control the men on their own – erroneous beliefs that persist to some extent even today. However when applied to the professional British and Hessian units fighting in North America at the time, such arguments were complete nonsense. Just like in professional military units today, the British and Hessian ranks were largely filled by “country lads” of good character and clean records who wanted to be there, led by a professional corps of able non-commissioned officers. Further, the British would learn a lesson from the Americans and adopt both rifles and sniping two decades later at the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars. (Fischer Washington’s 23, 39).
The British raid on Lechmere Point was well-planned and conducted in substantial force to steal cattle, as food supplies were running low in Boston. From the sparse descriptions in Washington’s letter praising the troops and Lieutenant Colonel Edward Hand’s subsequent letter to his wife, the raiding force was probably company-sized, with upwards of a hundred men and impressive support from three batteries of artillery on Bunker, Breed’s and Copp’s Hills, plus the guns of a British frigate 300 yards offshore. Lechmere Point then became an island at high tide, and the raid was timed for then to isolate the six riflemen tending livestock from reinforcements. Alerted by the gunfire, Colonels Thompson and Hand personally led the regiment in a cross-water counterattack, wading up to their armpits crossing the isthmus. The British departed empty-handed before the reinforcements came within range, however, with most of their (heavy) casualties caused by the original six defenders (Stroh Thompson’s 28).
