Rifles in the Revolution, II

[spgordon]

I was at the PA State Archives in Harrisburg yesterday and came across this letter among the Edward Hand papers. Seems like Charles Lukens, at Carlile, was collecting rifles to send to Hand at Fort Pitt:

Carlile May 8, 1777

Dear Sir,

Yesterday the waggon from York town arrived with only 39 Rifles, 29 of which are out of order, but I have ordered the Gunsmith to Repair them as fast as Possible, [and I] hope before you will want them  to have them done.

The arms sent from Lancaster came several of them open, the Boxes Split on the way but luckily few are Damaged. I hope notwithstanding so few came from York, you will have Enough. Mrs. Lukens desires her Compliments to Mrs. Hand.

I am Sir

Your Most Obedient & humble Servant

Charles Lukens

[loco219]

Good stuff there. It seems to have been pretty common for guns to get "lost" in transit on the wagon roads. I have a piece of data somewhere that practically begs the receiver to have some sub-standard guns repaired by "the gunsmith of Lancaster" and it goes on to describe the street address of Jacob Dickert, while not mentioning him by name. Seems the fellow had some New england rifles that would not shoot worth a hoot, and he had shipped them south to have old J. Dickert straighten them out !

[Bob Smalser]

Busy guy, that Hand.  Just so happens I'm in the middle of writing about him.

He was appointed William Thompson's Lieutennant Colonel in Thompson's Rifle Battalion after Lexington-Concord in 1775, and took over when Thompson was appointed Brigadier and sent with reinforcements to Quebec at the end of the year.

Hand's Rifle Regiment performed notably during the Siege of Boston, and in 1776 the New York Campaign, at Trenton and Princeton and the Forage Wars through the winter and spring of 1776-1777.

Hand was promoted Brigadier and arrived at Ft Pitt on Jun 1, 1777 to take command of the western theater, where William Nester's 2005 book on The Frontier War for American Independence has all the details..

... While the frontier riflemen were among the most able of George Washington’s forces in 1775 and 1776 (if not the best behaved),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.  Soon they 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. 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. 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” 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 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; Stroh Thompson’s 20, 22, 28, 42).

Note 13: 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 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).

 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 also list a “George Merchant” as a member of Captain Matthew Smith’s company from the Lancaster area, who may have been the same man.  Merchant was from Pennsylvania, specifically Donegal on the Susquehanna River in Lancaster County.  A head count of archived rosters shows 743 in Thompson’s Battalion with 170 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).

[spgordon]

Hmmm. I wonder where Lukens was writing Hand--since he's writing him in early May and Hand didn't arrive at Fort Pitt until June 1. He seems to have still been in Lancaster, since on May 19 the Moravian minister in Lancaster wrote to Bethlehem that "General Hand will soon go [to Fort Pitt] with an army to occupy the Indian Lands. He promised Br. William Henry, who consulted with him in the name of Br. Matthaeus so that he would commend him to our Brethren and Sisters there, that he wants to help and serve the Brethren there in every way he can." So Lukens, in Carlile, received arms from York and Lancaster that Hand (still in Lancaster) would receive in (or pick up on his way to) Fort Pitt?

There seems to be next to nothing published on Hand. His papers are scattered all over:

         http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/guidedisplay.pl?index=H000153

Scott

[Bob Smalser]

Hand was probably in transit during May.

He was still commanding his rifle regiment during the Forage Wars that lasted until the end of March.  Hand isn't mentioned much because for most of those engagements he attached a rifle companies to various militia units attacking the British.  ie Jan 20 at Van Nest's Mill Gen Philmont Dickenson's 400 militia augmented by 50 Pennsylvania Riflemen took on 600 British and inflicted 36 casualties to Dickenson's 4.

As Hand commanded the only intact frontier rifle regiment (Miles' had been largely wiped out on Long Island), he was Washington's go-to guy for open-order engagements, and was probably the brains behind much of Washington's success there.  That's probably why Washington promoted him and gave him the western command to deal with the loyalists and their native allies there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forage_War

http://www.thewildgeese.com/pages/digest.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1st_Pennsylvania_Regiment

Historian David Hackett Fischer compiled a list that he describes as "incomplete", consisting of 58 actions that occurred between January 4 and March 21, 1777.[23] The documented British and German casualties numbered more than 900; a number of the events do not include any casualty reports. Combined with their losses at Trenton and Princeton, the British lost more men in New Jersey than they did during the campaign for New York City. Fischer does not estimate American casualties, and other historians (e.g. Ketchum and Mitnick) have not compiled any casualty estimates.[24] Fischer notes that relatively few official reports of American (either militia or Continental Army) unit strengths for this time period have survived.[25]

[Bob Smalser]

Here you go...definitely in transit:

On April 1, 1777, Colonel Hand was made a Brigadier General and left the Regiment.  Command of the First Pennsylvania Regiment then fell to Colonel James Chambers, who was to lead the Regiment through the rest of the war.  After wintering with the Continental Army at Morristown, New Jersey, the Regiment started the spring campaign of 1777 in the First Pennsylvania Brigade in General Anthony Wayne’s Division.  By this time, the First Pennsylvania was considered an elite regiment and was given the post of honor on the right of the line.  In the 1777 campaign, the Regiment went in two directions: some north with the rifle corps under Captain Parr to fight with General Gates at the Battle of Saratoga, and the balance, now mostly battalion soldiers armed with muskets they received over the past winter, south to fight with the main army under Washington in Pennsylvania.  This latter portion of the Regiment fought well at Brandywine, covered the American retreat at Paoli, attacked at Germantown, skirmished around Whitemarsh, and then finally went into winter quarters at Valley Forge.

http://1stcontinentalregiment.org/docs/1-history.html

[spgordon]

In transit from the First Pennsylvania Regiment to his command at Fort Pitt, yes. But seems likely he spent much of May in Lancaster?  If Henry consulted with him shortly before May 18, he must have still been in Lancaster at that point. (And Lukens knew where to direct his letter to Hand earlier in May.) I don't know how long it typically took to travel from Lancaster to Fort Pitt.

I'm guessing a careful inventory of the scattered Hand papers would enable one to put together a pretty good chronology of where he was when ...

Scott

[Bob Smalser]

Hand wrote his wife regularly.   That'd probably be the place to look if you have access to a collection of his letters.  And if he wasn't writing his wife, he was probably with her at home.