Despite its superior range and accuracy, the rifle was to undergo almost a hundred years of development before it would supplant the musket as the standard infantry weapon. At first, each individual piece was handmade and each required a custom-made bullet mold. The standard bayonet would fit none of them. The rifle was effective only in the hands of an expert trained in its use. The rate of fire was only about one-third that of the musket; and therefore, without bayonet, the rifle could hardly be used by troops in the line. For the guerrilla tactics of the frontier, however, where men did not fight in line but from behind trees, bushes, and rocks, it was clearly a superior weapon. Like the tactics of the American forest, it would have its place in any future war fought in America.
This flintlock rifle, originally intended for hunting, dates from 1800–1820. One of the few truly American art forms of early America, the rifle inspired the design of U.S. military rifles that emerged from U.S. armories beginning in 1803.
Rogers’ Rangers
In 1755 Robert Rogers (1731–1795) recruited a company of woodsmen near his home in New Hampshire and was ordered by the British “to range the woods” and harass the French along the frontier. Rogers’ Rangers, as his unit came to be known, was one of several ranger companies the British formed as a counter to the Indian allies of the French. Rogers and his men infiltrated into French-held areas of the northern colonies and Canada, using stealth and surprise to win several important engagements. After the French and Indian War, Rogers wrote down twenty-eight “Ranging Rules” learned during his encounters with an unconventional enemy; they are enshrined to this day in U.S. Army Ranger training.
George Washington in the French and Indian War
George Washington (1732–1799), as a 22-year-old lieutenant colonel in the Virginia militia, was a principal player at the opening of the French and Indian War. In 1754 he led a small force of Virginians to try to compel the French to relinquish control of Fort Duquesne, which was strategically placed to control the Ohio Valley. After a skirmish with a French reconnaissance party, he fell back to a hastily constructed stockade, Fort Necessity, where he resisted a larger French force before finally surrendering. A year later he served under Braddock and ultimately took part in Brig. Gen. John Forbes’ successful campaign to capture what is now Pittsburgh.
The Colonial Heritage
In the Indian Wars and the colonial wars with France, Americans gained considerable military experience, albeit much of it in guerrilla warfare that did not require the same degree of organized effort and professional competence as the European style. The British had, after all, directed the major effort against the French in Canada. Many colonials later to become famous in the Revolution had served their military apprenticeship as officers of middle rank in the French and Indian War: George Washington, Israel Putnam, Philip Schuyler, and John Stark, for instance, in provincial forces and Charles Lee, Horatio Gates, and Richard Montgomery in the British Army.
Certain traditions had been established that were to influence American military policy and practice right down to the two great world wars of the twentieth century. One of these was primary reliance on the militia for defense and on volunteer forces for special emergencies and expeditions. Another was that relatively permanent volunteer units should be formed within the militia. The fear of a standing army of professionals, an English heritage, had become an even stronger article of faith in America. The colonial experience also established a strong tradition of separatism among the colonies themselves, for each had for many years run its own military establishment. Within each colony, too, the civilian authority represented in the popular assembly had always kept a strict rein on the military, another tradition that was to have marked effect on American military development.
Some characteristics of the American soldier that were to be fairly constant throughout all future wars had also made their appearance. The American soldier was inclined to be highly individualistic and to resent discipline and the inevitable restrictions of military life; he sought to know why he should do things before he would put his heart into doing them. If in the end he accepted discipline and order as a stern necessity, he did so with the idea of winning victory as quickly as possible so he could return to his normal civilian pursuits.
These traditions and characteristics were the product of a society developing along democratic lines. The military strengths and weaknesses they engendered were to be amply demonstrated when the American soldier took up arms against his erstwhile comrade, the British regular, in the American Revolution.
3 The American Revolution, First Phase
The American Revolution came about fundamentally because by 1763 the English-speaking communities on the far side of the Atlantic had matured to the extent that their interests and goals were distinct from those of the ruling classes in the mother country. British statesmen failed to understand or adjust to the situation. Ironically enough, British victory in the Seven Years’ War set the stage for the revolt, for it freed the colonists from the need for British protection against a French threat on their frontiers and gave free play to the forces working for separation.
In 1763 the British government, reasonably from its own point of view, moved to tighten the system of imperial control and to force the colonists to contribute to imperial defense. As part of an effort to make the costs of empire be borne by all British subjects, his majesty’s government sought to create an “American Establishment,” a force of 10,000 British regular soldiers in North America. The cost of this military force would be paid for by taxes the British Parliament levied on Americans. This imperial defense plan touched off the long controversy about Parliament’s right to tax that started with the Stamp and Sugar Acts and led to a final provocative deed in December 1773 at the “Boston Tea Party.” This party resulted in the destruction of a cargo of East India Company tea by a patriot mob in a protest against “taxation without representation.”
The ten-year controversy over taxation escalated to violence in large measure because several successive British ministries failed to understand the differences that had grown between the American colonies and the metropolitan power. Although possessing a professional army and navy, the British government nevertheless failed to act decisively enough to enforce British regulations or work toward the more viable form of imperial union that the colonial leaders, at least until 1776, insisted they sought.
In response to the Boston Tea Party, the King and his ministers blindly pushed through Parliament a series of measures collectively known in America as the Intolerable Acts: closing the port of Boston, suspending civilian government in Massachusetts, and massing troops in Boston under the military rule of Maj. Gen. Sir Thomas Gage. Outraged by the heavy-handed response to one colony, the other American political leaders called for a continental congress, in effect an American parliament, to coordinate a political drive to defend what the colonists deemed to be their rights and interests as Englishmen.
Since