British troops advance to within musket range at Bunker Hill, as depicted by 19th Century American artist Howard Pyle.
The reasons why, in combating the American rebels, the
British put so much emphasis on what were (by European standards) seemingly
outdated shock tactics are explored in detail in the next chapter. Here it is
necessary to examine how the redcoats delivered their fire in combat and
whether or not it was generally effective.
Strikingly, there is little evidence that British infantry
in action in America often employed the regulation firings, whereby volleys
were delivered in strict succession by the battalion’s fire divisions (whether
by the four grand divisions, the eight subdivisions, or the sixteen platoons)
in prearranged sequences. This is hardly surprising for three reasons. First
(as discussed in the next chapter), throughout the war the British preferred to
spurn the firefight wherever possible in favor of putting the rebels quickly to
flight at the point of the bayonet. Second (as noted in the last chapter), a
combination of broken ground and the battalion’s extended frontage often
prevented field officers from exerting close control over the whole in action,
compelling captains to exercise an unconventional degree of tactical autonomy
in handling their companies. It was only natural that this tactical
decentralization extended to musketry. Third, because, for most of the war, the
rebels lacked good cavalry and most of their infantry were unlikely to adopt
the tactical offensive, the British did not need to ensure that a fraction of
the battalion was always loaded to repel any sudden, determined enemy advance.
These three factors ensured that British battalions on the attack seem commonly
to have thrown in a single “general volley” (or “battalion volley”) immediately
prior to the bayonet charge.
When sustained exchanges of musketry did occur, as at
Cowpens or Green Springs, it seems likely that each company loaded and fired
independently of the others under the command of its captain or senior
subaltern. Evidence of this can be found in George Harris’s later account of
the action at the Vigie on St. Lucia, where (as major in the 5th Regiment) he
commanded the single grenadier battalion: “on my ordering the 35th [Regiment’s
grenadier] company, commanded by Captain [Hugh] Massey (from a reserve of three
companies which I kept under cover of a small eminence) to relieve the 49th
[Regiment’s grenadier] company, he was in an instant at his post, and as
quickly ordered the company to make ready, and had given them the word
‘Present!’ when I called out, ‘Captain Massey, my orders were not to fire;
recover!’ This was done without a shot, and themselves under a heavy fire.” In
another possible example, at the battle of Camden, a British officer was
“ungenerous enough to direct the fire of his platoon” at the horse of Colonel
Otho Williams. The rebel adjutant escaped injury from the British volley only
because, as Williams recounted, “I was lucky enough to see and hear him at the
instant he gave the word and pointed with his sword.”53 More conclusively, in August
1780 Lieutenant Colonel Henry Hope directed the 1st Battalion of Grenadiers
that, when the “Preparative” was beaten in action, the corps was “to begin
firing by companies, which is to go on as fast as each is loaded till the first
part of the General, when not a shot more is ever to be fired.”
Although British musketry was supposed to have been quite
effective by European standards, contemporary eyewitnesses and modern
historians have tended to give the impression that the redcoats were generally
no match for the American rebels in the firefight. It is of course impossible
to qualify this phenomenon with any degree of precision since, for any given
exchange of fire, we cannot precisely document the number of troops engaged on
either side, the total rounds discharged, or even the casualties they
inflicted. Yet one particularly striking example may serve to indicate how the
premise may have had some basis in reality. At Guilford Courthouse Cornwallis’s
initial attack pitted about 1,100 British and German regulars against roughly
1,600 smoothbore-and rifle-armed militia and light troops, mostly posted behind
a rail fence that separated the ploughed farmland to their front from the woods
to their rear. Once the British line had advanced to within about 150 yards of
the enemy, the rebels opened a general fire that appears to have inflicted
numerous casualties. For example, Lieutenant Thomas Saumarez (with the 23rd
Regiment, on the left wing) noted that the rebel shooting was “most galling and
destructive,” while Dugald Stuart (an officer with the 2nd Battalion of the
71st Regiment, on the right) later rued: “In the advance we received a very
heavy fire, from the [North Carolina Scotch-] Irish line of the American army,
composed of their marksmen lying on the ground behind a rail fence. One half of
the Highlanders dropped on that spot, [and] there ought to be a pretty large
tumulus where our men were buried.”
One participant on the rebel left later recalled that “after
they [i.e., the rebels] delivered their first fire (which was a deliberate one)
with their rifles, the part of the British line at which they aimed looked like
the scattering stalks in a wheat field when the harvest man has passed over it
with his cradle.” By contrast, the volley that the British battalions delivered
at much closer range, immediately prior to their charge, was almost wholly
ineffective (rebel returns having indicated that the North Carolina militia
sustained only eleven killed and wounded in the course of the whole action). Indeed,
Henry Lee later reported of the North Carolina militia (which comprised almost
two-thirds of the first rebel line and fled when the British rushed forward)
that “not a man of the corps had been killed, or even wounded.”
The apparent disparity in the effectiveness of the British
and rebel fire in this incident does not appear to have been wholly
unrepresentative. To explain this, one is tempted to point to the popularly
accepted view that, unlike in Europe, most males in America had access to firearms,
which they were very proficient in handling. Although some British participants
in the war subscribed to this view,58 it is likely to have been the case only
in the wilder backwoods and on the frontier. Moreover, because the Continental
Army and the state regular regiments filled their ranks largely with landless
laborers (many of them recent immigrants), it follows that a good proportion of
rebel enlisted men were hardly dissimilar to their British and German
counterparts.
If most rebel regulars and militia were not inherently
skilled in handling firearms, then it is necessary to consider the common
assumption that, unlike European regulars (who supposedly simply pointed their
muskets in the general direction of the enemy and blazed away on command), the
Americans tended to deliver independent, well-aimed fire in combat. This may
well have been true of the lively skirmishing that characterized the petite
guerre, in which individuals typically moved, sought cover, and fired largely
at their own initiative. Moreover, rebel militia used rifles more often than is
sometimes realized, particularly in the South (as in the case of the North
Carolina militia at Guilford Courthouse). For decades historians have been
playing down the combat effectiveness of riflemen in America by pointing to
their inability either to match the rate of fire of smoothbore-armed troops or
to perform bayonet charges. While both of these points are valid, riflemen were
undeniably able to do horrifying execution when employed as auxiliaries to
smoothbore-armed troops. If thrown forward as a screen, riflemen were able to
get off one or two destructive fires at the advancing enemy before retiring to
the cover of their musket-armed compatriots in the main line — as occurred at
Cowpens and Guilford Courthouse. In addition, riflemen were able to support
their fellow infantry during a static firefight by picking off enemy officers,
as occurred at Freeman’s Farm.
But if smoothbore-armed troops were likely to deliver
independent, aimed fire when engaged in the kind of skirmishing that
characterized the petite guerre, this was not the case in stand-up engagements
in the open field, for which rebel regulars and militia alike were trained to
employ more or less conventional volleying systems. Indeed, for much of the
war, the rebels used the 1764 Regulations or its British or colonial variants
as their standard drill.63 Because the experience of three years of war showed
that the British-style firings were difficult for the relatively inexperienced
rebel forces to master, the drill manual that Major General Steuben compiled
for them in 1778 prescribed a simpler variant, whereby the different battalions
within the line of battle could deliver general volleys in sequence.
The counterpart to the questionable notion that rebel troops
generally delivered independent and thus accurate fire in action in America is
the widespread assumption that European volleying techniques were ineffective
because they were calculated primarily to terrify rather than to kill and maim.
Admittedly, by the time of the American War, this kind of “quick-fire” mania
appears to have been the hallmark of the Prussian infantry, who reputably were
able to loose an astonishing six rounds per minute and whose king wrote in 1768
that “a force of infantry that loads speedily will always get the better of a
force which loads more slowly.” Interestingly, the subject of speed also
figured in contemporary British directives on musketry training. For example,
the 1764 Regulations laid down that, during the performance of the “platoon
exercise,” the “motions of handling cartridge, to shutting the pans,” and “the
loading motions” (that is, the fourth to sixth and the eighth to twelfth of the
fifteen motions) were “to be done as quick as possible.” Similarly, in 1774
Gage reminded the British regiments in Boston that in plying the firelock the
soldier “cannot be too quick” in performing the motions, “more particularly so
in the priming and loading,” and that “there should be no superfluous motions
in the platoon exercise, but [it is instead] to be performed with the greatest
quickness possible.” Strikingly, after the costly Concord expedition, one flank
company officer complained that the inexperienced redcoats had “been taught
that everything was to be effected by a quick firing” but that the determined
harassment they experienced during the return march to Boston had disabused
them of the notion that the rebels “would be sufficiently intimidated by a
brisk fire.”
Nevertheless, it would be wrong to argue that the Prussian
quick-fire mania had permeated the British Army by the time of the American
War. Significantly, when in 1781 military writer John Williamson decried the
“very quick” time adopted for “the performance of the manual,” he reasoned that
“it does not appear that a battalion can fire oftener in the same space of time
since the quick method has taken place, than before it.” Another military
writer, Lieutenant Colonel William Dalrymple, made the same point in 1782.
While he asserted that all motions with the firelock were “to be executed with
the utmost celerity,” he nevertheless argued that British soldiers should be
able to fire three times a minute (in other words, half the best Prussian
quick-fire rate) and scarcely ever miss at ranges between fifty and two hundred
yards. As Dalrymple’s comment suggests, if the British emphasis on rapid
priming and loading did not markedly increase the battalion’s rate of fire, it
certainly was not intended to diminish the accuracy of that fire. Indeed, the
leading authority on the performance of British long arms in this period has
argued that the eighteenth-century British fire tactics remained consistently
and firmly wedded to making the infantryman’s musketry as deadly as possible. The
dominant perspective probably remained that expressed by Wolfe when in December
1755 he reminded the 20th Regiment that “[t]here is no necessity for firing
very fast; a cool and well-leveled fire, with the pieces carefully loaded, is
much more destructive and formidable than the quickest fire in confusion.” It
is instructive to note that Wolfe himself played a significant role in the
introduction of the Prussian “alternate fire” volleying system into the British
Army.
If the Prussian quick-fire method did not quite permeate
into British training in the years before the American War, one might argue
instead that volleying was in itself inherently prejudicial to accurate fire.
There remains some disagreement on this question. Historians have commonly asserted
that, to have had any chance of hitting his target, a man had to choose his
moment to pull the trigger. Dr. Robert Jackson, who served in the American War
as assistant surgeon to the 71st Regiment, subscribed to this view: “The
firelock is an instrument of missile force. It is obvious that the . . . missile ought to be directed by aim,
otherwise it will strike only by accident. It is evident that a person cannot
take aim with any correctness unless he be free, independent, and clear of all
encumbrances; and for this reason, there can be little dependence on the effect
of fire that is given by platoons or volleys, and by word of command. Such
explosions may intimidate by their noise; it is mere chance if they destroy by
their impression.”
Although Jackson’s argument sounds persuasive, not all
contemporaries shared his opinion that volleying was incompatible with
accurate, aimed fire. In fact the 1764 Regulations explicitly directed that,
when given the order to present, the soldier should “raise up the butt so high
upon the right shoulder, that you may not be obliged to stoop so much with the
head (the right cheek [is] to be close to the butt, and the left eye shut), and
look along the barrel with the right eye from the breech pin to the muzzle.”
Military writers likewise commonly advocated that the men should aim carefully
before firing. For example, Major General the Earl of Cavan recommended that
officers “have at the breech [of the firelock] a small sight-channel made, for
the advantage and convenience of occasionally taking better aim.” Similarly, in
the directions for the training of newly arrived drafts and recruits issued
three days before the battle of Bunker Hill, Lieutenant General Gage directed
that “[p]roper marksmen [are] to instruct them in taking aim, and the position
in which they ought to stand in firing, and to do this man by man before they
are suffered to fire together.”
Furthermore, if volleying was incompatible with accurate,
aimed fire, then it is difficult to understand why the army invested such
effort in practicing the men in shooting. As John Houlding has shown, although
before 1786 regiments did not receive sufficient quantities of lead in
peacetime to fire at marks, in wartime troops spent a good deal of time shooting
ball when they were not in the field. In America, shooting at marks was a
common element of the feverish training that preceded the opening of each
campaign season; indeed, it occurred almost on a daily basis during the tense
months before the outbreak of hostilities in 1775. Here two examples of the
ingenuity and effort invested in this activity will suffice. At Boston in
January 1775, Lieutenant Frederick Mackenzie of the 23rd Regiment wrote:
The regiments are frequently practiced at firing with ball
at marks. Six rounds per man at each time is usually allotted for this
practice. As our regiment is quartered on a wharf which projects into part of
the harbor, and there is a very considerable range without any obstruction, we
have fixed figures of men as large as life, made of thin boards, on small
stages, which are anchored at a proper distance from the end of the wharf, at
which the men fire. Objects afloat, which move up and down with the tide, are
frequently pointed out for them to fire at, and premiums are sometimes given
for the best shots, by which means some of our men have become excellent
marksmen.
