Stephenson M. Patriot Battles. How the War of Independence Was Fought

the things they carried 149

Two pair of good shoes are indispensably necessary for a Soldier,

as he must otherwise be obliged (if depending on one pair) after

a wet day’s march, to give them a hasty drying by the fire which

not only cracks the leather, but is the certain method of shrinking

them in such a manner, as to give the greatest pain and trouble to

the wearer: the best shoes will always be found the cheapest [in

the long run], and it will be necessary to strengthen the heels, with

some small nails: the toes should be round and flat: the straps full

large enough to fill the buckle.

The Hide Department was created by Congress to be responsible for

procuring leather for the soldiers’ shoes. It was both corrupt and inept.

Washington knew how important shoes were to the fighting potential

of his army, and bitterly complained to the Board of Trade against

the department’s cheating “by putting in small scraps and parings of

Leather and giving the Shoes the appearance of strength and substance,

while the Soals were worth nothing and would not last more than a day

or two’s march.”

As America struggled to clothe its soldiers, the diversity of uniforms at

times made identification difficult. In the early phase of the war the choice

of uniform colors was left to the discretion of regimental commanders,

not always with satisfactory results. The colonel of one cavalry regiment

chose an almost exact replica of his British counterpart, the Queen’s

Dragoons, and Washington literally had to cover up the potential

confusion by having the Americans hide their scarlet uniforms under

“frocks” (hunting smocks).

The distinctiveness of uniform could bring

with it its own liabilities. British officers’ marks of distinction, particularly

epaulettes, invited unwelcome attention from patriot marksmen. The

American captain John Chester, on his way to the battle of Bunker’s Hill,

also knew the perils of uniform as identification. On 22 July he wrote to

a friend, “We soon marched, with our frocks and trowsers on over our

clothes (for our company is in uniform wholly blue, turned up with red),

for we were loath to expose ourselves by our dress.”

At the beginning of the war, when regular uniforms for patriot

troops were in particularly short supply, occasionally the only means

patriot battles 150

of identification was a simple piece of paper or cockade attached to the

hat. Just before Montgomery and Arnold’s attack on Quebec in 1775

the surgeon Isaac Senter recorded, “To discriminate our troops from

the enemy in action, they were ordered each officer and soldier to make

fast a piece of white paper across their caps from the front to the acmé of

them.”

Misidentification could be disastrous. The Loyalist lieutenant

colonel John Simcoe described how he bagged a patriot militia unit

who “were deceived by the dress of the Rangers [Queen’s Rangers] and

came to Lt. Col. Simcoe, who immediately reprimanded them for not

coming sooner, held conversation with them and sent them prisoners

to General Arnold.”

The British lieutenant William Digby recorded

a close call at Freeman’s Farm in 1777: “On its turning dusk we were

near firing on a body of our Germans, mistaking their dark clothing

for that of the enemy.”

Confusion over uniform could be lethal, as

the Loyalist cavalry commander Colonel John Pyle discovered on 18

February 1781 when his detachment came upon a cavalry unit on the

same road. It was, in fact, a patriot force led by Henry “Light Horse”

Lee. Pyle mistook Lee for the British cavalry leader Banastre Tarleton,

since both Lee and Tarleton’s men wore short green coats. Playing

the part, Lee invited Pyle to draw up his men by the side of the road

so that he could pass. Pyle complied, and when the patriot force was

level with the misguided Loyalists, it wheeled on them, slashing and

shooting them from their saddles: “There was no fight; it was simply a

massacre.”

The anecdote is a striking illustration of mistaken identity,

but it may be simply Loyalist propaganda.

Uniforms brought other much more common but equally fatal

perils. They were unhealthy in a number of ways. Given the general

absence of cleaning facilities, many communicable diseases were spread

by infected clothing. Scabies—“the itch” to soldiers of the time—headed

the list. The scabies mites caused vesicles on the skin which, when

scratched, became infected with staphylococcus. Infection reached

epidemic proportions in the patriot army at Valley Forge. Rejecting the

“official” treatment of sulfur in hog’s lard, some soldiers, half demented

by the itch, tried their own remedies. One covered his body in mercury

ointment and died of poisoning. Another drank one and a half pints

the things they carried 151

of rum and also died.

Stripping the dead was common, and a dead

officer’s kit was usually auctioned off, all of which only served to spread

disease.

The estimable Dr. Benjamin Rush had forthright views on

uniforms and health. He did not like linen, and he did not approve of

Washington’s enthusiasm for the linen hunting shirt.

It is a well-known fact that the perspiration of the body, by

attaching itself to linen and afterwards by mixing with rain, is

disposed to forming miasmata which produces fevers. Upon

this account I could wish the rifle shirt was banished from our

army. Besides accumulating putrid miasmata, it conceals filth

and prevents a due regard being paid to cleanliness. The Roman

soldiers wore flannel shirts next to their skins.

The British uniform looked the part but was hardly functional.

Heavy cloth, coarse canvas, cumbersome leather shoulder and waist

belts, tight “rolers” at the throat, restrictive spatterdashes, and leggings

were hell to fight in during hot weather. For example, fifty-nine British

and German soldiers died of heatstroke at the battle of Monmouth on 28

June 1778. On a march from Bedford to Flushing in August of the same

year, nine soldiers died and sixty-three more were felled by sunstroke.

Medical opinion at the time only aggravated the soldiers’ suffering:

“They were told never to expose their chest to the air, because this

would result in pulmonic and bowel disease. A soldier was prohibited

from drinking water when he perspired. If he did and felt bad, he was

given whiskey.”

The whole issue of the weight of the British soldier’s kit is, for some,

another illustration of the crassness of British military management.

How could British officers have loaded their men like mules, while light-

footed Americans cut them to shreds? Christopher Ward’s influential

The War of the Revolution (1952) described redcoats going into battle at

Bunker’s Hill carrying “an estimated weight of a hundred pounds for

each man.” Twenty years after Ward’s book, another popular history

has the same troops going up Bunker’s Hill with “a load reckoned at

patriot battles 152

120 pounds.”

Not to be outdone, a more recent history makes the

absurd claim that the redcoats had to hump “about the same weight as

if they carried a good sized deer [that would be 200–300 pounds!] on

their backs.”

British commanders, like their American counterparts,

were certainly capable of “absurdities” (as military hierarchies before

and since have been), but a moment’s consideration should give pause.

First, contemporary accounts give a fairly clear indication of the weight

of a soldier’s gear. Captain Alexander Baillie of the 60th Foot, who was

stationed in America in 1762, carefully weighed the equipment of one

of the grenadiers of his regiment.

Lbs Qtrs

Regimental coat 5 2

Waist coat 2 1

Pair of breeches 1 2

Hat with cockade 1 0

Shirt 1 0

Knee buckles 0 3

Firelock with sling 11 0

Shoe buckles, stockings, garters 1 2

Waist belt and buckle 0 2

Hangar, sword knot, scabbard 2 3

Bayonet and scabbard 2 1

Cartridge pouch and belt 3 0

24 cartridges 2 0

Oil bottle 0 1

2 flints and steel 0 1

Haversack and strap 0 3

6 days’ provisions 10 1

Full canteen 3 1

Total 47 26

[53

½ lbs]

Second, British soldiers of the day (or American, for that matter) could

hardly have physically managed 100–125 pounds even in noncombat

conditions, and certainly not in battle. A modern, superbly fit, special

the things they carried 153

forces soldier can routinely hump 125 pounds carried in a scientifically

designed pack. The eighteenth-century soldier, by contrast, was usually

in relatively poor physical condition and had only a knapsack (of

goatskin with the hair left on, or of painted canvas) in which to carry

his gear. It simply did not have the capacity to carry the enormous loads

some historians have suggested.

Even if he dropped his knapsack prior to battle (which was the

usual drill), there was still a good deal of equipment about his person:

“Cross-belts compressed the chest and, if the knapsack-straps were

connected by a breast-strap, could seriously impair breathing. Unless

the cross-belts were connected at the back the cartridge-box and bayonet

could become entangled and the soldier thrown off-balance.”

The Big Guns

ARTILLERY

rtillery had an almost parasitic relationship with the musket.

Because muskets were individually so inefficient, they had to

be massed in compensation, and it was this density of men that

gave eighteenth-century artillery its raison d’être. Lacking accuracy

itself, it was a beast of omnivorous and indiscriminate appetite, guzzling,

like some Cyclops, the herds of men conveniently marching in dense

formation toward its greedy muzzle.

The guns of the War of Independence were, like muskets, all

smoothbore and, like muskets, lacked efficient aiming mechanisms.

Although gunners thought of themselves as a cut above other branches

of the army because their business carried with it the aura of “science,”

it was as much a craft, even an art. The gunner’s “eye” and “feel” for

his weapon mattered more than the complicated mathematical tables of

barrel elevation, shot weights, and powder charges. The field gunner

had recourse to three ammunition types. The first and most popular

was simple round or solid shot: iron balls of different weights. Artillery

firing round shot was graded by the weight of the ball rather than the

caliber or diameter of the muzzle. The second was canister or case shot:

tin cans filled with musket balls or any old pieces of iron junk. (The

Prussian captain Johann Heinrichs described American case shot loaded

the big guns 155

with bits of “old burst shells, broken shovels, pickaxes, hatchets, flat-

irons, pistol barrels, broken locks etc etc.”)

The case disintegrated as

it emerged from the muzzle to spread its projectiles in a spray pattern,

shotgun fashion. The third was spherical shell: hollow cast-iron globes

filled with gunpowder and fitted with a fuse which, if cleverly adjusted,

could be configured to explode just over the heads of advancing infantry.

(In 1804, it would evolve into the famous shrapnel shell.)

Solid shot accounted for about 70 percent of the ammunition

carried by the artillery and was used for medium-range fire. Ranges and

lethality varied according to the size of ball and powder charge. William

Müller, an officer in the King’s German Legion, made extensive tests

of artillery accuracy which he published in The Elements of the Science

of War (1811). Müller’s tests, although from a slightly later date than

the War of Independence, would have been applicable to the earlier

time frame. As with all such tests, there is some dislocation from the

realities of the battlefield, but they are nevertheless useful as a range

finder of lethality. For example, the 6-pounder (the workhorse of field

artillery) firing at a cloth target six feet high by thirty feet wide (roughly

representing a company of infantry) scored 100 percent hits at 520 yards

and 31 percent hits at 950 yards. At 1,200 yards, however, it scored only

17 percent hits. Müller’s test does not quite tell the whole story because

gunners firing a round shot tried to get two or even more bites at the

cherry through ricochet: the effect of a cannonball bouncing before

coming to rest. A 6-pounder might have a range of about 1,200 yards,

but the ball had several phases of lethality over that distance. At zero

degrees elevation (parallel with the ground) the first bounce (“graze”)

would have been at about 400 yards; it would then travel for another

400 yards at shoulder height before making its second graze, and then

on for a further 100 yards at about three feet from the ground before

rolling to a halt. The knack was to pitch the ball just in front of the

enemy’s first rank and have it skip and rise through the subsequent

ranks. If the ground was hard and stony, each graze would kick up

splinters, which, in their turn, became secondary projectiles. Even in its

last phase, a rolling ball could be deceptively harmful. There are many

instances of men being badly wounded, even killed, by trying to “catch”

patriot battles 156

what seemed to be spent cannonballs, innocently rolling toward them.

John Trumbull was with the American army besieging Boston when

rewards were given for salvaged British cannonballs, but

it produced also a very unfortunate result; for when the soldiers

saw a ball, after having struck and rebounded from the ground

several times (en ricochet), roll sluggishly along, they would run

and place a foot before it, to stop it, not aware that a heavy ball

long retains sufficient impetus to overcome such an obstacle. The

consequence was that several brave lads lost their feet, which were

crushed by the weight of the rolling shot.

Private Edward Elley of Virginia described another incident, at the

siege of Yorktown: “The works of the battery were thrown up by the

militia soldiers, and whilst they were cutting brush a cannonball came

bounding along on the ground, and a youngster put his heel against it

and was thrown into lockjaw and expired in a short time.”

The most destructive potential for solid shot was when it was fired

“in enfilade”: into the side of a rank of men. Müller estimated that one

ball, fired in enfilade at effective range, would kill three men and wound

four or five, but greater numbers were often recorded. The weight of the

ball was an important factor in determining lethality because although

the muzzle velocity of most field guns was about equal at approximately

900 feet per second, the heavier the ball, the more velocity it retained

over longer distances. For example, at a 1,000-yard range, an eighteen-

pound ball traveled at 840 feet per second, compared with 450 feet per

second for a six-pound ball.

A six- or nine-pound ball of iron traveling at anything up to 900

feet per second could do terrible damage to human flesh. Peter Brown,

a patriot soldier crossing the Neck onto Charlestown Peninsula during

the battle of Bunker’s Hill, described the effect of British gunships firing

in enfilade: “One cannon [ball] cut off 3 men in two [cut them in half] on

the neck of land.” James Duncan of the Pennsylvania Line at Yorktown

recorded that on 3 October 1781 “four men of [his] regiment . . . were

unfortunately killed . . . by one ball.”

Even small-caliber guns like the

the big guns 157

three-pound ball from a “grasshopper” (a mobile gun sometimes referred

to as a “galloper”) could pack a punch. For example, at Monmouth in

June 1778 Joseph Plumb Martin described how the British “occupied

a much higher piece of ground than we did and had a small piece of

artillery, which the soldiers called a ‘grasshopper.’ We had no artillery

with us. The first shot they gave us from this piece cut off the thigh

bone of a captain, just above the knee, and the whole heel of a private

in the rear of him.”

Even near misses could be fatal. A large ball created potentially

devastating shock waves, with sometimes macabre results, as Joseph

Martin witnessed at Yorktown.

I was sitting on the side of the trench, when some of the New York

troops coming in, one of the sergeants stepped up to the breastwork

to look about him . . . at that instant a shot from the enemy (which

doubtless was aimed at him in particular, as none others were in

sight of them) passed just by his face without touching him at all;

he fell dead into the trench; I put my hand on his forehead and

found his skull was shattered all to pieces, and the blood flowing

from his nose and mouth, but not a particle of skin was broken.

A gun crew loading with ball could get off two or three rounds

a minute; the heavier the ball, the slower the process (firing canister

speeded up the rate). A six- or nine-pound gun would normally have

a specialist crew of a minimum of five men (often supplemented by

infantrymen to help move the gun and fetch ammunition). One man

stood to the right of the muzzle with a combination rammer-sponger;

the man to the left of the muzzle was the ammunition loader; a man to

the left of the vent hole at the rear of the barrel carried a slow-burning

match on a forked rod (“linstock”); opposite him stood the “ventsman.”

At the rear stood the gun chief, who aimed the piece and gave the order

to fire.

The loading sequence for the first discharge started with the crew

chief directing aim (“laying” the gun) and moving it on the horizontal

plane by having it manhandled with poles (“handspikes”). The

patriot battles 158

elevation of the barrel was controlled by a screw mechanism at the rear

of the barrel (or perhaps on older pieces by inserting a wooden wedge,

the “quoin”). The loader now slid a cartridge consisting of a flannel

or paper bag of powder and ball into the muzzle, and the rammer

pushed it down the length of the barrel. (On larger pieces, the powder

charge and ball were more often separate.) If the barrel was depressed

below the horizontal, a wad (of straw, hay, a coil of rope, even turf) was

rammed down to prevent the ball from rolling out. The ventsman now

inserted a “pricker” into the vent to puncture the powder bag. He then

inserted a quill or paper tube filled with “quick match” (cotton strands

soaked in saltpeter and alcohol). When the order to fire came and the

men had stood clear, the firer extended his linstock across to the vent

(being careful to keep clear of the wheel when it recoiled) and lit the

quick match.

Before the next shot could be loaded, the gun had to be relaid

because the recoil would have thrown it back several feet. (Not until

1897 would the recoil problem be solved by the hydraulic “antirecoil”

mechanism of the famous French 75.) The rammer reversed his pole

and used the end covered in sheepskin and soaked in water to swab out

the barrel. When the loader inserted the next powder bag, the ventsman

covered the vent with his thumb (protected by a leather “thumb stall”)

to prevent any accidental discharge. If a smoldering piece of the

powder bag or wadding remained, the rammer would use a pole with a

corkscrewlike end (the “wormer”) to extricate so it too wouldn’t create

an accidental discharge. But, of course, in the heat of battle accidents

did happen. At the siege of Charleston in May 1780 Lieutenant John

Peebles of the Royal Highland Regiment (42nd Foot) recorded, “An

artillery man lost an arm and an assistant killed by one of our own guns

hanging fire and going off when they put in the spunge.”

Canister or case shot (sometimes referred to as grapeshot, which

was made up of larger three-ounce balls and was primarily a naval

warfare munition) was reserved for relatively close-up work. It made,

said the American artillery sergeant White at the battle of Princeton,

“a terrible squeaking noise” as it flew. Characteristically, each canister

contained 85 balls. Tests carried out in 1810 indicated that 55 of those

Stephenson M. Patriot Battles. How the War of Independence Was Fought

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