James Madison weighed barely a hundred pounds and stood 5 feet, 4 inches, which would make him the shortest president in American history. In June 1775, two months into the Revolution, he was still certain the Virginians could beat the redcoats.
His reason was the rifle. Writing to Rhode Island patriot William Bradford, Madison predicted that his colony’s strength would lie chiefly in the riflemen of the upland counties. “You would be astonished at the perfection this art is brought to,” he wrote. Even the “most inexpert hands” could usually hit a man’s head at 100 yards, he said, and the better shots could hit such a mark at 250. His one fear was a scarcity of powder.
That letter opens a piece in Reason’s America 250 issue arguing that the American Long Rifle did more to shape the war than the record usually gives it credit for.
A gun built for the woods
Reason traces the weapon to Pennsylvania, founded in 1681 by the English Quaker William Penn. The colony had no tax-supported church and promised liberty in matters of faith, which drew skilled craftsmen. After George Louis of Hanover became King George I of Great Britain in 1714, German-speaking gunsmiths from Germany and Switzerland settled around Lancaster.
They brought rifling, spiral grooves cut inside the barrel that make a bullet spin and fly truer over distance. Most American guns until then had been smoothbores. The Jaeger rifle the newcomers first built was heavy, fired large, slow bullets and needed its rear sight adjusted for every range.
Colonists wanted something else, a gun for long hunters who spent weeks or months in the wooded interior. Historian Robert Held wrote that “the impossible had taken shape” by about 1735. The result went by the name Pennsylvania rifle or Kentucky rifle. Its barrel was longer than the Jaeger’s, and its caliber was usually .40 to .46, against .60 or .75 for European rifles. The size mattered: a pound of lead makes 46 bullets for a .45 caliber but only 16 for a .70.
Where rifles decided the war
Reason concedes that muskets, not rifles, were the common weapon. Muskets were cheaper, quicker to reload and sturdy enough for the bayonet fighting that ended most battles. The Continental Army, created on June 14, 1775, did add 10 companies of “expert riflemen”, six from Pennsylvania and two each from Maryland and Virginia, and they startled New Englanders by hitting British officers and sentries at more than 200 yards.
The magazine locates the decisive shot at the Second Battle of Saratoga on October 7, 1777. An American rifleman killed Brig. Gen. Simon Fraser, who was rallying British troops from a gray horse, from at least 300 yards. The British lost momentum, and ten days later Lt. Gen. John Burgoyne’s entire army surrendered, a first in history. When France learned of Saratoga, it opened talks with Benjamin Franklin that produced the Franco-American alliance.
Three years to the day later, on October 7, 1780, patriot militia with long rifles crushed a Loyalist force at Kings Mountain. Loyalist muskets could not reach the backwoodsmen shooting from 200 yards or more. In 1781, Brig. Gen. Daniel Morgan put 150 riflemen on an exposed line at Cowpens, South Carolina, and they picked off British officers from beyond musket range, the victory that cleared the way to Yorktown.
