American Gun

1 THE AMERICAN LONG RIFLE

On the morning of October 7, 1777, a young rebel named Timothy Murphy spat on his hands and began climbing up a tree in a field not far from Saratoga, New York. His progress was slowed by the weapon he gripped in his hand, but the gun was entirely his reason for getting up in that tree in the first place. Murphy was a Continental Army sergeant and a master marksman—a sniper in so many words. His weapon, a long rifle, was one of the few technologically advanced weapons the ragtag Continentals possessed during the Revolutionary War. His mission: to find and eliminate high-value targets in the ranks of the Red Coats mustering for attack a few hundred yards away.

Now, I may be a bit partial to Mr. Murphy, who like me was a sniper. But I think it’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the good sergeant and the other marksmen with him had the potential to change the Battle of Saratoga, and with that, the whole Revolution. They’d already harassed the daylights out of British General John Burgoyne and his troops. Burgoyne had a master plan to cut the American rebellion in two, slicing down New York’s Hudson River Valley. He was marching south; another general was coming north. If the two forces met in the middle, the Revolution was done.

But Burgoyne was having tough going. The Americans were better fighters than he thought. One reason they were whipping him was their tactics. The British army depended on close coordination on the battlefield. It was a thing of beauty to look at, assuming the Red Coats weren’t shooting at you. Groups of men marched in perfect precision, took their shots together, and made their bayonet charges like a well-oiled machine. But it all relied on well-trained officers and well-timed orders to keep things moving smoothly.

The Americans aimed to mess that all up by targeting those officers. In modern terms, we’d say they were zeroing in on Burgoyne’s command and control. Burgoyne couldn’t lead his army without its officers. That’s where Murphy and his fellow snipers came in. Their long-range shots sought to leave the Red Coat units headless.

If they could do that in this battle, the whole Revolution might turn around for them. The French king was looking on from the sidelines, wondering if he should support the Americans. If the Americans stopped the Brits here, not only would they have a huge victory, but maybe get some French guns and money to boot.

Not that Murphy was thinking about all that as he climbed the tree. He was just looking for a nice target to fire at.

Very soon, one rode into view: a British officer, buttons gleaming on his red coat. It was General Simon Fraser, the best British leader on the field, and the man commander John Burgoyne was counting on to save the British bacon today.

Murphy aimed, and fired….

While that bullet is sailing toward General Fraser—carrying with it the fate not just of the battle but maybe the entire American Revolution—let’s take a look at the weapon that fired it.

American long rifles were adapted for the demands of the New World from designs first produced by European-born gunsmiths in the 1620s. These had grown from the shorter-barreled, larger-caliber Swiss-German Jaeger hunting rifle used in the forests of central Europe. The lighter Americanized guns featured barrels of up to four feet, and often were adorned with nicknames and personalized designs and inscriptions. The biggest difference between muskets and rifles was the “rifling” in the barrels. Rifling is the series of spiraling grooves cut into the bore of the barrel, which cause the projectile to spin on its axis. This spinning would give the projectile enough stability to dramatically enhance the overall accuracy of the gun.

Gun-making was small manufacturing at its best. It was literally a cottage industry: you might have a single master with an apprentice or two creating a weapon for a customer he knew very well from church and the local market. It was a downright poetic activity, as John Dillin put it in his 1924 book The Kentucky Rifle: “From a flat bar of soft iron, hand forged into a gun barrel; laboriously bored and rifled with crude tools; fitted with a stock hewn from a maple tree in the neighboring forest; and supplied with a lock hammered to shape on the anvil; an unknown smith, in a shop long since silent, fashioned a rifle which changed the whole course of world history; made possible the settlement of a continent; and ultimately freed our country of foreign domination. Light in weight; graceful in line; economical in consumption of powder and lead; fatally precise; distinctly American; it sprang into immediate popularity; and for a hundred years was a model often slightly varied but never radically changed.”

The long rifle was so called because of its lengthy rifled barrel. It was also known as “the Kentucky rifle” (“Kentucky” was once the catch-all word used to describe much of the little-known western wilderness of the Appalachians and beyond) and “the Pennsylvania rifle” (Lancaster and other Pennsylvania towns were a Silicon Valley of innovation and creativity for gunmakers in the 1700s).

When I first fired a vintage “black-powder” flintlock long rifle, I was struck by two things. As a Navy SEAL sniper, I was used to handling weapons weighing in the area of fifteen or sixteen pounds. But the typical American long rifle was around nine pounds, a sleek, surprisingly lightweight gun, more like a precision combat surgical instrument than a battlefield weapon. The process of firing the gun, on the other hand, is incredibly slow. You line up your shot through the superb sighting system and pull the trigger. Sparks shower as the flint strikes the frizzen pan. There’s a quick flash as the sparks ignite the powder in the pan, and a delayed sensation of contact in the gun. A little bit of smoke puffs from the pan as it ignites. A flash of flame passes through a hole into the breech of the barrel, which kicks off the powder charge behind the patched lead ball. Then a mass of gray smoke blasts out of the end of the barrel. The smoke fills the shooter’s whole field of vision. The rifle is so light that the recoil feels more like a push against the shoulder.

Long rifles were first designed and used primarily to kill small-to-medium-sized game on the frontier. Precision was at a premium—a rabbit or deer gave a hunter a relatively short time to fire; by the time you got the weapon reloaded, it would be gone. But rifles would also prove their worth against Indian raids. The bullet—actually a round ball anywhere from .25 to .75 caliber, though usually around .40 to .50—could do a good piece of damage to any target.

(Should I explain what we mean by caliber? In theory it’s the measurement of the barrel’s bore diameter, or in a rifle the size of the grooved interior hole, expressed in fractions of an inch—for instance, 32/100s of an inch equals .32 caliber. But when we’re talking about guns in the Revolutionary War era, it’s best to remember that the measurements and calibers were not anywhere near as standard as they are today. Bullet making was as much of an art as gun making; precision standardization and mass production were about a hundred years in the future.)

The weapon’s longer barrel—extending from 35 inches to over 48 inches (compared to some 30 inches for the average musket)—gave the black powder extra time to burn, boosting the rifle’s accuracy and velocity. The long rifle had adjustable sights for long-distance accuracy; like modern rifles, the gun would be “sighted in” by its owner, tuning it not only to his needs and circumstances, but the weapon’s own distinct personality.

Since they were made by hand, no two long rifles were exactly alike. Granted, the majority might appear very similar to anyone except their rightful owner. But look closer, and each weapon’s uniqueness became obvious. Small variations in the wood furniture or the fittings were of course to be expected. Much larger innovations were also common—Sergeant Murphy, for instance, was believed to have had a double-barreled rifle. It was an over-under design, with one barrel above the other. The arrangement would have made it quicker for him to get off a second shot, a key asset in battle as well as hunting.

Warfare in the late eighteenth century was dominated by a very different gun, the smooth-bore musket. While the firing mechanisms used by muskets and rifles were pretty much the same, the barrels were decidedly not. As the name implies, a smooth-bore musket had a barrel that was smooth, not rifled; fire the gun and its bullet traveled down the tube as quick as it could. By design, the bullet was smaller than the inside of the barrel. This was necessary because deposits of burnt powder and cartridge tended to form on the inside as the weapon was fired. Gunmakers had learned from experience that under battlefield conditions, too tight a fit might lead to the gun misfiring—not a good situation. They designed their bullets to be snug, but not tight.

There was a downside to that. A bullet flying from a musket could only go so far on a given charge. Some of its energy was wasted in that open space around the ball. It also wasn’t necessarily that accurate. The farther the bullet got from the gun, the more likely it was to move in any direction but the one the shooter intended. Now, this wasn’t a problem at ten feet. But put yourself on a battlefield and engage an army at a few hundred yards, and you begin to see the limitations. Still, the musket was a considerable weapon. Contemporary tactics were organized around it; that’s why you see all those lines of soldiers in the historic paintings and reenactments. Truth be told, every important battle in the Revolution centered around those lines of men and their muskets.

The firearms the British used were generally Land Pattern Muskets, known informally as the “Brown Bess.” There were a number of variations on the same basic design; the most important was the Short Land Pattern, used by cavalry and other horsemen. Oftentimes, especially early in the war, the Americans used the Brown Bess, too. Later the French shipped large numbers of their various Charleville models. Like the long rifle, the muskets were flintlocks. Pulling the trigger released the flint to strike the frizzen; the spark ignited the gunpowder in the barrel and off went the bullet.

So why didn’t everyone use rifles, given their superior accuracy? The biggest problem had to do with how all guns were loaded in those days—through the muzzle. Pushing a bullet straight down a smooth, or nearly smooth, tube is a heck of a lot easier than getting it past one that’s rifled, particularly after the fouling caused by firing several rounds without time to clean. Now, I’ll give it to you that someone like our friend Murph could get the job done quickly under battle conditions, but Sergeant Murphy and his fellow riflemen were master marksmen, and something of an exception. They also had the advantage of not having to coordinate their fire (shooting on command in one group). A line of riflemen working at different paces would be quickly decimated by the most ragged row of musketmen all firing at the same time. They would load their weapons slower, and without time to clean them, have guns much more likely to jam.

Finally, while they were shorter, muskets generally had the advantage of being outfitted with bayonets. Rifles, originally designed for an entirely different type of job, did not. In many if not all battles, bayonet charges proved more deadly and more decisive than several rounds of gunfire.

But used in the right circumstances, a precision weapon like the rifle could be quite important. Traditionally, snipers have been deployed to take high-value targets at long range. And that’s exactly how they were employed in the Revolutionary War.

Which brings us back to our friend Sergeant Murphy, up there in that tree.

Murphy was a member of an elite brigade of riflemen under the command of Daniel Morgan. Colonel Morgan’s unit specialized in picking off British officers while they mustered their men on the battlefield. The idea was pretty simple: cut off the enemy’s head, and he floundered. The massed firing tactics that were so favorable to muskets depended on good coordination, which generally could only be provided by the officers in the field.

Throughout the war, British officers were horrified to see American riflemen like Timothy Murphy intentionally aiming at them. This went beyond even the guerilla tactics that had so decimated the British supply lines down from what is now Canada. To many British officers, deliberately aiming at them rather than firing generally at the mass of men on the front line was nearly akin to a war crime. The upper class that filled the officer ranks had never heard of such behavior before, and they were astounded. To them it seemed repulsive, very un-European tactic.

But it was definitely effective. The British feared the colonial riflemen so much they called them “widow-makers.” The best picture of the American long-riflemen comes from the unfortunate British troops who had to face them in battle. British Army Captain Henry Beaufoy wrote that his combat-hardened troops, “when they understood they were opposed by riflemen, they felt a degree of terror never inspired by general action, from the idea that a rifleman always singled out an individual, who was almost certain of being killed or wounded.” Another British officer reported that an expert rifleman could hit the head of a man at two hundred yards, and if he “were to get perfect aim at 300 yards at me, standing still, he would most undoubtedly hit me unless it were a very windy day.”

But their leaders had not fully absorbed the implications of the tactic, and on this day on the battlefield at Saratoga, several were sitting ducks out in the open, mounted on horses where they could be easily targeted. The most important of them was Simon Fraser, a Scottish aristocrat and British brigadier general who was massing his troops for a fresh charge on what would become known to historians as the Battle of Bemis Heights. Fraser’s commander, General Burgoyne, had launched a desperate attempt to break himself free of the rebels surrounding him. Hoping to lure the Americans into a trap, he sent Fraser against the left side of the American line. If Fraser’s troops could break the Americans’ will, the British might escape westward, and live to fight another day.

The battles at Saratoga have become the subject of legends and not a little propaganda on the part of the participants. But there’s no doubt that Murphy was up in the tree, and it’s more than a little likely that he and a few of his brothers-in-arms spotted General Fraser on horseback as he began rallying his troops for a charge. Murphy would have been about three hundred yards away—a good distance in those days, and probably far enough that Fraser didn’t feel in any danger at that early stage of the war.

As his rifle hammer dropped, Murphy’s firearm’s complex process of ignition unfolded, a fragile procedure that is nowhere near as fast as the firing of a modern cartridge arm. Murphy held steady throughout that long second and a half. He handled the gun like it was an extension of himself, and when loading it would have made sure to use the most efficient charge possible. The bullet would have made a sharp crack as it flew, its sonic reflections echoing against the nearby trees and ground.

It missed, though. Instead of hitting the general, it lightly nicked his horse.

Sergeant Murphy pulled a catch to flip up the preloaded bottom barrel. He performed a quick series of complex mental calculations, trying to adjust his aim for wind, altitude, and for the inevitable vertical and lateral drift of the bullet, which at this far distance could be severe.

Then he fired again. The second bullet missed, this one also barely clipping the general’s horse. I imagine he had some choice words going through his head. Nothing bad on Murphy—we all miss sometimes.

At this point, Murphy either would have paused to begin the time-consuming process of reloading his flintlock long rifle, which even for a crack shot like Murphy could have taken as long as thirty seconds, or more likely, someone would have passed him up another, preloaded long rifle.

In any event, Sergeant Timothy Murphy sighted down his barrel for a third shot, then squeezed the trigger. The bullet flew. Legend has it that this one found its target, squarely hitting Fraser in his midsection. In those days, a gut shot was both painful and nearly always fatal. Fraser slipped from his horse, mortally wounded.

Although it’s difficult if not downright impossible to definitively know whether it was Murphy’s bullet that struck the British general, one person above all apparently credited him with the kill: Fraser himself. Taken away to safety too late by two of his aides, the British officer spoke of seeing the American rifleman who shot him, far off in the distance, sitting in a tree.

Fraser’s death marked the final turning point of the battle. It deprived Burgoyne of his best lieutenant, and shortly after he was shot, the British troops fell back in retreat. Burgoyne’s position was now hopeless. Ten days later, he and six thousand British troops surrendered to the Americans, handing them a critical victory. Impressed, the French soon pitched in to offer crucial help to the Americans.

Sergeant Murphy’s boss, Daniel Morgan, is probably a guy you never learned about in history class, but he is one interesting character. He quit the Army after Saratoga because he felt he was passed over for a promotion. But he was soon back in action, and finally received his appointment to brigadier general in 1780. A short time later, he became one of the Revolution’s most important generals, one of the guys we probably couldn’t have won independence without.

Morgan wasn’t the only commander of riflemen in the war, and he didn’t just lead riflemen, but he did both very well. Credit where credit is due: individual riflemen played a small but important role in skirmishes and battles all across the continent. And employing what we would now call guerilla tactics, their hit-and-run raids kept the British off-balance throughout.

But let’s focus on Morgan and his crew. He had a bunch of riflemen besides our friend Murphy, who was back home north when Morgan returned to action down south. One of Morgan’s troops was a fella you may think you’ve heard of, namely Sam Houston.

No, not that Sam Houston—this was his dad. Major Samuel Houston Sr. was an officer in Morgan’s rifle brigade.

He was also my seventh great-grandfather on my mom’s side. My dad’s ancestors served in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. They were rebels in the first, but picked the wrong side in the second.

By the winter of 1780–81, Dan Morgan had amassed a force of at least 1,900 Continental regulars, state troops, and militiamen, plus a small cavalry unit. His men hailed from South Carolina, Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, Georgia, and Delaware. They had been given a simple task: raise as much hell among the British as they could in the Carolinas.

British Lieutenant General Charles Cornwallis had invaded the states in 1780 in an attempt to crush the rebellion in the South with the help of friendly American Tories and Native Americans. He did well at first, trouncing a rebel force under Horatio Gates and taking effective control of South Carolina. But as he expanded his campaign into North Carolina, the Revolutionary Army was able to regroup and slow his progress. In the meantime, small groups of rebels bit away at his supply lines, continually harassing him. The war behind the lines was ferocious in the South, just as it was in parts of the North; American Tories and American patriots massacred each other in small hand-to-hand encounters. Gruesome atrocities were the order of the day: scalping, hatcheting, spontaneous summary hangings, the slaughter of prisoners, you name it. It was a no-holds-barred kind of war.

As dirty and bloody as it may have been, the actions of one British commander in the south stood out as truly outrageous. Colonel Banastre Tarleton led the elite British Green Dragoons cavalry force, a small but highly effective unit of horsemen who moved with explosive speed and struck terror in American soldiers and civilians alike. By 1781, he was arguably the most hated man in America, a cold-blooded killer rebels called “the Butcher.” The title wasn’t propaganda. In his most notorious and controversial act, he had either ordered or stood by as his men slayed Americans attempting to surrender at Waxhaw Creek on the border of the Carolinas. Word of the massacre spread throughout the states; ironically, it helped turn the tides against the British, outraging many who’d been neutral in the war.

Whatever his morals, Tarleton was bold and audacious—and effective. At one point, in a daring raid deep behind American lines, he came within a whisker of capturing Thomas Jefferson and the entire Virginia legislature.

All this made him the perfect opponent for Morgan. Occupied in an ill-fated attempt to extend the Southern campaign to Virginia, Lord Cornwallis tasked Tarleton to find and destroy Dan Morgan and his unit operating in South Carolina.

For his part, Morgan was under orders only to harass the British with hit-and-run tactics, and to avoid the risks of an open battlefield confrontation. But Morgan knew the Butcher was hot on his trail, thirsting for blood, and about to catch up with him. So on January 16, 1781, with Tarleton closing in a few miles away, Dan Morgan decided to dig in to stand and fight in a field (or “cowpens”) near Burr’s Mill in South Carolina. That night, Morgan cooked up one of the most brilliant battle plans in American history, a masterpiece of combined arms, fire, and movement that featured the American long rifle in a starring role. It would go down in history as the Battle of Cowpens.

Dan Morgan’s men likely were armed with a mix of muskets and frontier rifles, personal guns the militiamen would have used in their regular jobs as hunters, trappers, and farmers. That night, Morgan delivered an inspiring speech to his troops. One soldier recalled, “It was upon this occasion I was more perfectly convinced of Gen. Morgan’s qualifications to command militia, than I had ever before been. He went among the volunteers, helped them fix their swords, joked with them about their sweet-hearts, told them to keep in good spirits, and the day would be ours. And long after I laid down, he was going about among the soldiers encouraging them, and telling them that [he] would crack his whip over [Tarleton] in the morning, as sure as they lived.”

Folklore paints a rosy picture of the American militia, the part-time army of local farmers and the like. But truth be told, the militia’s record through the Revolution was, to be polite, mixed. The majority of the American militia troops were ragtag, volunteer part-time soldiers who might panic, break, and run at the sight of a thousand enemy troops charging them with muskets, bayonets, and cavalry. Few had been trained to any degree of professionalism. Many didn’t necessarily want to be on the battlefield in the first place, only answering the summons to serve out of a sense of duty, pride, and in a few cases, fear. Their time in the field was generally supposed to be measured in months, and even if they stayed on, their homes, farms, and families were never far from their minds.

Morgan told them their part in the battle would be short and sweet. All he needed them to do was hold formation for three volleys. Then, battle over, they would be released from service—and be called heroes, even.

“Just hold up your heads, boys, three fires,” he said, “and you are free, and then when you return to your homes, how the old folks will bless you, and the girls kiss you, for your gallant conduct!”

Just three shots and you are free.

Morgan’s men chowed down on a hearty meal of butchered beef fresh from the pasture, stacked their guns, and tried to grab some shut-eye. Just before sunrise on January 17, Tarleton the Butcher and his 300 cavalry and 950 infantry troops fell into Morgan’s trap.

Morgan knew of Tarleton’s hair-trigger lust for the lightning-fast combat strike, so he constructed a plan that exploited the strengths and weaknesses of his own men, and the peculiar dynamics of the terrain at Cowpens. It all hinged on an elaborate trick, a stunning deception that required split-second timing by the Americans.

At dawn Tarleton emerged from the woods, saw the Americans, and quickly formed up his troops. Just as Morgan hoped, he lunged like a hound after a thick steak, barely waiting for all his men to arrive.

The British were cold, dehydrated, and exhausted from a long, fast march, and they hadn’t eaten or slept properly for days. But Banastre Tarleton saw his chance for a grand victory, one that would annihilate a good portion of the American southern army. His men played drums and fifes and cheered as they covered the length of three football fields in three minutes.

The British were, Morgan wrote a few days later, “running at us as if they intended to eat us up.”

Morgan had laid his pieces on the battlefield like a chess master. He deployed his troops in three main formations—the first line made up of riflemen-sharpshooters, the second line of militia armed with rifles and muskets, then musket-armed regulars. They created what you could call “a defense-in-depth on high ground,” or a “reverse slope defensive strategy.” The idea was to goad Tarleton into a premature victory rush up a broadly sloping hill, where Morgan would snap the trap shut.

Morgan put his long-rifle snipers at the tip of the spear. Some one hundred and fifty sharpshooting riflemen from Georgia and the Carolinas scattered in swamps and behind trees, guerrilla-style. Following Morgan’s plan, they opened fire individually at the advancing British from close range, with special attention given to the officers. Then, having blooded the enemy, they broke off and ran uphill toward the American lines, re-forming to commence long-range fire. With their slow reloading time and lack of bayonets, these soldiers had a special incentive to try to avoid close contact with the British regulars toting bayonet-tipped muskets.

The American second line, theoretically the riskiest bunch and the most likely to break, consisted of roughly 1,000 North and South Carolina militia troops. They opened fire, as Morgan ordered, inflicting major damage on the royal troops who were less than forty yards away. Most of the Americans couldn’t manage to pull off the three shots Morgan hoped for, and some could only manage one, but no matter. As a group, they turned their backs to the charging British and hightailed up the hill, simulating a panicked retreat.

As intended, the sight of a broadly collapsing American line cheered Tarleton’s remaining troops, who charged forward uphill—bloodied, weakened, and disorganized, not realizing that the third and final line was made up of five hundred battle-hardened regular American troops. These were General Dan Morgan’s best men, the Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia continentals. These seasoned vets acted as a screen for the fleeing militia troops, who ran behind and through them, then about-faced and started re-forming into a new unseen fourth line preparing to face the British. Meanwhile a reserve American cavalry force of light dragoons under Colonel William Washington (second cousin of George) stood ready to pounce at the right moment.

The American third line opened fire in good order, leading one militia man to report, “When the regulars fired, it seemed like one sheet of flame from right to left. Oh! It was beautiful.”

But suddenly, disaster appeared for the Americans.

In the chaos of combat, an order by American Lieutenant Colonel John Howard to his Virginia regulars to adjust their line to face the onrushing Scottish Highlanders of the 71st Regiment was misinterpreted as an order to retreat. Instead of wheeling to form a new line perpendicular to their unit, portions of the line withdrew, triggering a domino effect, and most of the American regulars started withdrawing. Colonel Howard later explained the catastrophe-in-progress: “Seeing my right flank was exposed to the enemy, I attempted to change the front of Wallace’s company. In doing this, some confusion ensued, and first a part and then the whole of the company commenced a retreat. The officers along the line seeing this and supposing that orders had been given for a retreat, faced their men about and moved off.”

To the British, it looked like yet another collapse of the American lines was under way, and they rushed forward, now in badly disconnected fragments.

This was not, however, part of the American plan, and it threatened to doom them on the battlefield.

But Morgan and two of his officers reacted instantly to the sudden crisis and created a new plan on the spot: stop the retreat, spin the whole line of five hundred Virginia regulars around, and blast the British from inside fifteen yards away, shooting muskets virtually from hip level.

“They are coming on like a mob!” declared cavalry leader Colonel Washington, sensing an opportunity to strike the British with a final blow. “Give them a fire,” he called to Lieutenant Colonel Howard of the Virginia militia, “and I will charge them!”

Howard yelled for his troops to stop and about-face. They did exactly that. “In a minute we had a perfect line,” recalled Howard. “The enemy were now very near us. Our men commenced a very destructive fire, which they little expected, and a few rounds occasioned great disorder in the ranks. While in this confusion, I ordered a charge with the bayonet, which order was obeyed with great alacrity.” As Dan Morgan later explained, “We retired in good Order about 50 Paces, formed, advanced on the Enemy & gave them a fortunate Volley which threw them into Disorder.”

At the same moment the Continentals fired, the American cavalry, until now held in reserve, appeared from behind the hill. They raced around the British and struck into their ranks. Simultaneously, the militia troops, having re-formed behind the screen of the regulars, jumped back into the fight, ripping away with musket and rifle fire into the British left flank. The exhausted British troops, stunned by the abrupt volley of fire and with their officer ranks withered by constant pressure from American long-rifle fire on their flanks, couldn’t take the punishment.

Now it was the Brits’ turn to panic and haul ass in the opposite direction. British Legion infantrymen fled. The Highlanders tried to form pockets in a doomed attempt to defend themselves, but their commander quickly ordered them to drop their guns in the dirt. Tarleton galloped onto the field and tried to rally his fleeing troops, briefly engaging in a mounted saber duel with the American cavalry. He soon realized it was hopeless and fled himself, barely escaping with his life. When he got back to British lines, he recommended that his boss court-martial him.

Dan Morgan had manipulated the enemy into a battlefield commander’s dream of maneuver warfare: the double envelopment, first perfected by Hannibal against the Romans at the Battle of Cannae two thousand years earlier. As the chief of the nineteenth-century German General Staff Alfred von Schlieffen wrote, the “Cannae model” was a sure recipe for victory in battle: “The enemy front is not the goal of the principal attack. The mass of the troops and the reserves should not be concentrated against the enemy front; the essential is that the flanks be crushed…. To bring about a decisive and annihilating victory requires an attack against the front and against one or both flanks.” At Cowpens, ol’ Dan Morgan slammed the British in their left flank, their right flank, and their rear. It was a complete victory.

In the twenty-minute battle, Tarleton lost roughly a hundred men, about a third of them officers. Over eight hundred were taken prisoner. Less than fifty Americans were killed. The Americans captured Tarleton’s cannon, supplies, and equipment, even his personal slaves. It was the worst psychological defeat for the British since Saratoga. Chief Justice John Marshall later wrote, “seldom has a battle, in which greater numbers were not engaged, been so important in its consequences as that of Cowpens.” The Battle of Cowpens, wrote British historian Sir George Otto Trevelyan, led to “an unbroken chain of consequences to the catastrophe at Yorktown which finally separated America from the British crown.”

Tarleton escaped, but neither he nor his commander were loose in America for much longer. In October 1781, sealed off from reinforcements by George Washington’s army and the French navy, Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia. Benny the Butcher Tarleton escaped, returned to England, wrote a book, served in Parliament, and enjoyed a comfortable estate in retirement. Dan Morgan was awarded a special medal by the new U.S. Congress.

I like to think of my ancestor Major Houston Sr. standing beside Dan Morgan as the redcoats surrendered. It’s recorded that the Americans graciously treated the defeated British officers to a delicious feast to show their honor. If Major Houston was anything like me, he introduced those tea drinkers to venison steaks and American whiskey. Now, that’s honorable.

Remember Tim Murphy, the sniper who killed General Fraser at Saratoga with a shot from his long rifle?

He was reported to be in the crowd of American soldiers who witnessed the surrender ceremony at Yorktown, when eight thousand British troops stacked their guns and a military band played “The World Turned Upside Down.”

I bet he had a fat grin on his face.

When I was growing up, I heard a lot of different stories about Sam Houston Junior. Some of them weren’t too good—you see, he earned a reputation among some folks as a general who ran away from the action during the Texas Revolution.

My ancestor, a coward?

Damn.

But if you check deeper into the story, you’ll see that Sam—founding father of Texas—wasn’t a coward at all, far from it. He was a hell of a crafty tactician and a master strategist. Though sometimes, as Dan Morgan proved at the Battle of Cowpens, running away from your enemy can turn out to be a good way to smash him right in the jaw.

Samuel Houston Sr. died when his son was fourteen years old. But I think it’s entirely possible that father and son might have talked about what happened at Cowpens, and maybe—just maybe—that served as inspiration for what became Sam Houston’s biggest moment on the battlefield in the spring of 1836.

In the decades after the Revolution, Americans kept pushing west—and took their long rifles with them every step of the way. They proved themselves on the frontier, and even did service in the War of 1812—not a particularly fun war for the U.S., though it at least showed Britain we wouldn’t let them push us around without fighting back. Then between October 1835 and April 1836, long rifles and a host of other firearms starred in Texas settlers’ bid to shake free from Mexico. In fact, the Texas Revolution was like a big gun show, showcasing the grab-bag assortment of weapons available on the open market at the time. It also offered a last snapshot of the old firearms designs that were soon to give way to new technologies. There is no good inventory of the guns used at these battles, but experts make educated guesses.

When Mexican dictator and president-general Antonio López de Santa Anna and his troops marched up to the Alamo in late February 1836 and began their epic thirteen-day siege, they outnumbered the fewer than two hundred rebellious Texas volunteers inside the fort by 10 to 1. Here and at the later Battle of San Jacinto, both sides would have been armed with European-patterned, muzzle-loading, single-shot, flintlock muskets like the English Brown Bess and some French models, too, plus Spanish-style escopeta short muskets and Spanish pistolas that would have featured the classic Miquelet lock.

The Texans would have had American long rifles, but also “blunderbuss” short-range muskets, carbines (a shorter version of the musket or rifle, often preferred by cavalry), bird guns, and some pistols here and there. The Texans may even have had a few guns featuring the new “caplock” or percussion-cap firing mechanism, which was a big improvement on the flintlock because it replaced the troublesome flash pan and flint with a sturdy, waterproof copper cap that triggered a spark when it was struck. Toss in some Bowie knives, tomahawks, and Belduques (a long fighting knife similar to the Bowie), and you’ve got yourself a gang that can really do some damage.

During the Battle of the Alamo, one legendary American long-rifleman was spotted on the wall by Captain Rafael Soldana of the Mexican Army. The “tall man with flowing hair” on the wall wore “a buckskin suit with a cap all of a pattern entirely different from those worn by his comrades. This man would rest his long gun and fire, and we all learned to keep a good distance when he was seen to make ready to shoot. He rarely missed his mark, and when he fired, he always rose to his feet and calmly reloaded his gun, seemingly indifferent to the shots fired at him by our men. He had a strong, resonant voice and often railed at us.”

Soldana later learned the man was known as “Kwockey”—the national celebrity frontiersman and former congressman Davy Crockett.

After almost two weeks of siege, Mexicans punched through the Alamo’s flimsy defenses and killed or massacred all but two of the Texan defenders of the Alamo, including Crockett. A month later, when General Santa Anna ordered the cold-blooded bayonet-and-bullet massacre of 353 more Texan prisoners near Goliad on Palm Sunday, March 27, terrified Texas civilians started fleeing eastward.

The panicked exodus was called the Runaway Scrape, and Texas General Sam Houston assumed the role of Skedaddler-in-Chief. Day after day, Sam led his troops eastward, away from Santa Anna, moving as fast as he could in the direction of Louisiana. Texas politicians were appalled, as were some of Sam’s own troops. They publicly wondered if he was a coward.

But Houston was just biding his time, looking for an opening to turn around and strike. The deeper Santa Anna marched into Texas, the more worn out his troops and equipment got. Camped near the meeting of the San Jacinto River and the Buffalo Bayou, Santa Anna decided it was time for a siesta on the afternoon of April 21, 1836. He forgot to post sentries. His men lay snoozing as a burly, mangy-looking Sam Houston and his more than eight hundred Texans and their allies snuck up through the cover of a forested hill, led by a contingent of uniformed Kentucky riflemen. “Now hold your fire, men,” Houston cautioned, “until you get the order!”

It was time for payback, Texas-style.

Screaming “Remember the Alamo!” and “Remember Goliad!” the Texans overwhelmed the Mexicans in a mere eighteen minutes, enough time for Sam Houston to lose two horses—both shot out from under him—and sustain a bad gunshot wound to the ankle.

The Texans were in no mood for mercy and unleashed a full-scale slaughter. No one was spared, not even the wounded or soldiers trying to surrender. “Take prisoners like the Meskins do!” shouted one Texan, and scores of Mexicans were shot to pieces after surrendering, or hunted down in the river and clubbed to death while pleading “Me no Alamo!” or “Me no Goliad!” A horrified Sam Houston tried to stop the massacre, shouting “Parade! Parade!” in a vain attempt to call his men back to form a dress formation and leave off killing. By the time the butchery stopped, a total of 630 Mexicans died that day, versus nine Texans.

The people of Texas were jubilant, grasping that independence was theirs. A messenger raced into one refugee camp on the Sabine River waving his hat and shouting, “San Jacinto! San Jacinto! The Mexicans are whipped and Santa Anna a prisoner!” A lady named Kate Scurry Terrell witnessed the reaction and wrote: “The scene that followed beggars description. People embraced, laughed and wept and prayed, all in one breath. As the moon rose over the vast flower-decked prairie, the soft southern wind carried peace to tired hearts and grateful slumber.”

When Santa Anna was captured, he asked Sam Houston to “be generous to the vanquished.”

Houston told the prisoner curtly, “You should have remembered that, sir, at the Alamo.” Santa Anna would eventually be shipped off to Washington; he later returned to Mexico and in fact would go to war twice more, against France and finally against the U.S.

The epic revenge-victory at the Battle of San Jacinto marked the birth of a free American Texas, and it altered the fate of three republics: Mexico, Texas, and the United States, then a country barely fifty years old. Mexico was forced to sign a withdrawal and peace treaty three weeks later that conferred legitimacy on the new Republic of Texas. Mexico never ruled Texas again, despite periodic raids in the 1840s. The United States absorbed the Republic of Texas in 1845, plus more Mexican land after the Mexican War in 1848.

If you drive about twenty-five miles southeast of downtown Houston today, you’ll come across the 570-foot-tall San Jacinto Monument, the world’s tallest memorial column. (Everything’s bigger in Texas, right?) The inscription reads, in part: “Measured by its results, San Jacinto was one of the decisive battles of the world. The freedom of Texas from Mexico won here led to annexation and to the Mexican-American War, resulting in the acquisition by the United States of the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Utah and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas and Oklahoma. Almost one-third of the present area of the American Nation, nearly a million square miles of territory, changed sovereignty.”

Not a bad day’s work for Sam Houston and his riflemen.

The battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto were crossroads battles, fought on the edges of several great eras of gun technology, when the flintlock was destined to give way to the caplock, the single-shot to revolving and repeating guns, and the muzzle-loader to the breechloader.

By the time it left the stage, the American long rifle helped give birth to a new nation. Generations of men and guns would now rise to save the United States from tearing itself apart, and raise it to a place of glory.