Challenging some assumptions about rifles & muskets during the Revolution

There’s an old joke about the American Revolution. It says the Patriots must have won a coin toss at the start, and elected to shoot from behind rocks and trees wearing earth tones, while the British had to wear red, march in a straight line, and shoot all at the same time.

The part about the coin toss was a joke, but the rest is based what a lot of Americans think actually happened. Kim Stacy wants to set his fellow Americans straight. He says he wants to “Explode the myth of the American riflemen.”

At noon on Friday, Aug. 21, in the theater at the main Richland Library in Columbia, he will deliver a free lecture called “Rifles vs. Muskets.” The program is part of the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum’s regular Noon Debrief series.

Stacy is a U.S. Marine veteran who in retirement has become an avid student of the Revolution, and tends to look at it, more than most Americans, from the British point of view. He has spoken at previous Noon Debriefs dressed in a British uniform. But he dismisses the “myth” of which he will speak based on American as well as British sources.

Some of the things he will challenge:

• The notion of wily, crafty American woodsmen who can hit any target with their rifled weapons, while the Redcoats don’t even bother to aim, firing blindly in formation. First, very few Patriots had rifles, and most carried old British muskets. Few Brits had rifles, either, but they were highly trained marksmen, and seasoned veteran soldiers.
• Besides, pinpoint accuracy at long distances was seldom a critical factor in the relatively small battles (by European standards) of the Revolution. And fighting mostly took place in confined circumstances, such as in wooded terrain – which means fewer encounters featuring Napoleonic-style formations.
• Not only were the British unimpressed by the supposedly crafty American riflemen, but George Washington even considered getting rid of rifles, which were fragile and expensive. And the men who brought their own were often a discipline problem. Both sides, says Stacy, had the attitude that “a hole is a hole is a hole,” and it didn’t matter much whether the ball causing the wound came from a sleek long rifle or a clumsy musket.
• There’s a legend that a crack American rifleman killed British Brigadier Simon Fraser at Saratoga after being ordered to do so by Benedict Arnold. Stacy says people overlook that it took the shooter “four or five” shots, and that he shot someone else on one of those misses.

This might challenge some folks’ cherished impressions. But Kim Stacy will be glad to discuss it during the Q. and A. at the end.

About the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum

Founded in 1896, the South Carolina Confederate Relic Room and Military Museum is an accredited museum focusing on South Carolina’s distinguished martial tradition through the Revolutionary War, Mexican War, Civil War, Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, Vietnam, the War on Terror, and other American conflicts. It serves as the state’s military history museum by collecting, preserving, and exhibiting South Carolina’s military heritage from the colonial era to the present, and by providing superior educational experiences and programming. It recently opened a major new exhibit, “A War With No Front Lines: South Carolina and the Vietnam War, 1965-1973.” The museum is located at 301 Gervais St. in Columbia, sharing the Columbia Mills building with the State Museum. For more information, go to https://crr.sc.gov/.