The Line Was the Weapon: The Truth About Musket Accuracy

On October 7, 1777, at Bemis Heights, a British brigadier general rode along a collapsing line on a grey horse.

His name was Simon Fraser. He was one of the best field officers Britain had in North America, and John Burgoyne's second attack at Saratoga was falling apart around him. Fraser rode the line in the open, in full view, trying to steady the Hessians and the light infantry and pull the assault back together. As long as he stayed in the saddle, the British still had a chance.

Colonel Daniel Morgan saw him do it. Morgan pulled a handful of his riflemen out of the fight, pointed at the officer on the grey horse, and told them to bring him down.

The distance was roughly 300 yards. At that range a smoothbore musket was not a weapon. It was noise. A line of British regulars could have emptied every barrel they carried in Fraser's direction and hit nothing but dirt and sky.

One of Morgan's men climbed for a firing position, settled a long barrel across a rest, and worked the problem. The first shot cut the crupper strap on Fraser's saddle. Another clipped the horse's mane. His aide begged him to ride out of it. Fraser said his duty kept him where he was. The next shot went through his abdomen. He was carried off the field and died the following morning. The attack came apart, and Burgoyne's army began the road to surrender.

Later generations gave that marksman a name and a double-barreled rifle and a tree to fire from. The men who were actually there and wrote it down called him only an elderly man, or one of the best shots in the corps, or simply a rifleman. The record leaves him without a name.

The shot became famous because almost no one else on that field could have made it. For every other soldier standing in line that day, on both sides, accuracy did not mean aiming at a man 300 yards away. It didn't really mean aiming at all.

The two guns that fought the Revolution were the British Land Pattern musket, the Brown Bess, and the French Charleville. Both were smoothbore flintlocks. Both were tough, simple, and built to be produced by the tens of thousands. Neither was built to hit a specific man.

Start with the barrel. The Brown Bess had a .75 caliber bore and fired a ball closer to .69. The Charleville ran a .69 bore around a ball closer to .63. That gap between the ball and the bore has a name. It is called windage, and it was there on purpose.

The reason was fouling. Black powder burns dirty. After two or three shots the inside of a barrel cakes with a thick, tarry residue. If the ball fit the bore tightly, a soldier would not be able to ram it home once the fouling built up, and a musket you cannot load is a club. An undersized ball slid down easily even when the barrel was filthy. That kept the gun in the fight.

It also wrecked any hope of accuracy. A loose ball rattles down the barrel when the powder goes off, bouncing off the walls, and comes out the muzzle with a random spin nobody chose. A spinning sphere curves in flight. So the ball left the barrel already committed to drifting somewhere the shooter never intended.

On top of that, these muskets had no rear sight. The Brown Bess used its bayonet lug as a crude front bead and nothing behind it to line the eye up against. You could point the gun. You could not aim it the way we mean the word today.

If volume wins, then the fastest-loading army wins. A well-drilled man could fire three to four rounds a minute with a musket. A poorly drilled man might manage two. Put those two units across a field from each other and the faster one simply puts more lead in the air every minute until the slower one breaks. Marksmanship never enters into it.

That is why drill was not busywork. It was the entire game. And it is why the Continental Army's turning point was not a battle at all.

In February 1778, at Valley Forge, a Prussian officer named Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben took a starving, disorganized army that was loading its muskets a dozen different ways and gave it one way. He took a model company of 100 men, drilled them himself, and used them to train the trainers. He stripped the loading sequence down to its essentials, fifteen motions across eight commands, and hammered it in until it ran on muscle memory. His work became the Blue Book, the manual that ran the American army for decades.

The point of all that repetition was not neatness on a parade ground. It was that a man who has loaded his musket ten thousand times can keep loading it when the man beside him is screaming and the smoke has swallowed the field. Drill was what let a soldier keep working while everything around him told him to run. A unit that could fire four disciplined volleys a minute under that kind of pressure would take apart a unit that could manage two.

The other half of discipline was knowing when not to fire.

The first volley was the best one a unit would ever fire. The muskets were clean, the flints were fresh, the men were not yet panicked, and the whole line went off at once. Waste it at long range and you traded your one good punch for a cloud of misses. So officers made their men hold, which is a brutal thing to ask of a frightened man watching a wall of bayonets walk toward him.

At Breed's Hill in June 1775, the provincial officers did exactly that. They walked the line telling men to hold, to fire low, to aim at the waistbands, to aim at the handsome coats of the officers. They held their fire until the British regulars were 40 to 50 yards away, and then they tore the front ranks apart.

That was unusually close. Most firefights of the era opened much farther out. At Guilford Courthouse and at Camden the shooting started around 100 to 140 yards, a football field between the lines. Letting the British close to less than half that before firing is what made Breed's Hill what it was. It was not marksmanship. It was nerve.

Which brings us back to the man in the trees at Saratoga.

The American long rifle, the Pennsylvania or Kentucky rifle, was a different animal entirely. It was not army issue. It was a frontier hunting gun, built one at a time by gunsmiths, and it was made to do the one thing the musket could not. Its barrel had spiral grooves cut into it. The shooter used a ball that actually fit the bore, wrapped in a greased patch that sealed the gases and gripped the rifling. That spin stabilized the ball the way a thrown football stabilizes, and it flew straight. A good rifleman could hit a man at 200 to 300 yards, the range that killed Simon Fraser.

Washington and his commanders knew what they had. They gathered these frontiersmen into specialized units, the most famous of them Morgan's Rifle Corps, and used them as scouts, skirmishers, and killers of officers. They fought from cover, at distance, on their own terms, well outside the rigid geometry of the line. The shot at Saratoga was the rifle doing precisely what it was for.

So if the rifle was that much more accurate, why did the whole army not carry one?