Stories of amazing prowess by American backwoods riflemen during the Revolutionary War have been passed around for quite a long time. Likely, it was more pleasant to believe that home-grown marksmen were totally responsible for liberating the Colonies than something foreign, like the French. The real military effect of riflemen during the conflict was more complicated than that, however.

But first, were there some skilled marksmen? Almost certainly. Rifles were often in use in the western areas of Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland, where large game was more often to be found, and so many westerners had grown up using them. Many joined rifle units from Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania when the Continental Congress asked for volunteers in the summer of 1775. One account of the recruiting comes from the diary of John Harrower, a servant teaching on a Virginia plantation near Fredricksburg. He described the commander of one company trying to weed out the bad shots from the large number of men who'd volunteered:

He took a board a foot square and with chalk drew the shape of a moderate nose in the center and nailed it up into a tree at one hundred and fifty yards distance, and those who came nighest the mark with a single ball was to go. But by the first forty or fifty that fired, the nose was all blown out of the board, and by the time the company was all filled up, the board shared the same fate. (p. 100)

That's pretty good: if you figure a nose at about 2 inches, that's about as good as most people can see at 150 yards. But of course, that's an account someone might claim is from the American side. On the British side, there's the account of Maj. George Hanger, who served with the notorious Col. Banastre Tarleton. Hanger was in a group of three on horseback, he and Tarleton in the front, a bugler just behind them, looking across a field at a mill at the American position. A rifleman came by, saw them, laid down on the mill dam and took a careful shot.

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It was in August, and not a breath of wind was stirring....a rifle ball passed between him and me; looking to the mill I evidently observed the flash of the powder. ...the bugle-horn behind me jumped off his horse and said, "sir, my horse is shot"....I have passed several times over this ground and ever observed it with the greatest attention; and I can positively assert that the distance he fired at us was a full 400 yards.

Hanger was captured at the Battle of Saratoga, and while a prisoner often asked the backwoodsmen what their best could do, and was told that "provided he can draw a good and true sight", one could hit the head of a man at 200 yards. The sniper Hanger described was shooting on a windless day at a group of three, and likely expected that if a slight breeze came up and drifted the ball off to one side or the other he would still get an officer. But his shot was straight, and only hit a little low. And why not: at a distance of 400 yards he would have had to compensate for the ball dropping around six feet, and the sights on his gun would be fixed- with no adjustments for elevation. He would have been aiming considerably above their heads.

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But it's also good to note that phrase, "provided he can draw a good and true sight". The marksman would need a stable target, decent light to see it, and time to take a shot.Rifles did not load quickly, and did not take bayonets, so rifle companies quickly showed their limitations when put against soldiers equipped with faster-firing muskets, and bayonets. Like in the so-called Wood of Horrors at Guan Heights in the Battle of Long Island of August 1776, when Gen. John Sullivan's rifle battalion was slaughtered by Hessian troops who simply waited for the first volley from the riflemen, charged, and pinned them to trees with their bayonets. And why, you might ask, did the Hessians know to do this? The Hessians were already supplying the British with rifle troops, Jaegers. They and the British knew what rifles could do. And so did the Americans: Washington quickly began trying to get soldiers armed with regular muskets, and though riflemen would prove to be handy in the Revolutionary War ( and later ones) as snipers and skirmishers, the heavy work of taking and holding ground would be done by the regular infantry.

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M.L. Brown : Firearms in Colonial America

Harold Peterson: Arms and Armor in Colonial America

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