Who armed George Washington's army?

by Laturnich

While reading a biography of John Adams I came across a passage that stated that, at the outbreak of the War of Independence in 1775, the American colonies had no native arms industry, meaning no infrastructure to produce muskets, cannon, or even gunpowder. Is this true, and if so, where did the Continental Army get their weapons and munitions from? How well armed were the American colonists in general at the outbreak of the war? Would the average person have owned a firearm? And since the individual states were notoriously unwilling to supply Washington with anything and I can't imagine them happily opening their arsenals to the Continentals, how was the Army able to obtain the guns and ammo to actually keep fighting?

Bodark43

In 1776, there was about 3% of the American population under arms. That dropped down to around 1.5% towards the end., falling from an estimated 89,661 to around 43,076. About 1/3 of the muskets, rifles etc. in their hands in 1776 were made in the colonies. The rest mostly came from England, and some small amounts from the European continent, notably Germany, and France: which had surrendered arms after the defeat in the Seven Years’ War, and some of those had ended up in militia armories. But at the outset those guns in the Continental Army varied in size and type. Most people were farmers, farmers tend to like guns, and many recruits brought their own, and those greatly varied. Baron Steuben found to his disgust at Valley Forge in the first dreadful winter of 1777-1778 that there was a mix of muskets, carbines, rifles and fowling pieces( shotguns) within the individual units, which meant a terrible variety of ammunition was required. There was, initially, considerable naïve optimism that Kentucky rifles in the hands of marksmen would be effective against the British Army. The colonists quickly discovered, notably at the Battle of Long Island, that riflemen could not fire fast enough to resist a charge and had no bayonets to use in one themselves. And their marksmanship , while useful, was often matched by hired Hessian Jaeger rifle troops. Military arms, muskets, were what was needed.

The individual states' Committees of Safety did try to contract for arms to be made for their militias. There were plenty of gunsmiths , especially in Pennsylvania, but setting up big shops to produce large numbers of muskets with bayonets turned out to be very difficult. Most American guns had been made with imported locks: the British and European shops could produce them at lower cost. Though gunsmiths could make lock parts, they didn’t have the tooling- the forging dies and other equipment- that made large-scale manufacture possible. Many of those gunsmiths were liable to be drawn into the fight, leaving their benches. And those workshops and the workmen in them were themselves prime military targets, so many of them did not stay in production very long before being burnt by Redcoats or Tories.. So, native wartime production was never going to be enough. The Rappahanock Forge in Virginia had a contract for 200 muskets in 1776. Another shop in Wilmington NC made a hundred. Pennsylvania’s Committee of Safety contracted for 4,500. , from fall 1775 to spring 1776, which worked out to be only about 643 a month- and that was for contractors in 11 counties. Clearly, the colonists were not able to arm themselves. Likewise with making gunpowder. Despite efforts to set up new mills, revive old ones, train the populace in how to make charcoal and collect saltpeter from dungheaps, etc. native manufacture could nowhere near meet the demand.

There were some purchased from Spain , Germany and the Netherlands; perhaps a few thousand. But the need was mostly filled by the French. Successful negotiations by the Continental Congress' representative in France, Silas Deane, with a sympathetic Comte de Beaumarchais and the King’s Foreign Minister the Comte de Vergennes resulted in the creation of a dummy corporation, Roderique Hortelez et Cie., which was capitalized with a million livres ( whether a loan or a gift would become a dispute with Beaumarchais later, after the war). In May of 1776 that company began to send arms, gunpowder and other war material mostly to French, Dutch and Spanish ports in the Caribbean , where it could be picked up by American blockade runners. After the Continental victory at Saratoga, Deane and Ben Franklin got more open cooperation from the King in 1777, which resulted in millions of dollars in loans, and they used some of the money to buy 80,000 muskets from the royal armory. Slowly those were also smuggled in past the British blockade. But even before then , before Beaumarchais' dummy corporation, 3,000 muskets came in from France to Connecticut.

In all, there were an estimated 102,000 French firearms imported during the Revolutionary War, and over a million and a half pounds of gunpowder. And of course the great expense of aid to the Colonists would later be a large ingredient in the fiscal breakdown of the French government, and the ensuing French Revolution.

( If it seems curious that the number of arms should greatly exceed the number of soldiers, you have to remember that this was a war: many muskets were captured, destroyed or lost on campaign. When General Howe abandoned Boston in 1776, for example, he took several hundred muskets made for the militia with him.)

TL:DR France, pas question

M.L. Brown Firearms in Colonial America