A Cultural History of Firearms in the Age of Empire

Karen Jones, Giacomo Macola

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409447528
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317188490
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Firearms have been studied by imperial historians mainly as means of human destruction and material production. Yet firearms have always been invested with a whole array of additional social and symbolical meanings. By placing these meanings at the centre of analysis, the essays presented in this volume extend the study of the gun beyond the confines of military history and the examination of its impact on specific colonial encounters. By bringing cultural perspectives to bear on this most pervasive of technological artefacts, the contributors explore the densely interwoven relationships between firearms and broad processes of social change. In so doing, they contribute to a fuller understanding of some of the most significant consequences of British and American imperial expansions. Not the least original feature of the book is its global frame of reference. Bringing together historians of different periods and regions, A Cultural History of Firearms in the Age of Empire overcomes traditional compartmentalisations of historical knowledge and encourages the drawing of novel and illuminating comparisons across time and space.

PART I
Adopting Guns: Environment, Class and Gender on the Imperial Frontier

Chapter 1
Guns, Violence and Identity on the Trans-Appalachian American Frontier

Matthew C. Ward

In 1860, residents of Frankfort, the state capital of Kentucky, sought to honour the memory of the most famous pioneer of their state, Daniel Boone. Boone had died in 1820 in Missouri, but 25 years later his body was reinterred in Frankfort. Now, another 15 years later, the town’s residents sought to mark his grave with a fitting memorial. The choice of memorial was significant – a 15-foot stone column with relief panels on each of its sides portraying scenes from Boone’s life. One panel depicted his wife, Rebecca, in a typical feminine domestic role milking a cow. The other three reliefs showed Boone in various masculine activities: in one Boone the hunter sits with a slaughtered deer at his feet, a rifle at his side; in another Boone stands offering advice to a fellow settler, a rifle in his hand; in the final relief he battles desperately with a Native American warrior, parrying his opponent’s blows with a rifle. That in every relief, and in almost every portrait ever painted, Boone is depicted bearing a Kentucky rifle says much about the association between the rifle and the image of Kentucky settlers in nineteenth-century America.1

By the early nineteenth century the rifle had become symbolic of the ‘First West’, the region across the Appalachian Mountains settled during and in the immediate wake of the Revolutionary War. Hunters, armed with rifles, were viewed as the archetypal settlers of the region; militiamen sniping from the cover of the woods, armed with rifles, were viewed as the region’s principal heroes of the Revolutionary War. However, it is surprising that a weapon based upon the German Jaeger, developed by gunsmiths in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and known to residents of early America as the Pennsylvania rifle, should become known by the early nineteenth century as the Kentucky rifle and have become intimately associated with the development of the Trans-Appalachian frontier.2

Figure 1.1 The Life of Daniel Boone from his memorial at Frankfort Cemetery, Kentucky

Courtesy of Matthew C. Ward.

In few places has the gun become so central to the imagery and identity of a region. Yet frontiersmen were not always so closely associated with their weapons and in many ways the association of the frontiersman and the rifle is highly ironic, for guns were more important to the Native American foes of early western settlers than they were to the settlers themselves. The arrival of firearms completely transformed the nature of Native American warfare. Before the arrival of European guns, Native Americans had fought large open battles sometimes even with the opposing armies lined up in ranks. The heavy causalities inflicted by firearms meant that this battle tactic was abandoned and replaced with what would become known as the ‘skulking way of war’. Not only did the arrival of firearms transform Native American warfare, but it also had a more profound effect on Native American society by transforming the nature and role of hunting. Pre-contact native cultures had relied on a mix of agriculture, hunting and gathering. By the eighteenth century hunting had become essential to the Native American economy, and the fur trade now supplied many necessities of life that had previously been produced in Indian villages. Gender roles were transformed, as women’s work, particularly agricultural labour, became less important. Competition between Native American peoples for skins, and between Native Americans and Europeans for land, dramatically increased conflict on the frontier and meant that guns were also essential for protection while hunting and travelling. Consequently, by the middle of the eighteenth century, Native Americans were almost certainly the most heavily armed people on earth.3

By contrast guns seem to have had a much slower impact on the life of Euro-Americans. Frontiersmen were not always skilled woodsmen. Before the outbreak of the Seven Years War in 1754, residents of the backcountry, particularly in the middle colonies and in Virginia, had little reason to use or possess firearms. Some early settlers were pacifist Quakers or Mennonites for whom the use of firearms was anathema; for others who did not have religious scruples against gun ownership, a gun was an expensive item to be purchased only if there was a clear need for its use for hunting or defence. In the middle of the eighteenth century a Pennsylvania rifle cost around four pounds sterling at a time when the average wages for an agricultural labourer were around two shillings and six pence per day.4 It therefore represented over one month’s income for a typical settler. In the colonies of New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Virginia in the mid-eighteenth century there seemed little need to possess a gun for defence. There had been no major Indian conflict on the frontiers of these colonies since the 1670s. A few settlers did hunt to supplement their meagre incomes and ventured into the woods. While English laws had forbidden hunting, in the North American colonies, hunting laws were steadily liberalised, although there were still some restrictions placed on what game could be hunted and in which season. A Virginia law of 1734, for instance, restricted the hunting of deer to the autumn, although there were few restrictions placed on those who needed to hunt ‘for the necessary subsistence of himself or family’.5

However, most of those who participated in the fur trade did not themselves head out west to hunt, but instead exchanged agricultural surpluses, particularly alcohol, directly with Indians who passed by their door. These small-scale trading activities were not encouraged, particularly when they involved, as they often did, the sale of alcohol, and the colonial authorities made repeated attempts to regulate liquor traders. Despite such attempts, the small-scale trade remained widespread and involved hundreds of families. However, while these families may have been involved in the fur trade, there was little need for them to own a gun.6

Settlers who sought principally to provide meat for their family may also have found more effective means than hunting with a gun. Before the 1770s, most settlers would have only had access to a musket. Muskets might have been of some use in hunting larger game, such as deer or bison, but for the smaller game that most settlers might have hunted in the colonial backcountry muskets were of limited use. They were heavy, weighting over 15 pounds, had a very short range, and the noise and smoke would scare away any game for miles. Except perhaps for the few settlers who lived on the very furthest western fringes of settlement, where larger game was more plentiful, if a backcountry settler wished to feed his family, it was far more efficient to trap small animals and birds or to fish, rather than to attempt to use an expensive gun in search of small game.7

During the Seven Years War complaints about settlers’ incompetence in the use of firearms were commonplace and were made by both British and American officers. For instance, William Parsons, a commander of the Pennsylvania provincial forces, reported that his men had great difficulty using their guns and were ‘generally as much afraid to fire them, as they would be to meet an Indian’.8 George Washington complained repeatedly about the Virginia militia’s lack of martial skills and in particular the ways in which instead of ranging quietly through the woods in search of the enemy, they would dash ‘hooping’ and ‘hallooing’, scaring off game and warning the enemy of their presence.9 Such comments can be found throughout the journals and letters of both British and American officers who served on the frontier during the Seven Years War. Much of the reason for this lack of familiarity with firearms seems to have been that many settlers did not own guns. Swiss-born British officer Colonel Henry Bouquet reported in 1758 that, as the Pennsylvania troops mustered, only ‘half … have their own Arms, the rest Walks with Sticks’.10

The Seven Years War, however, marked a turning point in the relationship between settlers and guns. Native American raiding parties had wrought havoc on the colonial frontier during the course of the war. Over 2,000 settlers were killed, even more captured, and settlers abandoned an area of around 30,000 square miles along the frontier from New Jersey to North Carolina. In 1763 war erupted again on the frontier in Pontiac’s War. Tales of Indian attacks and fear of Indian cruelty permeated backcountry settlements and became part of backcountry folklore. Whereas there had been no conflict on the frontiers for 80 years, the Seven Years War marked the first stage of continual conflict that some historians have termed ‘The Sixty Years’ War’. For the first time there were compelling reasons for backcountry settlers to possess a gun for self-defence.11

The Seven Years War and Pontiac’s War also dramatically increased the number of settlers who hunted in the west and literally opened up the west to settlers. Thousands of backcountry settlers had served in the provincial forces or had worked as teamsters or road-builders for the army and had seen the west first-hand. Daniel Boone, for instance, served as a teamster on Braddock’s expedition. Many were impressed by the fertility of the soil and the abundance of land in the west, and after the war sought to return to the west to hunt. The British Army facilitated the growth of hunting by constructing a network of roads and stations to move supplies and troops into the region. The new British posts in the west, such as Fort Pitt and Fort Vincennes, all paid hunters for any meat that they could supply, and therefore hunters could profit not only from the sale of their skins, but also from the sale of meat.12

By the 1760s, some ‘long-hunters’, such as Daniel Boone, were even venturing across the Appalachians on hunts lasting many months. James Dysart, for example, had emigrated from Ireland to Philadelphia in 1762. Over the next several years, Dysart gradually made his way to the western settlements of Pennsylvania and began to learn to hunt and to use the rifle. Towards the end of 1769 he enrolled in a party of around 40 men bound for Kentucky to hunt for up to a year. For these few men, hunting was both a viable commercial activity and, as Steven Aron has demonstrated, an opportunity to escape from farm work and emasculating dependence upon their fathers. The number of men who began to participate in such hunting expeditions was substantial. Angus McDonald wrote from Fort Burd, on Pennsylvania’s western frontier, ‘Here Comes Such Crowds of Hunters out of the Inhabitence as fills those woods at which the Indians seems very much disturbed and say the white people Kills all there Deer.’13 Obviously for hunters travelling across the Appalachians in search of game, there was a clear necessity to possess and be skilled in the use of firearms.

The American Revolution in the west further intensified the need for ordinary settlers to own guns for protection from attack. As pioneers crossed the Appalachian Mountains and founded new settlements in Kentucky, they faced almost constant attack from Indians, earning Kentucky the moniker of the ‘dark and bloody ground’. Attacks on frontier settlements could be sudden and unexpected, and there was every reason for settlers to keep their firearms close at hand. Joseph Smothers reported how a party of Indians had managed to surprise one frontier settlement and to get undetected into a cabin through the chimney, scalping one of the women inside and taking the other two captive before anyone even knew of the attack. Settlers in Kentucky had very pressing reasons to own guns, and particularly rifles, for defence, and had every reason to be skilled in their use.14

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Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures, Maps and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: New Perspectives on Firearms in the Age of Empire
• Part I Adopting Guns: Environment, Class and Gender on the Imperial Frontier
• Part II Resisting Guns: Edged Weapons and the Politics of Indigenous Honour
• Part III Controlling Guns: Gun Laws, Race and Citizenship
• Part IV Celebrating Guns: Firearms in Popular and Military Cultures
• Bibliography
• Index