THE RELUCTANT RIFLEMAN
When Scottish sniper Captain Patrick Ferguson refused to shoot George Washington because the rebel American leader’s back was turned, he changed the course of history, reveals Richard Bath
Sniper Captain Patrick Ferguson changed the course of history by refusing to take an important shot
Most great Scots are known for what they did, and how their actions altered history. Not Captain Patrick Ferguson. The greatest shot in the British Army and the inventor of the revolutionary fast-firing breech-loading Ferguson Rifle, he is known primarily for what he did not do: kill George Washington.
Had Ferguson been a soldier of less refined sensibilities, history may have taken a profoundly different course. But Ferguson was a gentleman deeply imbued with Enlightenment values who refused to shoot Washington because the rebel general was unaware of his presence and had his back turned to Ferguson and his sniper unit.
The ramifications of that decision, taken at a point in which the outcome of the American War of Independence was on a knife-edge, became obvious as Washington masterminded the Continental Army’s ultimate victory over the Redcoats, with the victories at Saratoga in late September and early October 1777 proving to be the beginning of the end for British rule of their American colonies.
The day in question was 11 September 1777 and Ferguson’s crew of 100 green-coated marksmen had occupied a stand of trees at Brandywine Creek near Chadds Ford in Pennsylvania, covering the flank as General William Howe’s force of 13,000 British troops and Loyalists marched on the rebel capital of Philadelphia. When two horsemen appeared – one a
cavalry officer wearing the gaudy uniform of a European hussar, the other an American officer wearing a high-cocked hat and riding a bay horse – the officer moved forward through the heavy cover to ambush them.
But just as his men were about to pick off the two horsemen, Ferguson had a change of heart, standing up and yelling at them. When the American made to ride on, Ferguson levelled his rifle and the horseman finally got the message, slowly cantering away.
It was an act of chivalry that was to prove costly as Washington lost Philadelphia, but won the war. Not that Ferguson ever admitted to regretting his decision. On learning that the man he could have shot was Washington, whose diaries confirm that along with Polish war hero Count Casimir Pulaski he was ‘out reconnoitering and busily engaged’, Ferguson’s response to this revelation was unapologetic.
‘I could have lodged half a dozen balls in or about him, before he was out of my reach,’ said Ferguson. ‘But it was not pleasant to fire at the back of an unoffending individual, who was acquitting himself very coolly of his duty – so I let him alone.’ He later wrote that ‘I am not sorry that I did not know at the time who it was.’
Almost 150 years later, the Germans laughed at the initial reluctance of British soldiers to deploy snipers during the First World War, a tactic they believed to be underhand and dishonourable. Despite being a crack shot, Ferguson encapsulated that ambivalence. But then Ferguson was a son of the Enlightenment who grew up in gilded splendour in rural Aberdeenshire under the guidance of his father, the eminent judge Lord Pitfour, and his mother, a sister of celebrated literary patron Lord Elibank. Ferguson personally knew leading
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It was not pleasant to fire at the back of an unoffending individual
No man of his rank and years ever attained more military distinction
Enlightenment figures like philosopher David Hume and dramatist John Home.
Although Ferguson was a career soldier who gained his first taste of action as an enthusiastic 15-year-old cornet in the Scots Greys in Flanders and Germany during the Seven Years’ War, he was a curious mix of hard-nosed disciplinarian and principled aristocrat. He was also an energetic, brave, durable and at times unconventional soldier who, despite sustaining a badly damaged leg that ended his service in the Seven Years’ War, went on to serve with distinction in putting down slave uprisings in the West Indies before decamping to sleepy Nova Scotia.
By the time 33-year-old Ferguson arrived in North America in 1777, he was an Army high-flier. As American historian Lyman C. Draper noted: ‘No man, perhaps, of his rank and years, ever attained more military distinction in his day than Patrick Ferguson.’ Ferguson was desperate to serve in North America. The West Indies had given him an appreciation of guerrilla warfare waged by local insurgents, and he was keen to see if he could negate the advantage the Americans’ famously accurate long rifles gave them against British troops using cumbersome and inaccurate Brown Bess muskets. The result was Ferguson’s rifle, the world’s first breech-loading rifle. Its rifled barrel increased the accuracy inordinately, it was three pounds lighter than the Brown Bess and was capable of firing seven aimed rounds per minute – more than double the musket’s rate of fire.
The military high brass were suitably impressed, and ordered enough to equip a company of 100 men, who were trained and led by Ferguson. Their first serious action was at Brandywine Creek when the Scot decided against killing Washington; and the next day his right elbow was shattered by a musket ball that almost led to amputation and would cause him pain until his death three years later.
His demise came on the border between North and South Carolina, by which stage circumstances had probably changed
Ferguson, or at least forced him to moderate the chivalry which saw him spare Washington. After smashing ten vessels of New Jersey-based privateers harassing British shipping, he was accused of massacring Pulaski’s Legion in a night attack after the Poles were sent to confront him.
After a series of successes in the Hudson Valley in late 1779, he was promoted to Major and sent southwards with 500 rangers to the crush the restless natives of the Carolinas by General Henry Clinton as the civil war became increasing uncivil. The fighting was brutal and relentless, and one night between Savannah and Charleston, says American historian Ernest B. Furguson in his excellent essay on his namesake, the Scot’s men ‘accidentally collided with a friendly force and in the darkness, a British bayonet sliced through his good left arm. Undaunted, for three weeks he
rode with his reins in his teeth.’
Sent into the backwoods after the fall of Charleston, Ferguson recruited loyalists where possible and put objectors to the sword. For his opponents in the Continental army – regulars augmented by local militias and partisans from beyond the Blue Ridge, skilled at shooting squirrels and fighting Indians – Ferguson had become a figure of hate. And when the loyalist cavalry of fellow British officer Colonel Banastre Tarleton massacred surrendering Americans at the Battle of Waxhaws in May 1780, the American rebels began to use the phrase ‘Tarleton’s quarter’ as meaning ‘no quarter offered’.
Ferguson did little to change perceptions of him when in late September 1780 he sent a message to the commander of the pursuing force of 1,500 backwoodsmen from the Carolinas, Virginia, Georgia and Tennessee to ‘desist from their opposition to the British arms,’ or ‘he would march his army over the mountains, hang their leaders, and lay their country waste with fire and sword.’
Unable to outrun his pursuers, Ferguson decided to fight at Kings Mountain, 35 miles west of General Cornwallis’ army at Charlotte. His 1,000 men were all loyalists, many of them militiamen, with Ferguson the only regular soldier on either side. His opposing commander, Colonel William Campbell from Virginia, told his attackers: ‘Let each man be his own officer. If in the woods, shelter yourselves and give them Indian play!’
The fighting was brutal, the triumphant backwoodsmen screaming up the hill with a high-pitched roar that would late become immortalised as the ‘Rebel Yell’. It is ironic that it was a sniper called Robert Young who shot Ferguson, conspicuous in his distinctive black-and-white shirt, from his horse as the Scot tried to rally his troops. Despite the white flag being waved, ‘Tarleton’s quarter’ applied and the Scot was shot eight times, one musket ball passing through his head.
In a final insult, while the other 157 dead loyalists were buried, Ferguson’s body was defiled (Tarleton alleged that ‘the mountaineers used every insult and indignity towards the dead body of Ferguson’) and left naked in the open, alongside that of his mistress ‘Virginia Sal’, to be consumed by the wolves.