"The Gun that Could have Won America": The Notorious Ferguson Rifle - Guns.com

While the American longrifle proved the bane of British troops early in the Revolution (particularly at the siege of Boston in 1775), the British later came to have little respect for American riflemen. American longrifles took too long to load (about a minute with loose powder/ball - there were no paper cartridges for rifles, and each rifleman had to mould his own ball due the variations in caliber among rifles) and could not mount a bayonet. On the other hand, British light infantrymen could fire three rounds per minute (using paper cartridges) and were able to use bayonets. So they just double-timed against American rifle units who didn't have time to reload and had to flee. George Washington recognized this and broke up his large rifle units, and thereafter only employed riflemen as skirmishers when they could be backed up by regular troops armed with muzzleloading smoothbore muskets equipped with bayonets. Used in this fashion, American rifleman Timothy Murphy (acting as a sniper in a tree), as part of Daniel Morgan's riflemen, probably won the Battle of Saratoga in 1777 by killing the British General Fraser at long range, thus nullifying a British attempt to rally against an American attack. I own two recreated flintlock longrifles. I have learned that in order to have accuracy beyond 100 yards, one practically must grow up with that rifle and "learn it." That's what American riflemen did, but even so they were lucky to hit anything smaller than a horse at 300-400 yards. At 200 yards or less, however, they were deadly.

I always shake my head at that. There were repeating rifles during the Civil War, and you know the writing was on the wall that they were the way of future warfare. The U.S. military didn't adopt one, however, until the Krag. Still, doctrine was to fire as a single-shot rifle unless ordered or overrun until the Garand in WWII - almost 100 years after repeaters were reliably developed.