COLONISTS WERE AT A DISADVANTAGE WHEN IT came to weapons. Though there were individual craftsmen who made guns, there were no gun factories, thanks to the Crown, and the guns they could afford to import were obsolete or damaged. So patriots seized local arsenals when they could, and France started sending weapons in 1776, thanks in part to the diplomatic negotiations of Benjamin Franklin, Lafayette, and others. As a result, patriot troops carried a mix of muskets, rifles, and other guns.
Every soldier was issued a musket, bayonet, and cartridge box, as well as tools to keep everything working. They carried rations and gear in haversacks and slung canteens over their shoulders.
The muskets were long—five feet or more—and could fire a single ball or a cluster of pellets, called shot. Musket balls ranged from about a half inch to nine-tenths of an inch in diameter and fit loosely with the gunpowder in the gun’s smooth barrel, or bore. Paper cartridges of powder and ball made the guns easy to load, but their effective range was short. Bayonets attached to the end of the muskets were used in hand-to-hand combat, causing devastating puncture wounds.
Muskets weren’t as accurate as rifles, the weapon of choice of colonists along the frontier, who brought their guns with them when they joined the fight against the Crown. Long rifles had grooved barrels that spun a tight-fitting ball as it blasted out of the bore, stabilizing its flight so that it could hit a target three hundred yards away, several times the range of a musket. But rifles took longer to reload, and their grooves were easily clogged with gunpowder residue. They also couldn’t be fitted with bayonets. Because they weren’t as standardized as muskets, soldiers had to practice more with them.
Patriots from the frontier also armed themselves with tomahawks, the Algonquian word for the light axes American Indians used as throw weapons or in hand-to-hand combat. Originally made from stone and wood, the weapons were adopted by colonists, who crafted them from sharpened metal and wood.