Clan Ferguson · 1777
Patrick Ferguson does not shoot Washington
On the afternoon of the eleventh of September 1777, on the wooded high ground above Brandywine Creek in Pennsylvania, in the opening hours of the battle that would clear the way for the British capture of Philadelphia, Captain Patrick Ferguson of the 70th Regiment of Foot, twenty-three years old, son of Lord Pitfour of the Court of Session in Edinburgh, the inventor of the breech-loading flintlock rifle that bore his name (the first practical breech-loader adopted by any European army, in his own experimental company of one hundred riflemen present on the field), saw two American officers ride past him at about a hundred yards. One was a tall man in a French-pattern hussar hat who was, by Ferguson's own letter to Lord Pitfour written four days later, *probably an officer of high rank*; the other was a younger officer in continental blue. Ferguson, in cover with his rifle drawn, had a clear shot. He chose not to take it. The two men rode on. The next morning, in the field hospital after a musket-ball had broken his right elbow at the second action of the day, Ferguson was told by a wounded American officer that the tall man on the bay horse had been Commander-in-Chief George Washington and his French aide the Count Casimir Pulaski. Ferguson, by his own letter, did not regret the choice. *I could have lodged half a dozen balls in or about him,* he wrote to his father, *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.*
It is twenty past two on the afternoon of the eleventh of September 1777, on the wooded slope above the south-east bank of Brandywine Creek, near Chadds Ford in southeastern Pennsylvania, in heavy late-summer light. He is twenty-three years old. He is Captain Patrick Ferguson of the 70th Regiment of Foot, son of James Ferguson, Lord Pitfour of the Court of Session in Edinburgh, schooled at the Royal Military Academy Woolwich, in command of an experimental company of one hundred riflemen on the British right flank, equipped with the breech-loading flintlock rifle of his own design, the only such company in any European army.
He has, in front of him in cover, the rifle on a shooting-rest cut in the bark of a cedar. The rifle is set for one hundred and twenty yards, the Ferguson sight calibrated for the heavy ball, the breech freshly screw-loaded and primed. He has, in the past hour, taken three American sergeants at over a hundred yards in single shots. The breech-load gives him three or four rounds a minute against the standard Brown Bess at one and a half, and from cover, against the standard linear American line at fifty yards, he is a fatal proposition.
Two American officers come up the trail at the foot of the slope at the walk. The leading officer is on a bay horse. He is over six feet, by Ferguson's later estimate; he is in the dark blue of a continental general officer, a French-pattern hussar hat, no rank-flash visible at this range, no aide flag. The second officer is on a chestnut horse, in a foreign uniform Ferguson cannot place at the distance, and is some years younger. The two have come up the trail as if they have been on a routine reconnaissance. They are at one hundred yards. They are in cover from the south but they are in Ferguson's clear sight from the cedar.
He thinks: the senior officer is a general. The general is on his own with a single foreign aide. The general should not be on his own at this point on a battlefield.
He thinks: the rifle is set. The breech is loaded. I have between three and five seconds at this range, and the senior officer goes down at the first round.
He thinks: to take a man at a hundred yards from cover, in the back, who is not aware he is being engaged and who is at the moment doing his ordinary duty as an officer of the army opposite, is the part of this trade that I do not enjoy.
He thinks: I have killed eleven men in two engagements this summer. None of them was at a hundred yards from cover. None of them was a general officer.
He thinks: if I do not take the shot in the next five seconds the two go past me down the trail and I do not have a second opportunity.
He stands up out of the cover at the cedar. He calls to the senior officer at a moderate voice, in English: halt, sir, or you are a dead man.
The two officers do not stop. They turn the horses, by Ferguson's account, with deliberate coolness, and at a brisk trot but not a gallop they ride down the trail in the direction they had been going. Ferguson tracks the senior officer with the rifle as he goes. He has, for four or five seconds, a steady centre-of-back shot. He thinks, by his own letter: I could have lodged half a dozen balls in or about him before he was out of my reach.
He chooses not to fire.
The afternoon went on. At about three o'clock Ferguson's right arm was broken at the elbow by a musket-ball from a returning American picket; he was carried to the rear and operated on at the field hospital by surgeon Robert Jackson. By the next morning, by Ferguson's letter, a wounded American captain in the same hospital told him that the tall officer on the bay horse the previous afternoon had been Commander-in-Chief George Washington and the foreign aide had been Brigadier-General the Count Casimir Pulaski, the Pole then commanding the Continental Army's cavalry. Ferguson, having had the night to think about it, by his own report to his father, did not regret the choice. He wrote: 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.
Patrick Ferguson recovered the use of the right arm partially over the next year, taught himself to shoot left-handed, and was given command of a corps of British and Loyalist provincial troops in the southern campaign of 1780. He was killed at the battle of King's Mountain in South Carolina on the seventh of October 1780, hit by eight rifle-balls in a long-range exchange with an American mountaineer rifleman force. He was thirty-six. The Ferguson rifle, his own invention, was withdrawn from British service after his death, on the grounds that the breech mechanism was too delicate for line-infantry use; six surviving examples are in the National Army Museum at Chelsea. Washington commanded the Continental Army for the rest of the war and was elected first President of the United States in 1789. The legend, that the United States exists because Patrick Ferguson chose not to fire on the eleventh of September 1777, is, in the form in which the legend is repeated in the popular military histories, an overstatement; Washington went on to lose Brandywine, lose Germantown, and very nearly lose the war in the dark winter at Valley Forge that followed. The legend in its precise form is, however, the question every careful biographer of Washington has had to ask: that the Continental command depended on the personal survival of one man, and that the personal survival of that man, on a Pennsylvania trail at twenty past two on a particular September afternoon, depended on the trigger discipline of a Scottish rifle captain who did not believe in shooting men in the back.