Patrick Ferguson does not shoot Washington

History is most often turned by the shots that are fired. Now and then it is turned by one that is not. The man who declines the trigger seldom knows what he has spared; he knows only the small private rule he has kept, and the rule, in that instant, outweighs the war.

THE RIFLEMAN OF PITFOUR

Patrick Ferguson was twenty-three years old in the September of 1777, and already a marked man within his own service. He was the second son of James Ferguson of Pitfour, raised to the Court of Session in Edinburgh, and of Anne Murray of the house of Elibank, a family of advocates, soldiers and improving lairds. Schooled at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, commissioned into the Royals Greys at fifteen, he had drilled with Hessian jaegers in Flanders and learned the German trick of the screw-breech. By 1776 he had set down on paper, and in steel, a flintlock rifle loaded at the breech by a single turn of the trigger guard: four rounds in the minute, prone, in the rain, where the Brown Bess could fire one and a half standing. The Board of Ordnance had given him a hundred picked men, green jackets, and orders to America. He believed, as inventors do, that he carried in his hand the next age of war.

THE BRANDYWINE

On the morning of the eleventh of September the army of Sir William Howe stood west of the Brandywine creek in the County of Chester, Pennsylvania, with the rebel Continentals dug along the eastern bank under General Washington. Howe's plan was old and good: Knyphausen to demonstrate at Chadds Ford while Cornwallis swung wide by Trimble's and Jeffrie's, came down upon the rebel right, and rolled the line into the creek. Ferguson's rifle company was thrown out as a forward screen on the flanking column, edging through woods of cedar and second-growth oak above the south-east bank. The air was thick with the heavy light of a Pennsylvania late summer; the corn in the bottom fields was full and yellow; the creek ran low. By two o'clock his men had taken three American sergeants in single shots at over a hundred yards, and were lying in cover along the lip of the slope, waiting for the column behind them to close.

THE CEDAR

He had cut a notch in the bark of a cedar for a rest. The rifle lay in it as quietly as a level. The breech was screw-loaded with a heavy ball, the sight set for one hundred and twenty yards; the priming was dry. Down at the foot of the slope two officers came up the trail at the walk, as if returning from a routine reconnaissance, taking no precaution. The leading man rode a bay horse; he was over six feet, in the dark blue of a Continental general, a French-pattern hussar hat low against the sun, no aide-de-camp, no colour flying. The second, on a chestnut, was younger and wore a uniform Ferguson could not name at the distance, something Polish or Hungarian in the cut of the dolman. They were at a hundred yards. They were in cover from the south, and in his clear sight from the cedar.

A SECOND OF TIME ON THE TRAIL

Here the afternoon dilated, the way a held breath dilates a room. The senior officer was a general; the general was alone on a trail with one foreign aide; the general should not have been alone, and the breech was loaded, and the wind through the cedar was steady from the north-west, and a man trained as Ferguson was trained measures these things in the time another man takes to draw a watch from a fob. Three rounds in the next twenty seconds, certainly; the first into the centre of the dark blue coat between the shoulders, where the spine meets the heart. He had killed eleven men since June and had thought afterwards of none of them; they had been in the line, with arms in their hands, in the smoke and shout of a fair fight. This was not that. This was a man at his ordinary duty, acquitting himself very coolly, as he would write four days later to his father at Pitfour, his right arm in splints and his pen held in a borrowed hand. To take such a man from cover, in the back, at a hundred yards, by the trick of a screw-breech he had himself invented, was a piece of the trade that did not sit upon him. He stood up out of the cedar. He called, in a moderate voice, that the gentleman would halt or be a dead man. The two officers turned their horses with what he would afterwards describe as deliberate coolness, neither spur nor flight, and rode at a brisk trot down the trail in the direction they had been going. He tracked the senior man with the rifle for the four or five seconds the back was offered to him. He could, as he later wrote, have lodged half a dozen balls in or about him before he was out of my reach. He did not fire. The trigger guard stayed cool against the curl of his finger. The two riders went into the trees, and the trees took them.

THE FIELD HOSPITAL

An hour later a returning picket put a musket-ball through his right elbow at thirty paces. The bone shattered into the joint; the surgeon Robert Jackson took him at the field dressing-station behind the line and saved the arm, though not its use. He lay through the night on a cot of green deal, the arm strapped along a board, and listened to the army talk of victory. Brandywine had gone for the King: Washington's line had been turned, Philadelphia lay open, Howe would have the rebel capital within the fortnight. In the cot beside him an American captain, taken with a thigh wound, asked who had been in the field that afternoon on the British right with rifles. They fell to talking, soldier to soldier, in the way of men who have stopped, for the night, being enemies. The American had ridden past with a message at about two o'clock and had seen, he said, the Commander-in-Chief himself going forward on the bay horse to look at the British line, with only the Pole Pulaski for company, that mad Pole, lately given the horse. Ferguson lay still. He did not name what he had not done. He turned the thing over in his mind through the small hours, the way a man turns a coin, and by the dawn had set it down where it belonged. It was not pleasant, he wrote on the fifteenth from a Quaker farmhouse near Dilworth, the letter dictated word by word to a fellow officer, 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 did not regret it. He never would.

THE BOARD OF ORDNANCE

While he learned to dress and shave with his left hand, his rifle was taken from him. The breech-loading company was broken up by general order within three months of Brandywine; the surviving rifles were collected into the Tower, and the men returned to line battalions with the Brown Bess. The reasons given by the Board of Ordnance were practical, that the screw-breech was too fine for the dirt of line service, that the ball moulds were non-standard, that a trained rifleman was a year's work and an angry private was six weeks'. The reason not given was the older one: that armies, like courts, distrust an invention that asks them to think again about a habit. Ferguson made no public complaint. He requested another command, drilled himself through a winter at Long Island to shoot with his left arm, and in 1779 was sent south, into the Carolinas, as inspector of militia under Cornwallis, with the local rank of major.

KING'S MOUNTAIN

He was killed on the seventh of October 1780, on the wooded crown of King's Mountain in South Carolina, by mountaineer riflemen from the Watauga and the Holston who had come over the Blue Ridge to find him. Eight balls struck him; one foot remained in the stirrup as the horse dragged him down the slope. He was thirty-six. He was buried that night by his enemies in a shallow grave under a cairn of stones, in a cow-hide for want of a coffin, with the Virginia woman who had ridden with him laid beside him. The Ferguson rifle survived him by inches: six examples are kept now in the National Army Museum at Chelsea, their breech-screws bright, their stocks darkened by two and a half centuries of handling, the only working specimens in the world of the first practical breech-loader adopted by a European army. Washington went on, after the lost field of Brandywine and the lost field of Germantown and the long cold of Valley Forge, to take the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown and, in the April of 1789, the oath of the first Presidency of the United States in New York.

THE THING NOT DONE

The legend, in the form in which it travels, says that the United States exists because a Scottish captain at Brandywine declined to shoot a tall man in a blue coat in the back. The legend, in that form, is too large for the day; Washington would lose Brandywine that evening, lose Germantown a month later, and come within a hard winter of losing the war. The legend, in its truer form, is the question that every patient biographer of Washington has been obliged to set down and consider: that the Continental command rested, in the autumn of 1777, upon the survival of one man, and that the survival of that man, on a wooded trail above the Brandywine creek at twenty minutes past two on a September afternoon, rested upon the trigger discipline of a Scottish officer who would not fire at a back. Of the great moments offered to inconspicuous men, this is among the strangest: the one in which the moment is met, and met honourably, by not being seized. Patrick Ferguson kept the small rule and lost the great chance, and was content. The cedar by which he stood is long gone; the trail has been ploughed into pasture; the rifle sleeps in its case at Chelsea, the breech-screw turning still, as quietly as it ever did, one quarter turn for a clean load.