Outfitting an American Revolutionary Soldier

[rollingb]

There's some good info here,........

https://ncpedia.org/history/usrevolution/soldiers

[Ohio Joe]

Another good read, Rondo. 

while it is a given that a smoothbore Musket can be loaded quicker then a Rifle,,, I personally have never thought or experienced that the rifle was that much slower to load - though yes - a smoothbore will always win out on speed loading / where the rifle will always win out on accuracy...

Again however - the muzzle loading "rifle" to me does not seem to take long to load at all.  When one thinks about it,,, after the ARW, was the Baker Rifle and Harper's Ferry Rifle's considered, "to slow to load" for military use? I don't believe so, otherwise they never would have been developed.

However I can understand the smoothbore muskets being preferred by the Armies of the world at that time simply because of the Bayonet charge that was bound to follow after a few exchanges of volley fire, and once you got your enemy on their heals retreating - you pretty much won the field & the battle.

There's some good reading in this post that really gets one's mind a thinking. 

[Oldetexian]

Thanks for sharing this article. Not only is it full of a lot of good factual information, it helps paint a vivid picture of the somewhat chaotic nature of the military during the Revolution. In many ways the military never changes. But this article clearly describes how our soldiers during the Revolution had to survive a much less organized system than any of us during the past several generations.