Notecards
Williamsburg, VA, Historical Interpereter. Interview. 20 Oct. 2016.
“Take that idea of standardization and throw it out the window.”
“You have a huge hodgepodge of weapons going on here.”
The militia is an armed institution that every person that is free, landowning, able bodied, and above the age of 16 and under the age of 60. If you are all those things you have to be part of the militia by law. The militia is essentially a bunch of civilians with guns.
The government requires you to have a weapon if you are in the militia. The most common job in Virginia is farming so a lot of people would get a gun that they could use to kill animals on their land. This gun would most likely be a rifle. There is no way to use this as a close quarters weapon.
That is why there were military muskets, which you could spear people with the bayonet. It is standardized so everybody can switch out parts without having to worry about compatibility. This also made switching ammo a lot easier. That is what differentiates the militia from the military equipment wise.
The bad part of having a short barrel is because of the inaccuracy and that it would not be as effective to spear people with.
Almost all of the weapons in the European armies are pretty much the same and work the same way. This makes it so there was never really a weapons advantage between militaries.
The flintlocks in Jamestown were very unreliable, so the matchlock mechanism was a lot more popular The flintlocks in the end of the 17th century was when they started to become reliable and more popular. The flintlock was a lot easier to load and was more safe than the matchlock which had a burning piece of rope that could blow them up.
“Take that idea of standardization and throw it out the window.”
Everybody was using different weapons.
Some were using English muskets some were using French muskets some were using shotguns.
From home and some people were using Dutch guns.
“You have a huge hodgepodge of weapons going on here.”
The next big leap in firearm technology will be the percussion cap which is a tiny little copper cap that is put over a tube that gets hit by a hammer. It is filled with mercury so when the mercury gets crushed it is always gonna spark.
The Americans had a magazine in Williamsburg because they needed a place to store gunpowder and weapons. The way the historical interpreter talked about everything made it seem like the Americans were desperate, probably because they are aware that they are small and that Natives might attack them, or that another country might attack them, assuming that this is before the Revolutionary War. All of this information is important because it is talking about all of the different types of weapons and their best uses in the Revolutionary War, in which without the Americans having weapons we would have lost. I wonder why the Americans had a militia and a military? I infer that this is because they did not have a big enough military to post throughout the colonies, so they would station their military troops in important areas and have each colony have their own untrained militia. I understand that most people during this time were farmers but what if someone wasn't a farmer? How would they choose what weapon to get then? I am also confused about why they had bayonets on their muskets if they could just slash them with their swords. Were there any soldiers that had rifles if they were mostly engaging at long range? Or did they all just have muskets in uniform. I think that it is really cool that all of the guns in the European armies were the same, but what about the swords? Were there any trends in European swords? Or did they all have a different style to them? What was the breaking point in the end of the 17th century that made it so flintlocks were more popular than matchlocks? I think that it is so neat how guns evolved in the span of 200 years, this makes me think about how our guns will look like in 200 years. Maybe we will all have laser guns? Who knows?
Created: 10/24/2016 09:42 AM