Longtime local historian Jack L. Dickinson has published a new book that’s something of a departure from his previous books on the Civil War or West Virginia history.
Working to compile a new catalog of the Herman P. Dean Firearms Collection at the Huntington Museum of Art, Dickinson spotted a Revolutionary War-era flintlock musket with an identification label attributing it to a Colonial Committee of Public Safety.
Having no idea what a Committee of Public Safety was, he was determined to find out. As he researched, he discovered that each of the 13 Revolutionary War-era colonies had various such county-level committees, more or less charged with organizing the armed resistance to the British.
Now the local historian has turned his research into a book. “Where’s Your Musket, Patriot?” It’s a slim little paperback that details the virtually untold story of where and how the Patriots got their guns. To arm the Patriots against the well-supplied British troops, American officials gathered weapons from an array of different sources.
Dickinson cites “four principal sources the colonies had for procuring muskets.”
First and most obvious, many men took their own muskets with them when they set off to fight. “Many of the first American soldiers,” Dickinson writes, “fought with the fowlers and rifles which hung over their fireplaces.”
Second, after a battle with the British, the Americans would make a point of collecting any British weapons that had been discarded and left behind. When complete guns could not be recovered, pieces were gathered and turned over to skilled gunsmiths to reassemble them into working firearms.
Third, the Committees of Safety (and later the Continental Congress) contracted with gunsmiths to manufacture guns.
Says Dickinson: “The main part of my little book (124 pages) concerns how they contracted with local gun makers to make copies of the British ‘Brown Bess’ musket. I’ve written a chapter on each of the 13 colonies, and included a list of the gun makers in each colony. Virginia had several, with a pocket of them in the Eastern Panhandle of today’s West Virginia.”
Fourth, guns were imported, either directly from Europe or from ports in the West Indies. “The ports there were swarming with war profiteers who had large stocks of both good and bad European arms.”
“Regardless how the Committees of Safety obtained the weapons, they succeeded in arming militia groups that helped win the Revolution,” concludes Dickinson. “Thus, the members of the Committees were the unsung heroes of the Revolution.”
“Where’s Your Musket, Patriot?” seems likely to interest not just gun collectors but any history-minded reader interested in the American Revolution. It’s available at Amazon.com and locally at Booktenders Bookstore, 621 Central Ave. in Barboursville.
James E. Casto is the retired associate editor of The Herald-Dispatch and the author of a number of books on local and regional history.
James E. Casto is the retired associate editor of The Herald-Dispatch and the author of a number of books on local and regional history.
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