The Regiment That Refused to Die

On November 16, 1776, a force of several thousand Hessian soldiers pushed up the rocky heights of northern Manhattan toward a crumbling American earthwork called Fort Washington. Defending the northern approach was a unit of frontier riflemen — barely 280 men — who had been in Continental Army service for exactly five months. They held their ground all day. When the fort fell, most of them marched into British captivity.

Contemporary accounts gave the regiment up for dead. They were wrong.

The Maryland and Virginia Rifle Regiment1 went on to fight at Trenton, Princeton, Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, and Saratoga. Elements of it scouted the Pennsylvania frontier and destroyed Mingo villages along the Allegheny River. It served four and a half years in total — longer than any other rifle regiment in the Continental Army. Wikipedia's editors chose its story as today's Featured Article, and it is worth understanding why a relatively obscure unit earned that distinction.

The Continental Congress authorized the regiment on June 17, 1776,1 combining three independent rifle companies that had been in service since 1775 — commanded by Captains Michael Cresap, Thomas Price, and Hugh Stephenson — with six newly raised companies, two from Maryland and four from Virginia. The result was nine companies of light infantry riflemen, organized exactly like the 1st Continental Regiment (the Pennsylvania Rifle Regiment) but accountable directly to Congress rather than to any single state: an Extra Continental regiment.

The men were recruited from the western counties of both states — Frederick and Harford in Maryland, and Berkeley, Frederick, Loudoun, Fauquier, Prince William, and Culpeper in Virginia.1 These were backcountry men, many of them experienced hunters and Indian fighters who carried the long-barreled Pennsylvania flintlock rifle rather than the smoothbore musket standard to most Continental infantry.

A Pennsylvania flintlock long rifle, circa 1775 — the weapon that gave rifle regiments their distinctive accuracy at long range. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

Field command went by seniority from the original 1775 companies: Stephenson (Virginia) as colonel, Moses Rawlings (Maryland) as lieutenant colonel, and Otho Holland Williams (Maryland) as major.1 At its peak in late 1776, the regiment numbered approximately 420 officers and enlisted men.

Then Stephenson died of illness, probably in September 1776, before the regiment ever saw a major engagement. Command fell to Rawlings.

By early November 1776, the regiment had joined Washington's Main Army in the New York campaign. About 280 men — roughly two-thirds of the regiment — were stationed at or near Fort Washington on the northern tip of Manhattan. The remaining 140 were still completing organization and recruiting back in Maryland and Virginia.1

On November 16, the British and Hessians moved against the fort with a coordinated assault from multiple directions. Rawlings' riflemen defended the steep northern approach against the Hessian columns — rocky ground that suited rifle fire from cover. They inflicted serious casualties and held through most of the day.1 It was not enough. When the fort's commander surrendered in the afternoon, roughly 2,800 Americans went into captivity. Among them were most of the Maryland and Virginia Rifle Regiment.

The attack on Fort Washington, November 16, 1776 — a watercolor by British Army officer Thomas Davies showing the assault from the south, with the Hudson River Palisades visible at right. From Wikimedia Commons.

Rawlings himself was taken prisoner. Major Otho Holland Williams was captured separately. The Wikipedia article notes that contemporaneous accounts of Fort Washington "convey the impression that it marked the end of the regiment as a combat entity."1 That impression, it turns out, was based on a fundamental miscount.

The 140 men who had never reached Manhattan were still free.

Washington reorganized the survivors into two composite rifle companies. Captain Alexander Lawson Smith commanded the Marylanders; Captain Gabriel Long commanded the Virginians. On December 24, 1776 — just over five weeks after the fall of Fort Washington — Washington reported to Congress that "a small part of Rawlins's regiment" was with his army above the falls of Trenton.1

Two days later, on December 26, both companies crossed the Delaware in the pre-dawn darkness with Brigadier General Hugh Mercer's brigade and fought at the Battle of Trenton.1 They fought again at Princeton on January 3, 1777. Six weeks after Fort Washington, the unit everyone had written off was walking up frozen New Jersey roads in the middle of the night.

During the winter at Morristown, the surviving men who had not already had smallpox were marched to Whippany for inoculation.1 Washington had ordered the procedure army-wide after the disease had torn through Continental ranks in 1776. It was the kind of unglamorous administrative detail — a cold march to a New Jersey town for a variolation procedure — that kept units functional through the war's long grinding middle.

Washington had wanted Daniel Morgan to take command as colonel and rebuild the regiment. Morgan had led one of the original 1775 rifle companies, and his connection to the unit ran deep. But Virginia appointed Morgan colonel of the newly formed 11th Virginia Regiment instead, and the colonel's slot in the rifle regiment was never filled again.1 The regiment would finish the war without a colonel.

In early June 1777, Washington created something new: a provisional elite force of the army's best riflemen, drawn from across the army, to be commanded by Daniel Morgan. Thirty-five officers and men from the Maryland and Virginia Rifle Regiment were selected, all serving under Captain Gabriel Long's Provisional Rifle Company.1

Morgan's Rifle Corps went north to join the army facing Burgoyne's invasion from Canada. At the Battles of Saratoga in September and October 1777, Morgan's riflemen operated as skirmishers and sharpshooters in the dense forest south of the Champlain Valley — exactly the kind of combat their long-range weapons were designed for. The battles at Freeman's Farm and Bemis Heights stopped Burgoyne's advance and led to his surrender on October 17, 1777, the turning point that brought France into the war on the American side.1

The rest of the regiment — those not selected for the Rifle Corps — stayed with the Main Army and fought through the Philadelphia Campaign. The Marylanders (Smith's company) were administratively attached to the 4th Maryland Regiment; the Virginians (Long's company) to the 11th Virginia. Both fought at Brandywine, Germantown, and Monmouth.1

Rawlings was eventually exchanged from British captivity in late 1777 or early 1778. He was assigned to command the prisoner-of-war camp at Fort Frederick in western Maryland and spent the next year trying to recruit his regiment back to strength. Washington wrote to Maryland's governor Thomas Johnson in December 1777 urging "that the most early and vigorous measures will be adopted, not only to make [Rawlings'] Regiment more respectable, but compleat."1 By the end of 1778, Rawlings had managed to enlist about 30 to 40 men. The regiment's Virginia contingent, meanwhile, had been quietly absorbed into the 11th Virginia by an act the Wikipedia article describes as technically exceeding the state government's authority — the regiment belonged to Congress, not to Virginia.1 Washington tacitly accepted it.

On January 23, 1779, Congress reorganized what was left of the regiment into three companies and reassigned it to Fort Pitt — the Continental Army's Western Department headquarters at the forks of the Ohio River, present-day Pittsburgh.1 The unit arrived in late May 1779 with approximately 100 enlisted men. A month later it lost nearly half of them: the three-year enlistments signed in 1776 expired.

Rawlings resigned on June 2, 1779, citing frustration at being unable to rebuild the unit.1 Captain Thomas Beall took command.

The regiment on the frontier was almost entirely Marylanders by now, the Virginia contingent long since absorbed. On the frontier it was known simply as the "Maryland Corps" or "Maryland Rifle Corps" — as Captain Adamson Tannehill later confirmed in writing, calling it "Rawlings Regt. – commonly called the Maryd. Rifle Corps."1

Fort Pitt in 1776, at the site of present-day Pittsburgh — the regiment's final post from 1779 until disbandment. From Wikimedia Commons.

In August and September 1779, the regiment joined Colonel Daniel Brodhead's expedition of roughly 600 men north along the Allegheny River, destroying Mingo and Munsee villages and burning crops.1 This was the western arm of Washington's coordinated 1779 offensive against Native nations allied with the British — the larger eastern wing being the Sullivan Campaign against the Iroquois Confederacy in New York.

The Brodhead Expedition aside, these were years of garrison duty and frontier patrol, with the regiment's small detachments rotating through a chain of frontier posts: Fort Laurens, Fort McIntosh, Fort Henry at Wheeling, and Holliday's Cove Fort.

In August 1780, Captain Beall was court-martialed at Fort Pitt. The charge was enlisting a British prisoner of war and then discharging him after issuing the man a recruitment bounty and regimental clothing. Washington's general orders of October 13, 1780, recorded the verdict: guilty of "discharging a Soldier after having been duly inlisted and receiving his regimental cloathing through private and interested views thereby defrauding the United States."1 Beall was dismissed. Captain Adamson Tannehill — one of the regiment's original officers, in service since 1776 — took command.

On November 1, 1780, Washington issued orders for a wholesale reorganization of the Continental Army, effective January 1, 1781. All Extra Continental regiments not affiliated with a specific state line — including the Maryland and Virginia Rifle Regiment — were disbanded.1

At the moment of disbandment, the regiment comprised 2 officers and 50 enlisted men.1

The officers were discharged on January 1, 1781. The enlisted men were transferred to the Maryland Line — but Fort Pitt was 300 miles from any Maryland Line unit, and no officers were present to supervise the relocation. The men were not actually transferred until November 1781, almost a year after the regiment officially ceased to exist.1

From June 17, 1776 to January 1, 1781: four years and six and a half months of continuous service. The Wikipedia article's designation stands — this was the longest-serving Continental Army rifle unit of the war.1

The Virginia elements of the regiment carry a direct institutional lineage into the present. The U.S. Army Center of Military History certified in 2003 that the 201st Field Artillery Regiment (United States) — a West Virginia National Guard unit — descends from those original Virginia rifle companies.1 Somewhere in the unit history of a National Guard artillery regiment in West Virginia, there is a line connecting back to Gabriel Long's Virginians crossing the Delaware in the dark on Christmas night, 1776.