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776 pages, Hardcover
First published May 14, 2019
The limits of the musket even in close combat were clear enough after the daylong battle [of Lexington and Concord]. Later scholars calculated that at least seventy-five thousand American rounds had been fired, using well over a ton of powder, but only one bullet in almost three hundred had hit home. The shot heard round the world likely missed. Fewer than one militiaman in every ten who engaged the column drew British blood, despite the broad target of massed redcoats. A combat bromide held that it took a man’s weight in bullets to kill him…
So slender that he seemed to lack shoulders, he had a receding chin, high forehead, tiny hands, and small, deep-set eyes; to call Lee homely was to insult homely men. “His nose is so large,” a German officer wrote, “that its shadow darkens the other half of his face.” Despite the fancy uniforms, he was habitually unkempt and reputedly owned but three shirts, each in such disrepair that he’d named them Rag, Tag, and Bobtail. The dogs trailed him everywhere, including a favorite Pomeranian…who sometimes sat with him at table, where they communed in what he called “the language of doggism…”
[Colonel Johann] Rall tried again to marshal his men…But the day was lost. American soldiers flocked through the cross streets to take firing perches in cellars, upper windows, and along the fence at Pott’s tanyard by the bark house and stone currying shop. Chipping their flints for a clean surface, picking out touchholes, and drying their priming pans, they fired, reloaded, and fired again, deliberately targeting officers…The clap of musketry echoed down King Street as hundreds of pullets pinged off walls, cobbles, and headstones. Wounded men dragged themselves into alleys and parlors; others bled to death in the gutter…