Light Dragoon Pistol

Origins

For most of the eighteenth century British cavalry carried a long, heavy pistol with a twelve-inch barrel of "pistol bore", about .56 inch. During the Seven Years' War the army began to raise a new kind of cavalry. Light troops were added to the dragoon regiments in 1756, and in 1759 the first complete regiments of light dragoons were formed, beginning with the 15th under George Augustus Eliott. These regiments were meant for scouting, outposts, raids and pursuit, and they were given lighter horses and lighter equipment. A new pistol was approved for them at about the same time. It is now usually called the Pattern 1759 Light Dragoon pistol, or the Eliott pattern, after the regiment's colonel.

Design & Construction

The new pistol had a round barrel nine inches long and of carbine bore, about .65 inch. The larger bore meant that a trooper's pistols and his carbine could use the same ball. The barrel was held to a walnut stock by a pin and a tang screw, and the furniture was plain brass: a rounded butt cap without the long side straps of earlier pistols, a trigger guard, a single ramrod pipe and a flat side plate. The flat lock was normally engraved with the crown and royal cipher and with the word TOWER, or on some early examples a contractor's name. The ramrod was at first of wood and later of steel. There were no sights. The pistol was a smoothbore, and with a loose-fitting ball it could be relied on only at a few yards.

Like other British service arms of the period it was not made in one factory. Barrels and locks came from contractors, mostly in Birmingham and London, and the parts were set up into finished arms under the Board of Ordnance. The same system produced the Brown Bess Musket and the Navy's Sea Service Pistol.

Combat Use

Troopers carried the pistols in a pair of leather holsters at the front of the saddle. Cavalry officers of the time taught that the sword decided a mounted fight, and that firing from the saddle wasted the force of a charge. The pistol was therefore a weapon for outpost duty, for giving the alarm, and for the close scramble after lines had met, when a man could put the muzzle almost against his opponent. It could not be reloaded quickly on horseback, so each trooper had in effect two shots.

Two regular regiments, the 16th and 17th Light Dragoons, served in America, and the 17th stayed for the whole war. Loyalist cavalry raised in America was armed from the same British stores where supplies allowed. The best known was the mounted part of the British Legion under Banastre Tarleton, which rode down the fleeing American army after the Battle of Camden in August 1780 and fought again at the Battle of Guilford Court House. At the Battle of Cowpens in January 1781, American accounts say that Tarleton fired a pistol at William Washington in a brief clash at the end of the action and wounded his horse, though the details differ from one telling to the next.

The American cavalry used whatever pistols it could find: captured British arms, French pistols, and privately made pieces such as the Kentucky Pistol. The Light Dragoon pistol was also copied directly. The Rappahannock Forge at Falmouth, Virginia, run by James Hunter, made close copies during the war, and surviving examples are among the rarest American military firearms.

Legacy

The nine-inch, carbine-bore pistol stayed in British cavalry service in slightly altered forms through the wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, when light dragoons carried it alongside the 1796 Light Cavalry Sabre. By then many officers thought cavalry pistols were of little use, and their issue was gradually cut back. Percussion locks replaced flint in the 1830s and 1840s, and the revolver later replaced the single-shot pistol altogether. Original Light Dragoon pistols are now sought after by collectors of American Revolution arms, and reproductions are widely used by reenactors.