Where Those Pistols Really Came From

On Sunday I showed these pistols, reportedly taken from the saddle of Maj. John Pitcairn’s runaway horse during the Battle of Lexington and Concord. I didn’t actually have much to say about them; I just thought they were pretty.

On Monday I had dinner with Mike Monahan of the recreated 5th Regiment of Foot, among other fine folks, and he alerted me that there’s some doubt as to whether these really are Pitcairn’s pistols.

And indeed, this Cambridge history site says:

The pistols were made by the famous John Murdoch of Doune. However, the crest on the escutcheon plate is not that of the Pitcairns. Some historians hold to the legend of General [Israel] Putnam and the Pitcairn pistols, but other historians theorize that there was an error in identifying from whose horse the pistols were taken.

And this page on Pitcairn says:

the heraldic crest engraved on the escutcheon plates depicts three swords, with a snake twined around the middle one. This does not resemble the known crest of the Pitcairns of Forthar, a moon rising from a cloud. So whose the pistols really were is uncertain.

And Marianne Gilchrist’s article on Pitcairn at AmericanRevolution.org says both those things.

I’m not surprised to learn that these pistols probably aren’t Pitcairn’s. As I wrote back in my discussion of his death at Bunker Hill, because he was in command of the troops that fired on Lexington common, Pitcairn became the British officer that rural New Englanders loved to hate. So if they knocked any officer off his horse and grabbed his pistols, they’d likely decide that was Pitcairn.

In addition, I don’t think the Putnam family mentioned these pistols publicly until decades after the war—plenty of time for “memory creep” to improve a story.

A bit of Googling tells me that many heraldic authorities say “three swords, handles upwards, one in pale and two in saltier, environed by a snake,” is the family crest of Crosbies. (A bit more Googling could tell me what “one in pale and two in saltier” means.) So was there any British officer with Crosbie connections on Battle Road?

Yes, there was Capt. William Crosbie of the 38th Regiment’s grenadier company. He was apparently wounded on the first day of the war, and went on to serve as an aide de camp to Gen. Sir William Howe and Gen. Sir Henry Clinton. He shows up in Walking the Berkshires’ series on Knyphausen's Raid.