Given troops didn’t wear armor, muskets take a while to reload and they arnt very accurate after 50 yards…or so I heard…wouldn’t there have been a niche in battles for longbow battalions?
The stock answer (really, why guns got a foothold over bows) is that bows take significant skill and training to fire with any accuracy and significant strength to draw – especially the English longbows people usually use as a comparison. Firearms are easier to use and, in mass, weren’t any less accurate being used by novices than a bunch of trained bowmen.
For more precision firing, the colonists made use of various hunting rifles and carbines.
If arrows were the projectiles, troops would start wearing armor again.
Well, there are other bows. The Welsh brought the longbow to perfection, but it takes considerable strength: they could have invited some Steppe dwellers to train them in composite bows, and then bought lots of little ponies. Lots and lots of little ponies.
People using bows and arrows against English people armed with muskets in the Americas didn’t fare very well in general…
There were any number of instances where bow and arrow guys did just fine against musket wielders; the long game, on the other hand, is a whole different bear. The difference lay in a variety of factors:
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At fifty yards or less, the musket’s generally a better weapon. Getting hit with a bow and arrow depends largely on where you’re hit. Getting hit with a musket ball will jack you UP, almost regardless of where you take the bullet; the whole hydrostatic shock thing and all. Sure, there are exceptions to both, but on average…
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It’s also a much better weapon for sniping; the bigger the bow, the more likely you are to give away your position. Not to mention wind factors, and a variety of other variables that any marksman already knows about.
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“If you want a good longbowman, start training his grandfather.” Longbows were great for a conscripted militia. They were not so hot for a professional army. Muskets are WAY easier to learn to use for individual or volley fire, and require a fraction of the physical strength to use effectively.
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Bows reload faster under most circumstances. So there’s that.
The American Indian understood the concept of war, but tactics, to him, were a vurra different beast than they were to these Europeans, who’d been gleefully slaughtering each other for centuries, and had gotten rather good at it. The iconic Indian victory was the Battle Of The Little Big Horn, which was the result of careful resource management and tactical assembly on the part of the Indians, and staggering stupidity on the part of General Custer, who nevertheless understood “supply trains” and “logistics” better than the Indians ever could… and didn’t bring along the women and kids in his travels, as the Indians had to.
The Indians were great at hit and run raids. Sustained military campaigns against a real army, not so much.
Didn’t black powder give away a sniper’s position?
Let’s say you’ve got an army of archers. What happens when they fight an army of swordsmen? The archers shoot, and the swordsmen run towards them. The archers may shoot a bunch of the swordsmen, but at some point the swordsmen reach the archers. Then what? Do the archers quickly drop their bows and pull out swords? That doesn’t work very well.
The way they solved this back in the day was that they surrounded their archers with infantry. So now you’ve got a group of archers surrounded by a group of pikemen. The archers fire at a distance, and when the enemy comes running up towards them, they face a whole row of guys with long pointy things. That ends up being pretty effective.
Muskets replace both the archers and the pikemen. The muskets can shoot at a distance, and can also be used like pikes.
This is what is going to give your group of archers a very bad day.
The muskets take a long time to reload, but you can help that by lining your guys up in ranks. One rank fires, then the second rank fires while the first starts reloading, then the third fires while the second rank starts reloading, and by that time the first rank is reloaded and ready to fire again. It takes each rank 15 seconds or so to reload, but the overall rate of fire is a volley every 5 seconds, which ain’t bad. Sure, it takes three times as many men to sustain that rate of fire, but remember, your archers have twice as many men because they need that group of pikemen surrounding them.
So let’s take some number of an archer/pikemen group and put them up against the same number of musketeers. The overall rate of fire isn’t that much in favor of the archers. Even though they fire faster, there’s only half as many of them. You’ve got twice as many musketeers firing, but at a third of the rate. All of the smoke from the musket also makes it difficult for the archers to see the musketeers, so that takes away a lot of the accuracy advantage of the archers. The archers end up just firing mass volleys of arrows into the smoke, which isn’t any more accurate or effective than the musket volleys. Generally, the muskets hit harder, but the archers are more accurate. Remove that accuracy, and the archers lose the slight advantage that they had. Now, even though the archers fire faster, the overall battle is fairly even.
Now the two armies charge at each other. Half of your archer army is pikemen, but the entire musketeer army functions as pikemen. So your archer’s pikemen are outnumbered 2 to 1. Eventually the pikemen fall, and the musketeers reach the archers. Maybe you have your archers carry swords for just this type of situation, but the archers can’t carry long weapons because they have to be able to fire their bows while their secondary weapon is sheathed. So the musketeers, with their pike-like muskets and bayonets, stab the archers long before the musketeers get within striking range of the archer’s swords, and the archers are slaughtered.
It’s the close-up bayonet fighting that does in the archers every time. Today we tend to think of bayonets as last-ditch weapons that you only use in an emergency, but back then, bayonet fighting was a major part of the battle, accounting for a third or more of all battlefield casualties. That didn’t change until the Civil War, when changes in musket technology and battlefield tactics turned the bayonet from a major player on the battlefield to something that caused less than 1 percent of battlefield casualties.
George Washington got his ass kicked up and down the battlefield until he went into Valley Forge. There, in addition to having his men die of disease, hypothermia, and malnutrition, he also got the survivors properly trained in military discipline and proper bayonet fighting. It was only after that training that his men were able to really go toe to to against the British troops.
Don’t think of it as muskets that shoot vs. bows that shoot. It’s army against army, and that includes both distance and close-up fighting. With archers, you have only half of your army able to fight. Either you’re fighting at a distance and your pikemen aren’t doing anything useful, or you are fighting close up and your archers aren’t doing anything useful. With muskets, your full army is engaged in both types of fighting. That’s a huge advantage.
Snipers were rarely used back then. Napoleon didn’t even permit rifles in his army. He didn’t think that they had any value. They took too long to reload, had to be cleaned often even during battles, and their accuracy on the battlefield was almost useless once everyone started shooting and the entire battlefield became obscured by smoke.
Snipers were also considered cowardly.
And yes, the black powder gave your position away as soon as you fired. Most snipers back then weren’t trying to stay concealed like a modern sniper. They were just trying to pick off individuals, like officers, as opposed to the regular troops who were just blasting volleys at the enemy with more of a shotgun type of effect.
Snipers in the Civil War were much more effective.
One last thing.
Rate of fire was critical for musket firing. Here’s a video of a guy firing a British infantry flintlock (aka Brown Bess musket) getting off 3 shots in 46 seconds. Being able to fire 3 or 4 shots per minute was a requirement of a musketeer back then.
(by the way, if you watch carefully, the last shot is a misfire that goes off after it should - flintlocks can be finicky).Cecil wrote an entire column on the question.
Upshot: yeah, being a good archer takes more training than they had time for, and even then it’s only the stronger soldiers that can use the good ones.
I’m currently enjoying reading Bernard Cornwell’s “Sharpe’s Rifles” series – right good stuff, and he goes into lovely detail on the advantages and disadvantages of rifles.
(The TV series was fun, too.)
You got here before me. In addition arrows didn’t offer the option of “buck & ball” and straight buck loads smoothbore muskets did. That was one of the reasons (as given by the Natives in some oral traditions) for them making the switch when/as early as possible.
To answer the OP in another way: bows and arrows had not been used in combat in Europe for two centuries, after gunpowder became widespread.
What would have been different about the Revolutionary War to reverse that trend?
Napoleon actually fielded dedicated Skirmisher units fielded from the best shots of his army to advance and fight as Snipers. They still used muskets, just got closer than riflemen.
Yeah, love that series.
To add to what others have said, bows take quite a bit of training and skill to use, especially firing in a coordinated fashion. They are vulnerable to cavalry and even other infantry if they close. Also, making bows of the type that would be useful takes skills as well as materials that most likely weren’t available to the colonists fighting for independence. The native bows weren’t up to this sort of military use, and I’m not sure if the type of yew tree favored for the English style long bow was available in large quantities to the colonies…certainly the craftsmen to make the things weren’t there, since the long bow had gone out of style long before the Revolutionary War.
Myself, I always used to wonder why the colonists didn’t adopt skirmisher tactics and fight the British in hit and run type running battles, instead of try and fight them in set piece battles where the British had essentially all the advantages, having a regular army while we didn’t really, especially at the start. The consensus of military types I was discussing this with is that skirmisher forces were really vulnerable to cavalry, and even though the English didn’t have a lot of cavalry during the war they had enough to have really cut us up had we tried to go that route more than we did. I’m not sure I’m convinced completely, but seems sounds reasoning. I think the assumption is that a lot of the generals back then were just stupid and hide bound, but that they actually did have good, solid reasons for things like massed infantry formations, even though it seems clear that doing so you are going to be very vulnerable to artillery, aside from the fact that you had to get right up on each other to hit anything, insuring a huge slaughter when you clashed.
Perhaps if you had enough guys to form an army, there were not enough trees to hide behind and sharp shoot.
Where bows were still used, both because not everybody had a gun, but also for indirect fire when troopers were pinned down.
Ever heard of Timothy Murphy, sniper/sharpshooter? He almost single-handedly changed the course of the Revolutionary War at Battle of Saratoga, to be succint. He was distinctly instructed to take out the leader/commander of the opposing ground forces so as to create disarray of the ‘charge’ upon the almost-Americans. Climbing a tree, he did just that and then some. His action(s) are considered to be VERY important and a major influence among the 15 most important turning-points of any battle(s)/wars in world history (!).
Kudos, Mr Murphy, and damn good job ya did 
A coward you were not - a well-trained soldier doing what needed to be done, yeah; you came through when it was the most important time of your/our life (afaik). Just wanted to say snipers have a place in warfare when used effectively to an end - no cowardice whatsoever, imho. The win at Saratoga, via Murphy’s take-downs, influenced France’s decision to support the colonies’s war efforts, IIRC. Just wanted to honor Mr Murphy’s actions and importance thereof…not a well-known factoid, I believe.
But back to arrows and whatnot…
But you were not supposed to do that, shoot at officers.