Huzzah76 Rules of Command, Rule 6: When Speed Is Your Weapon Do Not Slow Down to Reload
Wayne at Stony Point, July 15-16, 1779
August 21, 2026 | AmRev Resurrected
An hour before the assault, Anthony Wayne wrote a letter to a friend.
“This will not reach you until the writer is no more.” He asked his friend to look after his children. Then he folded the letter, sealed it, and led 1,150 men into the dark toward a British fort that everyone agreed was impregnable.
His orders to his men were precise: fix bayonets, leave your muskets unloaded, and do not fire a single shot under any circumstances. If any man raised his musket from his shoulder before ordered, the officers were to run him through. The entire assault would be fought in silence with cold steel. Speed and darkness were the only weapons that mattered. A single musket shot would give away the columns and cost them both.
Stony Point fell in less than an hour.
THE SITUATION
By the summer of 1779, the war in the North had settled into a grinding stalemate along the Hudson River valley.
The British held New York City and had extended their control up the Hudson, fortifying key positions to control river traffic and cut off New England from the middle states. Stony Point was one of those positions. It sat on a rocky promontory jutting into the Hudson, rising nearly 150 feet above the water on three sides, connected to the mainland by a narrow neck of tidal marshland. The British had fortified it heavily: two lines of earthworks, abatis of sharpened branches in front of the walls, a garrison of roughly 560 regulars under Lieutenant Colonel Henry Johnson.
Washington needed to strike. He had strategic reasons for wanting Stony Point taken and political reasons for needing a victory. The war had been quiet in the North for over a year. French alliance had not yet produced the decisive campaign everyone expected. American morale needed a win.
Washington surveyed the position himself and sent Wayne a plan of attack on July 10. Three columns: a northern flanking column, a southern flanking column led by Wayne personally, and a central diversionary force that would attack directly across the neck with the only loaded muskets in the operation. The flanking columns would go in silent and fast with unloaded muskets and fixed bayonets. Their only chance of success was to reach the walls before the garrison could organize a coherent defense. Any shot from either flanking column would betray the approach and allow the British to concentrate their fire.
Wayne had seen this tactic work before. He had been on the receiving end of it.
THE DECISION
On September 20, 1777, a British general named Charles Grey had hit Wayne’s encampment at Paoli, Pennsylvania with a nighttime bayonet assault. Grey had ordered his men to remove the flints from their muskets so no accidental shot could give the attack away. His men came out of the dark with bayonets and killed or wounded over 200 Americans in minutes. Wayne’s men never had a chance to organize a defense. The assault was over before they understood what was happening.
Wayne demanded a court martial over the Paoli defeat. He was acquitted. He spent the next two years carrying the memory of what a silent night assault could do, filed in the part of his mind where a commander keeps the things he intends to reverse.
Stony Point was the reversal.
On the afternoon of July 15, 1779, Wayne’s force moved through ten miles of difficult terrain over Dunderburg Mountain, arriving just out of sight of the British position at 8 PM. The assault would begin at midnight. Wayne inspected his columns, confirmed the orders, wrote his letter, and waited.
At midnight the columns moved. The northern and southern flanking forces went forward in silence. Each was led by a twenty-man volunteer unit that went first into the abatis and the British fire with nothing but axes and bayonets. These men were called the forlorn hope. They knew they would absorb the first volleys so the columns behind them could close the distance to the walls.
Wayne led the southern column personally. As his men cleared the abatis and began climbing the walls, a British musket ball struck him in the head. The wound knocked him down. He refused to be carried off. He told his men to carry him into the fort or leave him where he fell. They carried him forward. He was inside the walls before the fighting ended.
The northern column breached the walls from the other side. The British garrison, attacked from two directions simultaneously in the dark, by men who had crossed marshland and scaled cliffs without firing a shot, had no coherent response. The fighting lasted less than an hour. Approximately 500 British soldiers were captured. Wayne’s losses were 15 killed and 83 wounded.
Wayne wrote to Washington immediately after: “The fort and garrison with Colonel Johnson are ours. Our officers and men behaved like men who are determined to be free.”
THE FORMATION BEHIND THE DECISION
Anthony Wayne was born in 1745 at Waynesborough in Chester County, Pennsylvania, three miles from the site of the Paoli Massacre. His grandfather had been a British officer who purchased a large land grant in the Pennsylvania farmlands. Wayne grew up on that land, surveyed it, knew it the way a man knows terrain he has walked since childhood.
He was not a cautious man by nature. He pressed attacks. He held positions under fire past the point where most commanders fell back. He had been shot before Stony Point, had fought at Brandywine and Germantown and through the misery of Valley Forge. He had been court-martialed over Paoli and acquitted. He had learned at Paoli that speed and darkness and silence could destroy a superior force before it could respond.
The formation that matters for Rule 6 is not complex. Wayne had been hit by a tactic that worked. He spent two years understanding why it worked and storing the knowledge until he had the right target for it. When Washington gave him Stony Point, he recognized it immediately as the situation the tactic had been waiting for.
His order on the night of July 15 was absolute: no man fires his musket. The entire operation depended on that discipline. A single shot from either flanking column and the garrison concentrates. The surprise is gone. The men crossing the marshland in the dark become targets before they reach the walls. The forlorn hope dies for nothing.
Wayne understood that he had one advantage and that the advantage would vanish the moment anyone reached for it. He did not reach for it. He committed to the assault and refused to let his men slow down to reload.
He was shot in the head climbing the walls. He kept going.
THE CHARGE
You have a move that depends on speed.
You know which one. The pitch you are softening as you deliver it, adding qualifications to protect yourself from the rejection you are already anticipating. The hard conversation you are interrupting with your own hedges before the other person has a chance to respond. The decision you have committed to and are re-examining mid-execution because the execution is harder than the planning was. The ministry you said you would launch and are now surrounding with conditions that did not exist when you first said yes.
Slowing down to reload is not caution. It is the thing that costs you the assault.
Wayne’s men carried unloaded muskets into the dark and crossed a marsh and scaled a cliff under fire because the commander had made the commitment absolute. There was no fallback option. There was no moment where a soldier could stop and weigh the risks and decide whether to reload. The order was given. The columns moved. The only direction was forward.
The business pitch is either true or it is not. Deliver it. The hard conversation is either necessary or it is not. Have it. The ministry is either called or it is not. Launch it. Stop reloading. Stop giving yourself the option to slow down at the moment the assault requires speed.
Wayne was shot in the head at the base of the wall and told his men to carry him forward or leave him where he lay.
Fix bayonets. Move.
Value for Value
Send this to one man you know who is slowing down mid-assault to reload. He knows he is doing it. He needs someone to name it.
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~ Brett Hahn, AmRev Resurrected 🇺🇸
Brett Hahn is the founder of AmRev Resurrected and the creator of Freed. He is a member of the Sons of the American Revolution, Anthony Halberstadt Chapter, descended from Thomas Murphy of the 2nd Regiment, Salem County New Jersey Militia. His books Forge the Son and Made for the Mountains*, Volumes One and Two of The First Republic Series, are available on Amazon. His app* Freed is live at freedbyjesus.com.
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Where this first appeared
First published on AmRev Resurrected on August 21, 2026. Read it there.