Uncle Sam would not disarm for all the tea in Boston

NOBODY loves the sniper. He is assumed to relish playing God, or at least the godly function that decides who shall die when. War, it is supposed (mostly by people who have never been near one), does usually offer the other guy a chance. But sniping is just execution.

With the British, a sniper is treated as a privileged craftsman. He has all his special gear - the little green veil to hide his face, and sometimes camouflage mittens to keep his fingers warm as they fondle his rifle with its optical sight. He may have a little telescope as well as the sight. He knows how to damp down the planks of an attic so that they don't puff dust when he fires, and how to clean his rifle barrel so perfectly that it doesn't emit even a haze of smoke. He knows how to forget about food or cigarettes, and how to relieve himself without sound or smell.

He waits, until there is a tiny change in the bit of landscape he has been staring at for hours and days. Then he cuddles the stock, focuses on the unwitting human being at the hairline intersection and takes a decision: Yes? No? If it's yes, he breathes out softly and as the lungs come empty and still, squeezes the trigger.

The truth is that snipers live more dangerously than others. They only seem invulnerable. In practice, one sniper - as soon as he has fired his first shot - generates two or three counter-snipers who will devote their lives to killing him. And yet he deserves his hatred. The public hangman has gone, even from the Balkans, but the sniper remains.

In the hills above Sarajevo, I looked down from a rifle-pit at the great city below, glowing in the sun, pretending to be uninhabited. The Serb soldiers, training their telescopes from the darkness of the foxhole, watched intently for movement. Later, down in the pocked city itself, the young who valued their lives scampered across the screened-off streets marked "Pazi Snajper", but the old men did not even hasten their shuffle. I looked at the media's armoured Land Rovers, most bearing a tight cluster of impact stars in the middle of the bullet-proof window. The sniper also knows how to play. If he can't kill, he can still prove he can shoot.

And then, a few weeks ago, I made a small but ironic discovery. I am descended from a sniper. An American cousin arrived in London with some family research, and introduced me to an unknown ancestor some seven generations back. Samuel Whittemore was his name. He was a hard man.

In 1775, after the skirmish at Lexington between British troops and the colonial Americans who called themselves "Minutemen", the British retreated down the road from Concord to Boston while the Americans shot at them from cover. Samuel Whittemore, who was 80 at the time, came out of his house at Menotomy (now Arlington), took musket, pistols and cutlass and laid his rheumaticky old frame down behind a stone wall. When Lord Percy's First Infantry Brigade marched round the corner, with its flanking companies advancing through the fields either side, Sam opened fire and dropped one redcoat with his musket. But then, over-excited, he stood up and starting banging off with the horse-pistols, one in each fist.

He hit one more soldier and possibly another before a British bullet struck him in the face, followed by a rush of enraged Lancastrians from the 47th Regiment, who bayoneted him 13 times as he lay. But Sam was a tough old buzzard. He recovered and lived into his nineties, even - reputedly - fathering more children.

Boxers sometimes say of some primitive, windmilling melee that it was "not boxing". A banker once told a friend of mine that a bigger overdraft "would not be banking". If a professional marksman were to say that old Sam's behaviour was "not sniping", he would have a case. To hit a soldier with a smooth-bore musket at 150 yards was almost trophy shooting, but his cover was pathetic - and then he simply threw away all pretence at professionalism by standing up. Brave, yes, but not really ... well ... sniperly.

So what did Samuel Whittemore think he was doing, when he lay in wait and prepared to kill his fellow-countrymen (his grandfather had emigrated from Hitchin, Herts, in 1641)? This is the subject of an ancient controversy, which has flamed out in new form in the London Review of Books.

Christopher Hitchens points out that 19 April - "Patriots' Day" in Massachusetts, which celebrates Lexington and the Minutemen - was the day deliberately chosen by terrorists to blow up the government building in Oklahoma City. In the same way, the name "Minutemen" was reclaimed in the 1950s by right- wing fanatics who trained in the woods to resist a Soviet occupation of the United States. "There is a feeble insurgent pulse that beats at the heart of the bucolic fascist movement," says Hitchens, cruelly.

But Hitchens is not out to discredit the men of 1775. He is only pointing out that today's bucolic fascists who make war on the state have pinched some of their old clothes. And he is interested in how closely the aims of the "militia movement" converge with those of Newt Gingrich and the Republican right. It was a man from Massachusetts, not Hitchens the Brit, who used the London Review to disparage the Patriots.

Neither tea nor taxes (wrote Mr Andersson of Belmont, Mass) drove the colonists to shoot back at the troops that day. It was guns. The British marched to Concord in order to confiscate weapons at a time of crisis, and "American citizens rose to revolution only when the government attempted to confiscate the primal symbol of their self-regard - their guns".

If this is true, then Sam the Sniper belonged to the most successful gun lobby in history. He and his friends precipitated the American Revolution essentially as a gun club, as an elaborate scheme to keep unlicenced muskets in the porch.

Does this make him a "bucolic fascist"? He was certainly patriarchal (he had two wives and 10 children). At the same time he was no ragged frontiersman but a colonial man of property, whose banker grandson was to leave the then enormous sum of $900,000. He did not resent British taxes because he was poor but because he was rich. Samuel Whittemore had a lot to lose, and feared that the British government's new American policies would make him lose it; like his brother-Minutemen, he took up arms to defend the status quo. But then he found that the rights of the past could only be saved by a revolution into the future.

Most revolutions get going like that. "Everything must change, so that everything can stay the same" - but one thing leads to another as the revolutionary landslide accelerates, and in the end almost nothing is the same. The United States of America must have come as a great surprise, an unexpected, marvellous love-grandchild, for Samuel Whittemore in his last years.

I don't think, in the end, that he can be blamed for what Minutemen or snipers became in later centuries. The American Revolution was about beating off an archaic, distant state in order to create a modern polity based on what men on the spot wanted. It was not for radical democracy, but most certainly not for some take-to-the-woods scheme to restore frontier man to a state of nature.

And, on the matter of snipers, old Sam refused to go on playing God when he had fired that one deadly musket ball from his hiding place. The rest of the enemy were still on their feet and, dammit, he would meet them on his. So he stood up. That might have cost me my genetic mix, perhaps my existence. But I am glad he did.