Best Little Stories from the American Revolution

by C. Brian Kelly

  Into this brood in the early 1770s came Richard, raised in Ireland as the son of a member of Parliament. He grew up to become a British officer of proven valor and veteran of the Seven Years’ War. He later came to the colonies and soon became a zealous convert to the American cause. Arriving in New York in late 1772 and establishing himself as a gentleman farmer at King’s Bridge just north of the city, Richard renewed an acquaintanceship begun when he was stationed in New York for two years during the previous decade.

  She was Janet Livingston, and less than a year later, in July of 1773, they became man and wife. For her, she once wrote with surprising frankness for their era, he became “husband, friend and lover.” With him, she found “my every hope of happiness.”

  In the two years before the Revolutionary storm broke over the American colonies, she said further, she came to know “the feast of reason and the flow of soul.” As rebellion built around them, however, she had bad dreams. She dreamt he was killed in a sword fight with his brother, and Richard’s last words to her were, “No other way, no other way.”

  She told him about the dream, and he said he knew his happiness could not last. “Let us enjoy it as long as we may,” he said, “and leave the rest to God.” He brushed aside her expressed wish to have a son. Perhaps in jest, perhaps not, he said: “Be contented, Janet. Suppose we had a son, and he was a fool. Think of that!”

  With the storm clouds now darkening, he became a member of the New York Provincial Congress. Then, in June of 1775, the Continental Congress appointed him a brigadier general—one of the first eight American brigadiers. Were the bad dreams coming to fruition? When he told her and gave her a black ribbon to attach to his hat as a cockade, she later said, “I felt a stroke at my heart as if struck by lightning.”

  He said honor and duty to the cause called him, but she still could hold him from going if she insisted. “Say you will prefer to see your husband disgraced and I submit to go home to retirement,” he offered.

  Naturally, it was an offer she could not take.

  And so he went north in 1775. Plans were made and remade. Suddenly it was he, General Richard Montgomery, who would lead the American invasion of Canada.

  They had a last meeting in Saratoga, New York, before he marched off with his troops. His last words to her were, “You shall never blush for your Montgomery.”

  He and his men soon stormed Fort Chambly, Fort St. Johns, and Montreal, but Quebec still loomed as the most difficult conquest of all. By now, toward the end of 1775, Benedict Arnold and his surviving men had emerged from their starvation march northward through the Maine wilderness.

  Even so, the Americans didn’t have the numbers to make an assault easy. Indeed, when reminded that Quebec still lay ahead as the real key to conquering the British in Canada, General Richard Montgomery told his brother-in-law and fellow Continental officer Henry Beekman Livingston, “Oh, Harry, that is impossible.”

  Impossible or not, the attempt had to be made quickly, before the enlistment period for most of his troops expired at the end of the year. And so it was made early on the morning of New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1775, with the hope that a bold and direct assault would take the British by surprise.

  Of the two generals who led the Americans and fell in the futile assault, the one who survived, as fate would have it, was Benedict Arnold. Richard Montgomery, promoted to major general as he approached Quebec, was the first American general officer killed in the war.

  His death had impact on both warring sides. In Quebec, British officers who knew him, who had soldiered with him in the past, were among those according their former comrade a proper and decent burial. In London, Edmund Burke offered a stirring eulogy to Montgomery in Parliament, to which Prime Minister North replied that he could not join in the laments proclaiming Montgomery’s death “a public loss.”

  Reacting prophetically, Lord North also said: “A curse on his virtues! They’ve undone this country. He was brave, he was noble, he was humane, he was generous, but still he was only a brave, able, humane and generous rebel.”

  This stirred fresh reactions in the House of Commons, with onetime Montgomery friend Charles James Fox declaring: “The term of rebel is no certain mark of disgrace. The great asserters of liberty, the saviors of their country, the benefactors of mankind of all ages, have all been called rebels.”

  While the British may have been of two minds over Montgomery’s death, a symbolic tragedy at the early stages of the Revolution, there was no such division among his fellow Patriots in America. There, “commemorations, eulogies, and verse celebrated his union with the heroes of antiquity and called Americans to equal his ardor,” wrote Charles Royster in his book Revolutionary People at War. Thomas Paine, for one, published a supposed dialogue between Montgomery’s ghost and a faltering delegate to the Continental Congress in which the deceased hero’s spirit argued for independence. Further, “When public spirit faltered later in the war, a call to arms in the newspapers was signed, ‘THE GHOST OF MONTGOMERY,’” noted Royster.

  The widow Janet also figured in the song, rhetoric, poetry, and drama that picked up on the Montgomery story, Royster pointed out. Her friend and longtime correspondent Mercy Otis Warren, a well-known woman of letters in their era, used Montgomery’s parting words to wife Janet in a history of the Revolution (Mercy Warren’s History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution).

  After the death of her husband (“my General, my soldier”), Janet Livingston Montgomery’s life never would be the same. As her outward vestments, wrote Royster, she wore mourning to the end of her life. Inwardly, she also wore mourning without cease. Her loss, she once wrote, “always obtrudes itself… and unfits me for every other Duty.”

  Always a strong supporter of the revolutionary cause (but a caustic critic of certain surviving generals), she kept busy both during and after the Revolution. A frequent visitor to President and Mrs. George Washington during the New York residency, she also visited Montgomery’s sister in Ireland, Lady Ranelagh.

  After buying real estate in lower Manhattan, she began to build a mansion on the Hudson River above New York. “Chateau de Montgomery” was a showplace with a commanding view of the river below. “Her house had high ceilings, great windows, and stone walls two feet thick,” wrote Royster.

  It boasted a high peak in front of the house with a summit shaped like a bowl, he also noted. “Formerly called Liberty Cap, it became known to local people as ‘Mrs. Montgomery’s Cap,’ in honor of the widow’s cap she always wore.”

  She built her Hudson River mansion in 1802 and 1803, just as she was entering her sixties in age. Congress, in the meantime, back in 1776, had ordered a monument to her General, still buried in Canada. Benjamin Franklin arranged for it to be created by artisans in Paris, but the war naturally caused delays.

  Finally, in 1787, it was erected at St. Paul’s Church in New York City as the federal government’s first such tribute to a hero of the Revolution. But the hero, himself, still had not come home.

  Another three decades would pass before that day would come. Finally, in 1818, the General’s remains were disinterred from their resting place in Quebec and started homeward, an event stirring parades, salutes…overall, “the most impressive public display” since Washington’s death in 1799, said Royster.

  As the steamboat Richmond made its way down the Hudson toward New York for the ceremonial reburial planned at the site of the St. Paul’s monument, Janet Montgomery prepared for the culminating moment of her life as a widow. Told exactly what time on July 6 the steamboat would pass on the river below, she asked her guests to leave her while she watched with a spyglass from the riverside porch of her grand Chateau de Montgomery.

  The steamer, carrying her husband’s remains in a “plumed coffin canopied with crepe” under star-spangled banners, came to a stop below while its band played Handel’s Dead March from his Saul oratorio. Troops fired a salute, and after a long pause, the steamboat moved on—G
eneral Montgomery was close to his final home.

  His widow later said she looked on the vessel below and thought of how he had left her “in the bloom of manhood, a perfect being.” And now, “Alas! how did he return!”

  She would live on, into her eighties, long enough to dance with Lafayette on his tour of the United States in 1824. But did she ever know another moment like that of July 6, 1818, when her late husband at last was returning home… when her guests, going out on the porch after the steamboat had departed, found their hostess, his widow, had fainted?

  What’s in Another Name?

  DURING AND IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE REVOLUTION, MANY A NEWBORN CHILD WAS named for the hero Richard Montgomery. Later, at least sixteen counties throughout America were named for him, as were a number of cities—most conspicuously, one state’s capital city, Montgomery, Alabama.

  Preamble: “Who Can Be a Silent Spectator?”

  LONG BEFORE THE REVOLUTION, MEN AND WOMEN OF THE AMERICAN COLONIES were forming ideas about political liberty. A proliferation of pamphlets, newspapers, even sermons, were exploring the history of political rights and were expressing concern that cherished and long-standing political rights were being chipped away by the imperial Mother Country. That great rhetorical cry went out, later to be penned by Jefferson’s Declaration, the notion that all men are created equal.

  But…what about the women?

  “Are not women born as free as men?” The question was posed by Colonial Massachusetts thinker James Otis, brother of Mercy Otis Warren and a leading Patriot, in the opening pages of his 1764 pamphlet, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved. Many others privately conceded the woman’s role extended far beyond the home, although that premise was not to become universally acceptable in America for another two centuries.

  During the Revolutionary period, however, some women found ways to exert their influence on the great events unfolding before all, even if the same women did not always presume to reach very far beyond the domestic sphere. In their era, after all, neither the pulpit nor the policy-making stage was open to women.

  Two thinking women whose power of the pen did reach farther than home and hearth were Mercy Warren and Abigail Adams, both from Massachusetts, both extremely well read for their times, and both admirers of Catharine Macauley, the English historian who had dared to publish her own critiques of political philosophers Hobbes, Burke, and Rousseau.

  Abigail’s political thought found expression in letters to her husband and friends, many of them politically active male friends, although her letters were not published in her lifetime. In one letter, to husband John Adams in May of 1776, Abigail wrote in a plaintive vein concerning female citizenship: “To be adept in the art of Government is a prerogative to which your Sex lay almost exclusive claim.” And truly the all-male rebel legislators were not inclined to address the position of women in the proposed new order. Instead, women began to invent their own political character. As Linda K. Kerber points out in her book, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America, it was a new political role that “merged the domestic domain of the preindustrial woman with the new public ideology of individual responsibility and civic virtue.”

  While Abigail Adams penned her political ideas in private correspondence, Mercy Otis Warren felt less constrained and used poetry and plays to express her ideas. A wife and mother of four sons, however, she could advise other women both publicly, as in her writings for an audience, and more privately, more individually. In answering a friend who asked whether it was proper to discuss politics openly in her husband’s presence, Mercy wrote, “I know not why any gentleman of your acquaintance should caution you not to enter any particular subject when we meet.”

  More safely, Mercy added that politics was a subject “much out of the road of female attention.” But she was clear in her suggestion that even while maintaining their domestic responsibilities, sometimes women must attend to political matters. Political actions taken by the men, after all, could affect everyone…not just the men alone. “[A]s every domestic enjoyment depends on the decision of the mighty Revolutionary contest,” she added, “who can be an unconcerned and silent spectator? Not surely the fond mother, or the affectionate wife who trembles lest her dearest connections should fall victims of lawless power, or at least pour out the warm blood as a libation at the shrine of liberty.”

  The fact is, a good many eighteenth-century women were well aware of the momentous events unfolding around them. They may not have been as visible and outspoken as Mercy Otis Warren, had the political “connections” of an Abigail Adams or, for that matter, had the nearly automatic influence of a Martha Washington, but they often were well informed about the headlong course of events, about the warring councils of government, even about the new political philosophies emerging from the pens or tongues of husbands, brothers, or fathers. All men, of course.

  The fact is, too, a good many eighteenth-century women did enter the political arena—but through a variety of back doors, quite aside from whatever pleas or advice they poured into the ears of attentive (or, to be sure, sometimes inattentive) spouses. When the need arose, there was a virtual corps of these additional Founding Mothers who found ways to exert their will that ranged from overt petition and boycott, to covert trickery and spying, even appearance on the field of battle.

  ***

  “I desire you would Remember the Ladies.”

  —Abigail Adams to husband John, delegate to the Continental Congress, March 31, 1776

  If the men we call Founding Fathers were busy fighting off the British and then reinventing government for the new nation they had secured, who were the Founding Mothers, and what did they do, actually?

  To begin with, there were the obvious leaders: Martha Washington, Mercy Otis Warren, Abigail Adams. These and others of their ilk constituted a frankly elite circle of women who gave, gave, and gave yet again, just like their menfolk. Look carefully in the history books and you can find where there is occasional notation of their gallantry, their wisdom, their perseverance and, often, their plain old grittiness in time of peril.

  Few trumpets sound for them these days, but there they are, real Founders of a nation also.

  Nor were these elites alone. Many others, more on a sewing circle level, also could be considered Founding Mothers. That is to say, women like the “tea party” group in Edenton, North Carolina, who in October of 1774 openly signed their names to a resolution declaring they would boycott English tea and clothing. Instead of real tea, they drank a hot concoction derived from dried raspberry leaves. On a more individual basis, there were women like the famous Deborah Samson, who enlisted in the Continental Army disguised as a man.

  Nor should we forget those forced to improvise with quick decisions, women like Hannah Israel, who saved the family’s cattle herd from the British raiders one fateful day. The Israel farm on the banks of the Delaware River lay in full view of the moored British frigate Roebuck, where her husband and brother were being held captive. The British commander ordered his men to go ashore and drive the cattle from the family’s meadow to the edge of the river and there to slaughter them before the eyes of their prisoners. Learning of the British intentions, the brave Hannah, with the help of a young boy, drove the herd into her barnyard amid the whistling balls fired by the British. Since the redcoats were loathe to invade private property in full view of various witnesses, her barnyard became a sanctuary. Not a single cow was lost.

  There also were women, individuals, torn between love of their land and loyalty to the Mother Country—even between patriotism and fidelity to husbands who took a Loyalist stance quite different from their own. Elizabeth Graeme, daughter of prominent Dr. Thomas Graeme of Philadelphia, and granddaughter of a governor of Pennsylvania, was known in her own right for her literary accomplishments, among them a translation of the classic Telemachus into English verse. Soirees held at her home attracted literary and cultivated folk, and here on one of thos
e evenings she met her future husband, Hugh Henry Fergerson, newly arrived from Scotland.

  No sooner had they married than the Revolutionary War erupted. Choices had to be made—recent immigrant Fergerson chose to remain loyal to Great Britain, but his wife would be loyal to the land of her birth. They soon were separated. To complicate matters further, she tried to act as a go-between for the warring parties when the British occupied Philadelphia. But that effort at conciliation only won her rebuffs from the Patriot side as well as a cold reception from many of those who had once gladly partaken of her hospitality at her intellectual gatherings.

  Still others had to face up to the enemy himself.

  In April of 1781, British Colonel Banastre Tarleton was on the march from Wilmington, North Carolina, with his heart set on conquering Virginia. For several days he and his men were encamped on the grounds of a plantation in such a beautiful setting that Lord Cornwallis earlier had called it “Pleasant Green,” the name by which it would be known. The master of the plantation, a Lieutenant Slocumb, commanded a troop of light horse raised in his own neighborhood to act as rangers, leaving Mrs. Slocumb in charge of the affairs of the plantation.

  While she was enjoying a beautiful spring day sitting on the veranda of her magnificent home, a horseman rode up, tipped his hat, and greeted her with the question: “Is your husband at home?”

  The spunky Mrs. Slocumb answered that he was not. The next question raised her dander. “Is he a rebel?”

  Her answer rings down through the ages and exemplifies the courage of women who sustained the home front: “No sir. He is in the army of his country, and fighting against our invaders; therefore not a rebel.”