by Ray Raphael
22.Pension application for Rebecca Clendenen, discussed and referenced in note 29.
23.Thompson and Schaumann, “Goodbye, Molly Pitcher,†15–16; Butterfield, “Lie There My Darling,†204.
24.For two different references, one from an oral tradition and the other printed in the Pennsylvania Archives, see Hall, Margaret Corbin, 34–35. A poem cited in 1905 uses “Moll†and “Molly†interchangeably (Carol Klaver, “An Introduction into the Legend of Molly Pitcher,†Minerva: Quarterly Report on Women and the Military 12 [1994]: 52).
25.Butterfield, “Lie There My Darling,†206.
26.In his editorial notes to Custis’s Recollections and Private Memoirs of Washington (Philadelphia: J.W. Bradley, 1861), Lossing refused to call Captain Molly by the name that was assuming greater popularity by that time: Molly Pitcher. “Art and Romance have confounded her with another character, Moll Pitcher,†he stated (225–26). As recently as 1978, Michael Kammen, in his detailed study of how the Revolution was portrayed through American history, confused the protagonist of the play with the heroine of Monmouth (Michael Kammen, A Season of Youth: The American Revolution and the Historical Imagination [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978], 111, 121, 132).
27.“Searching for Molly Pitcher Exhibit, 2001,†Monmouth County Archives Internet site, accessed February 3, 2004; www.visitmonmouth.com/archives/.
28.Butterfield, “Lie There My Darling,†210.
29.In this manner, the Molly Pitcher legend parallels that of Betsy Ross: “There is really no point in arguing over who made the first flag because there wasn’t one. The stars and stripes that we know today had multiple parents and dozens of siblings.†(Ulrich, “How Betsy Ross Became Famous,†www.common-place.org/vol-08/no-01/ulrich/.) People’s motives for attaching themselves to the legend do not have to include fame; mere proximity will sometimes yield rewards. When Rebecca Clendenin applied for a war widow’s pension in 1840, she tried to prove that her deceased husband had actually served at Monmouth by telling the story of a woman who had taken her husband’s place at a cannon. Clendenin offered her version of a known “anecdote†as collaborative evidence; it gave her case an assumed authenticity, and it continues to do so today. Her testimony is sometimes used to affirm the existence of a real Molly Pitcher, even though anybody in the 1830s or 1840, including her husband, could have told the same story on the basis of what he or she had heard or read by that time. (Butterfield, “Lie There My Darling,†200.)
30.Thompson and Schaumann, “Goodbye, Molly Pitcher,†22.
31.Ibid., 21. A second obituary, although less low-key, likewise failed to acknowledge Mrs. McCauley as “Molly Pitcher.â€
32.Rev. George Swain, Historical Discourse in Connection with the Presbyterian Church of Allentown and Vicinity, 1876 (Philadelphia: Kildare, 1877), 18; Monmouth Inquirer, March 26, 1876, in David George Martin, A Molly Pitcher Sourcebook (Hightstown, NJ: Longstreet House, 2003), 38–40. Thanks to John Fabiano of the Allentown–Upper Free-hold Historical Society for these references.
33.We don’t know very much about her life before and during the Revolutionary War; in fact, there is some argument over the identity of the husband whom she supposedly accompanied into battle. Some historians claim he was John Casper Hays, who allegedly married Mary Ludwig on July 24, 1769; others say the marriage record actually lists the husband’s name as William. John Hays first enlisted in the army in 1775, then reenlisted in 1777 in the Seventh Pennsylvania Regiment, which fought in the Battle of Monmouth Courthouse the following year. William Hays, who enlisted as a gunner in the artillery in 1777, was also reported at Monmouth. For the John Casper Hays version, see John B. Landis, “Investigation into American Tradition of Woman Known as Molly Pitcher,†Journal of American History 5 (1911): 83–94, and John B. Landis, A Short History of Molly Pitcher, the Heroine of the Battle of Monmouth (Cumberland County, PA: Comman Printers, 1905), 10–14. For the William Hays version, see Thompson and Schaumann, “Goodbye, Molly Pitcher,†3–26. Thompson points to tax records for 1783, which show William and Mary Hays living with a three-year-old boy named John. Probate records confirm that young John was the son of William and Mary. If John Casper Hays lived in Carlisle after the war, he left no traces. In the revised American National Biography, published in 1999, John K. Alexander favors John over William, although he fails to explain John’s mysterious disappearance after the war and the fact that subsequent records indicate that William was the father of Mary’s son. It is certainly possible that Mary Hays was at Monmouth with her husband (whoever he might be), and it is conceivable, if she was with the army, that she helped the artillery team, but there is no written record for any of this.
After William Hays died in 1786, Mary Hays married John McCalla. (I render her surname as McCauley, perhaps the most common spelling, or Hays, her surname during the Revolution.) By 1810 John had either died or disappeared, and Mary, by then at least fifty-five years old, supported herself by whitewashing public buildings, cleaning, and laundering. (Thompson and Schaumann, “Goodbye, Molly Pitcher,†18–20; and Landis, Short History of Molly Pitcher, 17–20.)
In 1822, forty-four years after Monmouth, “Molly McKolly†was awarded a government pension amounting to a private’s half-pay. The initial draft of the bill read “widow of a soldier,†but the revised version read “for services rendered.†(Thompson and Schaumann, “Goodbye, Molly Pitcher,†20.) The specific nature of those services was not stipulated, but might they have included her manning the cannon of her stricken husband? Later commentators have assumed so, but contemporary reports made no mention of such heroism, as newsworthy as it might have been. The Philadelphia Chronicle reported flatly, “It appeared satisfactory that this heroine had braved the hardships of the camp and dangers of the field with her husband who was a soldier of the Revolution.†In New York, on the other hand, a press report added some embellishment, but nothing about firing her husband’s cannon at Monmouth: “Molly Macauly, who received a pension from the state of Pennsylvania for service rendered during the Revolutionary War, was well-known to the general officers as a brave and patriotic woman. She was called Sgt. McCauly, and was wounded at some battle, supposed to be the Brandywine, where her sex was discovered. It was a common practice for her to swing her sable over her head, and huzza for ‘Mad Anthony’ as she termed Anthony Wayne. It was an unusual circumstance to find women in the ranks disguised as men, such was their order for independence. Elizabeth Canning was at a gun at Fort Washington when her husband was killed and she took his place immediately, loaded, primed and fired the cannon with which he was entrusted. She was wounded in the breast by a grapeshot.†(National Advocate, March 7, 1822, quoted in Thompson and Schaumann, “Goodbye, Molly Pitcher,†20–21.) This account, offered during her lifetime but of dubious reliability, differed in almost every respect from the Molly Pitcher legend we know today.
34.Carlisle Herald, May 18, 1876, quoted in Linda Grant De Pauw, Battle Cries and Lullabies: Women in War from Prehistory to the Present (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 128.
35.The Cumberland Valley Chronicle: Writings About Colonial Times and People, in a packet of information put out by the Cumberland County Historical Society, states that the spelling on this headstone was actually “McCauly.â€
36.Klaver, “Legend of Molly Pitcher,†49.
37.Landis, Short History of Molly Pitcher, 24–25; Thompson and Schaumann, “Goodbye, Molly Pitcher,†24; Klaver, “Legend of Molly Pitcher,†42.
38.Landis, Short History of Molly Pitcher, 15.
39.Landis, “Investigation into Molly Pitcher,†83–96.
40.This was not necessarily “the
very same pitcher carried by Molly Pitcher at the battle of Monmouth,†the descendent admitted, but she claimed before a notary that the pitcher had belonged to her great-great-grandmother. A picture of the pitcher, along with a newspaper article announcing the gift to the Hamilton Library and the Cumberland County Historical Association, is included in the packet on Molly Pitcher available through the Cumberland County Historical Society.
41.Klaver, “Legend of Molly Pitcher,†49.
42.Stryker, Battle of Monmouth, 192. Amid all the fanfare, one man wasn’t buying it. Jeremiah Zeamer, himself a resident of Carlisle, did not think it appropriate to honor a woman who had been described as vulgar and profane, while many “Revolutionary heroes who lived useful and respected lives†remained obscure. “Molly McCauley is neither the historical nor moral character to hold up to young Americans for emulation,†he argued. Using careful genealogical research, he went on to shoot holes in the Molly-Pitcher-equals-Mary-Hays-McCauley equation. (Jeremiah Zeamer, “Molly McCauley Monument,†Carlisle Herald, April 5, 1905, and “Molly Pitcher Story Analyzed,†Carlisle Volunteer, February 20, 1907. The first is included in the Cumberland County Historical Society’s Molly Pitcher packet; the second is cited in Klaver, “Legend of Molly Pitcher,†41–42.) But the public showed no concern for Jeremiah Zeamer’s quibbles. Rather than scrap the legend, those who believed in their local heroine chose to change her image. Just as the vulgar Captain Molly had been transformed into a more genteel Molly Pitcher, so did Mary Hays McCauley take on a more gracious persona. The new monument placed by her grave in 1916 referred to her as an “army nurse†who became known for “her many acts of kindness.†Years later, a newspaper article described “Pennsylvania’s Number One Revolutionary Heroine†as a “cheerful†person. (Molly Pitcher packet, Cumberland County Historical Society.) Mary was now fit to become a respectable heroine, an appropriate model for impressionable young girls.
43.Hall, Margaret Corbin, 38–43.
44.Dumas Malone, ed., Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Scribner’s, 1948), 11: 574. Mary’s alleged maiden name, Ludwig, has also been questioned, as has her date of birth, posited alternately as 1744 and 1754, but these issues do not relate directly to the Molly Pitcher story.
45.Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, The Spirit of ’Seventy-Six: The Story of the American Revolution as Told by the Participants (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958), 710, 714–715.
46.Klaver, “Legend of Molly Pitcher,†49.
47.John Todd White, “The Truth About Molly Pitcher,†in The American Revolution: Whose Revolution? James Kirby Martin and Karen R. Stubaus, eds. (Huntington, NY: Krieger, 1977), 99–105; Linda Grant De Pauw and Conover Hunt, Remember the Ladies: Women in America, 1750–1815 (New York: Viking, 1976), 90. De Pauw elaborated in “Women in Combat: The Revolutionary Experience,†Armed Forces and Society 7 (198): 215, and Battle Cries and Lullabies, 126–131.
48.John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, eds., American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 17: 564–565; the author of the piece is John K. Alexander. All deeds ever attributed to “Molly Pitcher†are now attributed to Mary Hays as well. Benson Bobrick, in his 1997 Angel in the Whirlwind: The Triumph of the American Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), follows folkloric accounts picked up in the mid–nineteenth century when he writes, without citation, that “Mary Ludwig Hayes . . . had done equally brave service at Fort Clinton, where, in October 1777, she had actually fired the last shot before the fortress fell†(346).
49.“Supposedlyâ€: About.com Women’s History, http://womenshistory.about.com/od/waramrevolution/a/Molly-Pitcher.htm. “May have†and “according to legendâ€: Joyce Appleby, Alan Brinkley, Albert S. Broussard, James M. McPherson, and Donald A. Ritchie, The American Journey (New York: Macmillan/McGraw-Hill Glencoe, 2012), 164. “Legend saysâ€: Emma J. Lapsansky-Werner, Peter B. Levy, Randy Roberts, and Alan Taylor, United States History, Survey Edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2013), 164, 119. “Is said to haveâ€: Jacqueline Jones, Peter H. Wood, Thomas Borstelmann, Elaine Tyrler May, and Vicki L. Ruiz, Created Equal: A History of the United States, vol. 1 (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Longman, 2009), 221.
50.“Legendaryâ€: James West Davidson, Michael B. Scott, America: A History of Our Nation (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2014), 188. “Earning folk-legend statusâ€: Jones et al., Created Equal, 221.
51.Appleby et al., American Journey, 155.
52.Michael J. Berson, Tyrone C. Howard, and Cinthia Salinas, Harcourt Social Studies—United States: Making a New Nation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), 357.
53.Gerald A. Danzer, J. Jorge Klor de Alva, Larry S. Krieger, Louis E. Wilson, and Nancy Woloch, The Americans (Evanston, IL: Holt McDougal, 2012), 117.
54.Wikipedia, accessed April 7, 2013: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_Pitcher. The article further quotes They Called Her Molly Pitcher: “At one point, a British musket ball or cannon ball flew between her legs and tore off the bottom of her skirt. Mary supposedly said, ‘Well, that could have been worse,’ and went back to loading the cannonâ€â€”an age-appropriate translation of Joseph Plumb Martin’s ribald tale. (See note 15.)
55.Stryker, Battle of Monmouth, 192.
56.For a discussion of women in the wagons, and Washington’s general distaste for women in the army, see Ray Raphael, A People’s History of the American Revolution (New York: The New Press, 2001, 121–123; reprinted by HarperCollins, 2002, 153–155).
4: The Shot Heard ’Round the World
1.David Hackett Fischer, Paul Revere’s Ride (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 1994), 327.
2.A.J. Langguth, Patriots: The Men Who Started the American Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 240.
3.Joy Hakim, A History of US (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 3: 73.
4.Alan Brinkley, The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People, Volume 1, Seventh Edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2014), 102. Emphases added.
5.Americans didn’t call this controversial act of vandalism a “Tea Party†at the time. (Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party [Boston: Beacon Press, 1999], 108–113.) Public reception, even among those who opposed British policies, was divided. Washington, although he believed “the cause of America . . . ever will be the cause of America,†chided Bostonians for “their conduct in destroying the tea.†(Washington to George William Fairfax, June 10, 1774, The Papers of George Washington, W.W. Abbot and Dorothy Twohig, eds. [Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1983; Colonial Series 10: 94–101].) Franklin and many others believed the East India Company should be compensated for the ruined merchandise.
6.David M. Kennedy and Lizabeth Cohen, The American Pageant, Volume 1, Fifteenth Edition (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2014), 118.
7.James West Davidson and Michael B. Scott, America: History of Our Nation (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2014), 152.
8.William Deverell and Deborah Gray White, Holt McDougal United States History: Beginnings to 1877 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), 112.
9.Much is made in many narratives about the “Day of Prayer and Fasting†held in Virginia, the most populous colony, on June 1, 1774. Supposedly, this revealed how devoted the Virginians were to the people of Massachusetts, since it caused the British to disband the Virginia House of Burgesses. In fact, many Virginians were acting in self-interest, not charity, when they decided on this course. The previous year, growers of tobacco (the basis of Virginia’s economy) had announced that by 1775 they would withhold their crops from the market. They hoped that British merchants w
ould then buy tobacco at higher prices, anticipating the shortage to come. Since many tobacco planters were in debt, however, they feared that creditors would take them to court in retaliation, and if their scheme failed, the courts could seize their property. Supporting Boston with a “Day of Prayer and Fasting†and a pledge to boycott British trade solved all their problems. Not only did these actions give their market manipulation a patriotic cover, but they also caused the British government to dissolve the legislature—and since the legislature had not yet authorized the court fees, that meant the courts would have to close as well. The planters’ plan worked: tobacco prices soared in anticipation of future shortages while growers sold out their crops before nonexportation was scheduled to take effect. Meanwhile, no British merchants could take any Virginians to court for unpaid bills.
Boston had asked other colonies to withdraw trade from both Britain and the West Indies. For the reasons just mentioned, Virginia planters were more than willing to comply with respect to Britain, but they refused to end their lucrative trade with the Indies. Similarly, South Carolina went along with much of the boycott but insisted on an exemption for rice, its main moneymaker. These actions, traditionally touted as sympathetic gestures of support, had decidedly self-serving overtones. (Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999], 115–129.)
10.A “revolution,†according to the Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, is “a complete and forcible overthrow and replacement of an established government or political system by the people governed.†By this definition, the people of Massachusetts staged a textbook example of a revolution.
11.American Political Society, Records, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester; documents page of rayraphael.com: http://www.rayraphael.com/documents.htm.