Colonial Campaigns Club (CCC)

In an earlier thread a question was asked about any female members. In that spirit I am posting an article I found at MagWeb from the magazine CRYHOC! covering historical women in the revolution.

Enjoy!

Women Warriors
in the American Revolution
Introduction
by Janet Phillips, Ashdown, Arkansas

"Destroy all the men in America and we shall still have all we can do to defeat the women."
-- British officer's report to Lord Cornwallis
The harsh nature of early colonial life, starvation, disease, frigid winters and raids by Native tribes changed the female role dramatically in the New World.

Survival demanded that men and women share the workload. Women of this period knew how to handle a boat and a musket and were accomplished horsewomen. In colonial America, free, white unindentured women comprised 35 to 40 percent of the population. Therefore, commanding a high demand and equally high responsibilities, women of the early to mid-eighteenth century shared a more equal status than they would in the decades to follow. In some colonies, women could own land and slaves. Many women ran profitable businesses.

When the colonies declared independence from the Crown, women had a high stake in the land. Plus, the very nature of the battlefields of the American Revolution were inescapable: the war was fought in backyards, barns, and on the streets. Many women shouldered arms in self-defense often disguising themselves as men. Other women excelled in the dangerous art of espionage--as they would in virtually every subsequent American conflict. For couples who did not own property, a great number of women went to war with their husbands. Even those women not engaged in spying or taking up arms rarely escaped the brutality of eighteen-century warfare. The army employed many as nurses.

Lydia Darragh
by Janet Phillips, Ashdown, Arkansas

The nature of the American Revolution lent itself to many bold acts of spying by ardent patriots. Lydia Darragh risked her life spying on British officers and saved Washington's army from a surprise attack at Whitemarsh. Darragh lived across the street from General Howe's headquarters in Philadelphia and, as was the customary during the war, the general's staff used her home to plan strategy. In December 1777 the staff ordered the family to retire early but Darragh eavesdropped and got the information out the next day of an impending attack. A British officer interrogated her. "We were betrayed, he told her, sure it was a member of her family, "for, on arrival near the encampment of General Washington, we found his cannon mounted, his troops under arms and so prepared at every point to receive us that we were compelled to march back without injuring our enemy, like a parcel of fools." Darragh must have been convincing about the innocence of her family for her life and her family was spared.
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Sybil Ludington
by Janet Phillips, Ashdown, Arkansas

The Continental Army was using Danbury, Connecticut as a storage place. Supplies such as clothing, medicine, and ammunition, as well as pork, flour, and molasses were kept there. On the night of April 26, 1777, two thousand Redcoats under General Tryon, started an attack on Danbury. American Colonel Ludington had just dismissed his men after a long period of duty. It was planting time. The men had been allowed to return home to start their crops. Someone had to ride and alert the men to hurry back for the march to Danbury. Colonel Ludington, asked, Sybil, his sixteen-year-old daughter to go and sound the alarm. He could not go because he had to prepare the men. He needed someone who knew the area and where the individuals lived. Sybil rode from Ludingtonville to Carmel, into Mahopac and Mahopac Falls, Kent Cliffs and back home through Stromville. She shouted the news warning families to be ready to flee.

Arriving back home at daybreak, she found four hundred troops preparing to leave for Danbury. General Tryon's men had overrun the town burning almost every building. They had also discovered a cache of rum and helped themselves. When General Tryon heard of Colonel Ludington and another regiment led by General Wooster, were marching on the town, his army was in no condition to fight. The two regiments drove the Redcoats back to Long Island Sound. A statue of Sybil and her horse, Star, stands in Carmel near Lake Gleneida.
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Deborah Gannet Sampson
by Janet Phillips, Ashdown, Arkansas

Sampson is one of the best-know women to have posed as a man in the Revolutionary war. She had been a domestic servant but a way to perhaps the war as an opportunity to earn a living. She cut her hair, put on men's clothes and enlisted in George Washington's Continental army as Robert Shurtleff. Her family descended from one of the original colonists, Priscilla Mullins Alden, who was later immortalized in Longfellow's poem, "The Courtship of Miles Standish." She was hired as a teacher in Middleborough Public School after her servitude in the household of Jeremiah Thomas ended in 1779. She enlisted in the Fourth Massachusetts Regiment at the age of 21.
Because of rumors of her dressing as a man and enlisting in the army, she was excommunicated from the First Baptist Church in Middleborough. Her regiment was sent to West Point, New York where she was wounded in the leg in a battle near Tarrytown. She tended the wounds herself so her gender would not be discovered. General Henry Knox honorably discharged Sampson from the army at West Point.

She married a farmer named Benjamin Gannet and had three children. She also taught school. Nine years after her discharge, she was awarded a pension in the amount of thirty-four pounds lump sum from Massachusetts. Paul Revere sent a letter in her behalf to Congress in 1804. She was awarded a U.S. pension of four dollars a month. She died in 1827 at the age of sixty-six.
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Women in the Continental Army
by Janet Phillips, Ashdown, Arkansas

Continental Army women, usually three to six per company, were most commonly wives, mothers, and daughters of the men in rank. Historian Linda Grant De Pauw estimates that these "Women of the Army" who traveled with and drew pay and rations over a seven year period numbered 20,000. (In 1802, and act of Congress attempted to limit women's numbers and define their formal place within the military system.) The women in the Continental army received pay and drew rations for themselves and their children. According to historian, Linda Grant De Pauw, these women were held subject to military discipline, which meant they underwent court-marital and endured punishment when convicted of specific offenses.

The orderly book of general encamped Valley Forge, in the winter of 1778, notes one Mary Johnson was charged with plotting to desert the army. She was found guilty, received a sentence of one hundred lashes and was "drummed out of the army by all the fifes and drums of the division."
Besides doing a lot of women's work such as cooking and washing, the main duties of the women fell into two divisions, the Medical Corps and the Artillery Corps.
General Washington employed women as nurses when a smallpox epidemic broke out in Valley Forge. On May 31, 1778, he issued the following order: "Commanding Officers of the Regiments will assist the Regimental Surgeons in procuring as many Women of the Army as can be prevailed on to serve as nurses and will be paid the usual price." There was to be one nurse for every ten patients and a matron for every hundred sick. The nurses were paid two dollars a month and the matrons were paid fifteen a month. Their duties included cooking, washing, foraging for supplies and horses, preparing the dead for burial and digging latrines.

A record for a six month period of the total strength of force encamped at Valley forge averaged 23,539 but typically only 7,556 soldiers were fit for duty, 6,881 were sick, 3,032 lack clothing and or weapons and ammunition, and the remaining 4,814 were AWOL. In the Artillery Corps, the women were water carriers to the gun crews. Waters was considered more important for the artillery than for the soldiers. After each firing, the cannon had to be swabbed with water to douse any sparks that might cause the next load to explode. (The soldiers drank grog of highly diluted rum, which was thought to present heatstroke more effectively than water)

Some women moved from being water carriers to actually loading and firing weapons, as the situation demanded it. The two women we know the most about are Margaret Cochran Corbin known as "Captain Molly" and Mary Ludwing Hays McCauley, known as "Molly Pitcher."

When Margaret Corbin's, husband, John enlisted in Captain Francis Proctor's 1st Pennsylvania Artillery, Margaret accompanied him to the front. The Corbins found themselves in the Battle of Fort Washington in 1776. The British forced the army to give up this key strategic point in well-coordinated attacks. Corbin's husband was in the thick of the battle. When he fell, tradition has it Margaret took over for him loading and firing his cannon.

One reason Margaret's actions on the field are so well recorded is wounds from grapeshot were serious enough for her to lose use of one arm. In June, 1779, the Supreme Council of the State of Pennsylvania passed a bill in which it acknowledged Margaret had become disabled while she "heroically filled the post of her husband, who was killed by her side serving a piece of artillery." The council allocated her thirty dollars in immediate relief and recommended her case to the Continental Congress's Board of War. The Continental Congress resolved that Margaret should receive, for the rest of her life, a monthly pension amounting to one half a soldier's pay and a suit of clothes a year.

In 1780, Congress enrolled "Captain Molly" as the only women in what was called the "Invalid Regiment." She was stationed at West Point essentially on guard duty for three years. The Invalid Regiment was disbanded in 1783 but Captain Molly remained in West Point. She depended on the mercy of the army the rest of her life even drawing her supplies from the West Point Commissary.
Captain Molly's cantankerous personality caused West Point's Captain William Price to write to General Henry Knox in 1786: "I am at a loss what to do with Captain Molly. She is such an offensive person that people are unwilling to take her charge." Captain Molly died in about 1800. The West Point officials gratefully recalled her service to the Continental army at Fort Washington, but they probably also heaved a collective sigh of relief.

Mary "Molly Pitcher" Hays McCauley followed her husband, John, when he joined the army. During their seven years of service together in the Pennsylvania State Regiment of Artillery, she cooked and carried water.

John and Mary were involved in several battles, the most important being the battle at Monmouth, New Jersey in June of 1778. This is where Molly Pitcher rose to fame. The Continentals were engaged with the British force commanded by Lord Cornwallis. At the point her husband was wounded, Molly Pitcher took his place on the hot battlefield. In a journal entry dated July 3, 1778, Dr. Albigence Waldo makes mention of her: "One of the camp women I must give a little praise to. Her gallant, who she attended to in battle, being shot down, she immediately took his gun and cartridges and like a Spartan heroine fought with astonishing bravery, discharging the piece with as much regularity as any soldier present."

Forty years after the battle, the legislature of Pennsylvania responded to her petition for funds with an immediate lump sum of forty dollars as well as a lifetime pension of forty dollars per year. Despite her pension, after the death of her second husband, Molly Pitcher like Margaret Corbin struggled to support herself. According to historian, Edward Biddle, an old book was found in the Cumberland County, Pennsylvania Commissioner's office in 1920. This record contained a number of entries pertaining to payments made to Molly Pitcher for custodial word. An entry dated March 29, 1811 read: "Molly Mcauley, for washing and white washing public buildings---15 dollars."
Although Molly Pitcher spent the last decades of her life doing menial labor, her obituaries in 1832 respectfully focused on her contributions to the patriots' cause.
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Civilian Women's Roles
by Janet Phillips, Ashdown, Arkansas

In the years leading up to the Revolution women were active in protesting British Rule. After the passage of the Townshed Acts, which impose duties on goods to America, the Daughters of Liberty organized to enforce boycotts of British goods. They devised substitutes of tea and linen. Sometimes they took direct action against merchants who charged huge fee during the war or those that hoarded scare goods. Colonial women formed a number of Ladies Patriotic Societies. They made socks, sweaters, and bandages, sewed quilts and dipped candles. Some raised money for the purchase of boots and powder. Ester Reed and Sara Bache organized thirty-nine women in Philadelphia to raise money to buy material for more than 2,000 shirts. A number of merchants of the Colonial era were women. Their butcher shops, flour mills, bakeries, fish markets, lumber mills, and textile looms supplied the Continental army.

During the war, women, especially the wives of well-known revolutionaries, were the targets of British and Hessian troops. Their homes, crops and businesses were destroyed. There are records in several states of gang rapes.

American women did some of the destruction of property to deny the British supplies. Catherine Van Rennsaeler Schuyler, the wife of an American General, rode from New York City to her family's farm and burned the crops so the British could not harvest. Her example inspired other wealthy farmers to burn their fields. Rebecca Motte, of South Carolina, set fire to her own plantation to force the British occupiers out to face the attacking American forces.

In Peperell, Massachusetts, Prudence Wright commanded a troop of women dressed as men known as Prudence Wright's Guards. They captured a British courier and sent the plans to the Massachusetts militia. All of these women, no matter what the capacity, nor personality, nor final outcome, served their country during the American Revolution. Unfortunately, we are not left with a quantity of documentary evidence. They were there, however, side-by side with the men of the eighteenth century.