Founding Myths Read online

  We have made Molly Pitcher, a folk legend, into a real person. The legend started in the mid–nineteenth century, receded slightly in the mid–twentieth century, but then staged a dramatic comeback in the past quarter century, filling the demand to include more women in history texts. Out of six elementary- and middle-school texts published in the early twenty-first century, five include the story of Molly Pitcher, and four feature vivid pictures, including one of Molly’s dress flowing in the wind as she plunges a ramrod into a cannon.7 These images were painted in the mid–to late nineteenth century; now, thanks to high-quality color reproduction, they provide our textbooks with visual “evidence” of a female presence in the Revolutionary War. Because these paintings appear quaint and old-fashioned, any differences between the Revolutionary and Victorian eras are easily overlooked. The key concept—what really excited the artists—is the juxtaposition of masculine and feminine imagery: a figure bearing prominent female features (in some of the paintings, Molly’s breasts are partially exposed) braves the grit of the battlefield to master the ramrod and cannon. If a real woman can fight like this, these artists tell us, real men can hardly fail to follow suit.8

  One volume of Macmillan’s “Famous Americans Series,” intended for a juvenile audience, reveals Molly Pitcher’s perfect blend of masculine and feminine virtues. Just as thirsty soldiers at Monmouth were beginning to give up hope, they heard a woman speak:

  “Let me give you a drink,” said a voice. “I’ll hold up your head. Come, now, drink from my pitcher.” They drank and lived. Then other fallen soldiers drank from that pitcher. And others and others until it was empty.

  “I will get more,” the woman said. “The well is near. It is just across the road. Call me if you want another drink. Just say, ‘Molly’—I will come to you.”

  The sick men whispered her name to others. Before long many feeble voices were calling, “Molly! Molly! Pitcher! Pitcher!” Sometimes these calls were just “Molly Pitcher, Molly Pitcher.” . . .

  A hundred fallen men were kept alive by that water. Some were able to fight again. All blessed the woman who saved them.

  When her husband was also overcome by the heat, the story continues, Molly volunteered to fire his cannon in his place:

  The bullets fell around Molly. But she swabbed and loaded and fired. The hot sun blazed down on her, but she swabbed and loaded and fired.

  Her dress was black from gunpowder. There were smudges on her face and hands. She paid no attention. Her cannon must be fired!

  Once the battle had ended, the commander in chief himself honored the army’s new heroine:

  General Washington took her powder-stained hand in his. He smiled at her and spoke kindly. “Mrs. Hays, the courage you showed yesterday has never been equaled by any woman. Your kindness has never been surpassed. You were an angel of mercy to suffering men. You were a pillar of strength at the cannon, with the skill of an experienced gunner. . . . Therefore, I make you a sergeant in this army. And I now pin this badge of honor upon you.”

  There was silence until this was over. Then a thousand soldiers began to cheer.

  “Hooray for Sergeant Molly!” they cried. “Hooray for Molly Pitcher!”9

  Here is the tale writ large. In this children’s biography, Molly Pitcher takes her place beside Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, Babe Ruth, and thirty other “famous Americans” featured in the same series. There is one significant difference, however, between Molly Pitcher and the others: all the rest were real people, while Molly is only a myth.

  FROM CAPTAIN MOLLY TO MOLLY PITCHER

  Molly Pitcher was a long time in the making. Nobody in Revolutionary times would have imagined General Washington taking the hand of a female camp follower with the Continental Army (not even a private soldier) and instantaneously making her an officer. And a common woman from Carlisle, who scrubbed houses and public buildings for several decades after the war and died without great fanfare, had no idea she would someday become “Molly Pitcher,” the “best known” woman to serve in the Revolution.10 On the other hand, contemporaries of the Revolutionary War did not have to imagine women hauling water in pails and buckets to quench men’s thirst and cool the cannons; such people existed and were part and parcel of the war effort.

  At least one camp follower did assume the place of her husband on an artillery team, but not at Monmouth. At Fort Washington on November 16, 1776, Margaret Corbin stood in for her husband John, who had just been killed. Margaret herself was wounded by grapeshot during the battle, and she lost the use of one arm for the rest of her life. She later became part of the “Invalid Regiment” at West Point, and on July 6, 1779, the Supreme Council of Pennsylvania awarded a lifetime pension, “one-half of the monthly pay drawn by a soldier,” to the woman who had been “wounded and disabled in the attack on Fort Washington, while she heroically filled the post of her husband who was killed by her side serving a piece of artillery.”11 Corbin, it seems, picked up the nickname Captain Molly; two years after the Invalid Regiment disbanded, military records reveal that the government provided “Captain Molly” with such items as a “bed-sack” and an “old common tent.”12

  Unlike the imagined Molly Pitcher, this Captain Molly was flesh and blood—too much so, in fact, to make a good story. In the mid–nineteenth century, as the Revolution was receding from living memory, Benson Lossing tried to resurrect it by identifying the real people, places, and artifacts surviving from that time. While traveling to the Hudson Highlands near West Point, Lossing talked to three informants who claimed to have known or seen a woman named Captain Molly; one of these recalled that her Captain Molly was also called Dirty Kate and “died a horrible death from the effects of syphilitic disease.”13 Although touted in folklore, Captain Molly needed to acquire a more appealing persona before she could be enshrined as the Revolutionary War’s premier woman warrior. She needed to become Molly Pitcher, who tended to thirsty soldiers as well as tending a cannon, and for that to happen, she needed to find a home at Monmouth, where soldiers literally perished from the heat. Fortunately, Molly had little trouble traveling from battlefield to battlefield. Lossing’s informants placed her and her cannon-firing exploits not only at Fort Washington, where they were well documented, but also at Fort Clinton, Brandywine, and, yes, Monmouth.

  We have no firsthand descriptions, recorded at the time, of a woman at Monmouth firing the cannon of her fallen husband. We might have one secondhand account. Supposedly, Dr. Albigence Waldo wrote in his diary that a wounded officer told the doctor, five days after the battle, that he had observed a woman take up the “gun” (was it a musket or a cannon?) of her fallen “gallant.”14 This evidence is questionable, however, because the original diary has not been located and because diaries or journals from Revolutionary times were sometimes altered when they found their way into print in the nineteenth century.15

  In 1830, fifty-two years after the fact, Joseph Plumb Martin recalled seeing a women and her husband, working together, firing artillery at Monmouth. But Martin’s protagonist does not match the “Molly Pitcher” description: she did not carry water to thirsty soldiers, and she did not spring to action because her husband had fallen (she had been helping all along), and she received no reward from Washington or any other officer. In fact, in Martin’s tale, she was the butt of a ribald joke: “While in the act of reaching a cartridge and having one of her feet as far before the other as she could step, a cannon shot from the enemy passed directly between her legs without doing any other damage than carrying away all the lower part of her petticoat,—looking at it with apparent unconcern, she observed, that it was lucky it did not pass a little higher, for in that case it might have carried away something else.”16r />
  That’s all we have in the written historical record—suggestive snippets, nothing more. Yet historical tales evolve through oral transmission, and they start with real-life experience. At the Battle of Monmouth, amid scorching temperatures, thirty-seven soldiers died from heatstroke. This accounted for more than one-third of the battlefield fatalities.17 Several hundred female camp followers were either on the battlefield or close at hand. On normal days, these women cooked, washed, and hauled things about; during battles, they nursed the wounded and carried supplies to and from the lines. Undoubtedly, camp followers, so far as they could, made water available to thirsty, sweltering soldiers trying to survive the heat. Quite possibly, some of these women helped in the firing of cannons. During other battles, too, woman did what they could for struggling soldiers and aided artillery teams on the rear lines, removed from close contact with enemy soldiers. At Monmouth and elsewhere, survivors took some notice of these women’s efforts when passing on stories to folks who were not there, and as the stories traveled from mouth to ear to mouth, they began to reflect a view of women quite different from that common in Revolutionary times. It was in this context that a lowly camp follower could reemerge as an iconic heroine.

  Very likely, the evolution of a legendary Molly Pitcher received a boost from abroad. The first cohesive written accounts containing the key elements of the story come from the Napoleonic Wars, so its pedigree might not be entirely American. In 1808–1809, when a French army was laying siege to the Spanish town of Saragossa, a young woman named Augustina Domonech carried drinks to thirsty soldiers, then took the place of a dead artilleryman. Later, when her husband or lover was shot, she took his rifle and assumed his position in battle. This “Maid of Saragossa” became something of a sensation; unlike Mary Hays, she did not have to wait until after her death to receive her accolades. The similarity between the Maid of Saragossa and the final evolution of the Molly Pitcher tale might not be coincidental; as Molly’s fame grew through the nineteenth century, she was often compared to her European counterpart.18

  Half a century after the Battle of Monmouth, stories about an American heroine closely resembling the Maid of Saragossa emerged in print, conflated and confused but certainly vivid. One of the earliest versions appeared in a book called American Anecdotes: Original and Select, published in 1830:

  Captain Molly. Before the two armies, American and English, had begun the general action of Monmouth, two of the advanced batteries commenced a very severe fire against each other. As the warmth was excessive, the wife of a cannonier constantly ran to bring water for him from a neighboring spring. At the moment when she started from the spring, to pass to the post of her husband, she saw him fall, and hastened to assist him; but he was dead. At the same moment she heard an officer order the cannon to be removed from its place, complaining he could not fill his post with as brave a man as had been killed. “No,” said the intrepid Molly, fixing her eyes upon the officer, “the cannon shall not be removed for want of some one to serve it; since my brave husband is no more, I will use my utmost exertions to avenge his death.” The activity and courage with which she performed the offices of cannonier during the action, attracted the attention of all who witnessed it, finally of Gen. Washington himself, who afterwards gave her the rank of Lieutenant, and granted her half pay during life. She wore an epaulette, and every body called her Captain Molly.19

  The story contains the basic elements of the now-classic Molly Pitcher tale: she carries water to thirsty soldiers; her husband is killed; she jumps to the cannon and saves the day; she is honored and rewarded handsomely (as no rank-and-file Revolutionary soldier ever was, whether male or female). Molly then lives happily ever after on a lieutenant’s half-pay—no need for this wartime heroine to toil as a cleaning lady into her old age.

  Various newspapers at the time reprinted this moving account, with its vivid image of a female war heroine. In 1835 a variation appeared in Francis Alexander Durivage’s Popular Cyclopedia of History, this time using the name “Molly Pitcher” as well as “Captain Molly.” Two years after that, New Jersey newspapers, to promote interest in the Battle of Monmouth, added further embellishments. In this version, Molly was “indignant” that her husband’s cannon might lie idle, so she “flew to the gun.” At the end, Congress “ratified” Molly’s lieutenant’s commission, a yet more fanciful construction.20

  In 1840, George Washington Parke Custis, Martha Washington’s grandson through her first marriage, repeated the basic story from American Anecdotes but added visual detail and a new twist on the heroine’s words, as if the general had witnessed the scene himself:

  While Captain Molly was serving some water for the refreshment of the men, her husband received a shot in the head, and fell lifeless under the wheels of the piece. The heroine threw down the pail of water, and crying to her dead consort, “lie there my darling while I avenge ye,” grasped the ramrod the lifeless hand of the poor fellow had just relinquished, sent home the charge, and called to the matrosses to prime and fire. It was done. Then entering the sponge into the smoking muzzle of the cannon, the heroine performed to admiration the duties of the most expert artilleryman. . . .

  The next morning . . . Washington received her graciously, gave her a piece of gold and assured her that her services should not be forgotten. This remarkable and intrepid woman survived the Revolution, never for an instant laying aside the appellation she has so nobly won . . . the famed Captain Molly at the Battle of Monmouth.21

  Who could now doubt the tale? Washington had rewarded Captain Molly personally, then related the story to his grandson. With Custis’s endorsement, the Captain Molly “anecdote” of Captain Molly, like the heroine herself, received the Washington stamp of approval.

  One new element in the Custis version is worthy of note: “the pail of water.” Other versions hadn’t noted how water was delivered to soldiers, and Custis assumed the pail was the obvious vessel. According to another rendition from 1840, “A woman who was called by the troops Captain Molly was busily engaged in carrying canteens of water to the famished [and presumably thirsty] soldiers.”22 How, then, did “pail” and “canteen” evolve into “pitcher,” a delicate piece of dinnerware unlikely to be found on any battlefield?

  Again, we must look well beyond the Battle of Monmouth to sort this out, but there is a likely explanation. One of the best-known women during the late eighteenth century was Moll Dimond Pitcher, a fortune-teller in Lynn, Massachusetts. Sailors and ship owners would come from afar to consult Moll Pitcher before casting off to sea. Historian Emily Lewis Butterfield notes that Moll “unwittingly provided fodder for several generations of politicians, advertisers, poets, and dramatists.” In 1811, for example, the Massachusetts Scourge joked that President Madison might find Moll Pitcher’s “magic and popguns” more effective than gunboats as a defense against British harassment. John Greenleaf Whittier published an uncomplimentary poem about her in 1832, which he expanded eight years later into an epic he called “Moll Pitcher and the Minstrel Girl.” A popular melodrama entitled Moll Pitcher, or the Fortune Teller of Lynn played on stages in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia from 1839 until after the Civil War.23 Clearly, this Moll Pitcher had nothing to do with the Battle of Monmouth—but her name was out there, a household word, precisely at the time “Captain Molly” morphed into “Molly Pitcher,” and quite fortuitously, the word “pitcher” connoted the carrying of water to thirsty soldiers. Perhaps the renown of this controversial prophetess from Massachusetts, a legend in her own right, played some role in the evolution of Revolutionary War folklore. Throughout the late nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, the heroine at Monmouth was often called “Moll Pitcher.”24

  By the 1840s Moll Pitcher (the fortu
ne-teller) and Molly Pitcher (formerly Captain Molly), as disparate as they were, had partially merged. When the fortune-teller’s daughter died in 1841, an obituary in the Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics noted that she was “the daughter of the celebrated Moll Pitcher.” A reader understandably asked which Moll Pitcher that might be, and the editor replied the heroine of Monmouth and proceeded to tell the story of that battle.25 This mistaken explanation was picked up in several other papers. The female soldier’s story was more appealing than that of the fortune-teller, but the fortune-teller had the more fetching name. Much as the story of a woman firing the cannon of her fallen husband migrated from Fort Washington to Monmouth, so did the name “Moll Pitcher” transfer from one female protagonist to another. Over the next few generations, Moll Pitcher and Molly Pitcher, applied to a cannon-firing woman in the Revolutionary War, were used interchangeably.26

  At first, the name “Molly Pitcher” was merely appended to the traditional “Captain Molly” story, but in time the dainty dinnerware, with its feminine connotation, proved irresistible. Having traded in her heavy pail for a pitcher (which in later representations would display artistic ornamentation), Molly was no longer a poor, vulgar camp follower, but a respectable woman in service of men. Defined by both a cannon and a pitcher of water, she now embraced an irresistible blend of masculine and feminine attributes. That such a creature could be found in the middle of a Revolutionary battlefield was cause for wonder and celebration.