Founding Myths Read online

  The combination of masculine and feminine imagery excited visual artists. In 1848 Nathaniel Currier, seventy years after the battle, painted a canvas titled Molly Pitcher, the Heroine of Monmouth. In the 1850s Dennis Malone Carter followed suit with two paintings, one of Molly by a cannon, the other of Molly being presented to Washington. By 1860 reproductions of engravings were beginning to bear the caption “Molly Pitcher” instead of “Captain Molly.” With visual images now leading the way, Molly Pitcher finally prevailed over the real-life Captain Molly.27

  THE SEARCH FOR A BODY

  The legend was almost perfect, save for one element: an actual heroine, a person who had once lived and breathed. As Molly Pitcher came to life in the minds of her many fans, she demanded to be reified. People began to wonder: Who was this Molly Pitcher, anyway?

  In the early stages of the legend, many assumed the heroic Molly Pitcher must have been married to “Mr. Pitcher,” but that proved a dead-end trail. Since no Mr. and Mrs. Molly Pitcher, happily married until that fateful day at Monmouth, materialized in the historical record, some other woman, under a different name, must have been the one. The search, and the race, was on. What community, and what family, could claim Molly Pitcher as their own?28

  How to discover the “real” Molly Pitcher, however, is a problem without a solution, for it assumes a specific historical occurrence and an identifiable protagonist. Some legends start with real events and real protagonists, which are exaggerated later to create a tale of mythic proportions, but a legend can also derive from the gradual assemblage of diverse strands that feature multiple and often anonymous protagonists. Having no definable origin, such legends are free to wander as they will, and only later will people attempt to ground the story in a real-world occurrence. This was the dynamic here. Once a fictionalized Molly Pitcher was cemented in public memory, people came forth to attach themselves, their relatives, or their communities to her tale, reveling in her fame.29

  This brings us to Mary Hays McCauley, the eventual winner of the Molly Pitcher sweepstakes. In 1856, a local newspaper’s obituary of John L. Hays, Mary’s son, placed Molly Pitcher squarely in the town of Carlisle, Pennsylvania:

  The deceased was the son of the ever-to-be-remembered heroine, the celebrated “Molly Pitcher” whose deeds of daring are recorded in the annals of the Revolution and over whose remains a monument ought to be erected. The writer of this recollects well to have frequently seen her in the streets of Carlisle, pointed out by admiring friends thus: “There goes the woman who fired the cannon at the British when her husband was killed.”30

  This was a grand piece of recovered memory. Twenty-four years earlier, in the same paper’s obituary of John’s mother, there was no such talk—no “ever-to-be-remembered,” no proposed monument, and certainly no “Molly Pitcher.” Back then, before the Molly Pitcher legend had mushroomed, the description of Mary Hays McCauley had been far more modest. Being the “widow of an American hero” (no heroine in her own right), “she received during the latter years of her life, an annuity from the government.” The piece closed with generic words applicable to nearly any local resident:

  For upwards of 40 years she resided in this borough; and was during that time, recognized as an honest, obliging, and industrious woman. She has left numerous relatives to regret her decease; who with many others of her acquaintance, have a hope that her reward in the world to which she has gone, will far exceed that which she received in this.

  Had Mary Hays McCauley been celebrated during her lifetime for firing her husband’s cannon, the hometown editor would have seized on the opportunity to mention what would become her singular claim to fame—but he didn’t. When Mrs. McCauley died fifty-four years after the Battle of Monmouth, the legend of “Molly Pitcher” had yet to attach to this unsuspecting woman, who died with no great honors. Yet a quarter century after that, and three-quarters of a century after Monmouth, she had become in the minds of her family and community a celebrated heroine. In the life of a legend, what a difference a generation makes.31

  Carlisle was not alone in staking a claim. In Allentown, New Jersey, during the centennial celebrations of independence, Reverend George Swain declared in a “Historical Discourse” on the history of his church that “the famous Molly Pitcher, . . . who, at the battle of Monmouth, acted the role of cannoneer in the place of her husband or some other brave who had fallen beside his gun,” was reputed to be Mary Hannah, daughter of a member of their congregation. Nobody followed through on this piece of local lore, however—a lost opportunity.32

  Citizens of Carlisle fought harder and fared better. Mary Hays, before her marriage to a laborer named John McCalla (spelled variously in contemporary records and later accounts as McKolly, McKelly, McCauly, McCauley, McAuley, McCawley, McCaley, and McCalley), does seem to have been present at Monmouth, and in 1822, forty-four years later, she did receive a pension “for services rendered” of a private’s half-pay.33 These facts provided a base upon which embellishments could be overlaid. During the prelude to the centennial, an old-time resident named Wesley Miles recalled that forty-four years earlier, he had been present at the funeral of a local woman whom he claimed had been buried with military honors. (How strange that a woman supposedly buried with military honors escaped the gaze of Mrs. McCauley’s obituary writers.) Miles wrote to the local paper: “Reader, the subject of this reminiscence is a prototype of the ‘Maid of Saragossa.’ The heroine of Monmouth, Molly Pitcher.”34

  That’s all it took. Town promoters immediately claimed the legendary figure as their own. After Miles had identified the unmarked grave site, residents of Carlisle raised $100 to place a new headstone by the bones of their forgotten heroine:

  MOLLY MCCAULEY

  RENOWNED IN HISTORY AS

  “MOLLY PITCHER,”

  THE HEROINE OF MONMOUTH.

  DIED JANUARY 22, 1833

  AGED SEVENTY-NINE YEARS35

  Years later, somebody pointed out that the date of death on the tombstone was a year off. What if the site of the grave, as indicated by Wesley Miles, was off as well? In 1892, just to be sure, concerned citizens of Carlisle dug up the grave and discovered the skeleton of an adult female; they carefully placed it back, certain that those bones had once worked a cannon at Monmouth.36

  Once Carlisle had discovered and declared the identity of Molly Pitcher, elderly residents began to come forth with tales they had never told. One former neighbor, a young girl when Mary Hays McCauley was an old woman, recalled her saying, “You girls should have been with me at the Battle of Monmouth and learned how to fire a cannon.” Another suddenly remembered that she had met Mary in 1826, when “she was known as ‘Molly Pitcher’ ”; that was actually during the reign of “Captain Molly,” however, before the first recorded use of “Molly Pitcher.”37

  In a book published for the Patriotic Sons of America in 1905, local historian John B. Landis used these recovered memories to confirm Carlisle’s claim to the “real” Molly Pitcher. “No imaginary heroine was Molly Pitcher,” Landis wrote, “but a real buxom lass, a strong, sturdy, courageous woman.”38 Today, if elderly people suddenly came forth with stories they had heard from aging veterans of the Spanish-American War of 1898, the veracity of those stories might be questioned—but few people at the time seemed to care that more than a century had elapsed between deed and memory, and that the memories were twice removed. In 1911, when the prestigious Journal of American History published Landis’s findings, the McCauley/Molly Pitcher connection was anointed with a quasi-official badge of approval.39

  With her identity revealed and confirmed, Molly Pitcher began to accumulate physical artifacts. In 1903 a great-great-granddaughter of Mary Hays McCauley made a generous gift to the local historica
l society: “Molly Pitcher’s pitcher,” an ornate piece featuring oriental pagodas, some sort of fortifications, and figures floating in thin air.40 In 1905 the Patriotic Sons of America placed a flagstaff and a cannon by Molly’s tombstone; this cannon, acquired from an arsenal in Watertown, Massachusetts, had supposedly been used at Monmouth.41 Meanwhile, at Monmouth, history enthusiasts constructed two signposts declaring “Mollie Pitcher’s Well” on either side of the water source she supposedly used to fill her pitcher. Years later, Monmouth’s most prominent historian, William Stryker, revealed that the marked well had been dug fifty years after the battle.42

  Spurred by the dramatic rise to fame of her compatriot in Carlisle, Margaret Corbin—the “real” Captain Molly—staged something of a comeback. On March 16, 1926, at the urging of the Daughters of the American Revolution, her bones once again saw the light of day. (“A few decayed fibers of wood and several rusty hand-forged nails were the only traces of a coffin,” wrote a witness at the disinterment. “The bones of the skeleton were complete except the small bones of the feet and the bones of the right hand which had disintegrated.”) Twenty minutes later, the remains of Margaret Corbin were placed back underground in the cemetery of the United States Military Academy at West Point, only a few miles from her original grave site. A tablet identified her definitively as “Captain Molly.”43

  And so it was. By 1926 both Captain Molly and Molly Pitcher had been identified, properly reburied, and honored with the appropriate monuments. Their legends were literally sealed in stone. One tale, however, had subsumed the other. Although the “real” Captain Molly stood in for her husband at Fort Washington, this heroic deed was not quite enough. It took the cannon and pitcher together to create the Revolution’s iconic war heroine.

  For a century after the town of Carlisle made Molly Pitcher its own, and for seventy years after historian John Landis legitimized that claim, her story was firmly attached to a real, dead woman. The 1948 Dictionary of American Biography (DAB) included an entry for Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley, “better known as Molly Pitcher.”44 Henry Steele Commager and Richard B. Morris, in their classic compilation of primary sources published in 1958, told the story of Mary Hays’s heroic deeds at Monmouth. By way of documentation, they included Joseph Plumb Martin’s recollections under the title “ ‘Molly Pitcher’ Mans a Gun at Monmouth”—even though Martin mentions neither Molly Pitcher nor Mary Hays, and his protagonist did not lose her husband, serve water to thirsty men, or receive any reward.45 During her unchallenged reign as the “real” Molly Pitcher, the most serious threat faced by Mary Hays McCauley was not to her identity or her good name, but to her body. In the early 1960s, the Friendly Sons of Molly Pitcher, based in Monmouth County, New Jersey, threatened to steal the heroine’s bones from their resting place in Carlisle and place them at the scene of the battle.46

  Not until the last quarter of the twentieth century, starting with the bicentennial celebrations, did historians take a more serious look at the dubious McCauley/Pitcher connection. John Todd White in 1975 and Linda Grant De Pauw and Conover Hunt in 1976 suggested that the “Molly Pitcher” story was more folklore than fact, and that Molly herself should be treated as a compilation of female camp followers.47 For a moment, it looked as if the legend of Molly Pitcher would be expunged because of the work of diligent historians, but two contingencies turned that plotline around. First, the women’s movement, at a historic peak, had correctly noted that traditional history was “his-story,” and texts needed to include “her-story” as well; the hunt for historic female figures was on. Second, advances in color reproduction created a demand by textbook publishers for vivid historic images. Both demands could be satisfied by dusting off those nineteenth-century paintings of Molly tending her cannon, accompanied by a retelling of her story—and since these were textbooks, the story must be about someone, a real historic figure. Mary Hays McCauley’s place in history was rescued after all.

  Some historians continued to complain, but others let it be. The 1999 American National Biography, superseding the old Dictionary of American Biography, took the reification one step further than its predecessor had done, including an entry for “PITCHER, Molly (13 Oct. 1754?–22 Jan. 1832).” By its very structure, the article treated “Molly Pitcher” as an actual resident of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, with dates of birth and death. The details of her life, the author admitted, remained uncertain—“only her actual first name, Mary, is accepted as definite”—but like other entries that fill this twenty-four-volume authoritative reference shelved in most respectable libraries, “PITCHER, Molly” was assumed to have been a real person, even if historical disputes about her identity and her life continued.48

  But if facts are troubling things, so are facts that don’t exist. Since there is no contemporaneous evidence that Mary Hays of Carlisle carried pitchers of water to thirsty soldiers, took her husband’s place at a cannon when he was killed, and was honored and rewarded by General Washington, those still wishing to tell the story have conveniently walked it backward. There is no record that a man named Hays was killed at Monmouth, so they now say Mary’s husband at the time was only wounded or even just thirsty, they say, when Molly took his place. The lieutenant’s commission is mostly gone, and Washington’s gold pieces now appear primarily in renditions intended for children, the true holdouts. But the delicate vessels of water must remain, embedded in Mary’s name of fame, Molly Pitcher—no cumbersome pails permitted.

  Even with this watered-down version, those wishing to continue the tale find themselves on the defensive. Some texts published since 2012 retreat by using hedge words that get them off the hook, perpetuating the legend while disavowing any claim to its veracity: “supposedly,” “may have,” “according to legend,” “legend says,” and so on. Technically, the stories presented are only conjectural—Mary Hays “is said to have” joined her wounded husband’s gun crew—but “said” by whom? When? Why? Troubling questions of authenticity raised by such diction are not explored, and textbook readers, eager to be done with their assignments, are not likely to raise them on their own. They read through the hedges, accepting story as truth.49

  Other updated texts state flatly that Mary Hays took her husband’s place, making no disclaimer, but toss in a gratuitous “legendary” or “earning folk-legend status,” phrases that do not weaken the import of the statements but protect the authors against those who call Molly Pitcher a legend. The person and event are real and serve as the basis for the legend, these authors imply. This is historically incorrect. The legend came first, then promoters attached Mary Hays to it.50

  Still others use gimmicks. “Margaret Corbin of Pennsylvania went with her husband when he joined the Continental Army. After he died in battle, she took his place. Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley also joined her husband in battle.” Cleverly, the author does not actually state that McCauley’s husband died and she took his place—“also” refers only to joining her husband in battle—but few if any students will catch this. This text continues: “The soldiers called her ‘Moll of the Pitcher,’ or Molly Pitcher, because she carried water pitchers to the soldiers.” The altered etymology, based on no historical evidence, lends a seductive air of authenticity not in the least warranted.51

  A few current textbooks for lower grades don’t bother with hedges or gimmicks but repeat the story point-blank, walking back nineteenth-century excesses (Molly’s husband is wounded, not killed, and she receives no reward from Washington) but making no further apologies: “American women also won fame for their bravery during the war. Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley earned the name Molly Pitcher by carrying fresh wate
r to American troops during the Battle of Monmouth in New Jersey in 1778. When her husband was wounded, she took his place in battle, loading cannons.” This text wraps around an image of “Mary McCauley” in a full dress, ramming a rod into a cannon’s barrel.52 One current high-school text, published in 2012, unabashedly tells the same story, but with this long-discredited addition: “Afterward, General Washington made her a noncommissioned officer for her brave deeds.”53

  The Internet, meanwhile, has helped Molly Pitcher withstand attacks based on the historical record. Like nineteenth-century paintings, it is a medium that rewards excess. As of this writing, a Google search on the Internet reveals 485,000 hits for “Molly Pitcher”—and this number is increasing rapidly. Students hoping to produce reports on Revolutionary heroines can find a wealth of information on the Net, including digitized reproductions of those flamboyant Molly Pitcher paintings. Many of these enterprising young scholars, following a folkloric tradition appropriate for our times, post their own minibiographies of Molly Pitcher on the Web.

  Meanwhile, Amazon lists more than a dozen commercial biographies intended for children, two of which are cited as sources for the Molly Pitcher entry in Wikipedia. “During training, artillery and infantry soldiers would shout ‘Molly! Pitcher!’ whenever they needed Mary to bring water,” the Wiki article says, and the claim is duly referenced to a book titled Molly Pitcher: Heroine of the War for Independence, for ages nine and up. Wikipedia continues: “After the battle, General Washington asked about the woman whom he had seen loading a cannon on the battlefield. In commemoration of her courage, he issued Mary Hays a warrant as a noncommissioned officer. Afterward, she was known as ‘Sergeant Molly,’ a nickname that she used for the rest of her life.” The reference is to They Called Her Molly Pitcher, age range three to seven.54