soldiers, and citizens. In August 1776, Abraham Clark, a member of the Continental Congress, wrote that residents of his native Elizabethtown “are daily alarmed with news of an attack.”11 By the end of September, after British forces had actually invaded, patriots routinely discussed reports of British “savagery.” American General Jedidiah Huntington recorded that with almost one-third of New York City in flames, “unheard of barbarities were committed by the Kings Troops . . . some, it’s said, were thrown into the flames, others tied up by the legs and their throats cut,” all done to “deter” further insurrection.12
Figure 1. William Livingston, governor of New Jersey, 1776–1790.
Courtesy of the New York Public Library.
After the British invasion of New Jersey in late 1776, dozens of state leaders and soldiers saw the devastation inflicted by the British, its devastating impact on state residents, and how it pervaded residents’ focus throughout the war. For instance, Samuel Adams wrote to his wife Elizabeth about the “savage tragedies . . . without respect to age or sex” perpetrated by Hessian soldiers, which “have equaled the most barbarous” of all the “nations of the world.” Adams reiterated his belief in the barbarity of the Hessian and British forces the following week to his cousin John, when he again claimed that they had “been most inhumanely used in their persons, without regard to sex or age, and plundered of all they had.”13 Echoing Adams, William Whipple wrote to his fellow New Hampshire delegate Josiah Bartlett of the “brutal vengeance of an abandoned soldiery . . . exercised on all without distinction.” The “ravages committed by the enemy” in New Jersey were “really shocking to humanity.” Whipple feared that if the British shifted their operations to New England, his constituents would suffer “greater cruelties than New Jersey has experienced.”14 These letters echoed reports from field commanders, such as Nathanael Greene, who wrote to his wife in early December 1776 that American soldiers from Maryland and Virginia had been dispatched to New Jersey to “stop the ravages of the enemy.” Unlike other accounts of the campaign, Greene claimed both sides “take the clothes off of the peoples back. The distress they spread wherever they go exceeds all description.”15
In early 1777, after a congressional committee began investigating British and Hessian conduct in New Jersey, delegates heard reports of numerous rapes and murders perpetrated by forces loyal to the king, further evidence of the war’s destructive power. For instance, Virginian Thomas Nelson described how British soldiers “play the very devil with girls and even old women to satisfy their libidinous appetites . . . there is scarcely a virgin to be found.”16 In the same vein, Samuel Adams wrote to James Warren about the “shocking inhumanities shown to our countrymen in the Jerseys” as the British engaged in “plundering houses, cruelly beating old men, ravishing maids, murdering captives in cold blood, and systematically starving multitudes of prisoners.”17 John Adams and Richard Henry Lee both reiterated the “ravages in the Jersies” including “rapes, murders, and devastation . . . [which] would have disgraced the savages of the wilderness.”18 Likewise, New Jersey native Thomas McCarty recalled the brutal nature of the New Jersey-New York borderland during an engagement with a British foraging party in February 1777. McCarty reported that his unit “attacked the body and bullets flew like hail” causing significant casualties. In speaking of the American wounded, McCarty wrote that the British soldiers had “dashed out their brains those men wounded in the thigh or leg . . . with their muskets and run them through with their bayonets, made them like sieves. This was barbarity to the utmost.”19 Delegate Whipple believed that this wanton inhumanity inflicted by the British reflected the true state of “British humanity” and that “all America would have experienced” the same if they “submitted to the yoke of the tyrant.”20
Reports of widespread destruction, rape, and murder from the initial 1776–1777 campaign fueled New Jerseyans’ fears of future attacks by the British. This consistent fear made Newark leaders, in the spring of 1777, warn Governor Livingston of “the unhappy situation of this town being so contiguous to the Enemy who threatens us daily with an invasion.”21 These fears were never realized as the main British army quickly withdrew from New Jersey, but the campaign of 1777 brought renewed reports of attacks against American civilians. For example, while based in Perth Amboy, Hessian cavalry officer Baron Friedrich Adam Julius von Wangenheim wrote to his brother that “we will soon bring war to an area where no one is suspecting it” and “attack the enemy as on a hunt.” He claimed that his men would “crawl on our bellies through the bushes and if one sees a rebel, one sneaks up to him and shoots him dead” and reiterated the orders of General Howe, who had decided that the army in this campaign needed “to be cruel, since he has seen that with kindness one does not accomplish anything with them—there will be burnings, hangings, and everything will be ruined.”22
After the Patriot victory at Monmouth, New Jersey settled into a prolonged period of guerrilla warfare between patriots, loyalists, and British military units that sought food and supplies from the countryside, which further damaged the state’s economy. A second cold winter at Morristown (1779–1780) made New Jersey no friend to Continental soldiers as harsh weather, lack of supplies, and poor living conditions affected both their health and discipline. Alexander Scammell, the army’s adjutant general during the second encampment at Morristown, described that the complete lack of discipline rampant among American soldiers, especially thefts from other soldiers and the plundering of local residents’ property, further exacerbated the already present civilian anxiety over their economic livelihood. In January 1780, for instance, Rubin Parker received one hundred lashes on the bare back for theft, while in February the Continental Army executed another soldier for the same crime. Similarly, Scammell recorded death sentences in May 1780 for four soldiers of the Pennsylvania line after they plundered the house of Cornelius Bogart near Paramus.23 Plundering became so widespread that the General Orders issued on January 28, 1780, prohibited soldiers from leaving camp. Although some soldiers sought riches from plundering civilian homes, hunger motivated many more to search the countryside for food. Plundering continued after Morristown with Eliza Susan Quincy of Basking Ridge writing in her memoirs that in 1781 that a group of armed soldiers broke into her home searching for gold watches. The thieves stole thirty pounds worth of gold and silver before threatening to kill the home’s inhabitants unless they turned over more loot. The robbers proceeded to ransack the house and took twelve ruffled linen shirts, all the plates, the tea and coffee service, and every piece of silver, threatening to burn down the house if the family reported the theft.24
Just as American troops did, British forces also routinely foraged for supplies and angered already economically vulnerable residents. In December 1776, for instance, General Howe reported from New Brunswick that so many solidiers plundered civilian property, it would “be absolutely impossible to prevail upon the inhabitants to bring provisions to market” where the army could legally buy them. Similar reports came from Middlebush in June 1777 when Howe ordered that anyone found guilty of “marauding or pulling down houses, barns or any irregularity” would be punished severely. Punishments for plundering happened with regularity as Howe reported that John Gibson had been sentenced to 1,000 lashes for robbery and Jacob Van Tessel faced death for the same crime.25 Likewise, physician Martin McEvoy stood trial for illegally plundering a horse and cow in 1778, a charge of which the court-martial found him guilty and discharged him from the service. Lt. Boswell of the Maryland loyalists similarly stood trial in September 1778 for taking two horses. Boswell claimed that he only took them because he was “so very lame that he could hardly walk” and, after his unit left New Jersey, he sent the horses back to their owner. Even though the court found him not guilty, the actions he and others took affected not only the economic lives of New Jerseyans but their willingness to support the Continental Army.26
British forces quickly realized that foraging in New Jersey had turned many residents against their cause. As Howe had feared in New Brunswick in 1776, New York’s British governor,
