Founding Myths (8 page)

Many other tradesmen, artisans, and laborers met in the taverns of Boston to engage in collective action. Butchers, bakers, and leatherworkers sent petitions to the General Court and Boston's selectmen. Daily, during their 11:00 a.m. break, shipyard workers gathered in taverns and in the streets to talk over the state of affairs. These people, working in concert, had become political actors.
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All these people, and many more, came together for the Boston town meeting, the local governing organization that invited the
participation of “the whole body of the people”; during the height of Revolutionary fervor, this came to include apprentices and others who were not granted the formal right to vote. Each year, the town meeting elected representatives to the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and each year these men were handed specific instructions, approved by the town meeting, as to how they should respond to the key issues of the day.
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The entire edifice was heavily weighted at the bottom. This was a politicized population, and that was part of the problem: British officials and local Tories found it difficult to accept, or even comprehend, the degree of popular participation in politics in Revolutionary Boston.
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Samuel Adams functioned within this framework. He was one of the leaders of the Boston Caucus, the Long Room Club, and the committees of correspondence. He sometimes served as moderator for the town meeting. From his position as clerk of the House of Representatives he wielded considerable power at the provincial level. More a polemicist than a street leader, he drafted many letters and resolutions, giving sentiments that were shared by many a concrete expression. He was intelligent, dedicated, persuasive, and savvy—an effective activist and master politician.
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But Adams did not run the show, because nobody could. Revolutionary Boston did not function that way—and no self-respecting patriot, certainly not Samuel Adams,
wanted
it to function that way.

Royal officials and Tories never did grasp the Revolutionaries' distinction between “the body of the people” and a mindless mob. Because they knew no other way, they interpreted Boston's politics as a top-down chain of command. In the process, they transformed Samuel Adams into a detestable demon. Now, we honor the mythological figure his enemies created.

Mercy Otis Warren—sister of James Otis, wife of James Warren, political colleague and personal friend of Samuel Adams—knew very well that Adams owed much of his renown to the fuss made by his enemies. When General Gage singled out Adams and Hancock for
proscription in 1775, she claimed, he revealed his great ignorance of “the temper of the times, the disposition of the people at large, [and] the character of the individuals”:

His discrimination, rather accidental than judicious, set these two gentlemen in the most conspicuous point of view, and drew the particular attention of the whole continent to their names, distinguished from many of their compeers, more by this single circumstance, than by superior ability or exertion. By this they became at once the favorites of popularity, and the objects of general applause, which at that time would have been the fortune of any one, honored by such a mark of disapprobation of the British commander in chief.
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Warren seemed amused that Adams's enemies made him into a hero—but she had no way of foreseeing that people like Gage and Hutchinson would blind later generations of Americans to the importance of democratic political behavior during the Revolutionary era. Passionately committed to the idea that government must be rooted in the people, Mercy Otis Warren, Samuel Adams, and the rest of Boston's patriots would be quite surprised to learn that America's “patriotic” history would be told centuries later from a Tory perspective.

3

MOLLY PITCHER'S CANNON

H
ow nice it would be to discover a true heroine of the American Revolution. We have tried Betsy Ross, the woman who supposedly made the first American flag, but that story has been thoroughly discredited by serious historians.
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We honor Abigail Adams, who cajoled her husband to “Remember the Ladies,” but Abigail enters the story as the wife of a famous man, and she never went near a battlefield.
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We would like to celebrate Deborah Sampson, who dressed as a man to enlist in the army, but if truth be told, some female soldiers were unjustly drummed out to the “whore's march” once their identity was uncovered.
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Our preferred heroine, if we could find her, would have braved enemy fire in a famous battle—dressed as a woman, not a man. This is not too much to imagine. Try to picture, for instance, the Battle of Monmouth, where men are suffering from the heat as well as from enemy fire. A woman passes through the thirsty and wounded troops with a pitcher of nice, cold water. Perhaps, when her husband falls while manning a cannon, our heroine takes his place and continues to fire his weapon. This, of course, inspires the rest of the soldiers to continue fighting in the face of mortal danger. In the end, after the battle is over, George Washington naturally bestows a medal on our lady warrior—perhaps even making her an officer.

 

“Her cannon must be fired!”

Molly Pitcher, Heroine at Monmouth.

Lithograph by Currier and Ives, 1876.

 

This is the heroine we would like to celebrate—and we do. We have not only dreamed up such a tale, but we have convinced ourselves it is true. Although it would have shocked all her contemporaries, a recent middle-school textbook pronounces point-blank that Mary Ludwig Hays, a poor “camp follower” from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was the “best known” woman to serve on Revolutionary War battlefields.
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Another text tells her story: “Mary Ludwig Hays McCauly took her husband's place at a cannon when he was wounded at the Battle of Monmouth. Known for carrying pitchers of water to the soldiers, McCauley won the nickname ‘Molly Pitcher.' Afterward, General Washington made her a noncommissioned officer for her brave deeds.”
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A third text shows a picture of two women soldiers, one wearing a long dress and the other clad in modern military fatigues. The captions read, “Past: Molly Pitcher” and “Present: Women marines served in the Gulf War.”
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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.
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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.
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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!”
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.