Molly Pitcher and the women at Monmouth: legend vs record

Prints, paintings and textbooks have made her familiar: a woman in a skirt, a bucket at her feet, ramming a charge into a cannon beside her fallen husband. That picture was drawn generations after the battle. This page keeps two things apart: what records written in the 18th and early 19th centuries show, and what was added later.

Women with the Continental Army

Thousands of women followed the armies of the Revolution. Most were soldiers’ wives, widows or mothers who had lost their homes or could not feed their children alone. In camp they cooked, washed, mended, nursed the sick and wounded, and carried water.¹

George Washington at first wanted as few women in camp as possible and complained that they slowed the army on the march, but he came to see that the army needed their work and that men might desert without them. No one counted them all. The historian Holly Mayer estimates that about 7,000 women accompanied American troops during the war; Linda Grant De Pauw puts the number of “women of the army” as high as 20,000. They belong to a much longer story of women who went to war.²

Monmouth, 28 June 1778: a battle fought in the heat

On 28 June 1778 Washington’s army attacked the rear of Sir Henry Clinton’s British army near Monmouth Court House in New Jersey. The fighting swung back and forth for hours under a brutal sun, and by evening Washington judged his men too worn out by heat and fatigue to press on. Men on both sides collapsed and some died from the heat rather than from enemy fire. On a day like that, anyone bringing water mattered. You can follow the whole action in our account of the Battle of Monmouth.³

What did Joseph Plumb Martin see at Monmouth?

The one eyewitness account of a woman at the guns comes from Joseph Plumb Martin, a private of the Continental Army who fought at Monmouth. He published his memoir in 1830, about half a century after the battle.⁴

Martin describes the wife of an artilleryman who stayed at her husband’s gun for the whole action. As she stretched forward to reach a cartridge, an enemy cannon shot passed between her legs, carrying away all the lower part of her petticoat. She looked at it calmly, remarked that it was lucky the shot had not passed a little higher, and went back to work.⁵

The passage is good evidence that at least one woman served a cannon at Monmouth. It is not evidence for the legend. Martin gives no name. The woman’s husband is not killed, she is not carrying water, and no general rewards her.⁶

A second story is weaker still. In 1927 a posthumous book by the historian William Stryker (who died in 1900) printed a passage he attributed to the army surgeon Albigence Waldo, telling how a camp woman picked up her fallen companion’s gun and fought on. Waldo had it secondhand from a wounded soldier he treated, the passage has never been found among his surviving papers, and it names no one.⁷

Margaret Corbin: the documented “Captain Molly”

The woman whose service at a cannon is on record fought two years earlier and in another state. On 16 November 1776, at Fort Washington on Manhattan, Margaret Cochran Corbin helped her husband John, a Pennsylvania artilleryman, load his gun. When he was killed she kept the gun firing until she was hit and badly wounded, losing the use of her left arm.⁸

She was taken prisoner, released on parole and later served with the Corps of Invalids at West Point. On 6 July 1779 the Continental Congress granted her for life half the monthly pay of a soldier, plus a suit of clothes. She was the first woman to receive a pension from the new nation for military service. She became known as “Captain Molly” and died in 1800. Corbin served in the same Pennsylvania artillery as Mary Hays’s husband, one reason the two women blur together.⁹

How did “Captain Molly” become “Molly Pitcher”?

No account from the war years reports a heroine who took over her dead husband’s cannon at Monmouth. The tale reached print only around 1830, and no source from Mary Hays’s lifetime places her at the front. In 1840 George Washington Parke Custis, Martha Washington’s grandson, published a vivid version: “Captain Molly” is carrying water when her husband is shot dead; she seizes the rammer, keeps the gun firing, and the next morning Washington receives her.¹⁰

Where the name came from is disputed. One explanation is simple: Molly was a common nickname for Mary, and a pitcher was the vessel women used to carry water. Folklorists also note the idea that soldiers shouted “Molly, pitcher!” when they needed water. Ray Raphael, who has studied the legend, finds the name in print only in the late 1830s and suggests it was borrowed from Moll Pitcher, a famous fortune teller of Lynn, Massachusetts.¹¹

Pictures then fixed the story. Dennis Malone Carter painted her at the cannon in the 1850s, and Currier and Ives sold popular prints of her ramming a gun beside her fallen husband and a dropped bucket.¹²

Was Mary Ludwig Hays the real Molly Pitcher?

Mary Ludwig was born in about 1754 into a family of modest means; her parents were German immigrants. She married a barber named Hays, recorded as William in some sources and John in others, who served in the Pennsylvania artillery, and she followed him to camp. After his death she married John McCauley, whose name appears in many spellings, and spent the rest of her life in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.¹³

The firmest record is her pension. In 1822 Pennsylvania granted her $40 a year for life, plus a first payment of $40, according to the text of the act. She had asked for help as a soldier’s widow, but the award was made, in the words reported by the Smithsonian, “for services rendered”; the act itself speaks of her services during the Revolutionary War. It does not say what those services were. The grant came some 44 years after Monmouth, at a time when, as Raphael notes, thousands of poor veterans and widows were applying for aid.¹⁴

She died in Carlisle on 22 January 1832. Her obituary in the local paper praised her help to the sick and wounded and mentioned her annuity, but said nothing of a cannon or a pitcher. By the time her son died in 1856, his obituary called him the son of “the celebrated Molly Pitcher”.¹⁵

The link was sealed in the centennial year. In 1876 a long-time Carlisle resident wrote to the local paper identifying her grave as that of the heroine of Monmouth, and on 4 July 1876 the citizens of Cumberland County set up a stone naming Molly McCauly as Molly Pitcher, the heroine of Monmouth. The stone gives her death as January 1833, a year late. Stories that Washington made her a sergeant have no support in military records.¹⁶

What is documented and what is legend

Documented: women served with the Continental Army in large numbers; a woman helped work a cannon at Monmouth, according to Martin; Margaret Corbin fought at Fort Washington and received a Congressional pension in 1779; Mary Hays McCauley lived in Carlisle and received a Pennsylvania annuity in 1822.¹⁷

Rests on later testimony: that the woman Martin saw was Mary Hays. Historian James Kirby Martin, editor of the memoir, thought so; Raphael answers that there were hundreds of women at Monmouth and that the woman could have been any of them.¹⁸

Legend: the dead husband, the dramatic pitcher, Washington’s personal thanks and the promotion to sergeant. Emily Teipe, writing in the National Archives’ journal Prologue, concluded that the name is a collective generic term, much like G.I. Joe for American soldiers in the Second World War.¹⁹

How Molly Pitcher is remembered

The cornerstone of the Monmouth Battle Monument in Freehold, New Jersey, was laid on the battle’s centennial, 28 June 1878, and the column was dedicated on 13 November 1884. Five bronze reliefs by the sculptor James Edward Kelly ring its base, and one shows Molly Pitcher loading a cannon. In Carlisle a statue of Molly with a cannon stands over the grave of Mary McCauley.²⁰

Most institutions now present her with care. The National Women’s History Museum and the American Battlefield Trust treat Mary Hays as the most likely model while calling Molly Pitcher a symbol for many women; the Library of Congress folklife blog suggests she stands for all the women of the Revolution. The record supports that reading. The legend gives a face to thousands of women whose names were never written down, and Margaret Corbin, whose service was written down, deserves at least as much of the credit.²¹