On January 22, a Trenton-born girl passed away at the ripe old age of 87. She had outlived two husbands and earned a military pension for her service to the country as a young, married woman, the daughter of immigrants. Honored with a name on the New Jersey Turnpike, this octogenarian passed from this world to the next in 1832. This Jersey-gal’s real name was Mary Ludwig Hays McCauley, but she is best known as “Molly Pitcher.”

Like today, when the generation which served in the Second World War is rapidly passing into history as fewer and fewer WW2 veterans remain, the Jacksonian era paid witness to the passing of the original American Revolutionary War generation. Journalist Tom Brokaw coined the term “Greatest Generation” for the Americans who lived and served during the war years of the 1940s, and the Jacksonians may have felt similarly about the patriots and Founding Fathers of the 18^th Century. Stories both factual and legend surround so much of America’s birth-story, as it forms the mythos of our national identity. A prominent myth is the completely fictional story of Parson Weems who said a young George Washington hacked down a cherry tree and, when questioned by his angry father, admitted his guilt, saying “I cannot tell a lie” — to exalt in the almost demigod-like virtue of the Father of His Country. The reality, of course, was different, and Washington was, like the rest of us mere mortals, a flawed man. A flawed mortal, however, was not enough for the man who set the precedent for so much of America’s traditions, political disposition, and national character.

While men such as Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Hamilton, and so on are memorialized and remembered in marble, all of their efforts would have been nothing at all if not for the regular folks, which includes both the free and the enslaved, of the colonies and early American republic which followed. Mary Hays was one of those regular folks. She was a woman who was born in Trenton but also had her roots in neighboring Pennsylvania.  Dr. Kerri Lee Alexander, fellow of the National Women’s History Museum, said that Mary Ludwig was born to two parents who had come over from one of the German states (as Germany was not a unified country until 1871) and grew up with little to no formal education to speak of. She married a Pennsylvania barber, John Hays.

Hays was among the enforcers of the boycott on British-made goods in Carlisle, PA, in 1774. The American Revolution began in 1775 with a rebellion in Massachusetts. By the next year, the rebellion had spread throughout the colonies. In 1777, Hays joined with the Pennsylvania artillery and was encamped at Valley Forge that winter, where the army suffered much privation for want of supplies, food, and fuel. Mary joined her husband there, along with other women known as “camp followers”, to do work for the army such as laundry, mending, nursing, and other tasks that 18^th Century armies relied upon civilian workers for.

New Jersey, known now as the Crossroads of the Revolution, was uniquely situated between two major centers of power during the conflict. New York City was captured in the summer and autumn of 1776 and remained in British possession until the final evacuation in November of 1783. Throughout the Revolutionary War, New Jersey was a hotbed of unrest, raids, retribution, foraging parties, and massacres between the armies but also between colonists for the cause of independence and those loyal to Great Britain. Philadelphia was the rebel capital, where the Continental Congress met, until General Sir William Howe captured and held it in 1777. The Continental Congress fled. Howe, seemingly frustrated with the progression of the war, issued his resignation which was accepted the following Spring.  Howe left Philadelphia after throwing a great party known as the Mischianza, turning control over to General Sir Henry Clinton in May of 1778. Clinton withdrew from Philadelphia across New Jersey, headed back toward New York in the 1778 campaign. Followed by Washington’s army, the two forces clashed at Monmouth, not far from the ships waiting at Sandy Hook to ferry the thousands of redcoats and Hessians across to New York.

Mary Hays had followed her husband for the arduous march across New Jersey during this time. At the Battle of Monmouth, the weather was infamously hot and humid, as it still is today in the summer. Her task, like other women, was to bring desperately needed water to the soldiers engaged in the vigorous battle. As acrid white smoke choked the already thick, humid New Jersey air, fatigue and heat exhaustion began taking its toll on both sides.

Dr. Alexander writes, “During the Battle of Monmouth on June 28, 1778, Hays allegedly solidified her legacy as an American hero. Historians report that about fifty soldiers died of thirst and dehydration that day. This meant that as many men died from heat exhaustion as they did from gunfire. Hays went back and forth into the battle to bring water to thirsty soldiers from a nearby spring. She stayed on the battlefield bringing water and caring for wounded soldiers until her own husband got hurt. When her husband was wounded during this battle, she made the decision to take his place at the cannon and began firing. After the battle, legend has it that George Washington asked about the courageous woman who was on the battlefield and promoted her to a non-commissioned officer. For this reason, Hays carried the nickname ‘Sergeant Molly.’”

Mary’s act should not be understated. For a woman without formal training, nor expected to work the guns, she put herself in very real danger. The cannons were muzzle-loaders, which required the artillery crews to stand in front of the gun after it was fired, swab out the barrel with a sopping wet sponge on a long staff to clean it out and extinguish any potentially remaining embers, and then it could be loaded with a bag of gunpowder and a cannonball which had to be rammed down with another large wooden rod. Once done, the cannon could be primed and fired by means of a burning linstock match touched to the powder. The process was then repeated. Water, therefore, was not only necessary for the crews to drink, but to service their weapon as well, fully exposed to enemy gunfire.

“Molly Pitcher” is remembered today not just on the Turnpike where you can gas up your car, get a snack, or use the restroom, but at Monmouth Battlefield itself, a New Jersey State Park. There is a stone marker at the spring where she and the other women drew their water and kept the guns firing that hot summer day which ultimately resulted in a tactical draw, but a moral win for Washington. The Continental Army remained intact, but so did the British, and they withdrew rather than fight a second day. The war would last another five years, shifting its focus by and large to the south. The last major battle fought in the north had been settled in New Jersey.

As for Mary, Alexander asserts, she returned to Pennsylvania. Her husband died in 1786 from war-related injury and left her a significant piece of land. On re-marrying in 1793, this time to another Revolutionary War veteran named John McCauley, he seems to have spent her wealth and vanished fourteen years later. The Molly Pitcher of Monmouth fame worked as a household servant.

In 1822, she finally obtained a military pension from the Pennsylvania State Legislature. At such an advanced age by early 19^th Century standards, the state probably did not expect to have to pay her for very long, but she lived another decade. When she finally died, she was buried in Carlisle. Today, her grave is memorialized by a bronze statue recalling her heroism on the New Jersey battlefield which saw her rise to the occasion, putting aside her own fears to serve where her husband had fallen. With a rammer in her hands, she stands behind a cannon, and looks courageously forward, undaunted, toward both the enemy, but also the future, of the United States she helped to secure on the stifling, bloodied, rolling hills of Monmouth, New Jersey.