Founding Myths (9 page)

We have no firsthand descriptions, recorded at the time, of a woman at Monmouth firing the cannon of her fallen husband. We might have one secondhand account. Supposedly, Dr. Albigence Waldo wrote in his diary that a wounded officer told the doctor, five days after the battle, that he had observed a woman take up the “gun” (was it a musket or a cannon?) of her fallen “gallant.”
¹⁴
This evidence is questionable, however, because the original diary has not been located and because diaries or journals from Revolutionary times were sometimes altered when they found their way into print in the nineteenth century.
¹⁵

In 1830, fifty-two years after the fact, Joseph Plumb Martin recalled seeing a women and her husband, working together, firing artillery at Monmouth. But Martin's protagonist does not match the “Molly Pitcher” description: she did not carry water to thirsty soldiers, and she did not spring to action because her husband had fallen (she had been helping all along), and she received no reward from Washington or any other officer. In fact, in Martin's tale, she was the butt of a ribald joke: “While in the act of reaching a cartridge and having one of her feet as far before the other as she could step, a cannon shot from the enemy passed directly between her legs without doing any other damage than carrying away all the lower part of her petticoat,—looking at it with apparent unconcern, she observed, that it was lucky it did not pass a little higher, for in that case it might have carried away something else.”
¹⁶

That's all we have in the written historical record—suggestive snippets, nothing more. Yet historical tales evolve through oral transmission, and they start with real-life experience. At the Battle of Monmouth, amid scorching temperatures, thirty-seven soldiers died from heatstroke. This accounted for more than one-third of the battlefield fatalities.
¹⁷
Several hundred female camp followers were either on the battlefield or close at hand. On normal days, these women cooked, washed, and hauled things about; during battles, they nursed the wounded and carried supplies to and from the lines. Undoubtedly, camp followers, so far as they could, made water available to thirsty, sweltering soldiers trying to survive the heat. Quite possibly, some
of these women helped in the firing of cannons. During other battles, too, woman did what they could for struggling soldiers and aided artillery teams on the rear lines, removed from close contact with enemy soldiers. At Monmouth and elsewhere, survivors took some notice of these women's efforts when passing on stories to folks who were not there, and as the stories traveled from mouth to ear to mouth, they began to reflect a view of women quite different from that common in Revolutionary times. It was in this context that a lowly camp follower could reemerge as an iconic heroine.

Very likely, the evolution of a legendary Molly Pitcher received a boost from abroad. The first cohesive written accounts containing the key elements of the story come from the Napoleonic Wars, so its pedigree might not be entirely American. In 1808–1809, when a French army was laying siege to the Spanish town of Saragossa, a young woman named Augustina Domonech carried drinks to thirsty soldiers, then took the place of a dead artilleryman. Later, when her husband or lover was shot, she took his rifle and assumed his position in battle. This “Maid of Saragossa” became something of a sensation; unlike Mary Hays, she did not have to wait until after her death to receive her accolades. The similarity between the Maid of Saragossa and the final evolution of the Molly Pitcher tale might not be coincidental; as Molly's fame grew through the nineteenth century, she was often compared to her European counterpart.
¹⁸

Half a century after the Battle of Monmouth, stories about an American heroine closely resembling the Maid of Saragossa emerged in print, conflated and confused but certainly vivid. One of the earliest versions appeared in a book called
American Anecdotes: Original and Select
, published in 1830:

Captain Molly.
Before the two armies, American and English, had begun the general action of Monmouth, two of the advanced batteries commenced a very severe fire against each other. As the warmth was excessive, the wife of a cannonier constantly ran to bring water for him from a neighboring spring. At the
moment when she started from the spring, to pass to the post of her husband, she saw him fall, and hastened to assist him; but he was dead. At the same moment she heard an officer order the cannon to be removed from its place, complaining he could not fill his post with as brave a man as had been killed. “No,” said the intrepid Molly, fixing her eyes upon the officer, “the cannon shall not be removed for want of some one to serve it; since my brave husband is no more, I will use my utmost exertions to avenge his death.” The activity and courage with which she performed the offices of cannonier during the action, attracted the attention of all who witnessed it, finally of Gen. Washington himself, who afterwards gave her the rank of Lieutenant, and granted her half pay during life. She wore an epaulette, and every body called her
Captain Molly
.
¹⁹

The story contains the basic elements of the now-classic Molly Pitcher tale: she carries water to thirsty soldiers; her husband is killed; she jumps to the cannon and saves the day; she is honored and rewarded handsomely (as no rank-and-file Revolutionary soldier ever was, whether male or female). Molly then lives happily ever after on a lieutenant's half-pay—no need for this wartime heroine to toil as a cleaning lady into her old age.

Various newspapers at the time reprinted this moving account, with its vivid image of a female war heroine. In 1835 a variation appeared in Francis Alexander Durivage's
Popular Cyclopedia of History
, this time using the name “Molly Pitcher” as well as “Captain Molly.” Two years after that, New Jersey newspapers, to promote interest in the Battle of Monmouth, added further embellishments. In this version, Molly was “indignant” that her husband's cannon might lie idle, so she “flew to the gun.” At the end, Congress “ratified” Molly's lieutenant's commission, a yet more fanciful construction.
²⁰

In 1840, George Washington Parke Custis, Martha Washington's grandson through her first marriage, repeated the basic story from
American Anecdotes
but added visual detail and a new twist
on the heroine's words, as if the general had witnessed the scene himself:

While Captain Molly was serving some water for the refreshment of the men, her husband received a shot in the head, and fell lifeless under the wheels of the piece. The heroine threw down the pail of water, and crying to her dead consort, “lie there my darling while I avenge ye,” grasped the ramrod the lifeless hand of the poor fellow had just relinquished, sent home the charge, and called to the matrosses to prime and fire. It was done. Then entering the sponge into the smoking muzzle of the cannon, the heroine performed to admiration the duties of the most expert artilleryman. . . .

The next morning . . . Washington received her graciously, gave her a piece of gold and assured her that her services should not be forgotten. This remarkable and intrepid woman survived the Revolution, never for an instant laying aside the appellation she has so nobly won . . . the famed Captain Molly at the Battle of Monmouth.
²¹

Who could now doubt the tale? Washington had rewarded Captain Molly personally, then related the story to his grandson. With Custis's endorsement, the Captain Molly “anecdote” of Captain Molly, like the heroine herself, received the Washington stamp of approval.

One new element in the Custis version is worthy of note: “the pail of water.” Other versions hadn't noted how water was delivered to soldiers, and Custis assumed the pail was the obvious vessel. According to another rendition from 1840, “A woman who was called by the troops Captain Molly was busily engaged in carrying canteens of water to the famished [and presumably thirsty] soldiers.”
²²
How, then, did “pail” and “canteen” evolve into “pitcher,” a delicate piece of dinnerware unlikely to be found on any battlefield?

Again, we must look well beyond the Battle of Monmouth to sort this out, but there is a likely explanation. One of the best-known
women during the late eighteenth century was Moll Dimond Pitcher, a fortune-teller in Lynn, Massachusetts. Sailors and ship owners would come from afar to consult Moll Pitcher before casting off to sea. Historian Emily Lewis Butterfield notes that Moll “unwittingly provided fodder for several generations of politicians, advertisers, poets, and dramatists.” In 1811, for example, the Massachusetts
Scourge
joked that President Madison might find Moll Pitcher's “magic and popguns” more effective than gunboats as a defense against British harassment. John Greenleaf Whittier published an uncomplimentary poem about her in 1832, which he expanded eight years later into an epic he called “Moll Pitcher and the Minstrel Girl.” A popular melodrama entitled
Moll Pitcher, or the Fortune Teller of Lynn
played on stages in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia from 1839 until after the Civil War.
²³
Clearly, this Moll Pitcher had nothing to do with the Battle of Monmouth—but her name was out there, a household word, precisely at the time “Captain Molly” morphed into “Molly Pitcher,” and quite fortuitously, the word “pitcher” connoted the carrying of water to thirsty soldiers. Perhaps the renown of this controversial prophetess from Massachusetts, a legend in her own right, played some role in the evolution of Revolutionary War folklore. Throughout the late nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, the heroine at Monmouth was often called “Moll Pitcher.”
²⁴

By the 1840s Moll Pitcher (the fortune-teller) and Molly Pitcher (formerly Captain Molly), as disparate as they were, had partially merged. When the fortune-teller's daughter died in 1841, an obituary in the
Portsmouth Journal of Literature and Politics
noted that she was “the daughter of the celebrated Moll Pitcher.” A reader understandably asked
which
Moll Pitcher that might be, and the editor replied the heroine of Monmouth and proceeded to tell the story of that battle.
²⁵
This mistaken explanation was picked up in several other papers. The female soldier's story was more appealing than that of the fortune-teller, but the fortune-teller had the more fetching name. Much as the story of a woman firing the cannon of her fallen husband migrated from Fort Washington to Monmouth, so did the name “Moll Pitcher” transfer
from one female protagonist to another. Over the next few generations, Moll Pitcher and Molly Pitcher, applied to a cannon-firing woman in the Revolutionary War, were used interchangeably.
²⁶

At first, the name “Molly Pitcher” was merely appended to the traditional “Captain Molly” story, but in time the dainty dinnerware, with its feminine connotation, proved irresistible. Having traded in her heavy pail for a pitcher (which in later representations would display artistic ornamentation), Molly was no longer a poor, vulgar camp follower, but a respectable woman in service of men. Defined by both a cannon and a pitcher of water, she now embraced an irresistible blend of masculine and feminine attributes. That such a creature could be found in the middle of a Revolutionary battlefield was cause for wonder and celebration.

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: