Molly Pitcher and the women at Monmouth: legend vs record

Her story is tied to a handful of battles. Mary Ludwig Hays, the woman most often named as Molly Pitcher, is believed to have followed her husband’s Pennsylvania artillery through the Philadelphia campaign of 1777, which included the battles of Brandywine and Germantown, and the winter at Valley Forge. The legend itself is set at Monmouth in 1778. Margaret Corbin, a woman gunner whose service is on record, fought at Fort Washington in 1776. This page keeps apart what records written in the 18th and early 19th centuries show and what was added later.²

Who were the women of the Continental Army?

Thousands of women followed the armies of the Revolution, many of them soldiers’ wives. In camp they cooked, washed and mended clothes, nursed the sick and wounded, and carried water and food.³

George Washington at first wanted women kept out of the camps and complained that they slowed the army on the march, but he came to see that the army depended on their work. No one counted them all. The historian Holly Mayer estimates that as many as 7,000 camp followers accompanied American troops during the war. They belong to a much longer story of women who went to war.⁴

What did Molly Pitcher do at the Battle of Monmouth?

On 28 June 1778 Washington’s army attacked the rear guard of Sir Henry Clinton’s British army near Monmouth Court House in New Jersey. The fighting went on for hours in intense heat. Washington reported that day that some of his men had fainted and died, and Ray Raphael writes that men on both sides perished from the heat. On a day like that, anyone bringing water mattered.⁵

What Molly Pitcher did there is the core of the legend: she carries water to the gunners, her husband falls, and she takes his place at the cannon. The National Women’s History Museum and the American Battlefield Trust tell this story of Mary Hays, saying she took over when her husband was wounded. No document from 1778 records it. The evidence is one memoir and one secondhand story, both described below.⁶

What did Joseph Plumb Martin see at Monmouth?

The best-known 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.⁷

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.⁸

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.⁹

A second story is weaker still. A 1927 book by the historian William Stryker printed a passage he attributed to the diary of the army surgeon Albigence Waldo, describing a woman who kept a gun firing after her companion fell. Waldo had the story secondhand, the diary passage has never been found, and it names no one.¹⁰

Was Margaret Corbin the real “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, an artilleryman, load his gun. When he was killed she kept it firing until she was badly wounded, and she lost the use of her left arm.¹¹

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, which made her the first woman to receive a pension from the United States for military service. Soldiers called her “Captain Molly”. She died in 1800.¹²

Ray Raphael considers her very likely the real “Captain Molly” of the later stories. According to Teipe, Corbin served in Captain Francis Proctor’s Pennsylvania artillery company, the unit Mary Hays is also linked to, one reason the two women blur together.¹³

Where does the name Molly Pitcher come from?

No account from the war years describes a heroine taking over her husband’s cannon at Monmouth; according to Raphael the tale reached print only around 1830. In 1840 the writer George Washington Parke Custis published a vivid version in which “Captain Molly” is carrying water when her husband is shot dead, and she takes his place at the gun. In Raphael’s summary, Washington receives her the next morning.¹⁴

Where the name came from is disputed. One explanation is simple: Molly was a common nickname for Mary, and a pitcher was a vessel women carried. The Library of Congress folklife blog repeats the idea that soldiers shouted “Molly, pitcher!” when they wanted water. Ray Raphael 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.¹⁵

Pictures then fixed the story. Raphael dates a painting by Nathaniel Currier to 1848 and two paintings by Dennis Malone Carter to the 1850s; Cassandra Good gives 1854 for Carter’s large canvas. Currier and Ives sold popular prints of her ramming a gun beside her fallen husband and a dropped bucket.¹⁶

Was Mary Ludwig Hays the real Molly Pitcher?

Mary Ludwig was born in about 1754, possibly on 13 October, to German immigrant parents; sources disagree on whether she was born in Pennsylvania or New Jersey. She married a barber named Hays, recorded as William in some sources and John in others, who served in the Pennsylvania artillery.¹⁷

The National Park Service says she joined him for the Philadelphia campaign and the winter at Valley Forge. William Griffith, writing for the American Battlefield Trust, notes that his regiment was heavily engaged at Brandywine and Germantown, which, he argues, almost certainly put her in or near the fighting; he says only that she “most likely” endured Valley Forge.¹⁸

After Hays died she married another veteran named McCauley (John in most accounts, George in Teipe’s), whose name appears in many spellings, and she spent the rest of her life in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.¹⁹

The firmest record is her pension. In 1822 the Pennsylvania legislature granted her $40 a year. She had applied as a soldier’s widow, but, as Cassandra Good notes, the award was made “for services rendered” during the war, without saying what those services were. The grant came 44 years after Monmouth, at a time when, as Raphael notes, thousands of poor veterans and widows were applying for aid. Griffith, for the American Battlefield Trust, reads the pension as confirmation of her heroism at Monmouth; the wording of the award does not say so.²⁰

Whether she was the woman Martin saw is disputed. The historian James Kirby Martin, editor of the memoir, thought so, according to Teipe; Raphael answers that there were hundreds of women at Monmouth, Mary Hays among them, and that the woman could have been any of them.²¹

How did Mary Ludwig Hays die?

She died in Carlisle on 22 January 1832; the sources do not record the cause. Some later accounts, including Teipe’s, give 1833.²²

Her son’s obituary, published in 1856, called him the son of “the celebrated Molly Pitcher”. In 1876, the centennial year, a memorial to Molly Pitcher was placed at her grave, where the stone names her “Molly McCauley”.²³

She is buried in the Old Graveyard in Carlisle, where a statue of Molly Pitcher with a cannon stands above her grave.²⁴

Was Molly Pitcher a real person?

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 pension from Congress in 1779; Mary Hays McCauley lived in Carlisle and received a Pennsylvania pension in 1822.²⁵

Legend: the husband killed at the gun (Hays was wounded or exhausted, by most accounts, and outlived the battle), the dramatic pitcher, Washington’s personal thanks and the promotion to sergeant. Teipe notes that military records show no such promotion, and the National Women’s History Museum and the American Battlefield Trust both present it only as something “legend says” or “it is said”.²⁶

Verdict: 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 World War II. The American Battlefield Trust also suggests that Molly Pitcher may have been a composite of several women.²⁷

How is Molly Pitcher remembered?

The Monmouth Battle Monument, a column more than 90 feet tall in front of the Monmouth County Courthouse in Freehold, New Jersey, was dedicated on 13 November 1884. Five bronze relief tablets ring its base, and one of them is titled Molly Pitcher.²⁸

Most institutions now present her with care. The National Women’s History Museum treats Mary Hays as the woman behind the name; the American Battlefield Trust suggests a composite; the Library of Congress folklife blog says Molly Pitcher represents all the women active in the Revolution. 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.²⁹