Molly Pitcher Legend

MOLLY PITCHER LEGEND. The term "Molly Pitcher" seems to have been applied generically to the women—soldiers' wives or other camp followers—who carried pitchers of water to thirsty soldiers on the battlefield. The name "Molly Pitcher" came to be applied in the nineteenth century to two women whose husbands served in the American army. Margaret Corbin helped man an artillery piece after her husband, a gunner, was killed at the Battle of Fort Washington (16 November 1776). The name is more often associated with Mary Hays McCauley, a stout, strong Irish woman from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, who helped man a cannon in Captain Francis Proctor's company of the Fourth Continental Artillery at the Battle of Monmouth (28 June 1778). In his memoirs, published in 1830, Joseph Plumb Martin recorded his eyewitness account of the woman we know as Molly Pitcher:

A woman whose husband belonged to the artillery and who was then attached to a piece in the engagement, attended with her husband at the piece the whole time. While in the act of reaching [for] 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, and continued her occupation.

Mary McCauley died in 1832.

SEE ALSO Corbin, Margaret Cochran.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Martin, David G. The Story of Molly Pitcher. 2d ed. Hightstown, N.J.: Longstreet House, 2000.

――――――. A Molly Pitcher Sourcebook. Hightstown, N.J.: Longstreet House, 2003.

Martin, Joseph Plumb. Private Yankee Doodle: Being a Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Dangers and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier, Joseph Plumb Martin. Edited by George F. Scheer. Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1962.

Smith, Samuel S. A Molly Pitcher Chronology. Monmouth Beach, N.J.: Philip Freneau Press, 1972.

――――――. "The Search for Molly Pitcher." Daughters of the American Revolution Magazine, April 1975.

                              revised by Harold E. Selesky