1758–1851
1
recorded events
Connected towns:
Groton, CTBiography
Born in 1758 in Groton, Connecticut, the woman who would become known as "Mother Bailey" grew up in a community shaped by the rhythms of the Thames River — by fishing boats, merchant vessels, and the ever-present awareness that the same waterway that sustained local livelihoods could also deliver an enemy fleet. Groton and its neighbor New London sat at the mouth of one of Connecticut's most strategically important harbors, and the families who lived there understood the vulnerability of coastal life in ways that inland communities did not. Anna Warner came of age in this seafaring world, where women managed households and farms while men went to sea, and where the line between civilian and military life had always been thin. When the Revolutionary War transformed the Thames River corridor into a theater of conflict, she was a young woman in her early twenties, living in a town that had already spent years anxious about the British warships that patrolled Long Island Sound. Nothing in her ordinary upbringing marked her for fame, but September 6, 1781, would change that forever.
On that late summer day, the traitor Benedict Arnold led a devastating British raiding force up the Thames River in a two-pronged assault. While Arnold's troops burned New London on the western bank, a separate column under Lieutenant Colonel Edmund Eyre stormed Fort Griswold on the Groton heights, where a garrison of local militia made a fierce and ultimately doomed stand. During the battle or in its chaotic immediate aftermath — the historical record leaves the precise timing uncertain — the defenders found themselves critically short of wadding, the material packed into a cannon barrel to hold the powder charge and shot in place. According to the tradition that became inseparable from Anna Warner Bailey's name, she responded to this need by offering her own flannel petticoats to be torn apart and used as cannon wadding. It was an act both intimate and defiant — a woman stripping away her own clothing so that the guns of her community's defense could continue to fire. The gesture resonated powerfully with those who witnessed or heard about it, becoming one of the defining stories of civilian contribution during the battle.
The stakes of Bailey's act were as real and immediate as the smoke rising from burning New London across the river. Fort Griswold's defenders were not professional soldiers but local men — her neighbors, relatives, and fellow townspeople — fighting to protect their own homes against a force led by a man they regarded as the war's most despicable traitor. The massacre that followed the fort's surrender, in which British troops killed or wounded scores of men who had already laid down their arms, confirmed the worst fears of Groton's civilian population. Bailey's sacrifice of her petticoats was a small material contribution measured against the carnage, but it carried enormous symbolic weight precisely because it came from someone who had no obligation to act. She was not a soldier. No one had enlisted her. She simply saw a need and gave what she had — her own clothing, an object of personal modesty and domestic normalcy — to the communal defense. In doing so, she embodied the principle that the Revolution's survival depended not only on men with muskets but on the willingness of ordinary civilians to sacrifice when the crisis arrived at their doorsteps.
Anna Warner Bailey lived for seventy years after the battle that made her famous, dying in 1851 at the remarkable age of ninety-three. In her long life she became a living monument to Groton's Revolutionary experience, a woman whose very presence reminded subsequent generations of what the war had cost and what it had demanded of ordinary people. Her nickname, "Mother Bailey," spoke to the affection and reverence her community felt for her — she was not a general or a statesman but a mother figure for an entire town's memory of sacrifice. Monuments and local commemorations in Groton kept her story alive throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. Her legacy challenges us to think more broadly about what heroism looked like during the American Revolution, pushing past the familiar narratives of battlefield valor to recognize the countless acts of civilian courage that sustained the cause. Bailey's story is a reminder that revolutions are not won by armies alone — they are won by communities, and by the individuals within those communities who choose, in a moment of extremity, to give everything they have.
Anna Warner Bailey's story matters because it reveals a dimension of the American Revolution that textbooks too often overlook: the role of civilians — and especially women — in sustaining armed resistance at the most desperate moments. Students and visitors who walk the grounds of Fort Griswold in Groton are standing where local militia fought and died on September 6, 1781, in one of the war's most brutal engagements. Bailey's act of offering her own petticoats as cannon wadding connects the domestic world to the battlefield in a single, vivid gesture. Her story teaches us that patriotism was not confined to those who carried weapons — it lived in the choices of ordinary people who gave what they could when their community needed them most.
Events
Sep
1781
According to local tradition, Anna Warner Bailey — later known as "Mother Bailey" — brought flannel petticoats to Fort Griswold during the battle to be used as wadding for the garrison's cannon. The story, while difficult to verify from contemporary sources, became one of the most celebrated examples of female civilian support during the Revolution. Bailey's legend grew over the decades after the war. She was honored in her later years as a living symbol of patriotic sacrifice, and her story was invoked whenever Connecticut celebrated its Revolutionary heritage. Whether the petticoat story is precisely accurate or represents a broader truth about civilian women's contributions to the defense, it remains part of Groton's Revolutionary identity.