Long before it became an industrial corridor or a commuter gateway to Manhattan, the town of Elizabethtown — known today simply as Elizabeth — occupied a position of extraordinary strategic and symbolic importance in the American Revolution. Situated on the Arthur Kill waterway directly across from British-occupied Staten Island, this modest New Jersey settlement endured more sustained violence, political intrigue, and personal tragedy than most places in the thirteen colonies. It produced signers and statesmen, martyrs and spies. Its churches were burned, its homes raided, and its civilians murdered. Yet Elizabethtown never broke. The town's story, often overshadowed by the more famous engagements at Trenton, Princeton, and Monmouth, reveals a dimension of the Revolution that textbooks frequently neglect: the brutal, grinding, years-long war of attrition waged against ordinary people who refused to submit.
PEOPLE
Abraham Clark
Signer of the Declaration of Independence, Surveyor, Legislator, Congressman
Hannah Caldwell
Civilian, Minister's Wife, Patriot Symbol
James Caldwell
Presbyterian Minister, Military Chaplain, Patriot Leader
Elias Boudinot
President of the Continental Congress, Commissary General of Prisoners, Congressman, Director of the U.S. Mint
KEY EVENTS
PLACES TO VISIT
STORIES
HISTORICAL VOICE
The Commissary's Other War
My official title was Commissary General of Prisoners. My official duty was to negotiate with the British for the exchange and welfare of American soldiers held in captivity. What I also did, from my ...
HISTORICAL VOICE
The Minister's Wife
I did not choose this war. None of the women I knew chose it. The men gathered in parlors and churches and taverns and debated the rights of Englishmen and the tyranny of Parliament, and they decided,...