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, and we lived with what they decided. My husband, James, was among those who decided. He decided from the pulpit of the First Presbyterian Church of Elizabethtown that resistance to British authority was not merely a political right but a moral duty, and he decided it with such force and eloquence that the British put his name on a list of men to be captured or killed.

I lived with that decision every day. I lived with it when the raids started, when the boats crossed the Arthur Kill in the dark and the militia alarm sounded and we did not know whether the men coming up from the waterfront were soldiers or bandits or neighbors who had chosen the other side. I lived with it when they burned our church, the building where James had married us and baptized our children and preached the sermons that made him famous and made us targets. I lived with it when we moved from Elizabethtown to Connecticut Farms, seeking safety farther from the water, knowing that safety in this war was a word without fixed meaning.

We had nine children. Nine. Try to imagine keeping nine children alive and fed and clothed in a town that was raided every few weeks, where the British stole the livestock and the Loyalists burned the barns and the militiamen came through demanding provisions they could not pay for. I managed the household. I managed it when James was away with the regiment, which was often, because he was the chaplain and the chaplain goes where the soldiers go. I managed it when the money stopped and the supplies ran short and the neighbors who could have helped were dealing with their own disasters.

On the morning of June 7, 1780, the British came again. Five thousand of them, or so we were told afterward — I did not count them. They crossed from Staten Island and came through Elizabethtown, heading toward our village and beyond it toward Springfield and Morristown. I gathered the children in the parsonage. I did not try to flee because I believed that a woman with her children in her own home would not be harmed. I believed that even in this war, there were limits.

A soldier fired through the window. The ball struck me. I will not describe what happened next, because the dying is the least important part of this story. What matters is what came after — the way my death was used by both sides, each claiming it proved something about the other's barbarity or righteousness. The patriots said I was murdered in cold blood. The British said it was an accident of war. My children, who saw it happen, said nothing to anyone for a long time.

I became a symbol. I became the murdered wife of the Fighting Parson, the innocent victim of British savagery, the rallying cry that sent men to fight at Springfield with fresh fury in their hearts. I do not object to being a symbol if it serves the truth. But the truth is more complicated than any symbol. The truth is that I was a woman who kept a household and raised children in a war zone, and one day a bullet came through the window, and that was the end of my story and the beginning of my legend.

There were hundreds of women like me in the towns along the Arthur Kill. Women who ran farms when the men were away. Women who hid the silver when the raiders came. Women who nursed wounded soldiers from both sides because the wounded man in front of you does not wear his politics on his face. We were not symbols. We were the people who held the communities together while the men went off to argue about liberty and then fight about it. My name survived because my husband was famous. The other women's names are in parish records and family Bibles and nowhere else.

I want you to remember me not as a martyr but as a mother who was trying to keep her children safe in a house that stood between two armies. I want you to remember that the war was not fought only on battlefields and in congress halls but in kitchens and parlors and churchyards, by women who never signed a declaration or fired a musket but who bore the weight of independence on their backs every single day.