Groton Community Buries Its Dead After the Massacre

# Groton Community Buries Its Dead After the Massacre

On the morning of September 6, 1781, a British force of approximately 1,700 troops under the command of Benedict Arnold — the most infamous traitor of the American Revolution — descended upon the twin communities of New London and Groton, Connecticut. Arnold, himself a native of nearby Norwich, knew the terrain intimately and understood the strategic value of New London's harbor, which had long served as a base for American privateers who raided British supply ships. His mission was to destroy the port and neutralize its threat to the Crown's naval operations. What unfolded that day would leave scars on the region that endured for generations, and nowhere was the devastation felt more acutely than in the small community of Groton, which in the days that followed faced the almost unbearable task of burying its dead.

While Arnold personally led the assault on New London, ordering the burning of warehouses, ships, and homes that sent massive columns of smoke into the September sky, a second British column crossed the Thames River to attack Fort Griswold on Groton Heights. The fort was defended by a garrison of around 150 men — not professional soldiers, but local militia drawn from the farms, fishing wharves, and workshops of Groton and the surrounding towns. These were men who had answered the alarm bells and cannon signals that morning, grabbing muskets and rushing to the fort under the command of Colonel William Ledyard. They were neighbors, relatives, and friends, and many of them would never return home.

The British forces, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Edmund Eyre, demanded the fort's surrender, but Ledyard and his men refused to yield. The ensuing assault was fierce and bloody. The militia defenders fought valiantly, inflicting significant casualties on the attacking force — Eyre himself was mortally wounded during the charge. But the British ultimately overwhelmed the garrison, pouring over the walls and into the fort. What happened next became one of the most notorious episodes of the entire war. According to survivors' accounts, after Colonel Ledyard surrendered his sword to a British officer, he was run through with his own blade. The killing did not stop with his death. British soldiers, enraged by their own heavy losses, carried out a massacre of the garrison, cutting down men who had already laid down their arms. By the time the violence ended, approximately 88 American defenders lay dead and many more were grievously wounded.

In the days that followed, the people of Groton confronted a grief almost impossible to fathom. Eighty-eight men lost from a single small community in a single afternoon meant that nearly every household was touched by death. Fathers, sons, brothers, and husbands — men who had been tending fields, mending nets, and working trades just hours before — now had to be identified, recovered from the blood-soaked grounds of Fort Griswold, and laid to rest. The dead were gathered and buried together in a mass grave near the fort, a communal resting place that reflected the communal nature of their sacrifice. Families who came to claim knowledge of their loved ones did so while gazing across the Thames River at the smoldering ruins of New London, where homes and livelihoods had been reduced to ash.

The massacre at Fort Griswold and the burning of New London rank among the most brutal episodes of the Revolutionary War, and they carried profound significance beyond their immediate horror. The attacks occurred just weeks before the decisive American and French victory at Yorktown in October 1781, which effectively ended major combat operations in the war. That the British were still capable of — and willing to carry out — such devastating raids on civilian communities so close to the war's conclusion underscored the conflict's relentless cruelty. The fact that these raids were led by Benedict Arnold, an American-born officer who had once fought heroically for the patriot cause, added a layer of bitter betrayal that the people of southeastern Connecticut never forgot.

The mass grave near Fort Griswold became a site of remembrance and mourning, and in 1830 a granite monument was erected on Groton Heights to honor the fallen defenders. Their sacrifice reminded future generations that the costs of American independence were paid not only on famous battlefields but also in small communities where ordinary people gave everything they had for a cause they believed was just.