Hackensack

Hackensack at War: The Crossroads of Revolution in Bergen County

When George Washington rode into Hackensack on the raw afternoon of November 20, 1776, he was a general running out of ground. The previous night, thousands of British and Hessian troops had scaled the Palisades and overwhelmed Fort Lee, scattering its garrison and capturing stores that the Continental Army could not afford to lose. Washington had crossed the Hackensack River to reach the village, and from the stately home of Peter Zabriskie—one of Bergen County's most prominent dwellings—he scratched out desperate dispatches warning the Continental Congress that the situation was dire. Hackensack, the county seat of Bergen County, was not merely a waypoint in Washington's famous retreat across New Jersey. It was a place where the Revolution's survival hung visibly in the balance, where neighbors turned against neighbors with lethal consequences, and where the war's deepest contradictions—liberty proclaimed alongside slavery maintained—played out in miniature over seven agonizing years.

To understand why Hackensack mattered, one must first understand Bergen County on the eve of revolution. The county was one of New Jersey's oldest settled regions, home to Dutch Reformed families who had farmed its river valleys for generations. Its society was conservative, hierarchical, and deeply entwined with the institution of slavery; Bergen County held the highest concentration of enslaved people in the northern part of the state. When the imperial crisis began to accelerate in the early 1770s, loyalties in Bergen County fractured along lines of religion, ethnicity, kinship, and economic interest in ways that defied easy categorization. Broadly speaking, the Dutch Reformed community split between those whose theology and Enlightenment sympathies inclined them toward resistance and those whose traditionalism—and commercial ties to New York—kept them loyal to the Crown. By 1773, the county's political life had become openly contentious, with public meetings devolving into shouting matches over parliamentary taxation and colonial rights. Bergen County was not a hotbed of patriotism; it was a contested zone, and Hackensack sat at its center.

The formation of the Bergen County Committee of Safety in 1775 marked the moment when Hackensack's patriots attempted to impose revolutionary order on this fractured landscape. Among the leading figures on the committee was Judge John Fell, a prosperous merchant and civic leader who lived along the Hackensack River and threw his considerable influence behind the cause of independence. Fell would go on to serve as a delegate to the Continental Congress, but his prominence made him a target. In April 1777, a band of Loyalist raiders crossed from British-held territory, seized Fell from his home in the dead of night, and carried him to New York City, where he was held prisoner for months under harsh conditions. His capture was not a random act of war but a calculated strike at the patriot leadership of Bergen County, a reminder that in this part of New Jersey, the enemy was not an abstract empire across the ocean but a neighbor who knew exactly where you lived.

Equally vital to Hackensack's revolutionary story was the Reverend Dirck Romeyn, minister of the Dutch Reformed Church that stood at the heart of the village. Romeyn was a fiery advocate of independence who used his pulpit to rally his congregation to the patriot cause, a decision that carried real risk in a community where many of his parishioners remained loyal to the king. He served as a chaplain to Continental forces and lent moral authority to the Committee of Safety's work, helping to transform the church—one of the most important institutions in Dutch Bergen County—into an instrument of revolution. The Dutch Reformed Church in Hackensack became, in effect, a political as well as spiritual headquarters, and Romeyn's willingness to stake his ministry on the cause of liberty gave the local patriot movement a legitimacy rooted in the community's deepest cultural traditions.

Another figure who deserves recognition is Major John Mauritius Goetschius, a militia officer of Dutch descent who organized and led Bergen County's patriot militia in a grinding partisan war that lasted for most of the conflict. After the British occupied much of Bergen County in late 1776—using it as a buffer zone to protect New York City and as a source of forage and provisions—Goetschius and his militiamen waged a campaign of raids, ambushes, and intelligence gathering that kept the British and their Loyalist allies off balance. This was not the war of set-piece battles that dominates popular imagination. It was a war of midnight skirmishes along creek banks, of cattle driven off at gunpoint, of barns set ablaze in retaliation. Bergen County became one of the most violent and lawless theaters of the entire Revolution, a no-man's-land where armed bands from both sides terrorized the civilian population. The Baylor Massacre of September 1778, in which British forces under General Charles Grey attacked a regiment of Continental dragoons sleeping in barns at nearby River Vale, killing and bayoneting men who attempted to surrender, shocked the region and underscored the savage character of the war in Bergen County. Though the massacre occurred a few miles from Hackensack proper, it was intimately connected to the county seat's experience of war: many of the victims had been stationed in the area precisely because Bergen County required constant military attention.

The Loyalist raids that plagued Hackensack and its surroundings were not merely military operations; they were expressions of a civil war within a revolution. Families were divided. Property was confiscated. Men who had worshipped together in the same church found themselves on opposite sides of armed skirmishes. Loyalist irregulars, many of them recruited from Bergen County itself, launched raids from their base on Staten Island and from British-held territory across the Hudson, striking at patriot farms and officials with intimate local knowledge. The violence was personal, sustained, and corrosive. Hackensack's courthouse and church both suffered damage during the occupation, and the fabric of community life was torn in ways that would take a generation to repair.

Amid this turmoil, the war also opened unexpected possibilities for some of Bergen County's most oppressed residents. Enslaved people in the Hackensack region, well aware that the British had offered freedom to those who escaped patriot masters, seized the upheaval of war as an opportunity to pursue their own liberty. One such individual was a man known to the historical record as Sam of Hackensack, an enslaved person who fled his master and sought refuge behind British lines. Sam's story, though sparsely documented, represents hundreds of similar decisions made by enslaved men and women across Bergen County during the Revolution. The irony was profound and unavoidable: in a county where patriots spoke passionately of liberty, the largest population of enslaved people in northern New Jersey lived and labored. The Revolution in Hackensack was never simply a struggle between colonists and Crown; it was also a moment when the institution of slavery was tested, challenged, and—tragically—largely preserved.

The war years also brought remarkable figures into Hackensack's orbit who complicate any simple narrative of the conflict. Theodosia Prevost, the wife of a British army officer serving in the Caribbean, maintained her estate called the Hermitage just outside the village. Despite her husband's allegiance, Theodosia cultivated relationships with patriot officers, hosting Washington and his staff and creating a salon-like atmosphere where military and political figures exchanged ideas. Her home became a gathering point for Continental officers passing through Bergen County, and it was there that she met Aaron Burr, whom she would later marry. Theodosia Prevost Burr's story illuminates the blurred lines and complex social negotiations that characterized the war in Bergen County, where survival often depended on maintaining relationships across the ideological divide.

The end of the war in 1783 brought relief but not resolution to Hackensack. Loyalists who had fled or been driven out faced the question of return; patriots who had endured years of raids and deprivation faced the question of forgiveness. Property disputes, lingering resentments, and the physical destruction wrought by seven years of partisan warfare made the transition to peace extraordinarily difficult. Some Loyalist families returned and reintegrated; others found their property confiscated and their names blacklisted. The displaced—on both sides—struggled to rebuild in a community that had been fundamentally reshaped by violence. For the enslaved people who had sought freedom during the war, the peace brought its own bitter reckoning: many who had reached British lines were evacuated to Nova Scotia or other parts of the British Empire, while those who remained faced the continuation of slavery in a state that would not pass a gradual emancipation law until 1804.

What makes Hackensack distinctive in the broader story of the American Revolution is precisely its messiness. This was not a place of triumphant charges or decisive victories. It was a place where the Revolution was lived as a daily ordeal—where choosing a side could mean losing a farm, a family member, or a life. The war here was intimate, ambiguous, and relentless. Hackensack's experience reveals the Revolution not as a pageant of heroic ideals but as a profound disruption that forced ordinary people into extraordinary choices, many of which had no good outcomes.

Modern visitors, students, and teachers should care about Hackensack because it tells a story that the more famous Revolutionary sites often obscure. At Valley Forge or Yorktown, the narrative is one of endurance and ultimate triumph. At Hackensack, the narrative is one of division, survival, and moral complexity. To walk the streets of Hackensack today—past the Green where the Dutch Reformed Church still stands, past the site of the Zabriskie house where Washington paused in retreat, past the ground where militiamen drilled and raiders struck—is to encounter a Revolution that is harder to celebrate but more honest to remember. It is a Revolution that included not only the signers and generals but also the enslaved man who ran for his freedom, the minister who risked his congregation, the judge dragged from his bed, and the woman who kept her household together while armies moved through her parlor. Hackensack reminds us that the American Revolution was not won on battlefields alone; it was endured, negotiated, and suffered in communities where the cost of liberty was paid in ways that no monument can fully capture.