The Water Carrier of Monmouth

I followed the army because my husband went, and a wife who could work was needed as much as a soldier who could fire. That is not how the stories tell it — they make it sound as though I wandered onto a battlefield out of devotion or madness. The truth is simpler. The army could not function without the women who washed, cooked, mended, nursed, and carried. We were part of the army. We drew partial rations. We were subject to the army's discipline. We marched when the army marched and halted when it halted.

At Valley Forge, the winter was as hard for us as for the soldiers, though our suffering has attracted less attention from the historians. We lived in the huts alongside the men, sharing the cold and the hunger. My husband William was a gunner in the Pennsylvania artillery, and I made myself useful where I could — carrying water, tending fires, nursing the sick. When the Prussian drillmaster arrived and began his training, the whole camp changed. The soldiers drilled from morning until dark, and there was a sense of purpose that had been missing during the worst months of winter.

When the army marched out of Valley Forge in June, I marched with it. We crossed New Jersey in heat that pressed down on the column like a weight. The roads were sandy and the dust choked us. By the time we reached the area around Monmouth Court House, men were falling out of the ranks from the heat alone, before any shot had been fired.

On the morning of June 28, the guns went forward and the fighting began. I carried water from a spring to the artillery battery where William served his cannon. The pitchers were heavy and the distance was not short, and every trip I made across that ground was through air that smelled of powder smoke and was filled with the sound of cannon and musket fire. The men called for water constantly — their throats were raw from the cartridge paper they tore with their teeth, and the heat was killing them as surely as the British fire.

William collapsed at his gun in the afternoon. Whether it was the heat or exhaustion or both, he went down and could not rise. I had watched him sponge and load that cannon enough times to know the motions. I took the rammer and the sponge from his hands and went to work. The other men on the crew did not question it — they needed hands, and mine were available. We loaded and fired, loaded and fired, the gun bucking back with each discharge, the smoke so thick I could barely see the target.

An officer rode past at some point — I was told later it was General Washington himself — and I am told he acknowledged what I was doing. I do not remember the details of that moment. What I remember is the work: the weight of the rammer, the heat of the barrel, the sound of the shot leaving the gun. I remember that when the firing finally stopped and the British pulled back in the darkness, I was still standing at the cannon, and William was being carried to the surgeon.

After the war, the Pennsylvania legislature gave me a small pension. The document says I attended an artillery piece at the Battle of Monmouth. That is accurate. The stories that came later — the stories about Molly Pitcher — are partly about me and partly about other women who did similar work at Monmouth and at other battles. I do not begrudge the legend, but I want it understood that what I did was not extraordinary in the way the stories suggest. Women served throughout the war, at every encampment and every battle. I happened to serve at a cannon on a day when someone noticed. The others served just as faithfully, and their names are mostly forgotten.

I lived the rest of my life in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. William died a few years after the war, and I married again. I was not wealthy and I was not celebrated in my own time. The pension helped, but it was a soldier's half-pay, and a soldier's half-pay does not go far. I died in 1832, an old woman in a small town, and it was only later that the story of Molly Pitcher grew into something larger than the life I actually lived. I carried water. I fired a cannon. I did what was needed. That is all.