Abigail Hinman

Witness to the Burning of New London

A resident of one of New England's most defiant seaports, Abigail Hinman lived in New London, Connecticut, during the years when the town's identity was inseparable from the American cause. New London had distinguished itself as one of the most prolific privateering ports on the Atlantic coast, its captains and crews seizing British merchant vessels and hauling prizes back into the Thames River harbor with a regularity that enraged the Crown. The town's wharves, warehouses, and ropewalks hummed with wartime commerce, and its residents — merchants, sailors, tradespeople, and their families — understood that their community's aggressive participation in the conflict made them conspicuous. Hinman was part of this world, a civilian embedded in a town that had wagered its prosperity on revolution. The wealth flowing through New London's harbor was not abstract; it fed families, sustained livelihoods, and bound ordinary people to the war's fortunes in the most material way possible. That connection meant that when the British finally decided to punish New London for its defiance, the consequences would fall not only on soldiers and sailors but on every person who called the town home. Hinman could not have known the precise day the blow would land, but she lived in a community that understood the risk it carried.

On the morning of September 6, 1781, that risk became catastrophe. A British fleet appeared off the coast, and roughly 1,700 troops under the command of the notorious turncoat Benedict Arnold landed on both sides of the Thames River. While one column assaulted Fort Griswold on Groton Heights — where the garrison would be massacred after surrendering — Arnold's forces moved into New London itself, setting fire to warehouses, ships, and homes. The flames, fed by stores of goods and fanned by the wind, leaped from building to building with terrifying speed. Hinman was among the civilians who fled. Her account, preserved in the historical record, described the raw experience of that flight: the initial alarm and the dreadful confirmation that it was not a false warning, the frantic decisions about what possessions to grab and what to abandon, the choking smoke filling the streets, and the sight of the town collapsing into fire behind her. She described the panic of a population in motion — families separated, belongings dropped, the old and the young struggling to keep pace — and her testimony captured the particular horror of watching a familiar place consumed in real time.

What Hinman risked was everything that constituted an ordinary life: her home, her possessions, her safety, and the community that gave those things meaning. She was not a soldier choosing to engage an enemy; she was a civilian overtaken by a war that had, until that morning, been something fought largely at sea or at a distance. Her account speaks to the vulnerability of people who supported the Revolution not through military service but through the daily acts of living in a town committed to the cause — buying goods from privateer prizes, supplying ships, sustaining an economy that funded resistance. When Arnold's troops put New London to the torch, they destroyed approximately 150 buildings, including homes, stores, and warehouses filled with merchandise. For families like Hinman's, this was not a strategic setback to be analyzed on a map; it was the obliteration of shelter, livelihood, and security. Her testimony represented the voices of those who bore the war's costs without the recognition afforded to those who bore its arms, and it preserved the emotional reality of displacement — the fear, the grief, the disorientation of sudden homelessness — that no official military report would ever adequately convey.

The significance of Abigail Hinman's account lies in what it refuses to let history forget. Military narratives of the New London raid tend to focus on troop movements, the fall of Fort Griswold, casualty figures, and Benedict Arnold's treachery — all important, but incomplete without the civilian perspective. Hinman's testimony restores the human ground to an event that might otherwise exist only as a line in a campaign summary. Her words ensured that the burning of New London would be remembered not merely as an act of strategic destruction but as a catastrophe visited upon real people who smelled the smoke, heard the roar of flames consuming their neighbors' homes, and stumbled through streets turned unrecognizable in a single afternoon. In a revolution that was fought as much in towns and farmsteads as on formal battlefields, accounts like hers are essential primary sources. They remind us that the American Revolution was survived, not just won, and that the surviving was done disproportionately by people — women, children, the elderly, the enslaved, the poor — whose names rarely appeared in dispatches. Hinman's name endured because she spoke, and because New London chose to remember what she said.

WHY ABIGAIL HINMAN MATTERS TO NEW LONDON

The story of Abigail Hinman matters because it transforms the burning of New London from a historical abstraction into a lived experience. Students and visitors walking the streets of modern New London are walking ground that was, on a single September day in 1781, a landscape of fire and flight. Hinman's testimony connects that physical place to the human terror that once filled it. Her account teaches us that revolutions are not only fought by armies — they are endured by communities, and their true cost is measured not just in fortifications lost or soldiers killed but in homes destroyed, families scattered, and ordinary lives upended. In the network of Revolutionary War sites along the Connecticut coast, New London stands as a powerful reminder that civilian suffering was central, not incidental, to the struggle for independence.

TIMELINE

• 1781, early: New London continues to operate as one of the most active privateering ports in New England, making it an increasingly prominent British target.
• 1781, September 6, early morning: A British fleet carrying approximately 1,700 troops under Benedict Arnold arrives off the coast of New London and Groton.
• 1781, September 6, morning: Arnold's forces land on both sides of the Thames River, with one column advancing on Fort Griswold in Groton and another entering New London.
• 1781, September 6, midday: British troops set fire to warehouses, ships, and buildings throughout New London; flames spread rapidly through the town's wooden structures.
• 1781, September 6: Abigail Hinman flees with other civilians, carrying what possessions she can, as the town burns around them.
• 1781, September 6: Approximately 150 buildings in New London are destroyed, along with ships and vast quantities of stored goods; Fort Griswold's garrison is massacred after surrender.
• 1781, after September 6: Hinman provides her account of the raid, describing the civilian experience of the attack and the destruction of the town.
• 1781–1780s: New London begins the slow process of rebuilding from the devastation of Arnold's raid.

SOURCES

• Caulkins, Frances Manwaring. History of New London, Connecticut: From the First Survey of the Coast in 1612 to 1860. Self-published, 1895.
• Decker, Robert Owen. The Whaling City: A History of New London. New London County Historical Society, 1976.
• Hurd, D. Hamilton, ed. History of New London County, Connecticut. J.W. Lewis & Co., 1882.
• New London County Historical Society. Collections and records relating to the 1781 raid on New London and Groton. New London, Connecticut.
• Martin, James Kirby. Benedict Arnold, Revolutionary Hero: An American Warrior Reconsidered. New York University Press, 1997.