Red Bank Battlefield Today June 6, 2021

Today I met a couple of friends at Red Bank Batlefield to give thema quick battlefield tour. One of them is a docent at Atsion Mansion, and sometimes at Batsto; she is also a volunteer at Cedar Run Wildlife Center. Thinking about how I wanted to present it to them in a short form, since it is 93 degrees out today, I decided to start up on the bluff over looking the river, because really, that is the heart of the story.

Imagine, I said, that it is early autumn and the harvesst has almost reached its grand finale' and so far, although the Quaker family in the James and Ann Whitall farm house, were clearly aware of the war raging around them, they had been blissfully out of its reach, until now.

To this point our Coitinental Army had been thrashed from New England to New York and General Washington was battling over in Pennsyvlania in the Brandywine area. Raiders from both armies were burnign crops and rounding up farm animals to feed the famished soldiers because the British ships coun't get up the Delaware River to supply their army stuck in Philadelphia after they captured it.

I thik it is fair to say that generally in European wars the way you won was to capture the capital and or capture or smash the army. The British had captured our capital but they hadn't smashed our army and they couldn't feed their own army by foraging in Pennsyvania. When foragers stole the cattle and chickens and pigs, there were none left to breed and res-stock. They burned the fields so the enemy couldn't use the grain, so there was no more grain. They had stolen all the supplies the farm families had tried to hide, their preserves for winter, their hams, the potatoes and apples in the root cellars. No one had anything left to eat. The city was hungry, the armies were hungry, the people in the countryside were bereft.

Already soldiers from both sides had ransacked South Jersey, the cattled drive of General Mad Anthony Wayne, the forces of the British and there were small fires burning everywhere, skirmishes over bridges like Quinton's Bridge and Tavers (the meeting and gathering places for local militia) like Hancock House in Alloways Creek.

What had to heppen now was the British were determined to take out the two forts defending the River and the river fortifications. Sunk into the river were Chevaux de Frise - a french term for logs with etal spikes sunk in rafts of rocks all across the river to puncture the hulls of ships trying to come up the Delaware to Philadelphia to suppy the British forces. Fort Mifflin on the Philadelphia side had already been built and was under bombardment.

Next, the Continental forces had come to the Whitall family farm and confiscated their applie orchard to build a ground fort with ditch and fascnes made from the uprooted apple trees. This fort was called Fort Mercer after a beloved general killed in action, Hugh Mercer. Between the two forts Mifflin and Mercer, and the river fortifications, even though the British had captured Philadelphia, they couldn't feed their army and hold on to it. So they sent their hired army of Hessians under Colonel Carl Von Donop to take Fort Mercer while they battered away at Fort Mifflin.

The Whitall family being Quakers, were Pacifist and neutral, but the war came to them anyway, as all wars do. They had to leave their home in the hands of the Continental forces and take shelter with family members in Woodbury. Meanwhile, Ann Cooper Whitall's broher's house in Woodbury had been taken over by General Cornwallis for his residence while he was in the region at war with us.

In the Fort at the Whatall farm, a small force of 200 ment, some of them African American soldiers of the 1st Rhode Island, warned by the blacksmith's boy who ran all the way from Haddofield to tell them the Hessians were coming, waited. There were so few of them, they had to hole up in one corner of the fort and leave the rest unmanned, which turned out to be a saving grace.

The Hessians came marching down Clement's Bridge Road and attacked the fort on October 22, 1777 with about 2,000 battle hardened soldiers. But their commander was arrogant and didn'twait to batter the fort with artillery first. He ordered his men to charge and they were picked off like sitting ducks trying to climb through the fascine (the upturned roots of the apple trees). In only a couple of hours nearly 500 were wounded including Colonel Von Donop, shot 9 times, and they had to retreat. The Hessians took th wounded that they could carry or lay over their horses, wagons and cannon, the rest they had to leave on the ground, crying and calling for help and bleeding to death.

The victorious Cotinental defenders carried the wounded into the Whitall House and laid them on the floors while the army doctors did whtever they could to save them. Oral history has it that Ann Whitall returned to check on her house and helped to nurse the wounded sodiers with her skills in herbal medicine. There was also a myth that so many arms and legs were amputated that a huge hill of them stood outside the window of the surgical room, and that the floor was soaked with blood that seeped through the sawdust. It must have been a horrible scene. Many of the dead were buried in mass graves on the bluffs and over the years their bones washed out with flood tides. Some were gatheed up and re-bured in a small cemetery near Woodbury called The Strangers Cemetery. Other wounded were cared for in the confiscated Woodbury Meeting HOuse.

Whenever I go there, I always feel the fear and the suffering of those poor men and boys, especially the wounded lying on the ground, abandoned by their army, probably illiterate conscripts, who defiitely couldn't even speak English, and would never see their families again.

Meanwhile, we, the Continentals had a great, though short lived victory, and showed France that there was a chance we might prevail. Also on the river, the great Warship August had caught fire and exploded and both sister warships were disabled, so the river remained out of British reach for the time being. I am not sure how long the Whitall family had to remain out of their home, but they were lucky because when they returned it might have been dirty and bloody but it was intact and they could clean it up and re-furnish it and live it in again and for several more generations. James Whitall could get back to farming and his shipping investments and Ann couud get back to keeping the home, watching over the inentured servants, and her children, and going to meeting to watch over her soul. She was a fervently religious believer as she demonstrates in her diary, which is kept at the Gloucester County Historical Socity in Woodbury and is also on-line now. Unfortunately the volume that exists is only from 1762, becaue who wouldn't love to see what she said about 1777! Her son, Job kept a diary too, but it is more a record of farm business and ot much to say about the war; I think he was trying, as a good Quaker, to turn his mind away from war, and as a good Quaker of the time, toward stewardship of his farm property and business.

Many were not so lucky as the Whitall's were; their farm houses were burned, their fields destroyed their animals taken, sometimes the women wer raped, and sometimes defenders were killed. New Jersey is not only the Crosssroads of the Revolution, in many ways it was in the crosshairs! Ann Whitall - Thinking about Ann Whitall, her life, her world turned upside down. Having read the one diary, anyway, I got a small glimpse into her home. You can tell she was raised to be devoit. I suppose from the time she was born her religion was drilled into her, Quaker school (if she went to school) nothing but the bible to read. It made me think how her life was being riven by the same forces that were then beginning to fracture her religion. The Quakers were being divided into Orthodox (By the book) Quakers, and Hicksites (by the revelation -which was God talking to you) Quakers. The Quakers were becoming more secular and relaxing the hidebound rules that had eveloped around them when they took their version of Puritanism from England to the colonies. The free-wheeling frontier becoming domesticted, the Quakers could begin to relax a little, and the ones who really beived in hell fire and damnation and the fiery pit were frightened by the relaxation of the fences. Ann must have felt the coming of the war onto her own farm as a judgement of God, smiting them for their spiritual indolence.

Another thing I always think about with Ann and women of her period, their extreme innocence and naivity, along with the credulity. What must it have been like for a girl like her to get married and endure the shock of the marriage bed, not to mention the physical ordeal of childbirth, a life threatening experience in Ann's time, the terror, the pain! And Ann went through it seven times! All those children, all those people in the house, the half dozen indentured servants, who were most probably not a little resentful and untrustworthy. After all, one, Margaret Heeney, actually absconded with herself (Run Run Margaret - get free!) Ann must have been internally forced to be ever watchful, for her children, for her soul, for her household, and according to her diary, she felt very little support from her wordly husband and her increasingly wordly sons, who actually behaved disrespectfully towards her without being chastised by their father. She did, however, live a long life, into her eighties, before the hand of the punishing God struck her down with yellow fever.

Someday I would like to do a book THE SALEM ROAD, FROM BURLINGTON TO GREENWICH, with all the interesting historical events and people along that road!

Happy Trails! Jo Ann wrightj45@yahoo.com