Women Waging War in the American Revolution by University of Virginia Press

Author:University of Virginia Press
Format: epub

The prisoners taken at Saratoga in October 1777 remained interned until the end of the war, and although the majority absconded, a return from June 1781 suggests that married men were much more likely to remain imprisoned than escape. In January 1778, there were 211 wives with the British prisoners at Prospect Hill. In June 1781, those prisoners were at Lancaster, Pennsylvania; less than one-third of the soldiers remained but there were 174 with wives present.⁴⁰ Lacking names from 1778, it is not possible to determine whether some men had married while prisoners, nor are there comprehensive records to reveal what became of the women who were no longer among the prisoners. One of them, Mary McCarthy, wrote a petition describing her remarkable story. She had married into the 9th Regiment of Foot when her former soldier-husband in the 7th Regiment died in Canada early in the war. She followed her new husband on campaign to Saratoga, where he was captured. When the prisoners were moved from Prospect Hill to Virginia in 1779, her husband attempted to escape while crossing the Hudson River but was recaptured. Mary McCarthy, with three children in tow, spent a year in the Hudson Highlands before getting an unusual opportunity to go down river to British-held New York City. Benedict Arnold, then an American general, gave her a pass to carry dispatches to his British correspondents in New York. She made the journey on 4 September 1780, delivering coded letters that finalized the terms of Arnold’s treasonous attempt to surrender the post at West Point, a plot that was foiled three weeks later. She never did connect with her husband again, and in 1783 petitioned the British military government in New York for permission to relocate to Nova Scotia.⁴¹

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