Battle of Connecticut Farms: Hannah Caldwell's Death

The ground near here, in what is now Union Township, was the scene of a battle in June of seventeen eighty that became one of the most emotionally charged episodes of the Revolutionary War in New Jersey. It began on June seventh, when a British and Hessian force of approximately six thousand troops under Lieutenant General Wilhelm von Knyphausen crossed from Staten Island and marched toward the Watchung Mountains, intending to cut through Hobart Gap and reach General Washington's headquarters at Morristown.

American militiamen and Continental soldiers fell back fighting through the village of Connecticut Farms, the settlement that would eventually become Union Township. The British force was overwhelming in numbers, and the village was largely burned and looted as the redcoats advanced.

In the parsonage adjacent to the Connecticut Farms Presbyterian Church, Hannah Caldwell, wife of the fiercely patriot Reverend James Caldwell, had taken shelter with her children. A shot came through the window of the parsonage and struck her dead.

Historians have debated for nearly two and a half centuries whether Hannah Caldwell was deliberately targeted or the victim of a soldier who mistook a movement at the window for a sniper. The British command denied any order was given. But in the charged atmosphere of seventeen eighty, the distinction made little difference. News of her death spread rapidly and was treated throughout the colonies as murder.

James Caldwell, who had been serving as a chaplain with Continental forces, buried his wife and kept fighting. Sixteen days later, at the Battle of Springfield just a few miles from here, he is remembered for distributing Watts Hymnals to American soldiers who had run short of musket wadding, shouting, Give them Watts, boys. His grief had become a rallying cry.

Caldwell himself was killed the following year in Elizabethtown, shot by an American sentry in a disputed incident. The Continental Army lost one of its most fervent ministers of the cause at almost the same moment it won the war.