Monmouth Battlefield: The Revolution's Longest Day
Near Asbury Park, New Jersey
The fields stretching out around you here in Freehold Township were once the site of one of the largest battles of the entire Revolutionary War, a brutal summer battle that tested George Washington's army and produced one of the most celebrated heroines in American military legend.
On June twenty-eighth, seventeen seventy-eight, the British army under Sir Henry Clinton was abandoning Philadelphia and marching across New Jersey toward New York. Washington saw an opportunity to strike the rear column. He ordered General Charles Lee forward with roughly five thousand men to lead the assault. Lee advanced, then hesitated, then ordered a retreat without having engaged the enemy in any serious way. Washington, riding up to investigate, encountered his retreating troops and famously confronted Lee on the road, demanding an explanation. Lee could offer none adequate.
Washington took personal command, halted the retreat, and turned the army around. What followed was hours of intense fighting across open farm fields in a heat that killed soldiers on both sides from sunstroke as surely as from bullets. Temperatures that week frequently topped ninety degrees. Surgeons recorded men simply falling dead without a wound. Washington held the line, and though the British slipped away that night and eventually reached New York, the battle showed how much his army, drilled over the winter, had improved, as it stood and fought the British in the open field without breaking.
The woman history calls Molly Pitcher was likely Mary Ludwig Hays, about twenty-three years old, who spent the battle carrying water to exhausted gunners along the American artillery line. When her husband was wounded and could no longer work his cannon, she took his place at the gun. Whether she actually fired the piece or simply kept it loaded and running is debated by historians, but the image of a woman at a cannon in the smoke of Monmouth became one of the enduring symbols of women's participation in the Revolution.
The battlefield is preserved largely intact. You can walk the ground where thousands of men fought on one of the hottest days of the eighteenth century.
