The Ambush of Geary, December 1776

By December of seventeen seventy-six, the American Revolution was not going well in New Jersey.

British forces had swept across the colony after taking New York City, and General Howe had established a chain of outposts through central New Jersey, staffed largely by Hessian and loyalist troops, with British cavalry moving between them. For the local civilian population, the occupation was brutal. For the Continental Army, now retreating south toward the Delaware River with Washington, the situation was dire enough that one more British push might end the war.

In this climate, New Jersey militiamen who had no formal army rank were fighting their own war, ambushing foraging parties, cutting off couriers, and making the countryside dangerous for small British detachments. One such militia captain was John Schenck, who organized a trap near the Amwell Township in Hunterdon County on the fourteenth of December, seventeen seventy-six.

His target was Cornet Francis Geary, a young officer of the Queen's Light Dragoons, the son of Admiral Sir Francis Geary of the Royal Navy. Geary commanded a company of cavalry operating out of Pennington and was moving through the area when Schenck's men opened fire. The ambush succeeded. Geary was shot and killed.

The militiamen concealed and buried the body to prevent its recovery, and British forces never found it. The grave remained unmarked and forgotten until eighteen ninety-one, when the Hunterdon County Historical Society excavated a site suspected of being Geary's burial place. In the ground they found a skeleton and silver buttons stamped with the initials for the Queen's Light Dragoons.

The ambush was a small skirmish in a campaign of thousands of encounters, but it illustrated something larger: while Washington famously crossed the Delaware a week and a half after this engagement, it was the militia fighters, invisible in the historical record, who kept British control of New Jersey from ever becoming complete.