As every now and then some of their kinsmen or neighbors fell by the tomahawk, they became exasperated, coupling their vengeance against the guilty savages with jealousy of the Assembly’s partiality, and also suspicion against those Indians who were treated as friends.
A cry like the Covenanters came from their descendants in Pennsylvania; loud exhortations were heard on the frontier to carry out against the heathen red men the decrees of heaven against the Canaanites.
Molly Pitcher, Heroine of the Battle of Monmouth,
Born October 13, 1754
There have been many stories of “Molly Pitcher,” and they have not always agreed even on the main facts. But on the occasion of the ceremonies incident to unveiling the cannon erected over her grave in the “Old Graveyard,” in Carlisle, by the Patriotic Orders Sons of America, on June 28, 1905, an excellent short biography of the “Heroine of the Battle of Monmouth” was prepared by John B. Landis, Esq., from which the following story is taken.
The heroine’s name was not “Pitcher,” but Ludwig, and at the time she earned her well-known sobriquet she was the wife of an artilleryman. Her father, John George Ludwig, came to this country from the Palatinate, and settled near Trenton, in Mercer County, New Jersey, where he engaged in the occupation of dairyman. It was here his daughter Mary was born, on October 13, 1754, and here among the surroundings of her father’s home were spent the youthful days of the future “Molly Pitcher.”
The wife of Dr. William Irvine, of Carlisle, afterward General William Irvine, and one of the greatest patriots of the Revolution, was visiting friends in Trenton when she saw the youthful Mary Ludwig, and, being pleased with her and in need of a domestic, took the young girl with her on returning to Carlisle.
Mary had hardly become accustomed to her surroundings in the fine home of Dr. and Mrs. Irvine until she met John Casper Hays, a barber, whose shop was near the Irvine residence. Their courtship was of short duration, for a marriage was solemnized on July 24, 1769.
A few years of quiet wedded life, disturbed only by the warlike preparations centered about the patriotic town of Carlisle, and John Casper Hays became a soldier. He enlisted December 1, 1775, in Colonel Thomas Proctor’s First Pennsylvania Artillery, in which he served as a gunner. His term of enlistment expired December, 1776, but he re-enlisted January, 1777, in the Seventh Pennsylvania Regiment, of the Continental Line, in the company commanded by Captain John Alexander, of Carlisle.