📜 Liberty and the Republic
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The founding and its people

🎖️ People of the Revolutionary War

Short biographies of men and women who fought, spied, financed and wrote the Revolution, many of them names most Americans never learned: soldiers of color, a woman who enlisted under a man's name, a Spanish governor, a Polish engineer and a Prussian drillmaster.

60 lessons · about 9 hours ·

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  1. 1Joseph Warren: The Doctor Who Sent RevereJoseph Warren was a Boston physician who wrote the Suffolk Resolves, ran the Massachusetts resistance in the spring of 1775, sent Paul Revere and William Dawes to Lexington, and died at Bunker Hill fighting as a volunteer three days after he was made a major general.9 min
  2. 2Peter Salem and Salem Poor: Two Black Soldiers of Bunker HillPeter Salem of Framingham and Salem Poor of Andover were Black New Englanders who fought at Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775, and served for years afterward. One was honored by fourteen officers in writing; the other became the hero of a story the evidence does not support.9 min
  3. 3James Armistead Lafayette: The Spy Who Fooled CornwallisJames Armistead, enslaved in Virginia, served the Marquis de Lafayette in 1781 as a courier and then as a double agent in British camps. Virginia freed him by special act in 1787, and he took his general's name.8 min
  4. 4Deborah Sampson: The Soldier Called Robert ShurtleffDeborah Sampson of Massachusetts enlisted in the Continental Army as Robert Shurtleff, was wounded near Tarrytown, and was discharged at West Point in 1783. Her enlistment date is disputed, and her pension fight ran for decades.8 min
  5. 5Margaret Corbin: The Woman Who Kept the Gun FiringMargaret Corbin took her dead husband's place at a cannon during the fall of Fort Washington in 1776, lost the use of an arm, and won a pension from Congress in 1779. Her story is often tangled with the legend of Molly Pitcher.8 min
  6. 6Henry Knox: The Bookseller Who Hauled the GunsHenry Knox, a Boston bookseller with no military training, brought 59 captured cannon and mortars from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston in the winter of 1775 and 1776. They helped force the British out of the city, and Knox went on to run the artillery and then the War Department.9 min
  7. 7Nathanael Greene: The General Who Lost Battles and Won the SouthNathanael Greene, a Rhode Island Quaker turned general, took over a broken southern army in December 1780. He lost most of his battles and still drove the British back to Charleston and Savannah, then died in debt in Georgia in 1786.9 min
  8. 8Daniel Morgan: The Wagoner Who Won at CowpensDaniel Morgan went from teamster to rifle captain to the victor of Cowpens, where on January 17, 1781, he destroyed Banastre Tarleton's force with a plan built around militia who were expected to run.9 min
  9. 9Francis Marion: The Swamp Fox Behind the LegendFrancis Marion led South Carolina militia against British supply lines in 1780 and 1781 and fought beside Nathanael Greene. Parson Weems and Hollywood buried the man under legend, and the record includes his slaveholding and a brutal Cherokee campaign.9 min
  10. 10Friedrich von Steuben: The Drillmaster of Valley ForgeFriedrich von Steuben reached Valley Forge on February 23, 1778, with a title he had been given and a rank others inflated. He still taught the Continental Army to drill, march and fire as a unit, and wrote the Blue Book the Army used for decades.9 min
  11. 11Thaddeus Kosciuszko: The Engineer Who Chose the GroundTadeusz Kosciuszko, a Polish-Lithuanian engineer, chose the ground at Saratoga, fortified West Point and served under Greene in the South. His 1798 will left his American money to buy and educate enslaved people, and it was never carried out.9 min
  12. 12Bernardo de Galvez: The Spaniard Who Opened the MississippiBernardo de Galvez, Spanish governor of Louisiana, sent secret aid up the Mississippi to the Americans in 1777, then took British posts on the lower Mississippi and the Gulf Coast, ending with Pensacola in May 1781. Sources differ on several dates.9 min
  13. 13Haym Salomon: The Broker Behind the MythHaym Salomon was a Philadelphia bill broker who sold government paper for Robert Morris and lent money to members of Congress. The claim that he lent hundreds of thousands to the government grew after his death and is not supported by his own papers or Morris's diary.9 min
  14. 14John Laurens: The Soldier Who Asked Congress to Free SlavesJohn Laurens, aide to Washington and son of a rich South Carolina planter, proposed in 1779 to raise a battalion of enslaved men and free them for service. Congress backed the idea, South Carolina rejected it, and Laurens was killed in a minor skirmish in 1782.9 min
  15. 15Mercy Otis Warren: The Pen of the RevolutionMercy Otis Warren of Plymouth wrote satirical plays against royal officials, argued in 1788 that the Constitution needed a bill of rights, and published a three-volume history of the Revolution in 1805 that cost her a friendship with John Adams.9 min
  16. 16Polly Cooper: The Oneida Woman Who Fed Valley ForgePolly Cooper, an Oneida woman, is remembered for bringing white corn to Washington's army at Valley Forge in 1778 and refusing pay. Her story rests on Oneida oral tradition more than on documents, and the Oneida who stood with the Americans lost nearly all of their land afterward.9 min
  17. 17Joseph Brant: The Mohawk Who Chose the CrownJoseph Brant, educated at a Connecticut school and a translator of Anglican prayers into Mohawk, led Mohawk and Loyalist warriors for the British and was branded a monster by American writers for a massacre he did not attend. After the war he led his people to a Grand River grant in Canada and held enslaved people of his own.9 min
  18. 18Nancy Ward: The Beloved Woman of the CherokeeNanye'hi (Nancy Ward) held the Cherokee office of Beloved Woman, warned white settlers of an attack in 1776, and in 1817 put her name to a written plea against giving up more land. The Battle of Taliwa story that made her famous rests on oral tradition recorded long after the fact, and accounts say she held an enslaved man.9 min
  19. 19Samson Occom: The Mohegan Minister Who Funded DartmouthSamson Occom, a Mohegan Presbyterian minister, raised about 12,000 pounds in Britain for Eleazar Wheelock's school for Native students, and Wheelock used the money to found a college that Occom never visited. In 1774 Phillis Wheatley wrote him a letter on natural liberty that newspapers printed across New England.9 min
  20. 20Crispus Attucks: What the Record Shows About the Boston MassacreCrispus Attucks died on King Street in Boston on March 5, 1770, and John Adams later named him in court as the man chiefly to blame. Almost everything said about his birth, his enslavement and his place as the first to die comes from later memory, not from the trial record.9 min
  21. 21Phillis Wheatley: The Enslaved Poet Washington AnsweredPhillis Wheatley was seven or eight when she was sold in Boston in 1761, and in 1773 she published the first known book of poetry by a Black woman. George Washington answered her 1775 poem to him in his own hand, and her 1774 letter on the love of freedom was printed in newspapers.9 min
  22. 22Lemuel Haynes: The Minuteman Who Became a PastorLemuel Haynes, born to a Black father and a white mother and bound out as a baby, marched as a Massachusetts militiaman in 1775 and wrote a poem about Lexington. He later wrote an anti-slavery essay that went unpublished for two centuries, became a Congregational minister in 1785, and served one Vermont church for about thirty years.9 min
  23. 23Agrippa Hull: The Free Black Soldier Who Served KosciuszkoAgrippa Hull, a free Black man from Stockbridge, Massachusetts, enlisted at eighteen in 1777 and served over six years, most of them at the side of the Polish engineer Tadeusz Kosciuszko. He kept his discharge, signed by Washington, so firmly that Charles Sedgwick wrote in 1828 that Hull would rather forgo his pension than lose the paper.9 min
  24. 24Boston King and Thomas Peters: Two Black Loyalists Who Left AmericaBoston King and Thomas Peters both fled slavery for British lines, then left Nova Scotia for Sierra Leone in 1792 in search of the land and freedom Britain had promised. Peters took the settlers' case to London in 1790 after five petitions to colonial officials failed, and died in Sierra Leone within months of arriving, in the colony he helped found.9 min
  25. 25The First Rhode Island Regiment: The Black Soldiers of YorktownIn February 1778 Rhode Island voted to free enslaved men who enlisted and to pay their owners for them, and the men fought as the 1st Rhode Island Regiment until 1783. Historians disagree on how many there were, and on whether the regiment itself stormed a redoubt at Yorktown.9 min
  26. 26Abigail Adams: The Farmer Who Told John to Remember the LadiesAbigail Adams ran the family farm in Braintree, Massachusetts, for years while John served in Philadelphia and Europe, and she wrote the most quoted letter of the Revolution while doing it. Her 1776 request to "Remember the Ladies" asked for limits on husbands' power, and the word vote does not appear in it.9 min
  27. 27Nancy Hart: The Georgia Legend and What the Record HoldsNancy Hart is Georgia's best-known Revolutionary heroine, said to have shot a Tory soldier dead in her own cabin and held the rest until help came. The story first reached print in 1825, some forty-six years after it supposedly happened, and the Daughters of the American Revolution say no historical records exist of her wartime exploits.8 min
  28. 28Lydia Darragh: The Quaker Housewife and the Whitemarsh WarningLydia Darragh was a Philadelphia Quaker midwife whose house the British used for officers' meetings in 1777, and tradition says she overheard a plan to surprise Washington at Whitemarsh. No document from December 1777 proves it, and her own meeting later disowned members of her family for supporting the war.9 min
  29. 29Mary Katharine Goddard: The Printer Who Put the Signers' Names on the DeclarationMary Katharine Goddard ran Baltimore's newspaper and its post office through the Revolution, and in January 1777 Congress chose her to print the first Declaration of Independence that listed the signers by name. In 1789 the new Postmaster General removed her from the post office she had held for fourteen years, and Washington would not step in.9 min
  30. 30Anna Strong and Agent 355: The Women of the Culper RingWashington's spy ring on Long Island left behind one coded phrase about a woman, written on August 15, 1779, and nothing else. The famous black petticoat on Anna Strong's clothesline appears in print in 1939, and the source its author cites was never shown.9 min
  31. 31Esther de Berdt Reed: The Ladies Who Sewed 2,000 ShirtsIn June 1780 Esther de Berdt Reed, born in London, launched a door-to-door drive by Philadelphia women that raised over 300,000 paper dollars for Washington's army. Washington asked that it be spent on shirts, and 2,005 were finished by December, less than three months after Reed died.9 min
  32. 32Sybil Ludington: The Midnight Ride the Record Cannot ConfirmSybil Ludington is said to have ridden through the night in April 1777 to call out her father's militia after the British burned Danbury. The Danbury raid is well documented, but the first known mention of her ride comes from a family letter written in 1854, seventy-seven years later.9 min
  33. 33Nathan Hale: The Schoolteacher Hanged as a SpyNathan Hale, a 21-year-old Yale graduate and schoolteacher, volunteered to spy on the British in New York in September 1776 and was hanged within days of his capture. His famous last words were reported secondhand by an officer who was not there, and they echo a line from a popular play.9 min
  34. 34Benjamin Tallmadge and the Culper Ring: Washington's Spy NetworkBenjamin Tallmadge, who went to Yale with Nathan Hale, became Washington's spymaster in 1778 and ran the Culper Ring, a network of Long Island friends who passed numbered codes from British-held New York to Washington. The ring was never caught, and the name of its chief New York agent stayed secret until Morton Pennypacker announced it in 1930.9 min
  35. 35Hercules Mulligan: The Tailor Who Dressed the Enemy and Spied on HimHercules Mulligan was an Irish-born New York tailor who measured British officers for coats and, by tradition, passed what he heard to Washington. The best evidence for his spy work is thinner than the legend, and it includes the plain fact that he held an enslaved man.9 min
  36. 36Benedict Arnold: The Hero Who Sold West PointBenedict Arnold shattered his leg at Quebec in 1775 and took a musket ball in the same fight that won Saratoga, and Saratoga's Boot Monument honors that wound without ever printing his name. He then tried to sell West Point to the British, and the money he finally got was about a third of the 20,000 pounds first offered.9 min
  37. 37John Andre: The British Spy Master Hanged at TappanMajor John Andre, the charming young officer who planned a lavish Philadelphia pageant in 1778, ran British spying in America and was hanged as a spy in 1780. His captors may never have been offered the bribe in the famous form, and Washington never gave him the firing squad he asked for.9 min
  38. 38Marquis de Lafayette: The Teenage General Who Wanted Slavery EndedLafayette was a 19-year-old French nobleman when Congress made him a major general in 1777, and he became Washington's closest young officer. In 1783 he asked Washington to join him in buying land to test freeing the enslaved as tenants, and Washington answered warmly and did nothing.9 min
  39. 39Casimir Pulaski: The Polish Cavalryman Who Fell at SavannahCasimir Pulaski fought the Russians in Poland, fled into exile, and was recommended to Washington by Benjamin Franklin before he led American horsemen at Brandywine. He was mortally wounded at Savannah in 1779, and nobody has settled where he was buried.9 min
  40. 40Rochambeau: The French General Who Marched to YorktownJean-Baptiste de Rochambeau brought about 5,500 French soldiers to Newport in 1780 and led them roughly 680 miles to Yorktown a year later, lending Washington half of his remaining coin so American troops could be paid on the way. Back in France he was jailed during the Terror and was days from the guillotine when it ended.9 min
  41. 41Comte de Grasse: The Admiral Who Closed the ChesapeakeIn 1781 Admiral de Grasse chose to bring his West Indies fleet to the Chesapeake, carrying about 3,000 soldiers and money raised in Havana, and beat a British fleet off the Capes. Seven months later Rodney captured him at the Saintes, and a court-martial cleared his captains of the blame he put on them.9 min
  42. 42Johann de Kalb: The Self-Made Baron Who Held the Line at CamdenJohann de Kalb was a Bavarian peasant's son who gave himself the title of baron, rose in the French army and became a major general in the Continental Army. At Camden in 1780 he kept fighting after the American commander left the field, and he died of his wounds three days later.8 min
  43. 43Pierre Beaumarchais: The Playwright Behind Secret French AidPierre Beaumarchais, the author of The Barber of Seville, ran a sham trading house called Roderigue Hortalez and Company that shipped French arms to America in 1776 and 1777. He died in 1799 still claiming money from Congress, and his daughter was still petitioning in 1824.9 min
  44. 44George Rogers Clark: The Frontier General of the NorthwestGeorge Rogers Clark took the Illinois country from the British with a few hundred Virginia frontiersmen and a march through flooded winter woods in 1779. Virginia refused his claim for what he spent, and several thousand of his unpaid vouchers were found in the state Capitol in 1913.9 min
  45. 45The Overmountain Men: The Frontiersmen Who Won Kings MountainIn October 1780 about 900 frontier riflemen from the Carolinas, Virginia and today's Tennessee rode through a rainy night and destroyed a Loyalist force at Kings Mountain. Nearly every man on the losing side was an American, and the only Briton on the field was the commander, Patrick Ferguson.9 min
  46. 46Thomas Sumter: The Carolina GamecockThomas Sumter escorted Cherokee leaders to meet King George III in 1762, then in 1781 paid his soldiers with slaves he meant to take from Loyalists. Nathanael Greene approved the plan, Francis Marion refused it, and Sumter lived to 97 as the last surviving general of the Revolution.9 min
  47. 47Light-Horse Harry Lee: The Cavalryman Who Eulogized WashingtonHenry Lee led the Legion that stormed Paulus Hook in 1779 and served as Greene's cavalry in the South, then wrote the resolutions that gave Washington his most famous epitaph. The man who drafted the line spent a year in debtors' prison, was nearly killed by a Baltimore mob in 1812, and is now remembered mostly as the father of Robert E. Lee.9 min
  48. 48John Paul Jones: The Scottish Captain Who Raided Britain's Own CoastJohn Paul Jones, born John Paul in Scotland, raided the British coast in 1778 and took HMS Serapis in 1779 in a night fight that left his own ship sinking. His most famous line, "I have not yet begun to fight," first appeared in print 46 years later, from a lieutenant's memory.9 min
  49. 49John Barry: The Irish-Born Captain Who Held Commission Number OneJohn Barry, born in County Wexford, Ireland, captured the British tender Edward in 1776, fought the last sea action of the war in 1783, and in 1797 received the first commission in the permanent U.S. Navy. Though he is called Commodore, the Navy had no such rank until 1862.9 min
  50. 50Ethan Allen: The Green Mountain Boy Who Took TiconderogaEthan Allen led the Green Mountain Boys in the surprise capture of Fort Ticonderoga on May 10, 1775, then spent more than two years as a British prisoner after a failed grab at Montreal. The line he made famous, that he demanded the fort 'in the name of the great Jehovah, and the Continental Congress,' comes from his own book, and the sources checked for this lesson turn up no other eyewitness record of it.9 min
  51. 51Thomas Paine: The Pamphleteer Who Argued for IndependenceThomas Paine landed in Philadelphia in 1774 so sick with fever he had to be carried off the ship, and thirteen months later his pamphlet Common Sense was on sale, a work the American Battlefield Trust says electrified the colonies. Nobody knows how many copies sold, and the story that Washington read his Crisis essay to the troops before Trenton has no direct evidence behind it.9 min
  52. 52Samuel Adams: The Tax Collector Who Organized a RevolutionSamuel Adams was a failed maltster and a tax collector more than 8,000 pounds behind on his accounts, yet he built the committees and town meetings that carried Massachusetts toward independence. General Gage thought him dangerous enough to exclude him, with John Hancock, from a royal pardon in June 1775.9 min
  53. 53Robert Morris: The Merchant Who Financed the Revolution and Died BrokeRobert Morris kept Washington's army paid at its worst moments, from Trenton in 1776 to Yorktown in 1781, and he did it largely on his own credit. He had also opposed independence, stayed out of the July 2 vote, and later spent more than three years in debtors' prison.9 min
  54. 54Oliver Pollock: The New Orleans Merchant Who Paid for the War in the WestOliver Pollock, an Irish-born merchant in Spanish New Orleans, put up his own fortune and credit for George Rogers Clark's Illinois campaign and for Spain's help to the Americans. He ended in a Havana debtors' jail, and he is often credited with the first written dollar sign, a claim historians treat with caution.8 min
  55. 55Charles Thomson: The Secretary Who Kept Congress's BooksCharles Thomson, an Ulster orphan turned Philadelphia schoolmaster, served as secretary of the Continental Congress for its entire fifteen years and rode to Mount Vernon in 1789 to tell Washington he was President. He also wrote the description of the Great Seal, though he did not design it alone.8 min
  56. 56Benjamin Rush: The Doctor Who Titled Common Sense and Crossed WashingtonBenjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician, suggested the title Common Sense to Thomas Paine, signed the Declaration on August 2, 1776, and wrote an anonymous letter in 1778 that Washington blamed on him. He also bled hundreds of yellow fever patients, bought and freed a man named William Grubber, and talked Adams and Jefferson back into writing to each other.9 min
  57. 57John Witherspoon: The Preacher Who Taught the Founders and Signed for IndependenceJohn Witherspoon, a Scottish minister, crossed the Atlantic in 1768 to run a struggling New Jersey college and became the only clergyman to sign the Declaration. He also owned enslaved people, and his famous line that America was rotting for want of independence appears in several versions with no source from 1776.9 min
  58. 58Charles Carroll of Carrollton: The Last Surviving SignerCharles Carroll of Carrollton was a Maryland Catholic who was barred from Maryland politics when he began writing against the royal governor, and he lived to be the last signer of the Declaration of Independence. He also enslaved more than 350 people at his death, and the story that he proposed gradual abolition in 1797 has no paper trail.9 min
  59. 59Francis Salvador: The Jewish Planter Killed on the Cherokee FrontierFrancis Salvador, a wealthy London Jew who reached South Carolina in December 1773, was elected to the colony's Provincial Congress and died in a night ambush on August 1, 1776, at 29. He is called the first Jew to die for American independence, yet sources disagree on the date, the place, and was at his side at the end.9 min
  60. 60Joseph Plumb Martin: The Common Soldier Who Wrote It All DownJoseph Plumb Martin joined the war at 15, starved at Valley Forge and Morristown, and helped storm Redoubt 10 at Yorktown as a sergeant of sappers. His 1830 memoir was printed in a few hundred copies at most and sat in obscurity for more than a century before it came back in print as Private Yankee Doodle.9 min