What to Do with Captain Molly: War Hero

Margaret Cochran knew violence early. When she was four years and seven months old, the Pennsylvania frontier, where she had been born in 1751, turned treacherous. Her nervous parents, Robert and Sarah, sent their daughter and her older brother John to live with their uncle at a place considered safer.

Their concern was justified. The Delaware and Shawnee tribes resented the intrusion of white settlers into the Cumberland Valley. Allied with the French, they attacked a local stockade. They left Margaret’s father dead and scalped. Her mother may have been kidnapped—she was never seen again. Margaret’s uncle raised the children while the French and Indian War ran its long course in the American hinterlands.

When she was twenty-one, Margaret married a Virginia farmer named John Corbin and the couple settled in Pennsylvania. Three years later, war came again. John enlisted in the Pennsylvania Artillery to fight for independence. Margaret went with him, choosing to join the camp followers who did laundry, mended clothes, and tending to the sick and wounded.

Living with the army, Margaret Corbin learned the intricacies of firing the big guns. The delicate and dangerous task required care and attention to detail. Each gun needed five or six men to operate. The lack of manpower that plagued Revolutionary War patriots made knowledgeable hands, male or female, valuable.

The Corbins’ unit was posted with other Pennsylvania troops in New York on the heights of northern Manhattan Island. In the autumn of 1776, the British pushed the Continental Army out of New York except for Fort Washington, near the current location of the George Washington Bridge. John Corbin and his fellows were assigned to defend a post on high ground a half mile north of the fort.

On November 16, 1776, enemy forces attacked the Americans from three directions. The assault from the north was the fiercest, undertaken by battalions of Hessian troops who clawed their way up the rugged hillside in the face of American fire.

The American guns kept up a barrage, supported by a regiment of riflemen. The noise numbed ears, the intensity of the warfare cracked minds. As men fell, Margaret Corbin was called on to help load and sponge a gun beside her husband. The Hessians fired grape and round shot from their own guns, trying to knock out the American cannon. John Corbin was struck by a projectile and killed.

The angry, black-mustached Hessians moved closer. Margaret took over working the cannon to hold back the nightmare onslaught. She aimed and fired the gun as the crew working it shrank from casualties. Then she was hit herself—grape shot slammed her jaw and tore into her shoulder and left breast.

The post was soon overrun. The Hessians moved on to surround the main fort. Its commander surrendered at four in the afternoon. It was the worst defeat for the patriots yet. Nearly three thousand troops were made prisoner—most would die on hellish British prison ships.

The wounded were paroled. Margaret Corbin never regained use of her left arm. Disabled, she needed help to dress and feed herself. She was assigned to the Corps of Invalids, soldiers limited to garrison duty and hospital work while recovering from wounds. Her corps was sent to the fort at West Point.

Officers of her regiment petitioned on her behalf. She received a grant of $30 from Pennsylvania. The U.S. Congress then awarded her half pay for life, plus a yearly change of clothes. The delegates declared that she had been wounded while “she heroically filled the post of her husband who was killed by her side.” She was “entitled to the same grateful return” as any disabled soldier. Those who knew her record referred to her as “Captain Molly” and saluted her as America’s first female war hero.

Settling in Highland Falls, just south of West Point, she boarded with a number of different households. The pain of her wounds, her need for help, and a tendency toward drink gained her a reputation as “an offensive person,” whom people were reluctant to take into their homes. An officer complained, “I am at loss what to do with Captain Molly.”

She died on a wintery day in January 1800, at age forty-eight. She was buried—her grave, unmarked, was forgotten. It wasn’t until 1926 that she was restored to modern memory through the efforts of the Daughters of the American Revolution. They found her remains and moved them to the cemetery behind the Old Cadet Chapel at West Point, where they were reinterred with full military honors.

The story wasn’t quite over. Construction work led to her grave being disturbed in 2016. The 1926 bones proved not to be hers, they belong to a male. Margaret’s remains are still missing, but her memory lives on. A monument at the Point honors her, as does a renamed walkway near Manhattan’s Fort Tryon Park, the location where she received her wound.

Margaret Corbin became an emblem of the many women who have made unheralded contributions to the American military from its earliest days. It was only in 2013 that women were finally allowed, officially, to assume combat roles in the armed forces.

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