Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Jersey Blues

Neither a sad reflection on the state nor a 1920s jazz riff, "Jersey Blues" has been a nickname for the Garden State's fighting men for more than 250 years. New Jersey officially became a British possession in 1664, when a fleet dispatched to New Netherlands by the Duke of York seized that colony, which included present-day New York and New Jersey, from the Dutch. New Jerseyans subsequently fought in the series of wars between the British and French for domination of North America. In the last of these conflicts, the colony's soldiers would gain the iconic moniker, "Jersey Blues," that would endure to the present day.

The French and Indian War, known as the Seven Years' War in Europe, began with a frontier encounter between George Washington's Virginia provincial regiment and French forces in 1754. After Washington's defeat in July, New Jersey royal governor Jonathan Belcher requested the colony's assembly to authorize £15,000 in bills of credit to help cover the cost of the war, including funding to provide "Pay, Cloathing, and Subsistence of 500 men," organized into a provincial volunteer regiment. Command was awarded to the closest individual New Jersey had to a professional soldier: the aging Colonel Peter Schuyler, who had served in a previous war against the French. Recruits in search of adventure (or perhaps the £1 bounty offered) quickly filled the ranks. A Trenton correspondent wrote that "the Country Fellows list like mad."

Each recruit was authorized issue of "one good sheepswool blanket, a good lapel coat of coarse cloth, a felt hat, two check shirts, two pair of Osnaberg trousers, a pair of shoes and a pair of stockings ... a good firelock [musket], a good cutlass sword or bayonet, a cartouche [cartridge] box and a hatchet." A tent was issued to every five men, and the regiment as a whole was issued "fifteen barrels of pork, forty-five hundred weight of lead [for casting bullets] and other necessaries."

By the summer of 1755, in the aftermath of British general Braddock's disastrous defeat on the Monongahela in Pennsylvania, refugees from French and Indian frontier raids began to cross the Delaware into New Jersey, unsettling the residents of the northwestern part of the colony. Governor Belcher ordered militiamen to temporary active duty on the Sussex County frontier, and several hundred Sussex citizen-soldiers crossed the river to campaign alongside their Pennsylvania counterparts, but the brief expedition failed to intercept the raiders. By December, the assembly was vainly calling for the return of New Jersey's provincial regiment to defend the northwest border.

The regiment was long gone, however. While the border simmered, New Jersey's provincials had departed for Albany, joining volunteer soldiers from New York and New England under Sir William Johnson as part of an expedition intended to capture Crown Point on Lake Champlain. Half of the Jerseymen, under Schuyler, were diverted to Oswego, on Lake Ontario, where they built and garrisoned one of three forts. In August 1756, the French commander in Canada, Major General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm, captured the Oswego forts and the Jerseyans serving there, including Colonel Schuyler. Lord Loudon, then overall commander in America, called for more assistance from the colonies, including one thousand more men from New Jersey; the assembly voted to appropriate more money and called for another five hundred volunteers but failed to meet Loudon's troop quota. It appears that the recruits, including Sergeant William McCrackan of Somerset County, who had prior service in a British mounted regiment and enlisted in 1757, replaced the losses sustained by the New Jersey unit already in the field. Colonel John Parker replaced Schuyler, now a prisoner in Montreal, in command of the New Jersey regiment, now camped at Fort William Henry, on Lake George.

On July 21, 1757, Fort William Henry's commander ordered Colonel Parker to take a 350-man force of New Jersey and New York troops up Lake George by boat on a reconnaissance in force to capture some prisoners in an effort to determine what the French were planning. At Sabbath Day Point, the expedition was ambushed by a force of French and Indians who opened fire from shore and then encircled Parker's force with canoes. The provincials panicked, losing 160 men killed or drowned and many of the remainder captured, although Parker managed to escape with 100 survivors. The French lost one man wounded. A French officer later claimed that Ottawa Indians subsequently dined on at least one unfortunate Jerseyman. Fort William Henry, with 301 Jerseyans remaining in the garrison, fell to the French in August after a brief siege. A subsequent Indian attack on the surrendered and paroled garrison marching to Fort Edward (vividly portrayed in Last of the Mohicans) resulted in additional New Jersey casualties, including Sergeant McCrackan, who was carried off to Canada as a prisoner and later ransomed by the French.

By the terms of the capitulation, the Fort William Henry garrison, including 239 Jerseymen who survived Sabbath Day Point, the siege and the massacre, were forbidden to bear arms against the enemy for an eighteen-month period. McCrackan found himself, along with some of the Oswego prisoners, transferred to France. He was eventually exchanged but was then stranded in Ireland through 1763, until he had earned enough money to pay for his passage home. Perhaps all of the tribulations proved too much for Governor Belcher, who, ailing for some time, died on August 31.

As 1757 waned, the New Jersey regiment began to recover from its multiple disasters. Colonel Schulyer was paroled by the French that summer and, after a hearty welcome home to his estate, Petersborough, on the Passaic River outside Newark, including "bonfires, illuminations, cannonading, and health drinking," set about arranging a permanent exchange for himself and other prisoners. Unfortunately, he failed and, in June 1758, returned to captivity until he was officially traded for a captured French officer of equal rank in November. In his absence, the colony raised more men to restore the unit destroyed at Oswego and Fort William Henry. Recruits, at least some of whom may have been survivors of the initial regiment, were provided with "a cloth pair of breeches, a white shirt, a check shirt, two pair of shoes, two pair of stockings, one pair of ticken breeches, a hat, blanket, canteen and hatchet for each recruit, under a bounty of £12." The significant bounty, compared with the £1 previously offered, was intended to head off a draft from the militia requested by the British command in America. The new soldiers would also be paid £1.13s.6d per month plus "a dollar to drink his Majesty's Health" upon enlistment.

The men of the revived regiment, which left for Albany under the command of Colonel John Johnson in May, were probably the first Jerseymen who could accurately be called "Jersey Blues." Although the color of the clothing issued to previous recruits was not detailed, this group was dressed in "[u]niform blue, faced with red, grey stockings and Buckskin Breeches." One account has the regimental coat tailored "after the Highland manner," or cut short. Although another source maintains that the "Jersey Blue" nickname was used as early as 1747, the first documented record is in a letter dated in June 1759. In addition to raising new troops, the assembly voted to build barracks in Elizabeth, Perth Amboy, New Brunswick, Trenton and Burlington to house British regular army soldiers rather than quarter them in private homes. The Trenton barracks alone survives to this day, the only remaining French and Indian War barracks in the United States.

The "Blues" were engaged in yet another military misfortune in July 1758, when the British army under General James Abercrombie bungled an attempt to capture French Fort Carillon (Ticonderoga) on Lake Champlain. Although Abercrombie's army of sixteen thousand men, including the Jersey provincials, vastly outnumbered the French, a series of British frontal assaults on a French defensive line near the fort proved disastrous. Fortunately for the Jerseymen, they did not participate in the major thrust of the attacks, although they still lost Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Shaw of Burlington (who, as a captain, had survived the Fort William Henry debacle), along with ten other men killed and forty-four wounded. In the wake of his defeat, Abercrombie was replaced by General Jeffrey Amherst, and the tide of war began to turn in favor of the British, who captured Louisbourg and Forts Frontenac and Duquesne.

Following a succession of British victories, recruiting offices opened in Salem, Gloucester, Burlington, Bordentown and Newton as New Jersey raised more volunteers to serve in New York and Canada. New Jersey volunteers were also part of the British force that attacked Havana in 1762. In all, one scholar estimated that as many as three thousand men served in provincial forces of one kind or another or in the British regular army (which regularly enlisted colonists in its ranks) between 1755 and 1763, "a level of participation requiring the enlistment of every fourth free male between the ages of sixteen and forty-five who was not a Quaker." When the war ended in 1763, with British dominance in North America assured, it would seem that the future of the Royal Colony of New Jersey — securely tucked within the empire and with a military potential greatly enhanced by the war, which provided experience and training for both officers and enlisted men of a once ramshackle militia — would be secure. Perhaps, but not for long. Within a decade, Jerseymen would be fighting in another war — on both sides.

The nickname "Jersey Blues" has endured, and it has surfaced again almost every time Jerseyans have gone to war. During the Civil War, Trenton poet Ellen C. Howarth penned "My Jersey Blue," an ode to the state's soldiers, and the name has appeared as part of the insignia of the New Jersey National Guard's Fiftieth Armored Division shoulder patch in the 1950s and its current Fiftieth Brigade patch. It will, no doubt, endure as long as New Jersey's soldiers endure, a silent tribute to the sacrifices of Colonel Schuyler, Sergeant McCrackan and their comrades in the long ago.

Perhaps surprisingly, there has been no substantive work on the French and Indian War Jersey Blues until recently. Greg Casterline did an admirable job of assembling the available primary and secondary sources in one volume with his Colonial Tribulations: The Survival Story of William Casterline and His Comrades of the New Jersey Blues Regiment, French and Indian War, 1755–1757 (Lulu On-Line Publishing, 2007).

"Scotch Willie" Maxwell

New Jersey's Forgotten General

In December 1776, before his triumph at Trenton, George Washington assigned Brigadier General William "Scotch Willie" Maxwell to report to the secure American base at Morristown and begin reorganizing New Jersey's Continental army regiments. Maxwell was also assigned the job of operating alongside General Philemon Dickinson's New Jersey militia with his recruits as part of the harassment campaign against remaining British garrisons in the state. Scotch Willie, who set up headquarters on the east side of the Watchung Mountains in Westfield, fulfilled his mission with an enviable competence.

Born in 1733, Maxwell was one of the most interesting brigade commanders in the Continental army. A Scotch-Irishman who had moved with his family from County Tyrone to Sussex County, New Jersey, in 1747, Maxwell served as a junior officer in the "Jersey Blues" in the French and Indian War and then as a "king's commissary," supplying British garrisons on the frontier from Schenectady to Michilimakinac, on the Straits of Mackinac, separating Lakes Michigan and Huron.

Maxwell, a tough frontiersman with a Native American common-law wife and a reputed fondness for whiskey, returned to New Jersey in 1774 to participate in the events leading up to the Revolution. He was a member of the New Jersey Provincial Congress in October 1775, when he was appointed colonel of the Second New Jersey Regiment, which he led in the American invasion of Canada. Upon his return to New Jersey from that disastrous campaign, he was promoted to brigadier general and received his assignment from Washington.

Maxwell, it turned out, had a particular genius for the hit-and-run style of warfare needed to harass the British in New Jersey in 1777. He used his more disciplined Continental regiments to stiffen the militia at critical junctures, cooperating with Dickinson in what proved to be a seamless campaign.

On February 23, 1777, Colonel Charles Mawhood led a strong British force from Perth Amboy to Rahway, and Maxwell gave him a fight that he would not soon forget. Mawhood tried to outflank a line of militiamen with soldiers from the Forty-second Foot, a highly regarded Scottish Highland regiment, but Scotch Willie had quietly deployed an unseen detachment in a position outflanking the Scottish advance. At the appropriate moment, the Jerseymen rose up and shot the regulars to ribbons, after which the whole British force fell back toward Amboy, harassed by Continentals and militiamen along the way. Two weeks later, Maxwell repeated his performance against another enemy column. Historian David Hackett Fischer calculated that over the winter, following the Battles of Trenton and Princeton, General William Howe's British army lost "more than nine hundred men ... killed, wounded, captured or missing" in its "Forage War" operations in New Jersey in 1777. That damage was inflicted by the aggressiveness and growing military skill of the New Jersey militia and Continentals led by Dickinson and Maxwell.

After the British garrison in New Jersey withdrew to New York in the summer of 1777, a large British force under General William Howe sailed south to Maryland and began to move north toward Philadelphia. Washington marched to meet the enemy and created an elite battalion of physically fit and courageous "picked men" to engage the British advance. Maxwell proved a natural choice to command the outfit, and the Jerseyman was instructed by Washington to "be watchful and guarded on all the roads," to "annoy the enemy whenever possible" and to be careful when and where he fought, only engaging the British when he had a good chance of success.

On August 30, Maxwell deployed his seven hundred soldiers near Cooch's Bridge on Christiana Creek in Delaware. The Jersey general established a defensive line extending from the bridge along Iron Hill and then sent most of his men forward down the Aiken's Tavern Road, the main axis of the British advance. They made contact with the enemy on the morning of September 3, conducted a two-mile fighting withdrawal to Cooch's Bridge, made a short stand and then retreated again, through woods and across fields and up the slope of Iron Hill. At that point, General Howe personally appeared on the field with reinforcements and artillery and ordered an all-out attack on the American position. Outgunned and outnumbered, Maxwell's men, who had battled the British for seven hours, fled the field, some tossing away their blankets and muskets. The young and inexperienced Marquis de Lafayette, who had watched the last stages of the fight along with Washington, was critical of Maxwell's conduct, but the American commander thought that the Jersey general had done a fine job before retreating in the face of overwhelming odds.

Maxwell would have his revenge, as his men ambushed the British advance guard the following morning and in a vicious fight killed or wounded half the enemy force. Once again, however, overwhelming odds eventually pushed the Americans back and across Brandywine Creek in the opening stages of the Battle of Brandywine. Washington lost the battle, but not due to any failures on the part of Maxwell. Following the British capture of Philadelphia, the American commander attempted a counterattack at Germantown, where Maxwell, back in command of his old brigade, performed well in what proved to be, unfortunately, yet another defeat.

---

Excerpted from "Hidden History of New Jersey"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Joseph G. Bilby, James M. Madden and Harry Ziegler.
Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---