Captain Molly – Tim Fanning on Margaret Corbin, heroine of the American Revolution

Beside the Old Cadet Chapel at the entrance to the West Point Cemetery in New York is a monument commemorating an 18th-century Irish-American soldier. A bronze bas-relief attached to a granite tombstone depicts Margaret Corbin towering over the battlefield, encumbered by the tools of the 18th-century artillery gunner: powder horn slung over her shoulder, a ramrod in one hand, a linstock in the other.
While her body is depicted from a frontal view, Corbin’s head is in profile, staring into the distance, steely eyed and ready to meet her destiny for the common good. She could be manning a barricade along the river Neva, such is the similarity of the artistic style to the social realism of the Soviet era. Perhaps surprising given the surroundings and the fact that the monument was erected in 1926 at the behest of the Daughters of the American Revolution, a patriotic organisation not known for its left-wing sympathies.
A plaque explains that Corbin participated at the Battle of Fort Washington on the island of Manhattan on November 16th, 1776. When her husband, John Corbin, an artilleryman in the Continental Army, was shot and killed, Margaret picked up the tools of his trade and kept the cannon firing in the face of the British and Hessian onslaught.
After the battle, the British found Corbin severely wounded in her left arm, jaw and chest. She was taken prisoner but later paroled. She was then transported to Philadelphia before being placed in the care of the Continental Army’s invalid regiment where she received housing, food and care. Two years later, the Continental Congress awarded her a pension of a soldier’s half pay for the rest of her life, the first time the United States was to recognise a female veteran. Margaret Corbin became Captain Molly, a true American hero.
The 20th-century monument in the cemetery at West Point depicts Captain Molly as a stalwart patriot who selflessly carries on fighting in her husband’s absence, an American version of the French Marianne. One observer wrote that “in devotion to her husband, she illustrated the character of her countrywomen of the Emerald Isle”. But beneath the carefully constructed image exists a more complicated and interesting woman.
Margaret Cochran was born in 1751 to Irish emigrants on the frontier of western Pennsylvania, a region that soon became a theatre of the French and Indian War, itself the North American theatre of the Seven Years’ War. Such was the threat from the war that, when Margaret was four, her parents sent her and her brother to live with an uncle. Not long after she had left her home, Indigenous American warriors allied with the French killed her father and took her mother captive. Margaret never saw her mother again.
When Margaret was 21, she married a Virginia farmer called John Corbin. A few years later, when he enlisted in the Pennsylvania Artillery, she packed a few belongings and accompanied him to war, becoming a camp follower, a term that was used to describe the women and children who followed the army across the company, cooking and cleaning and tending to the wounded for meagre pay and even less respect.
Left a widower by the war and severely disabled by her wounds, Corbin spent the rest of her life at West Point where she seems to have ruffled not a few feathers, not least because of her drinking and sharp tongue. In 1786, the commissary of military stores at West Point complained to the secretary of war, Henry Knox, that her carers were unwilling to take charge of Captain Molly because of her offensive behaviour. The fact that Corbin had lost her husband and was suffering from horrendous injuries was not offered as mitigation.
Those who knew her in her later years described her as usually appearing with an artilleryman’s coat over her skirts. She was “brusque, coarse, red-haired” and “wholly wanting in feminine charms”. She even “made use of swear words”.
Margaret Corbin died in West Point in 1800 and was buried in nearby Highland Falls. Following the campaign by the Daughters of the American Revolution, she was reinterred in the cemetery at West Point. However, in 2017, when excavation work disturbed what were believed to be her remains, it was found that the body was not that of Corbin but a middle-aged man who had died sometime between the end of the American Revolution and the middle of the 19th-century.
The whereabouts of her original grave and further details about the character of this deeply traumatised woman remain a mystery.