This spring, a team of archaeologists and volunteers began digging into the history of Fort Mercer, a Revolutionary War fort on the Delaware River that is the centerpiece of New Jersey’s Red Bank Battlefield Park.
During the war, Continental Army soldiers were stationed at the fort to prevent the British and their German mercenaries from resupplying their troops in nearby Philadelphia. On October 22, 1777, the army repelled a major attack by the Hessians. Little known today, the Battle of Red Bank was short and ferocious, and was one of the worst defeats suffered by the Hessians in the war.
Archaeologists were focused on excavating trenches that were used to defend the fort during the battle. Wade Catts, principal archaeologist at South River Heritage Consulting in Newark, Delaware, said:Park director and historian at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey
Instead, on June 26, the last day of fieldwork, around 2pm, the team found a leg bone. They quickly determined that it was his one of the attacking German soldiers. It was the first human skeleton found at the site since a new fence was built on the battlefield in 1904. Over the next few weeks, the group recovered 14 of his bodies. This allows scientists to delve into the military life and death of that era. “I never thought I’d be mass buried,” Catz said.
On the day of the attack in 1777, the Hessians were certainly thinking the same thing. Colonel Karl Emil Ulrich von Donop led a force of 2,300 mercenaries, and according to letters written by his officers, he was a brave leader with a fierce temper. The fort was defended by just 534 men, including members of the 6th Virginia Regiment and the New Jersey Militia, as well as members of the 1st and 2nd Rhode Island Regiments, the two first combined military units in the country. . His 48 of the American soldiers were black. The regiment also included Native Americans of the Narragansett tribe.
Colonel von Donoop was confident of victory. Fort Mercer “will be Fort Donop, or I shall die,” he wrote to the British commander, General William Howe. When the Germans arrived at the fort, Colonel von Donop sent an officer to call on the Continental Army to surrender. “The King of England has ordered his rebellious subjects to lay down their arms,” his request said. “If they endure the battle, nothing will be given.”
The American commander, Colonel Christopher Greene, was quick to reply: The Americans accepted the challenge. The battle commenced at 4:00 p.m., when her 13 galleys of the Pennsylvania Navy bombarded the Germans with artillery straight from the river, while the men inside Fort Mercer opened fire with muskets and her 14 cannons. Did. Two battalions and one regiment of Hessians made their way through the barrage. Their attack was slowed by felled trees. The branches were sharply hewn and piled up in rows around the fort. The battle lasted only 75 minutes. When it ended, 377 Hessians and only 14 Americans were dead.
The horrors of that afternoon were immediately apparent to archaeologists. Fourteen skulls and many other human bones were found in a 10-foot-wide, 30-foot-long, 4.5-foot-deep borehole. Catz believes that his soldiers belonged to the von Mirbach regiment and were in the center of the Hessian force during the attack. According to Catz, injuries suffered by one soldier included: A lead canister was shot in the middle of his back where his thoracic vertebrae were gone. and his 1.5-inch iron grapeshot that supposedly took off his left arm.
Dr. Janowski noted that the river ships were firing chain shots and bar shots at the Hessians, ammunition designed to destroy the ship’s rigging. “They were under all sorts of attacks,” Catz said. “What a horrible place this was.”
According to accounts written by surviving Hessian officers, most of the wounded were left on the battlefield. The Hessians had brought no wagons to carry them, and the American soldiers remained inside the fort, fearing another attack. “It hurts me to lose so many good people. Words cannot describe it. Lieutenant Colonel Wurm wrote a few days later. “The pitiful tragedy of those wounded here in America cannot be told without tears, and there is no help for those left behind by the enemy.”
That night, a group of American soldiers ventured out to repair part of the defense. A voice came from the battlefield. Colonel von Donop was shot in the hip.
An American soldier shouted, according to Captain Thomas Antoine Maud du Plessis, the French engineer leading the group. The Colonel replied, “I am in your hands. You can take revenge.” The Americans took him to the fort, where he was cared for until his death a week later.
The remaining Hessian wounded were left lying around until the day after the American soldiers were entrusted with burying the dead. The ditch in front of the fort could have been an easy place to dispose of the bodies, Dr Janofsky said. “Are you seeing someone shot dead and buried?” she said. “Or do you see what the burial party did on October 23, 1777, which was essentially throwing the bodies into a convenient pit?”
The first human bone recovered, the femur, was discovered in an excavation pit by self-professed history geek and volunteer Joe Riley and another volunteer digger, Wayne Wilson. As soon as it appeared, all digging stopped — standard procedure when human bones were discovered. She said it did not belong to the deceased. Its advanced state of deterioration made that clear.
Over the next few weeks, Ms. Delaney removed all human remains from the scene and stored them in the lab. There it will be analyzed and hopefully the details of the soldier’s life will begin to emerge. She and Thomas Christo, a forensic anthropologist at Utica University who has worked with relics from the American Revolution, plan to study the chemical composition of bones. The presence of certain stable isotopes and trace elements can help determine where a person grew up and what their diet and health have been like since then.
Delaney and Christo also hope to recover DNA from traces of bone and blood attached to some of the artifacts. Genetic analysis could allow researchers to reconstruct the soldier’s family tree and learn their identities, Delaney said. The most exciting part of the whole process. ” Once the analysis is complete, the bones will be reburied in an as yet unidentified location.
Some of the artifacts recovered from the site tell their own stories. Rows of buttons were found, arranged as if they had been thrown into a trench and then laid over a rotting coat. Dr. Janowski said the buttons matched the description of the Mirbach regiment’s uniform. She suspects the coat was used to carry the severed body parts to the trenches.
Another interesting artifact found at the site was a British gold coin worth about a month’s salary for an average soldier. Mr. Catz suspects it belongs to Lieutenant Colonel Rudolf von Sieg, commander of the Hessian Regiment and killed in action Ernst. Finding.
For Dr. Janowski, the human remains inspire the story of the battle. Among the dead included a man aged 17 to her 19, the same age as many of her history students. “Few people have seen the violence on the battlefield. That’s what we’ve seen over the past few months,” she said. She “feels responsible for helping visitors understand the moment.”
