New Jersey Militia Newsletter

This is what happened to three of them.

• John Hart lived on a farm near Trenton. While his wife lay on her deathbed, with him at her side, Hessian troops invaded his property, devastated his farmland and destroyed his mills. Hart was forced to flee into the woods. This 65-year-old patriot was hunted like a dog. He avoided capture by hiding in caves. Returning sometime later to his home, broken in health by anxiety and hardship, he found that his wife had died, and that his 13 children had scattered in every direction.

• Abraham Clark had two sons in the Continental army. The Redcoats captured both of them. The enemy had contempt for all such "disloyal subjects", whom they confined aboard prison ships. Occasionally and poorly fed, confinement on a prison ship was tantamount to a death sentence, and a speedy death at that. On ships like the "Jersey", docked in New York harbor, more than 11,000 American prisoners of war perished. New York harbor reeked of the stench of death. Imagine Clark’s horror when he learned that one of his sons was a prisoner aboard the "Jersey", and that he was suffering special hardships because his father had signed the Declaration. The British offered to release his sons if he would publicly renounce liberty in favor of King and Parliament. Clark refused, and the fate of his sons is unknown.

• Richard Stockton was a member of the New Jersey Supreme Court. Fearing capture he and his wife and children hid in the home of a brave friend, until an informant betrayed him. In the middle of the night Redcoats dragged him from bed, brutally beat him, threw him into the infamous Provost Jail in New York City, and nearly starved him to death. Returning to Stockton’s home they burned his furniture, clothing and fine library, and stole his horses and silverware. He died a short time later before the war ended.

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