Posted on 06/11/2009 8:08:56 AM PDT by Pharmboy
Revere thoroughly deserves his place in American history, but another courageous American has been ill-served by those who write books about the Revolutionary War. Revere was 40 at the time of his journey, but she was a girl of 16.
Born at Patterson, Putnam County, N.Y., on April 5, 1761, she was the eldest of 12 children born to Henry and Abigail Ludington. On the stormy night of April 26, 1777, she is said to have been putting her younger siblings to bed when the family had a visitor. Close to exhaustion, a messenger had come to tell her father that the British were at Danbury, Conn., some 25 miles away, and that they had set fire to the town. Help was urgently needed.
Henry Ludington was a colonel commanding the 7th Dutchess County Militia, a volunteer force drawn from local farmers.
snip...He would be taking on a vastly superior foe. On April 25, 1777, a 2,000-strong British force,
snip... But before that victory, the local countrymen had to be alerted. Who could be spared to do this? The messenger was at the end of his strength, and besides he was unfamiliar with the local terrain.
Sybil volunteered, and her father agreed (probably with misgivings). He was exposing his daughter to considerable danger. ..worse, the countryside was infested by lawless men who would show no mercy to a girl who was traveling alone.
On her newly acquired pony, Star, Sybil set off on her hazardous journey. It took her through the little towns of Carmel, Mahopac and Stormville. Throughout her journey, she shouted warnings of the danger from British troops and for the need of farmers to rally round their colonel. They did so, enabling Ludington to assemble his men and join the main force.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
“should be sobering for those who think lawlessness and depravity just started after 1962 or so, and who pine for bucolic “good old days.”
Not really, war and it’s aftermath always results in disorder. British order was being broken down and would not be replaced for some time. That is what was so infuriating about the Iraq war, many (especially the media) thought you should be able to bring down a government and instantaneously replace it with a fully functioning government.
It was even worse after the Civil War, especially in the south. There were bands of deserters and other renegades that preyed on citizens long after the war. I also remember times when there was much less crime and depravity than currently exists.
Good points.
Somehow the image of a girl riding around in the dark calling, “The British are coming.” must have caused more than a few chuckles among the farmers.
Never knew this story...thanks much for posting.
Outliers, outlanders, bushwackers, scalawags ... and carpetbaggers.
Deserters from both sides hid out in the backcountry hollars for years, and would come a-pillaging and marauding. Reconstruction "government" was filled with less than honest men, or outright incompetents. Everything in the countryside, and in many towns and cities, was in complete disarray.
Scratching out a bare subsistence from the ground was the rule for most. Families fell apart. Histories were all but lost. People from formerly prominent families were buried with just a rock for a marker. I've been up to an old, inactive family cemetery belonging to my paternal grandmother's people, "The Big Lot," trying to piece together who was who, buried where and when. Working on getting a Revolutionary War marker for two of them, and Confederate for several others. It's not an easy task, though, "reconstructing" things that just ceased being important when simple survival was at issue. Some things from Reconstruction, we'll never know.
That veritable pit of poverty and ignorance is something to which you'd better hope you're never subjected. It took us over a century to climb out of it. I'm the first college graduate in my family since before that war. Before, there were several. Educators, politicians, prominent people, fluent in Latin and French. After, their descendants were fortunate to retain full command of the English language.
There’s quite a bit of intriguing history from the late Colonial period in NC.
As well as her ancestors.
Sybil is recognized here on the Ludington Ancestry site.
LOL, this is 1 of the things I’ll never forget for some reason from my childhood.
I guess it was 5th grade when we had 1 of those stories in the “reading” books to do.
It was “Sybil’s Ride”.
I don’t recall the story details, but bottom line it was about a girl named Sybil who went off to warn people about the British, and it was either NY or CT.
I always find it ironic and insulting when Dem-type people cite RevWar references (or any Founding).
For the Dems, it would be something like, “heroically fighting for everyone to get money for nothing”.
Yes, but it IS the Washington Post, and the man is in America; not the Daily Mail.
It’s a mite confusing.
It was most definitely a civil war. Moreso than that other war.
Insurgents win - revolution
Insurgents lose - civil war
1 of the reasons they were the good old days was because they got their due justice. No sitting around in a posh “prison” for a couple years and out. Problems, yes; but ask my mom about Baltimore just 60 years ago. Things WERE different.
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The only reason I was taken aback by wb's naughty joke is, I didn't get the opportunity to think of it first. ;') Thanks both of you. |
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Sorry. I screwed up. (I wish we could edit our posts.)
But it’s still in the US.
There is quite a bit of history from the “earliest” Colonial Period too.
That early history has not been so overlooked, deliberately denied or deemed questionable and then appropriated for another state or region. I guess early settlers to the Colony of NC were just too backwoods to be held up as exemplars in the blossoming national mythos, lol. That, and the squabbling of our Lords Proprietors was just a little unseemly.
But then, you have Virginia, a powerhouse of economic and cultural might in every colonial era, and the same fate befell them, with Jamestown. Plymouth gets the credit, not them. I guess yet another group of squabbling English businessmen looking for fortune weren't quite so compelling as Puritans looking for sanctuary.
So, I sense a bit of bias, tracing back to the Civil War era, perhaps?
The origins of the story that is topic of this thread seem well verified, so I can't honestly say that this is the case, here. That Sybill Luddington has a US Postal Service commemorative stamp, and a statue in her honor is nice. But, there are others, equally brave and daring, and not entirely unknown to history, who have received no such honor. I try to commemorate them in my own small way.
I've always been intrigued by this particular story, especially what Betsy Dowdy is reputed to have said to her little Banker pony, what she called her: "Black Beauty." No book or movie credits or acknowledgement for that, that I am aware.
bttt
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