The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (The Revolution Trilogy Book 1)

by Rick Atkinson

Soon after retreating across the Delaware, Washington also began to get reports of rape by British and Hessian soldiers, especially in a rural area north of Trenton. A magistrate, Jared Sexton, took sworn testimony that proved horrifying: the widow Mary Phillips reported being gang-raped, as did Mary Campbell, five months pregnant, and Elizabeth Cain, age fifteen. Rebekhah Christopher reported being raped by two men. Abigail Palmer, age thirteen, said she was raped by soldiers who threatened to blind her with bayonets if she screamed. Sexton’s affidavits were printed in the Pennsylvania Evening Post with the victims’ names redacted, although they were included in a report subsequently sent to Congress. Other testimonials accumulated as county justices, clergymen, and the governors of New Jersey and New York investigated further, identifying victims as young as ten and as old as seventy in what the historian David Hackett Fischer described as “an epidemic of rape.” “God made these men,” a Quaker said of the assailants, “but I am sure the devil governs them.” General Greene told the governor of Rhode Island in mid-December that enemy “ravages in the Jerseys exceeds all description. Men slaughtered, women ravished, and houses plundered. Little girls not ten years old ravished. Mothers and daughters ravished in the presence of their husbands and sons.”