Jonathan and Elizabeth Ross: Patriots, Part 2

    Jonathan Ross was among the soldiers who fell that day at Crooked Billet. Was he among those burned alive or hacked to death with cutlasses? The record does not show.

     On 23 August 1780, his widow Elizabeth joined John Ross (probably Jonathan’s brother), and John Buchanan as joint administrators of Jonathan’s estate, and together they reported a valued of £793.14.12.[i] Elizabeth received a dower of £264.11.5, while the children, John, Elizabeth, Jane/Jean, Nancy, and Mary, received smaller sums .[ii] On 23 August 1780, John Ross, Jonathan’s brother, was appointed guardian.[iii]

    In a few years Elizabeth, who did not remarry, found herself in reduced circumstances. Court records document her struggle to obtain a pension from the state.[iv] On 21 February 1787, she petitioned: “the said Jonathan Ross was killed in the engagement at Crooked Billet on the first day of May 1778 doing his duty as a private of the Militia, leaving your petitioner and seven children in a distressed situation; that several of said children were very young and totally incapable of supporting themselves and that your petitioner, since her husband’s death, hath labored under great difficulties and distress to procure a bare sustenance for herself and the children…”[v]

    The court considered the condition of her premises from reports supplied by the Overseers of the Poor and two freeholders. It then awarded her Jonathan’s half pay of 12 shillings and six pence per month retroactive to 1 May 1778, totaling £67.[vii]

      The situation worsened. Her only son John died unmarried in 1793, leaving a will that named his mother and his sisters Jane Ross, Nancy Ross, and Margaret (Mary?).[viii]  Some of the other daughters had married – Ann to William Ferguson (my fourth-great grandparents), and Jane with Thomas Ross, apparently a cousin.[ix] On 7 November 1796, the county sheriff appraised Elizabeth’s property at £848.8.10 and then sold it.[x] As late as 20 April 1801, Elizabeth continued to struggle to have her pension continued.[xi] On 11 April 1807, she wrote a will, naming only daughters Mary and Elizabeth, with Robert Robb a “trusty friend” as executor.[xii]     

       Historian Judith Ridner uses Elizabeth’s plight to illustrate the challenges brought about by the war for many backcountry women. “Widows, in particular, often found their economic independence contested or curtailed by wartime circumstances. Yet, because economic freedom was of such basic importance to women, when they found their autonomy … challenged, they moved readily into the courts to obtain relief.”[xiii]

      Jonathan and Elizabeth were both patriots – Jonathan, for giving his life to the Revolutionary cause, and Elizabeth, for struggling valiantly to maintain her family and her pride in the shadow of a devastating loss. I honor them both for their sacrifice.

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[i] Orphan’s Court Records of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, 23 August 1780, volume 2, page 273.

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Judith A. Ridner, "'To Have Sufficient Maintenance': Women and the Economies of Freedom in Frontier Pennsylvania, 1750-1800," in Larry Eldridge, ed., Women and Freedom in Early America (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 170-171.

[v] Orphan’s Court Records of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, 21 February 1787, volume 3, page 18.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] John Ross will (1793), Cumberland County, PA Will Book E: 311; transcript in Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Abstracts of Wills, 1750-1800 (Philadelphia: Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, 1905), 91: 408.

[ix] Orphan’s Court Records of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, 9 February 1796, volume 3, page 173.

[x] Ibid, November 1796, pages 188-191.

[xi] Ibid, page 319.

[xii] Elizabeth Ross will (1807), Cumberland County, PA Will Book G: 352-353; abstracted in F. Edward Wright, Abstracts of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania Wills, 1785-1825 (Westminster, MD: Family Line Publications, 1998), 155.

[xiii] Ridner, “’To Have a Sufficient Maintenance’: Women and the Economies of Freedom in Frontier Pennsylvania, 1750-1800,” 170.

Jonathan and Elizabeth Ross: Patriots, Part 1

   With Memorial Day having come and gone and Independence Day here before we know it, I am mulling the subject of “patriotism.” We often call our rebel ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War “patriots,” but what exactly is imbedded in that word?  In past generations we tended to consider patriots primarily as male soldiers (perhaps with a few women of letters, Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren), and we placed them on pedestals. They became examples of public morality – exalted subjects for our children and grandchildren to admire and draw inspiration. The reality is sometimes more grey, but also much more richly textured. Patriotism also extended well beyond the soldiers to their wives and extended families.

    The story of my fifth-great grandparents, Jonathan Ross and his wife Elizabeth (___) of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, serve as examples of this idea. Jonathan was born about 1728, possibly in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, but there is no first-hand evidence of his parentage.[i] He later lived on a farm in Tyrone Township, Cumberland County, in a part that later became Perry County. Land records show that on 3 February 1762, he purchased 150 acres and was taxed on that parcel in 1763 and again in 1767.[ii]

        The historical record offers few glimpses of his personality. In April 1767, he was arrested and prosecuted, along with David Beard, for assault and battery in the Cumberland County Court of Quarter Sessions.[iii] Thomas Ross, perhaps his brother, posted bail on 7 April,[iv] but the matter does not seem to have been continued, perhaps because the parties agreed to settle.[v] Later, Jonathan held several minor offices and positions in Tyrone Township, including fence viewer,[vi] superintendent of roads,[vii] and grand juror.[viii]

    At the outbreak of the Revolution, Jonathan enlisted as a Private in the Cumberland County Militia.[ix] Little is known about the activities of his unit, but in the spring of 1778, it, along with that of Bucks County, came under the command of the American General John Lacey, who had orders from General Washington to interfere with the flow of supplies into British-held Philadelphia. Through attrition from expired terms of enlistment, the Cumberland force was reduced to just sixty men, when they gathered on the morning of 1 May 1778, at Crooked Billet Tavern, about fifteen miles northeast of Philadelphia.[x] Lacey’s forces were surrounded by a much larger detachment of 400 British Light Artillery commanded by the British Lt. Col. Robert Abernathy, supported by 300 Queen’s Rangers commanded by Major John Graves Simcoe. A brief exchange ensued as Lacey withdrew into a nearby woods. The American forces managed to kill nine British soldiers but sustained 26 losses of their own. The British then committed several atrocities on the captured and wounded men.

    An anonymous diarist wrote in an account for the New York Journal newspaper:

The alarm was so sudden [that] we had scarcely time to mount our horses before the enemy was within musket shot of our quarters. We observed a party in our rear had got into houses and behind fences; their numbers appearing nearly equal to ours, we did not think it advisable to attack them in that situation…Our people behaved well; our loss is upwards of thirty killed and wounded. Some were butchered in a manner the most brutal savages could not equal; even while living, some were thrown into buckwheat straw, and the straw set on fire; the clothes were burnt on others, and scarcely one without a dozen wounds with bayonets and cutlasses.[xi]

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[i] Jonathan was aged “about 50” at the time of his death in 1778, according to a petition made by his widow, Elizabeth, to the Orphan’s Court of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, on 21 February 1787. See Orphan’s Court Records of Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, 21 February 1787, volume 3, page 18. Some researchers have speculated that he was a son of John Ross of Donegal Township, Lancaster County, but more research is needed to prove this assertion.

[ii] History of that Part of the Susquehanna and Juniata Valleys Embraced in the Counties of Mifflin, Juniata, Perry, Union, and Snyder (Philadelphia: Everts, Peck, & Richards, 1886), 2: 963, 968. See also Merri Lou Scribner Schaumann, Tax Lists – Cumberland county, Pennsylvania, 1750, 1751, 1752, 1753, 1762, 1763, 1764, 1765, 1766, 1767 (Dover, PA: Merri Lou Scribner Schaumann, 1988), 51, 135.

[iii] Merri Lou Scribner Schaumann, Indictments 1750-1800, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania (Dover, PA: Merri Lou Scribner Schaumann, 1989), 28, citing original Court Record page 297.

[iv] Ibid., 29, citing original Court Record page 315.

[v] Diane E. Greene, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania Quarter Session Dockets, 1750-1785 (Baltimore: Clearfield, 2000), 100, citing original page 133.

[vi] Ibid, 25 March 1789, 122, citing original pages 41-42.

[vii] Ibid., 20 March 1770, 136, citing original pages 81-82.

[viii] Ibid., 18 January 1774, 235, citing original page 106.

[ix] Thomas Lynch Montgomery, comp, Pennsylvania Archives (Harrisburg, PA: Harrisburg Publishing, 1906), 5^th series, 6: 342, 361.

[x] Mark Mayo Boatner, Encyclopedia of the American Revolution (New York: David McKay Co., 1966), 309.

[xi] Anonymous diarist quoted in Frank Moore, comp., Diary of the American Revolution, 1775-1781 (New York: Washington Square Press, 1967), 293-294.