Photo/Library of Congress, N. Currier. Murder of Miss Jane McCrea A.D. , ca. 1846. New York: Published by N. Currier. Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2002710603/. Jane McCrea was a young royalist woman who found herself in the path of the British invasion of 1777. She may have purposefully moved near Fort Edward hoping to join her fiancé, an officer in Burgoyne's army, as they approached. It is unclear how she ended up in the hands of Indigenous warriors allied to the Imperial forces, but it seems that her two captors argued over who would get the reward for bringing her to camp and that she was killed in the dispute. The precise circumstances surrounding her death are lost to history in a sea of conflicting accounts. Historians and story tellers through the intervening years have seized upon McCrea's death as a key turning point in the Saratoga Campaign. The story goes that the citizenry were so outraged by the killing that they, in their militia units, flooded into the American Army camps and turned the tide against the barbarous British invaders. Like so many other stories about the American Revolution, however, modern scholarship shows that this is simply not true. There are no contemporary sources which show this as a motivation for the militia groups that would join the campaign in the coming months. In fact, a number of militia units with the army at the time, far from being motivated by McCrea's death, left for home shortly after the event as their enlistments expired. An entire Continental Army regiment present with the Northern Army disbanded at Stillwater in early August, and not one man could be convinced to remain. So, even Continentals weren't interested in vengeance. While Horatio Gates famously mentioned the incident in a letter written on September 2 to Burgoyne, Phillip Schuyler, still in command of the American forces for another week after her death, never used McCrea's story in any of the letters he wrote to various entities bemoaning the state of his army and pleading for more soldiers to be sent. Although, it was noted by those who were there, no mentions of the incident have been found in any letters or journals authored by soldiers who did eventually come to join the battle. Others have talked about the use of the story as propaganda on a larger scale by the Americans. This is definitely not impossible as we know that Gates's letter, as well as Burgoyne's response, was printed in colonial newspapers. In general, the involvement of Native Americans on the British side was frequently used by the Americans to discredit their opponents, including most notably in the Declaration of Independence. It is difficult if not impossible to quantify the impact of a single event in this larger information war. It is also important to note that Jane McCrea was not only used in propaganda during the Revolutionary War. Her story largely gained its prominent place in America's Revolutionary history and memory during the 19th century, not the 18th when her death occurred. The first major work of art dramatizing her death came in 1804. She continued to appear throughout the course of the 1800s as Americans pursueded their "Manifest Destiny" westeard across the entire continent to create an "Empire of Liberty." This movement brought with it massive dispossession of Native American lands and genocidal military and social campaigns on the part of the United States government. The dramatic visualization of McCrea's death proved a powerful justification for these later events. |
Last updated: May 10, 2024