TABLE OF CONTENTS – Chapter 01
Of the military movements on the Northern frontier during the Revolution, much has been written about the brilliant campaign of Richard Montgomery in 1775, which terminated in his untimely death on the last day of that year. Much has also been written about the disastrous campaign of John Burgoyne in 1777. The same attention has not been paid to the events of the intervening year of 1776, which, though less striking in their effects, were of the greatest importance to the cause. There is not anywhere, so far as I am aware, any detailed account of that long and severe campaign. Its salient features have been noticed by all historians in passing, and some of them have dwelt upon it with more or less minuteness, but I have nowhere been able to find a connected, reliable, and circumstantial narration of all its interesting and often distressing events. Such a history I have endeavored to give in the following pages. Another object I had in their preparation was to make a record of the services of the troops of Pennsylvania, whose conduct always contrasted favorably with that of their companions in arms from the other Colonies, and yet whose achievements have never received that recognition which they deserve.
It was a campaign in which the Pennsylvanians of that day were deeply and anxiously interested. Not less than two thousand of their fellow citizens were actively engaged in it, and the friends and relatives they left behind them formed a large and influential part of the community. It should not, therefore, fail to possess interest for their descendants of the present generation.
My interest in the details of this campaign was first awakened by an examination of the materials connected with the militaryservices of my ancestor, Colonel Jonathan Jones, who passed through it from the beginning to the end. He was of Welsh extraction, his father, David Jones, having emigrated from Merionethshire, in Wales, in 1721, and settled upon the Welsh reservation at Radnor, in Chester county, Pennsylvania, where that clannish people, to use their own language, « desired to be by themselves, for no other end or purpose but that they might live together as a civil society, to endeavor to decide all controversies and debates amongst themselves in a Gospel order, and not to entangle themselves with laws in an unknown tongue, as also to preserve their language that they might ever keep correspondence with their friends in the land of their nativity. »
David Jones, with many of his countrymen, removed from Radnor in 1730 to the valley of the Conestoga, in Caernarvon township, Lancaster county, where he became an extensive landowner and iron-master, and where there are old mines which still bear his name. Here his three sons – John, Jonathan, and Caleb – were born. John was a member of the Committee of Safety of Berks county, in 1774, and a major in Grubb’s battalion of militia. Caleb was a justice of the peace.
Jonathan Jones was born in 1738. He was appointed a captain in the regular Continental army October 25th, 1775, was promoted to the rank of major, after active service in Canada, October 25th, 1776, and to lieutenant-colonel of his regiment, which had become the Second under the new arrangement, March 12th, 1777. His constitution was so shattered by the hardships and exposure of the campaign against Canada, that he was obliged to return home to recruit his health in the winter of 1776-77. Having partially recovered, he rejoined his regiment in the spring of 1777, the command of which devolved upon him after the resignation of Colonel James Irvine, June 1st, 1777. Two companies of the regiment were then on duty in Philadelphia, and the remainder were guarding the upper ferries of the Delaware. Increasing ill health, however, obliged him to resign his commission in the latter part of July. In December, 1778, he was appointed by the Assembly of Pennsylvania a commissioner under the test laws, and he was a member of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania, from Berks county, which sat in Philadelphia from October, 1779, to October, 1780. His health continued steadily to decline, and he was shortly afterwards stricken with paralysis, of which he died, after a lingering illness, on the 26th of September, 1782, at the early age of forty-four. He was buried in Bangor church-yard, at Churchtown, of which church his family had been wardens and vestrymen from its earliest foundation.
Philadelphia, November 1881