Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans firmly believe having an abortion is a very personal, very private decision between a woman and J.D. Vance.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

The press swings at every pitch, we don’t have to.

At some point, the ability to learn is a factor of character, not IQ.

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

Hi god, it’s us. Thanks a heap, you’re having a great week and it’s only Thursday!

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

There is no compromise when it comes to body autonomy. You either have it or you do not.

I’m more christian than these people and i’m an atheist.

Accused of treason; bitches about the ratings. I am in awe.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

If you thought you’d already seen people saying the stupidest things possible on the internet, prepare yourselves.

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

Stamping your little feets and demanding that they see how important you are? Not working anymore.

Live so that if you miss a day of work people aren’t hoping you’re dead.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

You are here: Home / Politics / America / Sybil Ludington’s Ride: A Day Late

Sybil Ludington’s Ride: A Day Late

by | 71 Comments

This post is in: , , , , ,

(Image 1: Sybil Ludington Monument)

Last night in 1777, 16 year old Sybil Ludington rode 40 miles to alert the American militia that the British had moved on Danbury, CT. Ludington was able to alert over 400 militia and she fended off an attack during her ride with her father’s musket.

(Image 2: Sybil Ludington Historical Marker)

Ludington’s ride was partially the result of her father being a colonel in the colonial militia:

On April 26, 1777, Colonel Ludington received word from a rider that the nearby town of Danbury was under attack by British troops and needed help. At the time, Ludington’s regiment had disbanded for planting season, and his men were miles apart at their respective farms. With the rider too tired to continue and Colonel Ludington focused on preparing for battle, young Sybil rose to the cause. Some accounts say she volunteered; others that her father asked for her service, but either way, she rode through the night alerting the Colonel’s men of the danger and urging them to return to the fight. She rode all night through dark woods and in the rain, covering anywhere from 20 to 40 miles (estimates vary). By the time she returned home, hundreds of soldiers were gathering to fight the British. Ludington’s troops arrived too late to win the battle, though they did fight with departing British soldiers.

(Image 3: Close Up of the Base of the Ludington Monument)

Ludington:

… completed her mission around daybreak, covering nearly 40 miles—more than twice what Paul Revere had ridden—raising 400 men, and even fighting off a highway man with her father’s musket. The militia caught up with the retreating British and beat them back, too late to stop the attack, but not too late to make them pay dearly.

Alexander Hamilton wrote Col. Ludington: “I congratulate you on the Danbury expedition. The stores destroyed have been purchased at a pretty high price to the enemy.”

Sybil received personal thanks from both Gen. George Washington and Gen. Rochambeau, the French commander fighting with the Americans.

Colonel Henry Ludington’s memoir claims:

“One who even now rides from Carmel to Cold Spring will find rugged and dangerous roads, with lonely stretches. Imagination only can picture what it was a century and a quarter ago, on a dark night, with reckless bands of “Cowboys” and “Skinners” abroad in the land. But the child performed her task, clinging to a man’s saddle, and guiding her steed with only a hempen halter, as she rode through the night, bearing the news of the sack of Danbury. There is no extravagance in comparing her ride with that of Paul Revere and its midnight message. Nor was her errand less efficient than his. By daybreak, thanks to her daring, nearly the whole regiment was mustered before her father’s house at Fredericksburgh.”

(Image 4: Sybil Luddington’s Tombstone)

I think Ms. Luddington would be particularly touched that this happened on the 241st  anniversary of her ride:

Yep, that’s a Ranger tabbed woman taking command of an operational company in the 3rd Brigade Combat Team/82nd Airborne Division. That’s progress!

H-Minus! & All the way!

Open thread!

(Sorry I was a day late on this, but things have been a wee bit busy…)

 

Reader Interactions

71Comments

  3. 3.

    Stuart Frasier

    Er, that’s three different spellings of her name in three monuments. I know that orthography was fluid then, but one would think names would be consistent.

  4. 4.

    Mary G

    The country wasn’t all that grateful:

    After the war, Ludington married in 1784, at age 23, when she met Edward Ogden. The couple had one son, Henry, and lived in Catskill, New York. Ludington’s husband died of yellow fever in 1799. Four years later, she bought a tavern and helped her son become a lawyer. When she sold the tavern, she earned a tidy profit, three times what she paid for the land, and purchased a home for her son and his family, where she also resided. After her son died in 1838, Ludington applied for a Revolutionary War pension, since her husband had served in the military. Her pension was denied, claiming insufficient proof of marriage. At age seventy-seven, Ludington died in poverty.

  12. 12.

    Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism

    @Stuart Frasier:

    I know that orthography was fluid then, but one would think names would be consistent.

    Why in the world would you think that? I’ve seen the same name spelled different ways in the same document.

  15. 15.

    Omnes Omnibus

    If I remember correctly from my time in Newtown, Danbury was burned.

    OTOH, Congrats to CPT Haver.

  19. 19.

    PhoenixRising

    @efgoldman: She rode 40 miles with her horse in a hackamore, which is a type of halter that doesn’t have a bit. I mean…I wouldn’t ride a circle in a fenced ring in a hackamore. Let alone carrying a musket!

  20. 20.

    scav

    As a change from orthographic-derived pedantry, I’m struck by the statue showing her apparently riding side saddle, while elsewhere she’s described as clinging to a man’s saddle.

  26. 26.

    kattails

    I always enjoyed seeing this statue when I visited a friend near Carmel. Note that the base reads “presented by Anna Hyatt Huntington”, who was in fact the sculptor, and is worth a lookup online. She was noted for her animal sculptures, lived to be nearly 100, and if this was presented in 1961 she would have been 85. Her father was a professor of paleontology and zoology at Haahvaahd.

  27. 27.

    Mnemosyne

    @Mary G:

    Marriage was more than a little equivocal at the time. If you moved in together in a new town and told people you were married, there wasn’t much people could do to prove otherwise, but it was also hard to prove that you were married without your “marriage lines,” i.e. a document from the minister kind of like a marriage certificate.

    Fun fact: the future George IV really did marry Mrs. Fitzherbert, as was long rumored. Her copy of the marriage lines is in an archive. However, the marriage was invalid from the start because she was a Catholic and he didn’t get prior permission from the king.

  28. 28.

    Yarrow

    @Mnemosyne:

    I’m still wincing at “colonal.” Nothing like a spelling error on a historical marker that is itself now a historical object.

    And which was placed by the State Education Department.

  31. 31.

    Mnemosyne

    @scav:

    I tried zooming in, but I couldn’t quite tell if she was riding on an actual sidesaddle or if she was leaning off the horse.

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Given that it was created by a woman sculptor, it could also have been a symbolic “backwards and in high heels” statement.

  34. 34.

    efgoldman

    @Steve in the SFO:

    you’ve seriously never ridden a horse?

    I was a city kid. I may have ridden a carnival pony when I was a very small boy.
    I’m old enough, barely, to remember horse-drawn peddler’s carts in the old West End (torn down for “redevelopment” in the mid-1950s) of Boston

  37. 37.

    kattails

    @Adam L Silverman: Meant to say thank you also, it was a nice treat at the end of a long day. Now, please explain the meaning of “Ranger tabbed woman”, I’m sure I’ll be happier for Capt. Haver and everyone if I get the broader picture.

  38. 38.

    Ruckus

    @Mnemosyne:
    I zoomed in and both boots are on the left side of the horse. The left boot appears to be in a stirrup but I wouldn’t swear to that.
    Now forty miles side saddle in the rain and at speed? On trails? I’m not a horseman and have never ridden side saddle but that sounds freaking impossible.

  41. 41.

    Wapiti

    @kattails: CPT Haver was one of the first two women to complete the US Army’s Ranger School (in 2015), so she wears a “Ranger” tab.

  42. 42.

    Mary G

    @kattails:From the Army Times:

    Maj. Lisa Jaster on Friday became the third woman – and first female Army Reserve officer – to earn the coveted black and gold Ranger tab.

    A total of 88 soldiers graduated from Ranger School during a ceremony Friday at Fort Benning, Georgia.

    Jaster, a 37-year-old engineer, joins Capt. Kristen Griest and 1st Lt. Shaye Haver as the only women in the Army to have graduated from Ranger School. They are the only ones from a group of 19 female soldiers who started Ranger School in April as part of the Army’s gender-integrated assessment to successfully complete the punishing course.

  43. 43.

    Adam L Silverman

    @kattails: One gets a Ranger tab when one completes the Ranger school.
    https://www.military.com/military-fitness/army-special-operations/army-ranger-school-prep

    Two groups of US Army personnel do this. Actual members of the Ranger Regiment and other Soldiers who have chosen to take the course for professional development reasons. CPT Haver is only one of two women to have successfully completed the course as it has only recently been opened to female Soldiers. Autoplay video at the link below.

    https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2018/03/13/first-female-ranger-grads-open-up-about-the-aftermath-and-joining-the-infantry/

    Five years into the Global War on Terror, a 17-year-old girl was ready to serve her country, having worried that the war might be over before she had a chance to get into the fight.

    “I was trying to enlist in the infantry, and realized that wasn’t possible,” she told an audience Monday at the Army Women’s Foundation Summit on Capitol Hill.

    That war is still very much on, and now-Capt. Kristen Griest, 29, has not only deployed in support of it, but she managed to wait out the Army’s ban on women serving in direct combat roles.

    Griest and her Ranger school history-making counterpart Capt. Shaye Haver recounted their roads to becoming some of the Army’s first female infantry officers, from the chance decisions and hard work that got them there, to the online backlash when they received their tabs and making the move to serve as infantry officers.

    “So West Point was an opportunity that I saw, if I just performed well and did everything I could to set conditions to join the infantry whenever it did open – and West Point seemed like the place to do that,” Griest said.

    Haver, an Army brat with an aviation dream, also went the West Point route, but might have never found herself in that first integrated Ranger school course if it hadn’t been for a battalion commander at Fort Carson, Colorado, who talked up her PT stud status to the 4th Infantry Division’s deputy commanding general.

    “And his first question to me was if I wanted to go to Ranger school,” Haver said. “And I was shocked, I had never thought about it before.”

    Griest had been waiting for her chance for year. While at West Point, where she eventually selected into military police, she joined an infantry mentorship group, where the colonel who ran it put them through PT tests and shared their scores over email.

    “I was sure I was going to be dead last – all these infantry, Ranger-bound men at West Point,” she said. “And it showed me that I wasn’t. I was sometimes in the top third, depending on the event.”

    And then it hit her.

    “These guys are all going to [the Infantry Basic Officer Leader Course],” she said. “The only reason I can’t is because I’m not allowed to, apparently.”

    But that colonel convinced her that a policy barrier was no reason to give up.

    “He really flipped the switch for me, in terms of thinking I was just this woman trying to do these things, and everybody expecting me to fail,” Griest. “Whereas he was like, ‘No, I expect you to do these things and I expect you to succeed.’ If I didn’t want to go to Ranger school, I was wrong.”

    Following a 2013 deployment to Afghanistan with the 101st Airborne Division, she got the call from a mentor that Ranger school was opening a pilot for an integrated class, and selections were coming up.

    “They did an assessment real quick and I found out that I was doing just as well as the guys, and I ended up getting a slot to go,” Haver said. “And I really would have never have even tried if it wasn’t for my leadership telling me that I could have done it and that I should try.”

    After the tab

    You likely already know what happened next.

    Much more at the link. There has now been a 3rd female Soldier to earn her Ranger tab:
    https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2015/10/12/3rd-female-student-earns-army-s-prestigious-ranger-tab/

  44. 44.

    opiejeanne

    @Stuart Frasier: Yes, you’d think the spelling of a surname especially would be set, but no. In my family I’ve seen siblings listed on the Census with their last name spelled slightly differently from each other. It makes tracing the Chessman (Chesseman, Cheseman, Cheeseman) family a bit of a challenge.
    And they only started naming all the people in a family in the 1850 census so the fluidity was still around until pretty recently.

  45. 45.

    opiejeanne

    @Mary G: It took the Canadian government until 1832 to award the promised land or money to the part of my family who aided Burgoyne in upstate New York, acting as guides leading to the Battle of Saratoga (which ironically was fought on their farm). This was promised to my 4X great grandfather and his son, and only finally paid to my great great grandmother.

  46. 46.

    Ruckus

    I know a guy, last name Ludington, if he’s part of this family I can see where she would have gotten the moxie to not only try but succeed at such a task.

  48. 48.

    Mnemosyne

    @Adam L Silverman:

    Reminder to self: never read the comments.

    My buddy knows someone who knows someone who knows a guy that says they didn’t have to do the same tests, and they have DUIs on their records, also, too!

  49. 49.

    opiejeanne

    @Ruckus: The way Sybil is depicted here suggests that the saddle has a horn and that she has hooked her right knee around it.
    I’ve only ridden a horse a couple of times, twice with a “western” saddle and once bareback and I know nothing about riding side-saddle. Except for that time that the asshole choir director at my church wanted to borrow a newish baby for the outdoor Christmas pageant and my youngest was the only one available. That meant I was Mary and had to ride sideways on the back of a donkey, which was pretty scary, nothing to hang onto and while the donkey was a sweetie I wasn’t sure how used to having a rider he was. I don’t think my expression when I entered the church patio was particularly beatific.
    My youngest was a year old at that point, but I wouldn’t let them use her when she was 10 days old the previous year. The asshole choir director was really very annoyed with us when my daughter (Baby Jesus was a girl!) pulled her bottle out of her mouth with a loud POP! and held it up so everyone watching got a good look. People were laughing while the choir was singing a very solemn Christmas carol (don’t ask me why they weren’t singing something joyful), including the choir. Oh he was mad! But he was an asshole so who cares?

    Did I mention he was an asshole?

  51. 51.

    Ruckus

    @opiejeanne:

    Did I mention he was an asshole?

    Not enough times, it deserves another mention.
    Anything is possible but really side saddle? There just isn’t any way to hold on, hang on to a musket, let along reload the damn thing…… Give the lady all the props in the world, she deserves it for sure. It’s called gravitas. I’ve known guys who thought they were tough. Most of them would not have even attempted this. I’ve also known a few women who I don’t think would have hesitated a second.

  54. 54.

    Mnemosyne

    @Ruckus:

    Okay, you guys made me go find a sidesaddle video and being able to reload on one is more plausible than I thought, because there’s an apparatus on the saddle that you could use to brace the gun’s stock while you reloaded.

    I also had to laugh because that video was so obviously produced for a (straight) female audience.

  56. 56.

    Mary G

    @Mnemosyne: When I read it I assumed she whacked one of them over the head with the musket, still seems like it would hard to ride and shoot at night.

  58. 58.

    Ruckus

    @West of the Rockies:
    Assholes rarely know how to laugh. Crap, piss and moan, that they know well. Notice that many of the congregation had no problem laughing and enjoying themselves. But it is a sign of an asshole that laughter is one of the most difficult things for them to muster up, and often when they do it is forced. For they are assholes.

  60. 60.

    Ruckus

    @Mnemosyne:
    A musket is a fairly long weapon. She would have had to stand on the saddle to reload it with the but anywhere but down by her foot. Also remember that this is at night, most likely on basically a trail over roughish ground, she had to ride at a brisk pace, hang on, guide the horse, figure out a way to study the rifle to pour the powder, place the wad, load the round, pull out the rod and hold both it and the gun still enough to get the rod down the barrel, tamp down the load, replace the rod in the rod holder………. That’s one round loaded while not being able to see much of anything. Not saying side saddle is impossible, just an entire level or 12 harder.

  63. 63.

    tokyocali (formerly tokyo expat)

    Thank you for this. I thought about Sybil Ludington’s ride when I read your previous post about the other Revolutionary rider. I grew up next door to Carmel. That statue is a familiar sight, but not one I have seen in decades. It was very cool to see it honored on my favorite blog.

  66. 66.

    J R in WV

    I’m thinking that musket was loaded while she stopped somewhere at least somewhat sheltered from the weather. You can’t reload a musket in the heavy rain very effectively – one drop in the wrong place and you’ve got to dig all that material out of the gun before you can reload it.

    She probably took other breaks as well, while involved in this ride, think how long she rode. Not to mention letting the horse take a break. Maybe one of our semi-pro riders will kick in on that. But I have ridden horses in the past, and worked a horse on our farm. They (must) take breaks when doing anything hard. Just like we do.

  67. 67.

    Brachiator

    @Adam L Silverman:
    Belatedly, cool story about Ludington, and cool contemporary story about Captain Shaye Haver.

    I particularly liked this piece that you quoted.

    “He really flipped the switch for me, in terms of thinking I was just this woman trying to do these things, and everybody expecting me to fail,” Griest. “Whereas he was like, ‘No, I expect you to do these things and I expect you to succeed.’ If I didn’t want to go to Ranger school, I was wrong.”

    Encouragement vs throwing up obstacles and negative expectations can make a huge amount of difference.

  68. 68.

    Bill Door

    Got a smile out of the heroic statue. Here is what probably went down IRL- Sybil’s “noble steed” was most likely a plow horse, short on beauty but long on endurance, just what you need for a 20+ mile slog on rough ground. It was ridden occasionally, which is why her father had a saddle- so no side saddle. Being a 16-yo girl, she had most likely made something of a pet of the horse, riding it around with only a halter, which is why she felt she could make the ride.

    Our heroes are often just ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances, like the fellow who disarmed the gunman at the Waffle House- they saw what had to be done, and did it.

    That would make a great story- for both young adults and the oldies.

  70. 70.

    Ruckus

    @Brachiator:

    Encouragement vs throwing up obstacles and negative expectations can make a huge amount of difference.

    Very true and easily deserves to be repeated often.

  71. 71.

    kattails

    @Adam L Silverman: Only 24 hours late, (because work stuff) but thanks to all for such detailed information, I’ll follow up on your links. And yes, happy for her and everyone who supported her, who stuck their neck out, who thought outside the box. I’m having a hard time responding because this has me rather sitting and contemplating. It’s expansive rather than the horribly contracting, cringing kind of news we’ve sadly had to become accustomed to, if that makes any sense.

Comments are closed.