Connecting with Place

My recurrent theme in this blog has been the ability to connect with place.  More importantly, in some sites, the terrain is little changed.  In such cases, we are able to "see" what the place looked like to those who walked the ground during the Revolutionary War.

One such place is Cattus Island, near Toms River, Ocean County, New Jersey.  It is not really an island so much as a peninsula, but it provided coves, such as Mosquito Cove, sheltered from the ocean by the barrier islands off the New Jersey coast.

Here is a view of Mosquito Cove from Cattus Island:

Various sources have identified Timothy Page, of the Page family that settled on Cattus Island, as a privateer who used this area as his base of operations.  With a view like this, with no discernible houses or other constructed objects, we can get a feel for what this country looked like.  

Long Beach Island, Partisan Thugs and the Digital Age

     Captain Andrew Steelman of the American privateer Alligator found an abandoned and stranded cutter in Barnegat Bay, in the vicinity of present-day Barnegat Light.  He and his men spent a day unloading the cargo and camped on the beach that night.  On October 25, 1782, a year after the Continental victory at Yorktown, the Tory Loyalist John Bacon (considered more of a banditti or outlaw using the cloak of his partisanship for criminal activity) attacked Steelman and his men in their sleep, with knives.  Twenty-one Americans were killed.  Bacon only had nine men with him.  Steelman had been betrayed by one of the locals he had enlisted to help unload the cargo.  Reinforcements arrived and the Loyalists withdrew.  The episode gave a sense of urgency to the Patriots, and two months later Bacon was finally killed after the battle of Cedar Creek Bridge.  A plaque about a mile from the site of the incident, in the vicinity of Barnegat Lighthouse, informs of the event.

     Today we have the digital equivalent of partisan thugs.  As silent as knives, the on-line campaigns destroy reputations and people with the same deadly vigor.  There are those who cloak invidious views under the broader ideological rubrics.  They are no better than the banditti of the Revolution.  

Chestnut Neck, Privateering and Terrorism

I had a prior post on Chestnut Neck, noting the role of foreign officers in the Continental Army.  This post takes a different look at the affair, which was the result of privateering activity by the Americans.  Jack Coggins, in Ships and Seamen of the American Revolution, notes that "[i]n a sense, a privateer was little more than a licensed pirate." Authorized by the Continental Congress, during the Revolution, privateers accounted for 800 commissioned vessels, far outnumbering the 198 commissioned vessels in the United States navy.

Here we see the view from Chestnut Neck across the Mullica River at the Jersey shore.

The Battle of Chestnut Neck makes us consider the rule of law and terrorism in the context of another time.    It has been suggested that the British deemed themselves, as we might put it today, to be fighting state-sponsored terrorism.  In an article on this topic, Professor Jesse Lemisch of John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York has written that "[p]rivateers were denounced by the British in ways that resonate with the denunciation of terrorists that we hear these days."