Or Molly Stark sleeps a widow

The story, from several sources

This account blends Rothbard’s chapter with the other sources listed below and has not yet been separated into Rothbard’s own account and the fuller story. Read Rothbard’s chapter 39 for his account.

In August 1777 John Burgoyne, short of food and horses on his march south from Canada, sent about 700 men under the Hessian Lt. Col. Friedrich Baum to raid the stores at Bennington. Baum ran into General John Stark’s militia. Stark had fought at Bunker Hill and Princeton, then quit the army when he was passed over for promotion, and in July the New Hampshire legislature asked him to raise a brigade. He raised 1,500 men, about one voter in ten in the state. Congress’s generals ordered him to join the main army, and Rothbard says Stark flatly refused, answering only to New Hampshire’s General Court, and chose to harass Burgoyne’s supply lines. After a day and a half of rain, on August 16 the militia came at Baum’s hilltop redoubt on Walloomsac, about ten miles from Bennington. Some men approached in shirtsleeves with white paper in their hats, the mark the Germans had been told to expect of Loyalists, and walked in close before the shooting began. Tradition has Stark telling his men they would have the enemy by night or Molly Stark would sleep a widow. Baum was killed, over 350 Germans were captured, and Seth Warner’s 400 men routed the relief column. Burgoyne lost nearly a thousand men.