A bullet before surrender

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 51 for his account.

In October 1780 Sir John Johnson and Joseph Brant came down on the New York frontier with some 1,200 men, in step with a British thrust from Lake Champlain and the hope that Benedict Arnold would deliver West Point. They laid waste the Schoharie Valley. At the Middle Fort, about two hundred Continental soldiers and a body of militia sheltered behind a stockade, under Major Melancthon Woolsey, an officer thought unfit for his post. Johnson’s guns did little, and a British officer in green came up under a flag of truce, with a fifer. Woolsey was ready to admit it. Timothy Murphy, a rifleman of Daniel Morgan’s corps who had shot General Fraser at Saratoga, fired at the flag party and told the major he would send a bullet through his heart rather than let it in. Woolsey ordered his arrest, and the officers and men refused. Colonel Vrooman took command, and about three o’clock Johnson gave up and marched on. Rothbard calls it singlehanded saving of the fort and a courageous mutiny, a private and the militia overruling a cowardly officer. Two days later Johnson was beaten at Klock’s Field. Simms later wrote that Woolsey took French leave from the fort while Vrooman was away.