Smoke rolls down the ridge above the Hudson. On the crest a single cannon keeps firing while the men around it fall, and a woman stands close enough to the barrel to feel the heat come off it.
It is 1776.
She had followed her husband to the war, as many wives did, cooking and washing and nursing in the camps that trailed the army. Her husband served the guns, a matross in a Pennsylvania artillery company, and on the sixteenth of November she stood at his side on the high ground north of the city when the Hessians came up the slope in numbers no one could hold.
When he fell dead at the cannon, she took his place. She had watched him work the piece often enough to know it, and now she swabbed the barrel, loaded the charge, aimed, and fired, alone at a gun built for a crew while the line gave way on either side of her.
The grapeshot found her before the position fell. Three iron balls tore through her arm, her shoulder, and her chest, and left the arm all but severed, useless for the rest of her life. The fort surrendered that afternoon. She was carried off the field a prisoner, broken in a body that would never again do easy work.
The new country then did something it had never done. In 1779 the Continental Congress granted her a pension, half the monthly pay of a soldier, and later placed her on the rolls of the invalid corps at West Point. She is widely credited as the first woman in the United States to be paid such a pension by the Congress. The soldiers called her Captain Molly. Then the century turned, and the name slipped out of the books.
She did alone, and wounded, what the drill books said took a full crew, and the republic she helped hold that day paid her a soldier’s due and then let her name go dark. The pension was a first small admission that what a woman gave to the country counted the same as what a man gave.
Her name is Margaret Corbin.
Now we know em.
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