The Mass Grave Under the Riverbank

There is a bluff above the Delaware in Gloucester County where, on an autumn afternoon in 1777, a badly outnumbered garrison of American soldiers did something the Continental Army rarely managed that grim year: they won, decisively, and they made the enemy pay a fearful price for the attempt.

We are standing in the 250th year of American independence, and the parades and drone shows and revival concerts will rightly claim their share of attention this summer. But if you want to feel the Revolution rather than commemorate it, drive down to Red Bank Battlefield and stand where Fort Mercer stood. The ground there has been giving up its secrets again — and some of them are hard.

Why the river mattered

Let me set the scene, because the stakes were enormous and most people who pass the park’s picnic tables have no idea. In October 1777, the British had taken Philadelphia, the young nation’s capital. But a captured city is worthless if you cannot supply it, and the Delaware River was the supply line. Two American forts guarded the river below the city — Fort Mifflin on the Pennsylvania side and Fort Mercer here at Red Bank, on the Jersey bluff. Take them, and the British could feed their army through the winter. Hold them, and Washington’s ragged force at the gates of the city might just survive to fight another season.

On October 22, 1777, some 1,200 Hessian troops — German soldiers hired by the Crown, among the most feared professionals in Europe — marched on Fort Mercer, where roughly 400 Rhode Island Continentals waited behind the earthworks under Colonel Christopher Greene. The Hessians demanded surrender. Greene refused. What followed was less a battle than a reckoning. The attackers, funneled into the fort’s defenses, were cut down in staggering numbers. Their commander, Colonel Carl von Donop, was mortally wounded and died in American hands. The garrison held. The river stayed closed a while longer. And for a country desperate for proof it could win, Red Bank was proof.

What the ground delivered, 245 years later

That is the history you can read on a plaque. Here is the history the ground itself delivered, almost 245 years later.

In the summer of 2022, a Rowan University excavation led by public historian Jennifer Janofsky, with archaeologist Wade Catts overseeing the dig, was working the trench system that once ringed Fort Mercer. Near the end of the project, a volunteer turned up something no one expected — a human femur. Then more. What the team had found, in a four-and-a-half-foot-deep trench, was a mass grave: the remains of some fifteen individuals, in all likelihood the Hessian dead of that October day, buried where they fell by the men who defeated them.

The trench gave up more than bones. A 1776 British gold guinea — a soldier’s monthly pay, tucked away and never spent. Pewter and brass buttons. A uniform knee buckle that still bore traces of human blood. Musket balls scattered through the fill. Each object is a person’s morning: a coin someone saved, a button someone fastened, a life that ended on a bluff a very long way from home.

They died in our mud. And 250 years into the experiment they tried and failed to strangle, a New Jersey university is working to remember them as people.Henry Whitaker

Giving names back to the dead

What has happened since is, to me, the most South Jersey part of the whole story. Rather than treat the remains as a curiosity, the Rowan team turned the work toward humanity. Forensic anthropologists have been extracting DNA from bone and teeth, hoping to trace where these men actually came from — which German villages, which families that never learned exactly how their sons died. Isotopic, genetic, and radiological analysis continues. The project’s stated aim is not to score a patriotic point but to give names, or at least origins, back to the anonymous dead of the losing side.

There is something profoundly decent in that, and profoundly local. We are a region that has always lived close to its own past — the Quaker meeting houses, the river towns, the old brick that outlasts everyone who laid it. Red Bank asks us to extend that closeness even to the men who came here as enemies. They were, most of them, poor Europeans sold into someone else’s war.

That, I would argue, is what a mature nation does in its 250th year. Not just celebrate the victory — though the victory at Red Bank was real and worth celebrating — but sit with the full human cost of it, buried right here in Gloucester County, and choose to honor even that.

Red Bank Battlefield Park is open to the public, free, with the Delaware rolling by exactly as it did in 1777. Go stand on the bluff. The view is beautiful, and the ground beneath it is still telling the truth.

Based on reporting from Rowan University, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Smithsonian Magazine, 6abc Philadelphia, and the American Battlefield Trust.