Nancy Hart could get things done! When Colonel Elijah Clarke, one of the leaders of the Georgia militia, needed information about what the British troops on the other side of the Savannah River were planning, Nancy Hart volunteered to cross the river and find out what she could. The only problem was there was no bridge. That didn’t stop “Aunt Nancy,” as she was often called.
Described as “six feet high, very muscular, and erect in her gait; her hair light brown,” Nancy gathered some logs strewn along the riverside and used those muscles of hers to tie them together with vines to form a raft, which she navigated across the river. She got the information, returned, and told it to the Georgia troops.
That’s one of the “Nancy Hart stories,” as they’re called.
While stories about Nancy are considered legends, the details of her life are not. Nancy Morgan Hart was born Ann Morgan probably in 1735 and nicknamed Nancy by her parents, Thomas and Rebecca Alexander Morgan—Nancy was a popular nickname for those named Ann or Anne.
Since the Hart family lived in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and later moved to North Carolina, Nancy may have been born in either place. She was related to some prominent people. Her cousin was the frontiersman Daniel Boone, the son of her father’s sister, Sarah Morgan, and her husband, Squire Boone. Thomas Hart Benton, who was a US senator from Missouri from 1821 to 1851, was also a relative.
Nancy married Benjamin Hart, who during the Revolution was first a quartermaster and in 1776 became a lieutenant. He served until November 1782. During their life together, Nancy and Benjamin moved from a home in Edgefield, South Carolina, to Elbert, Georgia, and later to Wilkes County, and raised eight children: Morgan, John, Benjamin, Thomas, Samuel, Mark, Sukey, and Keziah.
Nancy was by all accounts a larger-than-life personality. Another Nancy Hart story was published in 1854, 70 years after the end of the Revolution, in Reverend George White’s book, Historical Collections of Georgia. White claimed he heard the story (and the raft story) from a woman named Mrs. Wyche, whom he described as “a lady far advanced in years who was on terms of intimacy with Mrs. Hart.”
As the story goes, when the British were in control of Augusta, Georgia, and Colonel Clarke again wanted to know British plans, Nancy dressed as a man and marched with confidence into a British camp. She pretended to be crazy so as to avoid close inspection, and under this guise was able to gather information about British plans, which she passed on to Colonel Clarke.
Reverend Snead, another man who knew Nancy, shared another Nancy story with Reverend George White, mentioning that Nancy “never failed to be much excited” when she talked of her adventures with the Tories, and had related the following to him firsthand: One day Nancy was at home, busily stirring a pot of boiling soap that was hanging over an open fire, when one of her children “discovered someone from the outside peeping through the crevices of the chimney, and gave a silent intimation of it to Nancy.” Nancy suspected it was a Tory.
While she continued stirring, Nancy did talk excitedly and disparagingly about the Tories—supporters of the British—while she kept an eye on the crevice to see if the Tory would look in again. He did. Then, “with the quickness of lightning, she dashed the ladle of boiling soap through the crevice full in the face of the eavesdropper, who taken by surprise, and blinded by the hot soap, screamed and roared at a tremendous rate.” Nancy walked outside and made fun of him as she tied him up, and “bound him fast as her prisoner.”
The many Nancy Hart stories are hard to believe. That’s one reason they’re considered legends—stories passed on from one person to another that may be partly true but are probably exaggerated.
Exaggerated yet irresistible! Since Mrs. Wyche knew Nancy Hart, the stories she shared surely have a kernel of truth. How much truth? According to Reverend White’s account, another woman, Mrs. T. M. Green, regent of the Kettle Creek chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, “said that her father who was born in 1798, lived in the Nancy Hart neighborhood and that she had often heard him tell stories about Nancy Hart; but Mrs. Green admitted that some of the stories ‘have of later years been somewhat exaggerated.’”
The most well known of the Nancy Hart stories highlights Nancy’s brash, quick-thinking ways. It was told to Elizabeth Ellet, author of the three-volume book Women of the American Revolution (1848–1850), who visited Georgia in the 1840s to collect stories about women who participated during the Revolution—personal stories, heroic stories, stories of every sort. An unnamed but reportedly reputable gentleman shared the story with her.
According to Ellet’s version, Tories from the British camp at Augusta came to the area where Nancy lived and “savagely massacred a friend of Nancy’s while he was in bed in his own house.” The friend was Colonel John Dooly, one of the leaders of the local pro-Revolution militia. The Tories then arrived at Nancy’s house. According to Ellet, Nancy was “well known to the Tories, who stood somewhat in fear of her vengeance for any grievance or aggressive act.”
After Nancy greeted them, the Tories confronted her with a question: “Did you help a rebel escape from some of our other Tory friends?” Nancy admitted it, and boasted of how she did it. She told them that some days before, she had been alarmed when she had heard sounds of a horse galloping toward her house. She had grabbed her gun, but when she saw that the horseman was a fellow Whig, she had put it down. After the horseman told her that Tories were chasing him, she promptly motioned him to pass through her house and “take to the swamp, and secure himself as well as he could.”
After he left, Nancy covered her head so that she appeared to be an old woman, as her children stood watching. When the pursuing Tories knocked on her door, she opened it and asked “why they disturbed a sick, lone woman.” When the men told about their search for a man on a horse, she said she had seen “someone on a sorrel horse turn out of the path into the woods.” She was, of course, lying to them, and the men headed off in the opposite direction of the way the fugitive had gone.
The Tories listened to Nancy as she related her tale, laughing as she did. After the other Tories had left, she told them, she had pulled the rag off her head and said to her children, “If they hadn’t er been so lofty minded—but had looked on the ground … they would have seen his horse tracks up to that door, as plain as you can see the tracks on this here floor, and out of t’other door down the path to the swamp.”
According to Ellet’s telling, after the men heard Nancy boast about how she had tricked their fellow Tories, they demanded she cook a meal for them. Nancy complained that the other Tories had stolen all her chickens and pigs and that she hardly had enough to feed her own family. On hearing that, one of the Tories spied an old turkey walking in her yard, shot it, and told her to cook it for them. “She stormed and swore awhile” and then started to clean it.
As she was preparing the meal, her 12-year-old daughter, Sukey, helped her, as did one of the Tories. Nancy joked with the helping Tory, and the men began drinking the liquor they’d brought with them. At the same time, though, Nancy was devising a plan. Under the guise of needing water for cooking, she asked Sukey to go outside to fetch some at the spring. Yet it wasn’t the water that Nancy really wanted. She wanted Sukey to pick up the conch shell kept on a tree stump by the spring and blow in it. Settlers in that area used the shells like musical instruments and to relay information. For example, one sound meant to be on the alert; another sound meant to come at once. Sukey used the conch to alert her father and neighbors to the Tories’ presence.
Meanwhile, inside the house, as the men started to enjoy themselves and relax, they “stacked their arms where they were in view and within reach.” Nancy stealthily took one of the muskets and slid it out through a space between the logs of the cabin. Then she slid another. She again sent Sukey out to the spring for “water.” This time Sukey used the conch shell to tell her father and neighbors to come at once.
Inside, as Nancy tried to take the third musket, “the whole party sprang to their feet.” Nancy responded quickly, raising the musket and pointing it at the Tories. She warned them that she “would kill the first man who approached her.” When one of them moved toward her, she shot him dead. Nancy then grabbed one of the other muskets, warning the Tories again as she pointed it at them.
When Sukey returned with the pail of water, she announced, “Daddy and them will soon be here.” The Tories must have realized the danger and reality of the situation—that it would be easier to fight against one woman than a group of men. One of them moved. Nancy shot again, and killed him. Sukey handed Nancy one of the other muskets and Nancy demanded that the Tories surrender their “d_____tory carcasses to a whig woman.”
Benjamin Hart and his neighbors arrived and wanted to shoot the remaining Tories, but Nancy insisted “shooting was too good for them.” Nancy, Benjamin, and the others took the remaining Tories outside and hung them.
Nancy Hart and the Tories.
Pioneer Mothers of America, 1912
Ellet’s story inspired artists to depict the scene, which boosted its legend.
This is surely a dramatic and memorable story. But is it true? In 1825, some 23 years earlier, and 40 years after the Revolution, the story about Nancy and the Tories first appeared in print, in the Milledgeville Southern Reporter, and was later copied in two other publications.
It was a much simpler version of the tale. As it went, one day Nancy was at home with her children when six Tories—locals who were pro-British—stopped by her house. They demanded that she cook them a meal. Before long, “smoking venison, hoecakes, and fresh honeycomb” were on the table. The men had just stacked their guns and sat down to eat when Nancy seized one of their guns. She pointed it at them, “cocked it, and with a blazing oath declared she would blow out the brains of the first mortal that offered to rise or taste a mouthful!” While the men sat captive, she sent her son to fetch some local Whigs, supporters of the Revolution. According to the Southern Reporter, the Tories, either “uncertain because of her cross-eyes which one she was aiming at, or transfixed by her ferocity, remained quiet.” The Whigs soon arrived and dealt with the Tories “according to the rules of the times.”
On one point, Reverend Snead, who knew Nancy, commented that “she was positively not cross-eyed.”
A third version of this same story was told by George R. Gilmer in an 1851 speech. He told of three Tories who snuck up to Nancy’s cabin in the summer of 1780. They wanted breakfast. “When the Tories sat down to eat they stacked their guns, whereupon Nancy grabbed one of the weapons, cocked it, and marched the Tories off to Clark’s station.”
Which story of Nancy and the Tories is most accurate, the one printed in the Milledgeville Southern Reporter in 1825, Elizabeth Ellet’s 1848 version, or Gilmer’s from 1851? It is hard to tell. One argument against the more dramatic versions is that quite a few historians visited the area where Nancy lived in the 50 years after the Revolution seeking evidence of actions of individual people in the war. Yet a two-volume history of Georgia didn’t mention her, and other histories only included brief comments or noted that “the stories related in fancy sketches ought to be taken with some grains of allowance.” The Nancy stories would likely have faded away had they not been retold in 1901 by storyteller Joel Chandler Harris, author of the Uncle Remus stories, and by the publicity efforts of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution.
In 1912, however, a discovery gave rise to much speculation about the visiting Tories story. During the construction of the Elberton and Eastern Railroad, workmen digging near the location of Nancy Hart’s cabin discovered six human skeletons. Were they the remains of the Tories slain by Nancy and her husband and his neighbors? Was this proof? Historians are not sure. As expressed by E. Merton Coulter, a prominent Georgia historian who explored the truth of the Nancy stories in the 1950s, “Yes, there was a Nancy Hart and there will always be a Nancy Hart tradition.”
That tradition is evident in the naming of Hart County, Georgia, after her, the only county in Georgia named for a woman, as well as Lake Hartwell, the Nancy Hart Highway, various schools, hotels, and more.
After the end of the Revolutionary War, and after the death of Nancy’s husband, according to Reverend White, Nancy “consoled herself, like most other good wives who have the luck, by marrying a young man,” and moved out West with him. Another Nancy Hart story? In fact, Nancy never remarried but lived with her son John and his wife after Benjamin’s death and moved to Kentucky with them. After John’s death, she continued living with his widow.
When did Nancy die? It’s hard to know. No contemporary record of her death has been found. It might have been in 1815 or 1820. Nancy would have been 80 or 85 then, and during both those years, a memorable natural event occurred. According to one historian, “A descendent of Nancy’s wrote in 1901 that at the time of her funeral there was a total eclipse of the sun.”
A total eclipse of the sun? The start of another story? Probably not, but a fitting send-off for Nancy.
“The Nancy Hart Story”
Georgia Stories
Georgia Public Broadcasting
www.gpb.org/georgiastories/story/nancy_hart_story
“The Nancy Hart Story—Historical Documents”
Georgia Stories
Georgia Public Broadcasting
www.gpb.org/georgiastories/docs/the_nancy_hart_story-13
“Nancy Morgan Hart (1735–1830)”
National Women’s History Museum
www.nwhm.org/education-resources/biography/biographies/nancy-morgan-hart/
Women of the American Revolution, Vol. II, by Elizabeth F. Ellet, contains a chapter on Nancy Hart.
http://archive.org or Google Books