Engraving of Washington taking command of the Continental army at Cambridge, July 3, 1775, after a painting by M. A. Wageman.
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Engraving of Washington taking command of the Continental army at Cambridge, July 3, 1775, after a painting by M. A. Wageman.
THE CONTINENTAL CONGRESS DECLARED JULY 20, 1775, AS A day of “public humiliation, fasting, and prayer.” Reflecting the strong religious beliefs of many of its founding legislators, the newly minted Congress asked Americans to pray to God to forgive them for their “iniquities” and to “inspire” King George III with the “wisdom” necessary to put a “speedy end … to the civil discord between Great Britain and the American Colonies.” It was hoped that such prayers would prevent a “further effusion of blood.” But Maj. Joseph Vose of the Continental Army had no interest in atonement or in asking God to influence the king’s actions. Instead Vose and his men had their sights set on attacking the Boston Lighthouse.
Ever since the battles at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, and even more so after the Battle of Bunker Hill nearly two months later, Boston had been under siege. While the British army and navy controlled the city and the harbor, an increasing number of American soldiers surrounded Boston itself, effectively isolating the British. Although most Americans were still hopeful that reconciliation could be achieved, many—particularly those in and around Boston—believed that an all-out war for independence was inevitable. When waging a war, the main goal, of course, is to inflict injury, lethal if possible, on the enemy, and that is where the lighthouse played a contributing role.
On July 2, less than three months after the outbreak of hostilities, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress recommended that the colony’s three lighthouses—on Little Brewster Island, Thacher Island, and at Gurnet Point—be put out of commission, leaving it to the towns where the lighthouses were located to take the necessary action. The logic was inescapably clear: Lighthouses do not distinguish between friend and foe, and as long as the colony’s lighthouses remained operational they would help safely guide British vessels along the treacherous Massachusetts coast and into Boston Harbor, where they could strengthen and resupply the beleaguered British forces. Disabling the lighthouses, it was hoped, would make it that much more difficult for the British to sustain the siege.
As for the lighthouse at Gurnet Point, Congress was a little late: The resolute residents of Plymouth had already extinguished it on April 23. Thacher Island Lighthouse was the next to go. The day after Congress made its recommendation, Capt. Sam Rogers, a doctor from Gloucester, Massachusetts, led a hardy band of local militia to Thacher Island, where they smashed the lighthouse lamps and the glass in the lantern room, also collecting all the whale oil. The lighthouse, however, was hardly their only target. The patriotic citizens of Cape Ann suspected Capt. James Kirkwood, the lighthouse keeper, of being a Tory, and that was reason enough to get rid of him. After finishing with the lighthouse, Rogers and his men grabbed Kirkwood and his family and deposited them unceremoniously on the mainland, where, according to a British military report, they were left “to shift for themselves.” Their suspicions were correct, for soon thereafter the Kirkwoods fled to Canada, becoming part of the exodus of sixty thousand Tories who left America during the war to settle somewhere else in the British Empire, refugees whom the historian Maya Jasanoff has labeled “Liberty’s Exiles.”
Although the lighthouses at Gurnet Point and on Thacher Island had significant strategic value, the safety of the Boston Lighthouse remained of paramount importance to the Redcoats. Therefore disabling it became a Revolutionary grail. With that goal in mind, Brig. Gen, William Heath ordered Major Vose to lead a raid on Little Brewster Island. A farmer formerly of Milton, Massachusetts, Vose and sixty soldiers set out from Hingham, Massachusetts, in the early morning hours of July 20. After muffling the oars by covering the oarlocks in cloth, they quietly rowed seven whaleboats to the tip of the Nantasket Peninsula in Hull, and then dragged the boats across a slender ribbon of sand to a beach opposite the lighthouse. Into the water they went again. When they finally reached Little Brewster, Vose and his men burned the lighthouse’s wooden portions and seized three casks of whale oil, as well as the furniture in the keeper’s house, fifty pounds of gunpowder, a couple of boats, and a cannon.
At the time of the attack British marines and loyalists were tending the lighthouse, yet bizarrely there is no record of an initial confrontation. Even if there was no fight on the island, however, one soon broke out. At eight that morning a watch on the HMS Lively, anchored only a mile away, spotted the line of whaleboats approaching the lighthouse. Realizing that something was terribly wrong, he alerted his commanding officer, who quickly signaled other nearby ships for assistance.
Before the British could respond, Vose’s men had done their damage, and were piling back into their whaleboats to race for the shore. A few minutes later eight British vessels were in furious pursuit, bearing down on the Americans and unleashing a series of broadsides in their direction. The rain of metal notwithstanding, Vose’s raiders made it back to Nantasket with only two men sustaining minor leg wounds. Once on land, the Americans arrayed themselves in battle formation, in effect daring the British soldiers to come ashore. But they didn’t take the bait and instead moved their vessels out of range of the Americans’ muskets. An eyewitness to this entire affair said that he “saw the flames of the lighthouse ascending up to heaven like grateful incense, and the [British] ships wasting their powder.”
THE DARING ATTACK ON the Boston Lighthouse heartened the patriots. As Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John, who was in Philadelphia with the Continental Congress, “these little skirmishes seem trifling, but they serve to inure our men, and harden them to danger.” And better yet, Adams added that she had heard that the British—whom she labeled, with characteristic eloquence, as “vermin and locusts”—were “very wroth at the destruction of the lighthouse.”
The attack had even greater significance as part of a broader pattern of patriot defiance. In the months leading up to the attack, Americans had on multiple occasions successfully used whaleboats to raid various harbor islands to burn hay and take off crops and livestock so as to keep these valuable resources from falling into British hands. American whaleboat warriors had even harassed British ships. The attack on the lighthouse acted like a tocsin, revealing once again that although the world’s mightiest navy controlled the harbor, the Americans could still fight back. This boldness led James Warren, the president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, to boast, “It is said they [the British] are more afraid of our whale Boats than we are of their Men of War.”
While the patriots were emboldened by the attack on the lighthouse, Vice Adm. Samuel Graves was enraged. As the commander of British naval forces in North America, he was in charge of protecting British interests and defending against American attacks. Yet repeatedly the Americans had gotten the better of his fleet, the attack on the lighthouse being only the most recent example. In response to this latest indignity, Graves, who was on board the HMS Preston anchored in Boston Harbor, immediately issued a circular “To all Seafaring People,” warning them that the lighthouses on Thacher Island and at the entrance to Boston Harbor had been “burnt and destroyed by the rebels,” and urging them to “be careful that they are not deceived by false lights, which the rebels threaten to hang out, in order to decoy vessels into destruction.”
At the same time Graves sent loyalist carpenters to repair the Boston Lighthouse, and for their protection he provided a guard of thirty-two marines and one lieutenant, along with a heavily armed longboat. “With this party,” Graves wrote, “the engineers were of [the] opinion the light house might well be defended, until succors arrived, against 1,000 men.” Work progressed quickly, and by July 29 the British-controlled lighthouse was once again illuminating the besieged harbor.
That light was of no small concern to George Washington, who had assumed command of the American forces at the beginning of July. Although Washington had learned of Vose’s raid only after the fact, he now went on the offensive, ordering a second attack on the lighthouse. The man chosen to lead the attack was Maj. Benjamin Tupper, another member of Brigadier General Heath’s regiment.
A FORMER TANNER, schoolteacher, and veteran, like Washington, of the French and Indian War, Tupper assembled three hundred soldiers and thirty-three whaleboats along the shore of Dorchester, Massachusetts, late in the evening of July 30. According to tradition, he told the men, “If there is any one of you who is afraid, and does not want to go with us, let him step two paces to the front.” He then—we can only hope slightly facetiously—whispered to one of his officers that if any man stepped forward, he was to “shoot him on the spot.” Nobody moved. And soon the miniarmada began rowing to Little Brewster Island, reaching its destination at about two the following morning. As they approached, one of the marines guarding the lighthouse yelled, “The whaleboats are coming!” whereupon his superior, Lieutenant Colthurst, ordered his men to grab their arms and assemble. This proved to be a difficult maneuver, since quite a few of the marines were, as one of them later recalled, “in the liquor and totally unfit for service.”
Disregarding a direct order, a few of the intoxicated marines fired their muskets at the Americans, causing them to halt their approach and raise their oars. While the Americans appeared to be considering their next move, Midshipman Christopher Hele urged Colthurst to continue firing at the Americans in the hope that it might cause them to retreat. No sooner had Hele spoken than the Americans let out a seemingly feral, warlike cheer, and split their forces into small groups of whaleboats, each making for different parts of the island. Colthurst decided that the only choice the British had, being so vastly outnumbered, was to withdraw to their schooner and longboat, and then try to reach the HMS Lively, which was not far off.
As the Americans swarmed onto the island, the longboat managed to escape, but the schooner grounded very close to the shore, and was soon set upon by the Americans. In the melee that followed, Tupper’s men killed six, including Colthurst, who was shot through the head, wounding five more in the process. Upward of thirty prisoners were taken, mainly marines, but also a number of workers and assorted Tories who were visiting the island—thus definitively refuting the British boast that the lighthouse would be able to hold off an onslaught of one thousand men until reinforcements showed up.
While some of Tupper’s men were busy engaging the enemy, others, acting to complete the guerrilla offensive, torched the lighthouse and the rest of the buildings on the island. Their mission complete, the Americans now faced a new foe—the tides. The same low water that foiled the schooner’s escape now hampered their departure. By the time they set off, the British were already chasing them at close quarters, firing furiously. But Tupper had wisely planned ahead. Before the raid began, he had ordered Maj. John Crane to position his fieldpiece on Nantasket beach to cover the Americans’ retreat. And now, as Crane blasted away, sinking one British boat, Tupper and his men made it safely to shore, having suffered only one fatality, a Rhode Islander named Griffin who was shot through the temple.
The prisoners were ultimately sent to a Revolutionary jail in Springfield, but before they left, a moving scene played out in Germantown (West Roxbury), where Griffin was interred on August 1. The British marines who had been wounded during Tupper’s raid actually attended the funeral to pay their respects. After the service Abigail Adams told the marines “it was very unhappy that they should be obliged to fight their best Friends.” They said “they were sorry,” and hoped that God would put a speedy end to “the unhappy contest.” The marines also said they “had been deceived, for they were told if they were taken alive,” the Americans would kill them. Such sentiments reflected the often ambiguous division that separated the former colonists and their foes.
Early-twentieth-century photo of Benjamin Blyth’s pastel portrait of Abigail Adams, circa 1766.
The same day as the funeral, Washington issued a congratulatory letter, lauding the attack on the lighthouse. Washington thanked Tupper and his men for “their gallant and soldier like behavior, … and for the Number of Prisoners they took there.” This action, Washington claimed, would undoubtedly make the Continental Army “as famous for their mercy as for their valor.”
Washington’s pride was shared by many Americans, among them Elisha Rich, a Baptist minister from Chelmsford, Massachusetts, who memorialized Tupper’s assault in verse. Having earlier written a ballad on the Battle of Bunker Hill, Rich now offered a new broadside called “Poetical Remarks Upon the Fight at the Boston Light-House,” which included the following patriotic stanzas:
The Boston Light-House that did help our foe,
By God’s assistance thou did’st overthrow,
By means which in danger they must be,
Should other Ships of War come against thee.
But when thy foe this Building would repair
That they may pass the channel without fear,
They met with force repulse to their surprise,
Their works were all destroy’d before their eyes.
AMERICANS behold with joyful eyes,
The lofty Light-House now in ruin lies,
It gives not light to Bloody Tyrannts here,
And tho’ they fight this should not move thy fear.
The British reaction to Tupper’s raid was scorn—directed not so much at the Americans but at Vice Admiral Graves, who had once again been clobbered by the forces whom the British general John Burgoyne had derisively dismissed as a “rabble in arms.” From the King, members of parliament, and military colleagues, criticism rained down on the now hapless Graves, not only for the two humiliations at the lighthouse, but also for his failures and general inanition on so many other fronts.
The general feeling toward Graves was perhaps best expressed in a private letter from Burgoyne to Lord George Germain, the colonial secretary in Prime Minister Lord North’s government, written on August 20, 1775. Burgoyne, at the time stationed in Boston, started off with a query. “It may perhaps be asked in England,” he wrote, “ ‘What is the Admiral doing?’” Burgoyne responded, “I wish I were able to answer that question satisfactorily; but I can only say what he is not doing. … He is not defending his own flocks and herds, for the enemy have repeatedly and in the most insulting manner plundered his own appropriated islands. He is not defending the other islands in the harbor, for the enemy landed in force, burned the lighthouse[,] … and killed and took a party of marines under the guns of two or three men of war.” In any event, Graves’s failings ultimately became too much for the British government, and he was recalled by the end of the year.
In the meantime the British desperately wanted the lighthouse relit, but that took quite a while. Work crews labored on and off for months, protected by marines on the island, and an armed transport or warship anchored nearby. To further increase safety, the workers were often shuttled to the island during the day, and then taken on board one of the ships at night. Four months later, on November 23, 1775, the lighthouse that British general William Howe said was “so necessary for the safety of vessels bound to the port” was finally guiding ships once more. British troops by year’s end guarded the lighthouse around the clock to keep the Americans from staging another attack. Nonetheless the lighthouse’s trials by fire were not over.
The Siege of Boston, in which the British had essentially strung a strategic noose around the city, finally ended in 1776 when royal troops, and the bulk of the Royal Navy, placed in an indefensible position by the sudden appearance of patriot cannons on Dorchester Heights, retreated and sailed to Halifax, Nova Scotia, on March 17—forever after celebrated by Bostonians as Evacuation Day. A few warships, however, remained in the vicinity of the lighthouse to warn other ships coming from Britain that the army had departed. The continued British presence infuriated the Americans, and on June 14, Continental Army troops, under the command of Col. Asa Whitcomb, fired cannons and mortars at enemy ships from batteries on Long Island, while other troops fired on them from Nantasket. This barrage forced the remnants of the British fleet to put to sea, but before they left, British marines landed on Little Brewster Island. Recognizing the lighthouse’s strategic value to the insurgents, the British torched it and left a keg of gunpowder at its base. Then they returned to their ships along with the lighthouse guards. Less than an hour later, at eleven in the morning, the keg’s fuse hit its mark. The Boston Lighthouse blew up, turning it into “a heap of rubbish” in the words of one eyewitness.
BY THE TIME THE British withdrew from Boston in March, the number of Americans who still thought reconciliation a possibility had diminished significantly, owing to a number of dramatic events that had transformed the rift between America and Britain into an irreparable breach. In January 1776, Thomas Paine’s elegantly argued Common Sense appeared, further energizing American patriots by eviscerating the rationale in favor of continued British rule. The manifesto urged independence and declared that “the birthday of a new world is at hand.” And in February, American fury was aroused yet again when the insurrectionary people learned that Parliament had passed the punitive Prohibitory Act, which attempted to strangle American commerce by halting all British trade with the colonies. The bill treated American ships as if they were now enemies of the Crown, thereby making them subject to seizure by the British navy. Thus, by March 1776 the question was not whether the undeclared war with Britain would continue, but where the next battle would be waged.
EVEN BEFORE EVACUATION DAY, all eyes had pivoted to New York City. As early as January 1776, Washington believed that the British were planning to invade this thriving metropolis. Given his premonition, he ordered Maj. Gen, Charles Lee to strengthen the city’s porous defenses. Although New York City contained numerous loyalists, who would heartily welcome a British invasion, New York’s Provincial Congress was of the same mind as Washington. It sought to prevent a British takeover, and one of its strategic steps involved the lighthouse at Sandy Hook.
Like their brethren to the north in Massachusetts, New Yorkers did not want their lighthouse to aid the enemy. Thus, on March 4, 1776, New York’s Provincial Congress ordered that the lighthouse be dismantled, appointing a committee to make sure that was accomplished. The committee, in turn, selected William Malcolm, a prominent New York merchant, ardent patriot, and major in the local militia to carry out this “important enterprise.” Malcolm’s instructions were clear: to remove the glass from the lantern room and collect all the whale oil in casks. If Malcolm could not remove the glass, he was supposed to smash it, and if he could not find casks, or if the enemy appeared, he was to pump the oil onto the ground. “In short,” the committee told him, “you will use your discretion to render the lighthouse entirely useless.”
Since secrecy was paramount, the committee sent Malcolm to New Jersey alone, for fear that if he departed from New York with any appreciable force, loyalists in the city would alert the British warships patrolling the area. But the committee knew Malcolm could not complete the mission on his own, so they gave him a letter of introduction to the patriotic Committee of Inspection and Observation in Middletown, New Jersey, where Sandy Hook was located. The letter beseeched the New Jerseyans to offer assistance, and they obliged, providing a small detachment of militia led by Col. George Taylor to accompany Malcolm to the lighthouse on March 8.
The party encountered no resistance, but they had to smash the glass since they lacked the tools to take the panes out of their metal frame. In addition to three and a half casks of whale oil, they took eight lamps and two block and tackles from the lighthouse. The mission’s success, however, proved only transitory.
Facing no opposition, the British in a move of geographic significance took possession of the tip of Sandy Hook in the middle of April, placing marines on land and warships just offshore. This achieved three strategic goals: First, it gave the British access to drinking water, something that was in desperately short supply since their source on Staten Island was cut off as a result of American attacks. Second, it allowed the British to monitor and control the main shipping channel into New York, which ran by Sandy Hook. And, finally, it meant that the British also controlled the lighthouse, which was expected to play a critical role in the upcoming attack on New York City, its shining beacon serving to guide the British fleet safely on its approach. But for the lighthouse to be a guide it first had to be fixed, a challenging task that was not completed until about the middle of June. While repairs were ongoing, Capt. Hyde Parker of the HMS Phoenix strengthened defenses by increasing the number of marines guarding the lighthouse.
THE CAPTURE OF SANDY HOOK and the resuscitation of the lighthouse understandably worried Washington, who had been in New York City since April 13 preparing the Continental Army for the impending British invasion. For the same reasons that the British wanted to hold on to Sandy Hook, Washington wanted to oust them, and disable if not destroy the lighthouse. To achieve those goals, he turned, once again, to Benjamin Tupper. Since distinguishing himself in the assault on the Boston Lighthouse, Tupper had been promoted to lieutenant colonel and put in charge of a fleet of whaleboats, schooners, and sloops, whose job it was to patrol the waters from Long Island to northern New Jersey, report on the movements of British ships, and keep those ships from communicating with American loyalists. Now Washington ordered Tupper to attack Sandy Hook.
Tupper’s force of about three hundred men set out in whaleboats and other assorted craft from Perth Amboy, New Jersey, at 11:00 a.m. on June 19. By sunset they landed at Middletown, where Tupper failed to obtain any assistance from New Jerseyans, “tho,” he later recalled, it was “earnestly requested.” Tupper thought this refusal “a little strange,” and indeed it was a marked difference from just a few months earlier, when Taylor and his men had willingly led Major Malcolm to the lighthouse. But New Jersey was a colony of sharply divided loyalties, and many residents did not stand with the patriots. By the time Tupper arrived, the number of loyalists had risen, and it would soon include among its ranks the erstwhile patriot George Taylor, Malcolm’s escort. Seen in this light, Tupper’s failure to enlist the help of the New Jerseyans was not so strange after all.
Without reinforcements, Tupper and his men then set off again, arriving at about two the following morning at Spermaceti Cove, a sheltered embayment near the base of Sandy Hook that derived its exotic name in 1668 after a sperm whale washed ashore there. Tupper waited until late that evening to begin the nearly four-mile march to the lighthouse over the dunes and through the dense cedar forest, moving very slowly so as to keep quiet and not alarm the enemy. The men were in “high spirits,” the soldier Solomon Nash later recalled, and they made it to within about 450 feet of their target at about four on June 21, undetected by the British. While his men formed ranks on the slope of a small hill, and primed their fieldpieces, Tupper and one of his officers strode to the lighthouse and demanded to speak with the commanding officer, his plan being to persuade the British to surrender. Tupper had barely made this request before the sentry began shooting, only narrowly missing the Americans, who quickly retreated back to their party.
Tupper ordered the “artillery to play,” launching twenty-one cannonballs at the lighthouse, but its walls were so thick and strong that the rounds made “no impression.” At the same time Tupper’s men exchanged fire with the marines guarding the lighthouse, while two British warships lying offshore unloaded their guns on the Americans. Frustrated by his failure to damage the lighthouse, Tupper ordered his men to move closer to the ships in the hope of drawing the British onto the shore to fight, but he found that he “could not provoke them.” Despite the fact that this battle lasted roughly two and a half hours, and much of it was fought during the dawn’s early light, only two of Tupper’s men were hit, and their wounds were minor. And it appears that there were no British casualties.
After this anticlimactic encounter, the Americans returned to their camp on the other side of the cedar forest, where Tupper wrote Washington a letter in which he claimed that the heavy force waiting to meet him was proof that the British had been warned of his coming. Tupper also pledged to renew the attack that evening, but instead he returned to Perth Amboy to regroup. It was just as well, since when Washington finally received the letter, only one day later, on June 22, he immediately wrote back ordering Tupper to “desist from the enterprise, as it seemed dangerous and no[t] to promise success.”
Engraving of General George Washington, circa 1777.
Penning those words must have pained Washington, who had been anticipating a victory. Only the day before, eighty-three men, including three officers, had paraded on his orders before Assistant Quartermaster General Hugh Hughes at army headquarters in New York City. They had provisions, arms, and ammunition to last seven days, and their mission was to reinforce Tupper’s troops on Sandy Hook. When Washington learned of Tupper’s failure, however, the mission was canceled.
WHILE TUPPER’S MEN and the British were firing away at one another, a formidable British fleet, a veritable armada, was at sea, heading from Halifax to New York, with orders to rendezvous at Sandy Hook. It arrived on June 29. The New-York Journal reported that perhaps as many as 130 British ships had anchored inside the Hook, and that they had been “sent out by the tyrants of Great Britain” who had destroyed “the English constitution here, on the pious design of enslaving the British colonies and plundering their property at pleasure, or murdering them at once, and taking possession of all.” Less than a week later the undeclared war became a real one when the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4. John Adams, who had long advocated breaking free of Britain, joyously proclaimed, “We are in the very midst of a revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of nations.”
To consolidate their hold on Sandy Hook, the British added to their defenses around the lighthouse and stationed additional warships nearby. In subsequent years the Americans repeatedly attacked the British forces at Sandy Hook without success. During this time the Hook became a magnet for loyalists, as well as runaway slaves who were lured by the promise of freedom in exchange for enlisting in the British army. The temporary settlement that grew up in the penumbra of the lighthouse was called Refugee Town, and the lighthouse acquired the moniker Refugee Tower. From this crude outpost, the motley band of refugees launched numerous raids into northern New Jersey, terrorizing the local populace and leaving a trail of murdered patriots and burned homes. It wasn’t until Lord Cornwallis surrendered to Washington at Yorktown on October 19, 1781, that the British occupation of the Sandy Hook Lighthouse came to an end, the Refugee Town finally disbanding.
Drawing of Sandy Hook Lighthouse appearing in the August 1, 1790, issue of New-York Magazine.
NOT ALL LIGHTHOUSES FEATURED so dramatically during the War of Independence. Many were used as lookouts to alert the countryside to the arrival and movement of British ships. Other lighthouses were burned. Cape Henlopen’s was, but it is not at all clear who torched it, or when. The most repeated account blames the British. According to this version, the HMS Roebuck, sometime in April 1777, was near Cape Henlopen when the hungry men on board cast a covetous gaze at the cattle grazing around the base of the lighthouse. A party of sailors went ashore to obtain a few cows. The only problem was that the bovines belonged to the lighthouse keeper, a Mr. Hedgecock, and when the British asked him if he could spare a few, the scrappy keeper reportedly said, “I’ll give you no cows, but if you don’t get out I’ll give you some bullets!”
This ultimatum sent the sailors scurrying back to the Roebuck to get instructions from their commanding officer, who ordered them to return, this time in greater numbers to get the job done. Hedgecock, who saw the longboats heading for the beach, grabbed his valuables and rushed into the woods, herding his cattle before him. When the sailors arrived only to see that their dinner had disappeared, they turned their wrath on the lighthouse, smashing the lantern room and burning the stairs.
It’s a wonderful story, but most likely apocryphal. For one thing the Roebuck’s log has no record of the event, and such an action would almost certainly have merited at least a mention. It is also hard to believe that hardened British marines, who despised the American rebels, would have been so intimidated by a saucy lighthouse keeper. Instead it is far more likely that they would have given him the butt end of their muskets, or even shot him, before in workmanlike fashion taking what they wanted.
View of the Cape Henlopen Lighthouse, seen from the sea, 1780.
If cows and a cheeky keeper were not involved, then how did it happen? Some argue that Hedgecock accidentally burned the lighthouse and blamed it on the British. Others claim that the Roebuck—at a later date—or some other unidentified British warship was responsible. Whatever actually transpired, the lighthouse, after the fire, remained dark for the duration of the war.
While the culprit at Cape Henlopen remains a mystery, there is no doubt about who burned the Beavertail Lighthouse two years later. On October 24, 1779, after occupying Newport for nearly three years, British forces departed, but just before leaving they set fire to the lighthouse’s wooden stairs and landings. The extreme heat shocked the masonry so badly that nearly twenty-five years later the badly damaged lighthouse still leaked during storms despite heroic efforts to make the walls tight again.
THE TREATY OF PARIS, which was signed on September 3, 1783, officially ended the Revolutionary War and rescued America’s lighthouses from being used as pawns. But how the newly formed United States would organize itself and make its way in the world was yet to be determined. There was, however, no doubt that lighthouses would have a critically important role to play. They had contributed to the colonies’ economic vitality, and they would now do the same for the new nation.