Archives of Maryland
(Biographical Series)

James Marle
MSA SC 3520-16787 

Biography:

James Marle (or Marl) joined the Continental Army in 1776 while very young. He was born in 1763 and was only thirteen at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, but he joined the Continental Army nonetheless; he enlisted “as a fifer, or rather to learn to play the fife, . . . [but] being well grown (for a boy of his age) he was soon made to carry a musket, and served all the time as a private soldier, not as a musician.”[1] However, Marle’s path did not end with success for the former soldier. After leaving Maryland, he ended up homeless and living in a Virginia shelter. The story of James Marle illustrates one harsh reality of life after the war for many migrating veterans.

Growing up in the area of Baltimore County, he experienced a situation similar to that of Samuel and William McMillan. In the period before the outbreak of the Revolution, the Chesapeake region was heavily dependent on tobacco grown on the plantations of wealthy landowners. The free male population in Baltimore County numbered 3,733 in 1771, and only about forty percent of this number owned land in the colony, an amount that was steadily decreasing.[2] A large majority of the other sixty percent lived as tenants on rented land. Tenancy was not an easy thing to escape, and it continued to be prominent in the Chesapeake region as westward expansion proceeded apace.[3] Land ownership did not often follow tenancy, for the practice commonly trapped the tenant into long-term agreements that left little opportunity to escape. This being the case, it is possible that Marle was never able to own land for himself, but rather remained a landless member of American society.

After being handed a musket instead of a fife, James Marle marched with the Fifth Company of the First Maryland Regiment to Philadelphia and subsequently New York, serving as a member of the Maryland Line. Marle fought at the Battle of Brooklyn  (also called the Battle of Long Island) in August and in the Battle of White Plains in October before returning to Baltimore with his company in December of 1776. Though these battles were high in casualties for the Continental Army--and the Marylanders took especially heavy losses--and he saw a man killed at his side, Marle himself escaped injury. It was upon the regiment’s return to Baltimore in 1778 that his stepfather supplied a substitute and Marle was discharged from service by his colonel, Mordecai Gist. He only received pay for two months of his service, foreshadowing a trend of financial difficulty that would continue.[4]

An incident that may give some insight into Marle’s financial situation occurred after he had served in the First Maryland Regiment for two years: his stepfather hired a substitute and removed the young man from service.[5] Unfortunately, his stepfather’s name was never recorded, making it difficult to determine whether or not he owned land or was wealthy by other means. The fact that it took two years for a substitute to be acquired suggests that Marle’s family may have had to save money until they could afford one, though other factors may have been involved. Also, the surname Marle never appears in the records for Baltimore County, his place of enlistment, implying that his biological father was not wealthy. This financial background was likely a factor that caused Marle to leave Maryland after the Revolutionary War, but he ended up in a worse situation than he had ever been in before the move.

Upon his discharge, James Marle stayed in Annapolis and served in a company of the Anne Arundel militia, but he did not encounter much action. As stated in his pension, “he continued in this service until after the close of the war but was called out but once, only for a short time, when they took some Tories (as prisoners) on the Chesapeake Bay.”[6] Due to his age at enlistment, Marle was still a young man at twenty years old when the war formally ended in 1783, and he remained in Annapolis for a few years after its end. He eventually relocated to Baltimore County and stayed there for a few years before moving to Loudoun County, Virginia, around 1813.[7]

The approximate year of his emigration, 1813, is interesting because it was in the middle of the War of 1812. Marle would have been about forty years old at this time, so he was likely too old to be wanted for the service. The threat of British invasion caused a number of Anne Arundel residents to flee around that time, and this may have factored in his relocation.[8] If he left in 1815, he would have fallen into the wave of migration that swept the eastern states that year, after the War of 1812 ended. This mass movement was due in large part to the defeat of the British and their native allies and the removal of the British from the west; the frontier was once again open for expansion. Marle is the only veteran in this study to have moved during the nineteenth century, though it is estimated that fifty percent of the population moved at least once per decade during that span.[9] It is unclear why he waited so long to leave Maryland, but being older at the time may have hampered his ability to find success after relocating.

It is possible that Marle had some financial success after his migration, but this is unlikely. Loudoun County had one of the highest rates of tenancy in the state of Virginia after the Revolutionary War; it was not a land of opportunity like western Pennsylvania had been for McMillan, and Marle likely remained in a similar situation his first few years there as he had previously experienced in Maryland.[10] Even if he did manage to achieve some success, it did not last. He fell upon hard times and by 1833 was living in a poor house while suffering from what he termed affliction. His memory remained strong despite his troubles, for in 1839, more than fifty-five years after the end of the Revolutionary War and around twenty-five years since he had last seen any man he had served with, he was able to recall the names of his captain, lieutenant, first sergeant, two of his corporals, and two other privates in his company.[11]

Based on where he ended up, he may have been in search of something other than land; as previously stated, Loudoun had a similar shortage of real estate to Maryland in the post-war period. Because he enlisted in the militia after his family supplied a substitute for him, it is possible that Marle was not willingly removed from the Continental Army and did not support his family’s decision. He was about fifteen at the time the substitute was supplied, an age not uncommon for rebellious attitudes. Adding to this is the fact that he enlisted in the militia of Annapolis even though his family was from Baltimore. Perhaps he left the state for the opportunity, not of financial improvement, but to escape his family.

Although he could remember his service with such detail, his application for a pension was denied due to lack of documentary evidence. Marle’s struggle to obtain a pension was not an uncommon obstacle for veterans of the Revolution. His case was one of the more unfortunate, though, for he was truly in need and not simply trying to add to his income as some others did. While the first Pension Act was passed in 1818 and a number of others were added every few years after, Marle did not submit an application for assistance until 1839 because he did not know anyone who could attest to the truth of his service. The pension office was unable to find any record of his service and most records for his company no longer exist, but several of the names he mentioned in his deposition could be confirmed through other means, indicating that his story was true.[12]

The struggle of veterans to obtain federal pensions was caused by a number of factors, one being public opinion. In the years following the end of the Revolution, the opinion of the former soldiers was very low; most Americans remembered the conflict as a people’s war won by a determined citizenry, and the members of the Continental Army were viewed as lower-class citizens who could not compare to the devoted militiamen. After the turn of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the War of 1812, this sentiment began to change. The Revolutionary War’s veterans were transformed into heroes of the war who embodied the American spirit in the public’s eyes. Their heroic efforts in the previous war inspired the country in the one that had just begun, and they were treated with respect and admiration. However, the early struggles and defeats that the United States’ forces encountered in the War of 1812 diminished some of this sentiment until the war had ended. A large number of citizens and delegates supported legislation for veteran benefits by 1816, but it was not until 1818 that the Pension Bill was passed.[13]

Another problem arose after the bill’s passage. Despite anticipating fraudulent applications and setting up a system to prevent their approval, the Pension Office was quickly overwhelmed by the number of applicants and the ensuing corruption. This resulted in an overhaul of the system, and new regulations were instituted that made the process more secure than it had been. Even so, acquiring a pension was not an extremely difficult task provided that the applicant had sufficient evidence: a veteran who no longer possessed their discharge papers, such as James Marle, was required to supply depositions from two witnesses admitting the truth of his service along with a magistrate’s statement attesting to these witnesses’ credibility.[14]

Unfortunately for Marle, he was not in contact with anyone who knew of his service by 1818 and did not have the means to find them. He could only supply one witness, but he mentioned several of his fellow soldiers who, he claimed, could testify to his service if they were found.[15] These circumstances likely contributed to his delay in applying, and they ultimately resulted in his application’s rejection.

It is very possible that Marle died in the same state of poverty that he was in when he applied for a pension. There is no record of him ever having started a family, and he did not mention one in his application. This sad conclusion reveals that, while emigrating from Maryland could lead to improved circumstances, the opposite result was also a possibility. His lack of success makes it difficult to determine why he left Maryland and little record of his situation exists from before the war, but it is clear that his move did not achieve its desired effect. Whatever new opportunity he was looking for, Marle did not find it.

Jeffrey Truitt, 2014.

Notes:

1. Pension of James Marle, The National Archives, Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty-Land Warrant Application Files, NARA M804, R 6908, 6, from Fold3.com.

2. David Curtis Skaggs, “Maryland's Impulse toward Social Revolution: 1750-1776,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 54, No. 4 (Organization of American Historians, 1968), 772. 

3. Thomas J. Humphrey, “Conflicting Independence: Land Tenancy and the American Revolution,” Journal of the Early Republic 28, no. 2 (2008), 163.

4. Pension of James Marle, 6-7.

5. Pension of James Marle, 7.

6.  Pension of James Marle, 7.

7. Pension of James Marle, 7-8.

8. Jane Wilson McWilliams, Annapolis: City on the Severn, a History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 124-126.

9. James W. Oberly, “Westward Who? Estimates of Native White Interstate Migration after the War of 1812,” The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 46 No. 2, (Jun. 1986):431-432.

10. Humphrey, “Conflicting Independence,” 180.

11. Pension of James Marle, 1, 6-11.

12. Pension of James Marle, 6-8.

13. John Resch, Suffering Soldiers: Revolutionary War Veterans, Moral Sentiment, and Political Culture in the Early Republic (Amherst, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 65-77.

14. Resch, Suffering Soldiers, 119-126.

15. Pension of James Marle, 7.

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