Joseph Steward
MSA SC 3520-17498
Biography:
Joseph Steward enlisted as a private in the First Maryland Regiment's Second Company, commanded by Captain Patrick Sim, in February 1776. After enlisting, Steward and his company traveled to Annapolis, joining five other companies of the regiment that were stationed there; three additional companies were in Baltimore. Commanded by Colonel William Smallwood, the regiment was the first unit of full-time, professional soldiers raised in Maryland for service in the Continental Army. Steward was probably a native of Prince George's County, Maryland, where many of the men in the company were recruited from. [1]
In July, the regiment received orders to march to New York, in order to defend the city from an impending British attack. The Marylanders arrived in New York in early August, where they joined with the rest of the Continental Army, commanded by General George Washington. On August 27, 1776, the Americans faced the British Army at the Battle of Brooklyn (sometimes called the Battle of Long Island), the first full-scale engagement of the war. The battle was a rout: the British were able to sneak around the American lines, and the outflanked Americans fled in disarray.
During the retreat, the Maryland troops fought their way towards the American fortifications, but were blocked by the swampy Gowanus Creek. Half the regiment, including the Second Company, was able to cross the creek and escape the battle. However, the rest were unable to do so before they were attacked by the British. Facing down a much larger, better-trained force, this group of soldiers, today called the "Maryland 400," mounted a series of daring charges, which held the British at bay for some time, at the cost of many lives, before being overrun. They took enormous casualties, with some companies losing nearly 80 percent of their men, but their actions delayed the British long enough for the rest of the Continental Army to escape. In all, the First Maryland lost 256 men, killed or taken prisoner. [2]
It is likely that Steward survived that battle, like most of the men in his company, and continued to serve with the Marylanders that fall, although no official record describes his fate. However, a soldier in another Maryland unit, who knew Steward from Prince George's County, recalled seeing Steward killed in combat. Moses Gill was a member of John Hawkins Lowe's company of the Flying Camp, and when he applied for a Federal veteran's pension in the 1830s, he described Steward's death:
One Circumstance is still fresh in memory. A man by the name of Joseph Steward foolishly attempted to stop a cannon ball which was rolling by him and got his leg broke. He begged not to be left on the field and two men took him up to carry him--but they had not proceeded far before another cannonball passed between the men carrying him and cut the wounded man in two. [3]
Gill's account of his service is a bit vague in places, a fact which serves to emphasize just how clearly he remembered Steward's death more than fifty years later. It also makes it difficult to say with certainty which battle Steward was killed at, but there is a good possibility that it was the Battle of Harlem Heights on September 16, 1776. Gill's company took part in the fight, and his captain was wounded there. He described fighting in a battle that appears to fit with Harlem Heights, although he thought it happened in Pennsylvania, not New York. Gill also listed the names of six men he served with, "all of us from the same neighborhood" in Maryland. Two of them were in Lowe's company with him, and three were in the First Maryland Regiment: Steward and John Lindsay, who were both in the Second Company, and Zechariah Welling, from the Third. [4]
No other documentation exists of Steward's life, and nothing more is known about him. But while he disappeared from official records, he remained in the memory of his comrade for the rest of his life.
Owen Lourie, 2017
Notes:
1. Muster Rolls and Other Records of Service of Maryland Troops in the American Revolution. Archives of Maryland Online, vol. 18, p. 8; Pension of Moses Gill. National Archives, Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty Land-Warrant Application Files, S 16823, from Fold3.com.
2. Return of the Maryland troops, 27 September 1776, from Fold3.com; Mark Andrew Tacyn "'To the End:' The First Maryland Regiment and the American Revolution" (PhD diss., University of Maryland College Park, 1999), 48-73. For more on the experience of the Marylanders at the Battle of Brooklyn, see "In Their Own Words," on the Maryland State Archives research blog, Finding the Maryland 400.
3. Gill pension. There are no other records of Gill's military service, which is unfortunate, but not particularly odd, especially for a member of the Flying Camp.
4. Gill pension; Reiman Steuart, The Maryland Line (The Society of the Cincinnati, 1971), 106. The unit of the sixth soldier is unknown. Gill gave his name as John Eaglin, which does not appear in any records. A man named John Edelin, however, served in the Second Company with Steward.
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