The Cannonball That Outlasted the Empire That Fired It: A 250th Anniversary Story from Jersey City

Eighteen years ago, I was doing some landscaping in the backyard of my previous Jersey City brownstone, leveling it out with my friend and fellow artist Tom O'Flynn, when we pulled something out of the dirt that had us both scratching our heads. It was a heavily corroded chunk of iron. Our first thought was that it was a piece of an old ornate gate, or perhaps a shot put, and then we both sort of looked at each other and said, "could that be a cannonball?"

                        

The crude hunk of iron, as found in 2008

 

Instinctively, both Tom and I knew New Jersey didn't see any Civil War battles, so we were pretty convinced it was from the Revolutionary War. Most of us know the Hudson River waterfront played a huge role in the Revolution, but I never realized just how much history happened right under our feet. For seven years straight, this exact stretch of riverbank was a tense, dangerous war zone.

Right where the Billykirk studio sits today, people lived through a chaotic blur of deafening cannon fire from British warships, constant gunpowder smoke, and real blood spilled during the unyielding British raids along the shore. I was also surprised to learn how that whole story connected our coastal marshes to the hidden ironworks in the hills just to the west, and the improbable Great Chain the Americans stretched across the river at West Point. Discovering what really happened right under our feet completely changed how I look at my local history.

Soon after it was unearthed, I did some research and discovered it weighed 12 pounds, which ruled out a shot put and pointed toward something far more significant. I reached out to the New Jersey Historical Society, and the representative immediately focused on two things: the cannonball's weight and exactly where I lived.

My former home at Pacific and Communipaw Avenues sits about 1.5 miles from today's shoreline at Liberty State Park, in what was then called Bergen Town during the Revolutionary War. In the 1770s, however, the Hudson River shoreline ran much closer, likely only a quarter mile from my old house, with most of the surrounding land being tidal marsh and wetlands that formed the edges of Communipaw Cove. A 12-pound cannon of that era could easily reach that distance. Once the representative knew those details, he said it very well could have been fired by a British ship patrolling the cove, or possibly from Paulus Hook itself, which the British held from 1776 to 1783.

The cannonball rests on a stacked veg-tan leather base made at the Billykirk studio a few blocks from City Hall. Photo by @jbrophoto

 

The Fort That Controlled Everything

To see why so much cannon fire fell across this stretch of New Jersey shoreline, you have to understand Paulus Hook, which is now a highly desirable historic neighborhood in Downtown Jersey City located right on the Hudson River waterfront.

The cannonball that landed in my backyard was fired when Paulus Hook was just a peninsula that, at high tide, essentially became an island, accessible only by a single embankment through the surrounding salt marshes. It sat less than a mile across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan, directly along the main stage route connecting New York to Philadelphia. In other words, whoever held Paulus Hook held the corridor between the two most important cities in the colonies.

In the spring of 1776, American General William Alexander, known as Lord Stirling, ordered a fort built there on Washington's instructions. On July 12, 1776, just eight days after the Declaration of Independence was signed, that American fort joined a chain of batteries at Red Hook, Governors Island, and the Battery in firing on the British warships HMS Phoenix and HMS Rose as the two ships ran up the Hudson. It was one of the first major artillery exchanges of the New York campaign, though the American gunners did little real damage that day.

It would not be the last exchange. After the devastating American defeat at the Battle of Long Island in August 1776, the British turned their attention toward securing the New Jersey shore as well. Facing the threat of being cut off and overwhelmed, American patriots abandoned Paulus Hook on September 23, 1776, and the British occupied it soon after, marking the first piece of New Jersey territory in British hands. It would remain that way for the rest of the war, nearly seven full years.

What the British Built There

The British did not simply hold Paulus Hook, they transformed it into one of the strongest positions in North America.

The fort the Americans abandoned in September 1776 was small and unfinished, never built up to its full potential before the British arrived. Once they took it, the British spent the next several years turning it into a formidable fortification. They cut a moat across the neck of the peninsula. A single drawbridge spanned it, the fort's only landward entrance. Beyond it stood a dense barrier of felled trees, their sharpened branches facing outward. Within the walls stood blockhouses, a powder magazine, and cannon emplacements covering the river and the surrounding countryside.

For most of the occupation, the fort was held by some 200 Loyalist troops, an "invalid" regiment under Lieutenant Colonel Abraham Van Buskirk. By the time of the Americans' 1779 raid, the garrison also included a detachment of the British 64th Regiment under Major William Sutherland, along with a company of Hessian soldiers rushed over from New York as reinforcements that very night. Paulus Hook remained the most heavily fortified piece of New Jersey soil in British hands for nearly seven years, until they finally evacuated on November 22, 1783.

Whether it was fired from a British gunboat patrolling the cove, from the guns of the Phoenix or Rose as they ran upriver, or from the fort itself during one of its many exchanges across the water, the cannonball that ended up in my backyard is a small, solid piece of that history, one shot among the many fired around Communipaw Cove during the seven years New Jersey's most strategic foothold sat in British hands.

The Ships That May Have Fired It

When I started digging into all the British ships patrolling these waters, I uncovered a massive fleet.

Cross-referencing General Washington's wartime correspondence turned up some useful info: a letter dated July 12, 1776, discusses Paulus Hook directly in the context of British ships firing on the position, and closes with an urgent appeal to Congress for musket powder, lead, and cannonballs of various sizes.

For the naval side of the story, I turned to Ryan Cole, a Billykirk customer, historian and the author of Light-Horse Harry Lee: The Rise and Fall of a Revolutionary Hero, who has spent years working directly with British ships' logs from this period. Cole identified the master log of HMS Roebuck, dated September 23, 1776, documenting the vessel anchoring off Paulus Hook and opening fire, the exact date the British took the fort. He also found references to HMS Tartar, HMS Emerald, and HMS Carcass taking position at Paulus Hook that same day, along with additional Paulus Hook references in the master log of HMS Eagle, Admiral Lord Howe's flagship. Period maps of the Battle of Long Island corroborate this, marking the Roebuck's position at the foreshore of Paulus Hook with the notation "Roebuck on the 23 Sept."

The Roebuck is, by this evidence, the most probable source. The ship carried 12-pound cannons, matching the weight of my cannonball exactly.

But the Roebuck had plenty of company. HMS Phoenix, a 44-gun fifth-rate ship of the same class, fired on American positions at Red Hook, Governors Island, and Paulus Hook on July 12, 1776, while running up the Hudson, and carried 12-pound guns on her upper deck. HMS Tartar joined Roebuck and Phoenix in a sustained, ninety-minute engagement on the Hudson on October 9, 1776, forcing a passage upriver while exchanging fire with Forts Washington and Lee; as a 28-gun frigate, Tartar likely carried 9- or 12-pound guns as her main armament. And the Eagle, as Howe's flagship, would have carried 12-pounders among her secondary battery.

By the middle of 1776, by Cole's account, thirty British warships carrying 824 cannons were concentrated in New York Harbor alone. Add to that the cannon batteries of the Paulus Hook garrison itself, pointed across the river for the better part of seven years, and the volume of iron moving through this stretch of water becomes almost impossible to picture. That a single 12-pound cannonball survived in the soil near Communipaw Cove is, against those numbers, less surprising than it first seems.

American Iron, British Cannonball

At the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, the American colonies were producing roughly 15 percent of the world's iron supply, making them the world's third-largest iron producer and putting them ahead of England itself. Britain had passed the Iron Act of 1750 specifically to limit what colonial foundries could produce, trying to keep American industry subordinate to British manufacturing. That restriction helped push ironmasters straight toward the Patriot cause. Pennsylvania's George Taylor, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was himself an ironmaster whose Durham Furnace supplied ordnance to the Continental Army, and he was far from the only signer with ties to the iron trade.

The Ringwood Ironworks in Bergen County, just about 30 miles from Paulus Hook, produced munitions for the Continental Army throughout the Revolution. Its ironmaster, Robert Erskine, sided firmly with the Patriots. Washington visited Ringwood multiple times over the course of the war. Not far away, the Sterling Iron Works in Warwick, New York, just across the New Jersey line, forged the Great Chain itself, the massive iron barrier stretched across the Hudson at West Point to stop British ships from sailing north. Before the war, its owner Peter Townsend, who came from a Quaker family with deep roots in the region, had been making anchors and cast iron goods for the colonies. He had almost certainly been operating an illegal steel furnace in secret, in direct violation of the Iron Act of 1750.

The British law meant to suppress American iron production ended up supplying the forge that blocked the British Navy. Ringwood's contribution was equally vital: its forges produced the heavy log boom installed in front of that chain, the first line of defense against any British ships attempting to breach it. There is some irony to all of this. Sterling and Ringwood, two ironworks built to forge basic colonial tools, were suddenly repurposed to stop the British Navy from sailing north and cutting New England off from the rest of the colonies.

Then there were the Loyalist ironmasters. William Allen and Joseph Turner, prominent Philadelphia merchants, had established both the Andover Iron Works in Sussex County and the Union Iron Works in Hunterdon County. As the war pushed on the Allen family and their business partner Turner toward the Crown, their foundries were confiscated by the Continental Congress in January 1778 and repurposed to produce munitions for the American cause.

Just a short distance away in Hamburg Borough, things weren't quite as they seemed. Joseph Sharp's Iron Works sat just up the road from Andover, but unlike its neighbor, it was never confiscated. Instead, its wartime operator, Stephen Ford, was a covert Loyalist. Right under the noses of his Patriot neighbors, Ford quietly manufactured cannonballs for the British Army. In reality, the deception of the war ran straight through New Jersey's iron country, dividing it foundry by foundry and family by family.

Though I will never know the exact origin of my backyard cannonball, one thing that struck me after learning about the various Patriot and Loyalist foundries was the possibility that it was cast from New Jersey ore in a Loyalist-owned foundry and later fired by the British against the very soil it was pulled from. Unfortunately, while intriguing, it is doubtful, considering that by 1778 most ironworks, especially those closer to northern New Jersey, were under American control. Therefore, the more likely scenario is that the cannonball was simply standard British ordnance, forged in England and shipped over with the fleet. Either way, this 12-pound cannonball stands as a tangible reminder of just how complex and layered New Jersey's Revolutionary War history really was.

The Powder Behind the Ball

The deeper I dug into this history, the more I kept finding things that surprised me, things that had been quietly buried, not unlike the cannonball itself. One of the most startling was this: a cannonball is only as good as the black powder behind it. Without the powder charge, it's dead weight sitting in the barrel. And in 1776, Washington's army was desperately, dangerously short of it.

What I didn't know, and what I suspect many Americans don't know either, is that Washington's army got through some of its darkest days because of a secret French supply operation organized by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais and Silas Deane. Long before France officially became our ally, they arranged for shiploads of gunpowder, muskets, cannons, clothing, and other military supplies to reach the Continental Army. Most of us learn about the French alliance after Saratoga in school, but the secret support that came first, and the men who made it possible, often gets only a brief mention, if it's mentioned at all. Perhaps that's because the young republic preferred a founding story built on American grit and self-reliance rather than one that gave equal credit to the French assistance that helped keep the Continental Army alive.

The man who made it happen was a French playwright.

Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, best known today as the author of The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro, was also a watchmaker, spy, diplomat, and one of the most consequential arms dealers in American history. In 1776, with the backing of King Louis XVI and the French Foreign Minister, he set up a shell company called Roderigue Hortalez et Compagnie, a fictitious private trading firm built to secretly move French and Spanish military supplies to the American rebels while keeping France out of an open war with Britain. Through it he put together a fleet of forty ships and loaded over 200 bronze cannon into their holds, along with hundreds of thousands of musket flints, thousands of muskets, and more than 100 tons of the finest gunpowder in the world. French powder burned cleaner and more completely than anything the British manufactured, and somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of the gunpowder used by American forces at the Battle of Saratoga came through his operation. Without Saratoga, there would have been no French alliance and without the French alliance, the war would almost certainly have been lost.

That gunpowder had its own remarkable story. Antoine Lavoisier, was considered the founder of modern chemistry, who had taken over France's national gunpowder commission in 1775 and within a few years transformed French powder from the worst in Europe to the best. After exhaustive testing he landed on a precise formula: 75 percent saltpeter, 12.5 percent charcoal, 12.5 percent sulfur. He later said of the supply that reached America: "It can truthfully be said that it is to those supplies that North America owes its freedom." One of Lavoisier's students was a young Frenchman named Eleuthère Irénée du Pont, who took everything his mentor had taught him about gunpowder chemistry to America in 1802 and built a powder mill in the Brandywine Valley in Delaware. That mill became the DuPont Company. 

Lavoisier himself never lived to see it. During the French Revolution, despite being one of the greatest scientific minds of the eighteenth century, he was condemned not for his science but because he had served as a member of the Ferme générale, the deeply unpopular tax-farming system of the old regime. His extraordinary contributions counted for nothing once the political winds shifted. He was guillotined in 1794, never knowing that the chemistry he had perfected would help secure American independence and later become the foundation of DuPont, one of America's most consequential industrial companies.

And the proof of all this isn't tucked into some obscure footnote, even if the role these men played has largely been left out of the story we've long told about the American Revolution. It's sitting on a hilltop less than four miles from where I found my cannonball. Just up the Hudson waterfront in Hoboken, the Stevens Institute of Technology campus at Castle Point is home to a French bronze cannon, heavily patinated with age, cast in Strasbourg in 1758, that arrived in America on April 20, 1777, aboard the ship L'Amphitrite, one of Beaumarchais’s fleet. Workers unearthed it during construction in 1888. French royal markings were still visible on the barrel, including the Latin inscription “Ultima Ratio Regum,” the Last Argument of Kings. A sister cannon from the same shipment shows up in John Trumbull's famous painting of the Surrender of Burgoyne at Saratoga, hanging in the US Capitol Rotunda today. The French cannon that came to America through Beaumarchais's covert supply network is commemorated at the heart of American democracy, while the man who made its journey possible never got so much as a thank you note.

The American working with Beaumarchais on the ground in Paris was a Connecticut merchant and diplomat named Silas Deane, sent by the Continental Congress as one of its first foreign envoys alongside Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee. Deane negotiated the supply arrangements, helped bring Lafayette, von Steuben, and Pulaski into the Continental Army, and did much of the legwork that led to the formal French alliance of 1778. By March 1777, his determination had put more than a thousand barrels of gunpowder, 52 cannon, and 12,000 muskets on ships headed for American ports. Neither he nor Beaumarchais was ever properly thanked, and politics had a great deal to do with it.

Giving Beaumarchais and Deane their due would have meant acknowledging just how indebted the Revolution was to a covert French supply network organized in large part by Beaumarchais, a playwright who never set foot in America. Instead, their names slowly faded from the story most Americans came to know.

Beaumarchais spent years trying to recover what he had advanced from his own pocket. He died in 1799 without a word of recognition from the United States. By modern estimates, he advanced the equivalent of billions in supplies to the American war effort and received only a fraction in return.

Deane's end was even worse. In 1778 he was recalled to Philadelphia on charges of financial misconduct pushed by a political rival. He spent years trying to clear his name before a Congress that wouldn't give him a fair hearing. He ended up broke and exiled in Europe. In 1789, on a voyage back to America, he fell ill shortly after leaving England and died before the ship had cleared the Channel. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Deal, England. In 1841, more than fifty years after his death, Congress revisited the handling of his accounts and acknowledged that the original audit had been unjust. His granddaughter spent years pressing the case from abroad, and because of her efforts Deane's heirs were eventually paid approximately $37,000.

What happened to all three of them is one of the more quietly damning chapters in American history. Beaumarchais and Deane were actively pushed aside by the country they helped save. Lavoisier was guillotined by his own, and the student who carried his chemistry to America had originally planned to call his powder mill Lavoisier Mills out of respect for his mentor, but renamed it Eleutherian Mills instead, in honor of freedom, as a tribute to the political refugees who had fled to America to escape the same revolution that killed Lavoisier.

And for all the fireworks bursting over the Hudson every July 4th, powered by the same basic chemistry that loaded every cannon in this story, here's the part that almost never gets told: that iron ball sitting in a glass case at Jersey City City Hall was almost certainly propelled by British powder, while just a few miles away, French powder from Beaumarchais's fleet was one of the decisive factors that stood between a free nation and the end of the American experiment as we know it.

Light Horse Harry Lee

Despite all the fortifications, Paulus Hook was not entirely impenetrable. On the night of August 18, 1779, a 23-year-old Princeton graduate named Major Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee led roughly 400 men on a march of about fifteen miles, setting out from New Bridge and crossing the Hackensack River before turning south toward the fort.

The approach was brutal. Delays and wrong turns in the dark meant the attack, planned for midnight, didn't begin until after 3 a.m., and Lee ended up making the assault with only about half the men he'd started with, the rest having gotten lost along the way. Soaked from wading through the marshes surrounding the fort, their gunpowder useless, Lee's men fought with bayonets alone. They overran the fort, took 158 prisoners, and suffered only two killed and three wounded. Lee had planned to burn the barracks but held off when he found sick soldiers, women, and children quartered inside, writing to Washington afterward, "I intended to have burnt the Barracks, but on finding a Number of sick Soldiers and Women with young Children in them, humanity forbad the Execution of my intention." They marched out before daylight, and made it back to New Bridge by 1 p.m., still holding every one of their prisoners after a 23-hour, roughly 30-mile operation.

Lee showed a lot of grit and humanity on the battlefield, but he didn't get much of it from his fellow officers. When Light Horse Harry Lee won his legendary victory at Paulus Hook, Congress awarded him a rare gold medal along with fifteen thousand dollars to be split among the men who took part, making him the only non-general officer to receive that honor during the entire war. However, his fellow officers were furious. Driven by pure jealousy over Lee's rapid rise and his close relationship with George Washington, they dragged him through a petty court-martial on charges of misconduct, insubordination, and retreating too early. Lee was eventually acquitted with honor, but it showed how quickly the high-stakes pressure of the war could turn Patriots against each other.

The British, however, kept the fort, and the cannon batteries kept firing. It wasn't until November 22, 1783, that the British finally lowered their flag at Paulus Hook, three days before they did the same in New York City. It was one of the last British military posts evacuated in North America. Lee's legacy extended well beyond that night. He returned to Virginia after the war, served as governor, and later wrote the famous eulogy describing George Washington as "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." His son, born in Virginia in 1807, grew up to command Confederate forces as General Robert E. Lee.

And here in Jersey City, the raid itself left its mark. The Light Horse Tavern, just blocks from where Lee's men stormed the British fort, sits on ground that was once part of the fort's grounds itself, and was named in Lee's honor by founders Bill Gray and Ron Smith in 2002, after they restored the building, an 1850s structure that had once served as a Prohibition-era speakeasy. Inside, a portrait of Lee watches over oak-plank floors, pressed-tin ceilings, and a long mahogany bar. It's a great place to raise a pint to one of Jersey City's most daring moments, and well worth a visit for anyone with an appreciation for the history beneath their feet.

The Cannonball Today

In 2022, I had the chance to meet up with then-Mayor of Jersey City Steven Fulop. Together, along with Christine Goodman, Director of the Office of Cultural Affairs, and Greg Brickey, Visual Arts Curator, we arranged for the cannonball to be put on public display at Jersey City City Hall, where it sits today in a proper glass-lit pedestal on the second floor alongside the desk of Frank Hague, the notorious boss mayor who ruled Jersey City from 1917 to 1947.

                              Christine Goodman, Steven Fulop, Chris Bray, and Greg Brickey. Photo by @jbrophoto

It doesn't look like much, just a dark, pitted ball of iron sitting in a glass case on the second floor of Jersey City City Hall. But it spent more than two centuries buried beneath a city most people think of as little more than the view across the river from Manhattan, and what happened on this shore during those years almost never makes the history books.

As the country marks its 250th anniversary this July 4th, most of the attention will go to Philadelphia and Boston and the battles everyone already knows by name. But the Revolution was also fought right here, on this shore and in these waters.

If you want to see it, stop by Jersey City City Hall. 

It has been waiting a long time to finish its story.