He crossed the Delaware with Washington: A Black Revolutionary War soldier is set to be honored in his hometown

Since they were children, cousins Arianna Murray and Jane Fox Long had known the story of Oliver Cromwell. 

His story wasn’t taught in school books. But in New Jersey and across the country, nine generations of his family helped keep it alive.

“We knew that our great-great-great grandfather – I forget how many greats – had crossed the Delaware with Washington,” Fox Long said. “It was the story that my mom had told, and it was also passed down to her.” 

“Every Fourth of July, it was always a conversation piece,” said Murray, from her home in Philadelphia. "How could it not be?"

Cromwell was a decorated hero, they knew, a representative of an American history that had gone unheralded for much of this nation’s lifetime: an African American patriot of the Revolutionary War. 

He was far from alone. Anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 free and enslaved Black soldiers fought for the lofty ideals of equality and liberty promised in the Declaration of Independence. In some Continental brigades, as many as 8% of soldiers were of African descent, according to an audit of forces in 1778. 

“For soldiers of African descent, this was one of their most important routes to, in some cases, freedom from enslavement,” said Philip Mead, historian at Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution. “In probably more cases, it provided access to a political identity and maybe some political rights that they could negotiate based on having made sacrifices for the creation of the nation.”

But that promise wasn't always borne out. Some soldiers of African descent were instead re-enslaved after the war, said Mead. And Black soldiers' sacrifices were sometimes willfully forgotten by the country they helped create.

Though a decorated soldier, Cromwell lies in an unmarked grave in Burlington, New Jersey. For centuries, official commemorations of his service were denied.

But on April 27, Cromwell will receive his due with a ceremony and historical marker from the Daughters of the American Revolution, an organization long charged with honoring Revolutionary War heroes. 

"Original Home of Revolutionary War Soldier, Private Oliver Cromwell," the plaque will read at Cromwell's former home in Burlington, enumerating the many battles in which he took part. "Discharge papers signed by George Washington."

Cromwell's service would stand out, perhaps, among any enlisted soldier in the war. On Christmas of 1776 he'd crossed the Delaware with General Washington, he later recounted to newspaper The Burlington Gazette, and gave spirited chase to Princeton where they “knocked the British about lively.” At Yorktown in 1781, Cromwell told of seeing the last man fall in battle. 

“He lived a long and admirable life. Had he been a little lighter of complexion (he was just half white), every newspaper in the land would have been eloquent in praise of his many virtues,” wrote James McCune Smith, an ardent abolitionist and the first African American to hold a medical degree. 

Cromwell's discharge papers, on file at the Department of Veterans Affairs, bear witness to one of the nation’s early war decorations. “Oliver Cromwell Private has been honored with the Badge of Merit for Six Years Faithful Service,” reads the tattered paper, creased deeply during the long years Cromwell kept it.  

The signature gracing the page is the same one you’ll find on the United States Constitution, elaborated in jagged and loopy script: “G. Washington.” 

That signature on his discharge, Cromwell would later say, was one of his most treasured possessions. “He was very proud, often speaking of it,” Smith wrote.

But he wasn’t able to keep it.  

By 1820, according to his pension application, the sum of the decorated war veteran’s worldly possessions amounted to no more than $10: two iron pots, a tea kettle, four chairs, six plates and knives and forks, a bed and bedding, and the work clothes on his back. At 67 years old, he attested, he was unable to work any longer as a laborer, and had a disabled daughter to care for.

Cromwell reluctantly turned over his prized discharge to a pension agent as proof of service. He would eventually receive an annual war pension of $96 – about $1,600 in today’s money. 

He lived to be nearly 100 years old, the father of at least 14 and a grandfather many times over. An 1856 book by abolitionist William Cooper Nell described him as “a man of strong natural powers – never chewed tobacco nor drank a glass of ardent spirits.”

A reporter for The Burlington Gazette encountered Cromwell at his Burlington home in 1852, the year before his death. The writer described him as an “old colored man, who might be seen, sitting in front of his residence, in East Union street, respectfully raising his hat to those who might be passing by. ... And yet, comparatively few are aware that he is among the survivors of the gallant army who fought for the liberties of our country, ‘in the days which try men’s souls.’”

An obituary printed in the New Jersey Mirror declared him “much respected by the citizens there.”

But monuments to his life and service were difficult to come by.

After his death, the Gazette had petitioned its readers to provide a marker for Cromwell's grave, according to an article in the Trenton Evening Times in 1905. This effort was unsuccessful.

In the same piece, Cromwell's great-grandaughter, Mary McBride, told the Evening Times she had "no inclination to throw the Daughters of the American Revolution into consternation by asserting her honorable right to membership."

In 1914, the postmaster of Burlington wrote the pensions office asking for Cromwell’s documents, saying a “movement was afoot to erect a monument to his memory.” 

Amid the forbidding racial climate of that time, with intensifying segregation under president Woodrow Wilson and the violent rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan the next year, that monument was also never built. 

But finally last year, Murray received an unexpected call from her godmother, Marilyn Knox. A historian from the Daughters of the American Revolution wanted to meet.

“They were inviting us all into membership into the Daughters of the American Revolution,” Murray said. The long-awaited historical marker was also in the works. 

For Murray, it comes as a welcome but bittersweet acknowledgement of a history her family has honored for centuries. 

“I just wish that some of my great aunts and uncles were alive to see this,” she said.

A daunting choice for African Americans during the Revolutionary War

For people of African descent, the Revolutionary War was often a fight not just for liberty, but emancipation.

As the war began, slavery was still legal even in the North. Vermont became the first to abolish the practice in 1777. People of African descent were met with a daunting dilemma, said museum historian Mead.

“They had to face the question: Which side was a better bet toward their own emancipation?” Mead said. 

“On the one side, you have this new nation that espouses all this language of equality and liberty,” he said. “On the other hand, it has done very little to end slavery.” 

Opposing the American revolutionaries was the immense slave-trading empire of Britain, whose representatives issued proclamations offering the protection of the Crown – though not necessarily freedom – to enslaved people who joined British forces.

Anywhere between 10,000 and 30,000 people of African descent took the British up on this offer.

For those who fought for the Continental Army, the sweeping ideals of the American revolutionaries may have had great persuasive pull, Mead said.

“The new country made a lot of lofty promises, in documents like the Declaration of Independence," Mead said. 

Against this backdrop, Cromwell was born on the farm of tavernkeeper John Hutchin on May 24, 1753, in present-day Burlington County, New Jersey, an area whose taverns “Burlington Biographies” author Richard L. Thompson described as a hotbed for American revolutionary sentiment.

Cromwell’s parentage is not known with certainty, but multiple records refer to him as being of mixed race, likely African and white heritage. Late in life, he referred to himself as being “in the family of John Hutchin.” 

Cromwell joined the New Jersey militia in 1775, where he was listed as “Indian,” leading to speculation he may have had Native American heritage. This is far from definitive, said Burlington County historian Jeff Macechak, who noted that other soldiers he believed to be of African descent were also listed the same way. 

In 1777 Cromwell enlisted into the same regiment of the Continental Army as Hutchin, under the command of Captain Lawrie, and served for six years. Combined with his militia experience, this places him in armed service for nearly the entire duration of the conflict – an estimable span in a war whose wealthier participants often enlisted for just a year. 

Throughout his life, he professed pride in his role fighting for the new nation.

Oliver Cromwell commemorated

Though he wasn’t broadly known elsewhere, the citizens of Burlington kept the story of Cromwell going.

Naomi Todd Fox, among the sixth generation of Cromwell’s family in Burlington, kept a book of clippings and obituaries documenting Cromwell’s long family line. 

In 1982, a group of dedicated amateur historians in Burlington began to meet under the name of the Oliver Cromwell Black History Society, hoping to generate awareness of Black historical contributions.

That year in January, photographer Richard Timbers II had attended a city council meeting to ask leaders what they planned to do for Black History Month. He wasn’t particularly satisfied with their answers, he told the Burlington County Times in 1993. But on the steps of City Hall, he learned of Cromwell’s story from historian Nicholas Kamaras. 

“I was almost in tears,” Timbers told the Times, “because, at the time, I was researching my own family’s roots.” 

The Oliver Cromwell Black History Society founded sponsored essay contests and prizes in Cromwell's name. A 2019 mural honors Cromwell alongside other important city figures. So does an unofficial plaque on Cromwell’s former home, installed by homeowner Harry Heck.

One of the Black History Society’s accomplishments, said former president Clayton Sills, is changing the way local war re-enactment groups depicted Continental soldiers, persuading them to also include Indigenous and African American soldiers. 

From its founding in 1890, the Daughters of the American Revolution  was not always as dedicated to the histories of African American patriots, national spokeswoman Bren Larsen acknowledges. 

Looming over the organization is the story of Eleanor Roosevelt, who in 1939 resigned from the DAR when African American opera singer Marian Anderson was not allowed to play at the group’s Constitution Hall.

“The good, bad and the ugly of our history – there's a lot to work through,” said Larsen. “But a lot to also analyze and and celebrate, and to figure out how we can move forward.”

The group admitted its first African American member in 1977, and has since been public about its desire to diversify its membership to include all descendants of Revolutionary patriots. Wilhelmena Rhodes Kelly, head of the New York DAR, became the first African American woman to serve on the group’s board in 2019.

In 2020 the DAR began a project called E Pluribus Unum, continuing a commitment to research and honor Revolutionary soldiers of African and Indigenous descent. That same year, the group placed DAR markers on the gravestones of Black Connecticut soldiers Samuel and Jeruel Phillips. As of last year, at least two of Cromwell’s descendants are members, said DAR's New Jersey state historian Deb Hvizdos.

For Cromwell descendant Arianna Murray, who says she’s pulling together genealogical papers to join the DAR, the historical marker is about the future as much as the past.

“It's a wonderful thing that they're recognizing us now. And there are some wonderful people that are in the organization,” she said. “Do I feel that this adds a huge legitimacy to what I've already known? Not necessarily. But it's wonderful that my son and his children now have this opportunity. Because they are well-aware of who Oliver Cromwell is, and what he contributed to this country's history.”

Follow reporter Matthew Korfhage on Twitter: @matthewkorfhage