Attacked by Native Americans allied with the British on the eve of the patriots’ victory at the Battle of Saratoga, McCrea was quickly transformed into a martyr. Her story became one of the most effective examples of propaganda during the American Revolution, cited as a cautionary tale of wartime atrocities sanctioned by the British. McCrea loomed large in the public imagination despite the fact that she was just one of many civilian victims of the war.
In the 19th century, McCrea’s death was weaponized once again, with portrayals of her as a helpless, innocent white woman killed by Native warriors powering vehement anti-Indigenous sentiment.
“She became a useful tool. She became a saint, you might say, of the Revolution,” says Paul Staiti, an art historian at Mount Holyoke College and the author of The Killing of Jane McCrea: An American Tragedy on the Revolutionary Frontier. “People felt as though they could feel her fear, feel her death, feel her love for her fiancé. Underlying all of that was the sense that American leaders can’t let this happen to white families ever again, this in spite of the fact that white Americans were just as vicious to Native Americans.”
Historians don’t know much about McCrea’s life. Of Scottish and Irish ancestry, she was born in New Jersey around 1752. The daughter of a Presbyterian minister, she relocated in the early 1770s to New York, where she lived with her older brother and his family.
At the time of her death, McCrea was reportedly in a romantic relationship with David Jones, a colonist who’d enlisted in the British Army shortly after the Revolution began. McCrea’s older brother, meanwhile, fought for the patriot cause. Of her ten other siblings, some were loyalists and others patriots. McCrea’s own views on the war are unknown. Like many women of her era, none of her writings survive. Without clear evidence of her allegiances, propagandists enjoyed “unimpeded license to make her into whatever they wanted—or needed—her to be,” writes Staiti in his book.
Multiple accounts record the circumstances of McCrea’s killing on July 27, 1777. Generally, the sources agree that she met with disaster while visiting a friend, Sarah McNeil, at her home in Fort Edward, New York. McNeil was preparing to flee from the British, whose forces were marching south from Canada, when Native soldiers arrived at her door. The warriors took McCrea and McNeil prisoner but failed to find Eve, a Black woman likely enslaved by McNeil, who’d hidden in the house with her infant son.
The prevailing narrative suggests that McCrea’s captors—who are usually identified as Wyandot or Mohawk—shot and scalped her after quarrelling over whose prisoner she was. In a report written shortly after McCrea’s killing, John Bartlett, a surgeon in the Continental Army who’d just returned from Fort Edward, claimed that “the poor girl was shot to death in cold blood, scalped and left on the ground, and the other woman [McNeil] not yet found.”
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