Jane McCrea
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Jane McCrea (died 1777) was a Loyalist during the American Revolutionary War whose reported death at the hands of Algonquin allies of the British became a motivating event for the American rebels. Her last name has also been spelled "McCrae" and "MacCrae".
McCrae was born one of the younger children in the large family of Rev. James McCrae of New Jersey. The McCrae family illustrated one of the difficulties caused by the war. Since her father's death, she had been living with her brother John at Saratoga, New York. She had become engaged to David Jones. As the war began, two of her brothers served with the American forces, while her fiancé fled with other Loyalists to Canada. As John Burgoyne's Saratoga Campaign expedition neared Albany, Colonel John McCrae took up his duty with a regiment of the Albany County militia. Jones was serving as a lieutenant in one of the Loyalist militia units accompanying Burgoyne, and had been stationed at Fort Ticonderoga after its capture. She left her brother's home and was travelling to join her fiancé.
She had reached the village surrounding the old Fort Edward, but so had the war. She was staying at the home of a Mrs. McNeil, another Loyalist and a cousin to the British General Simon Fraser. On the morning of July 27, 1777 a group of Indian allies of the British advance raided the outskirts of the village, and Jane and Mrs McNeil were taken hostage. As the Indians withdrew, they were separated. Mrs McNeil was later united with her cousin, but discovered to her horror that another brave had Jane's scalp.
There are conflicting accounts of her death. The traditional version has it that two warriors quarreled over who would take her in for an expected reward, and that one of them killed her with a tomahawk to settle the issue. Another, that she was killed by a bullet from the rear guard of the Americans withdrawing from Fort Edward. This second version was claimed by the warrior who had her scalp, presumably to avoid punishment when questioned by General Fraser.
Her death, and those of others in similar raids, inspired some of the resistance to Burgoyne's invasion leading to his defeat at the Battle of Saratoga. But the effect expanded later as reports of the incident were used, almost as propaganda, to excite rebel sympathies during the war, especially before the Sullivan Expedition in 1779. The story had become a part of American folklore when James Fenimore Cooper described some similar events in his novel The Last of the Mohicans.
David Jones never married, and later lived in Canada with the United Empire Loyalists. The place where Jane died is marked by a monument three miles south of Fort Edward, New York, and, in 1852, her body was moved to the Union Cemetery there. In 2003, McCrae's body was exhumed in hopes of solving the mystery of her death. Surprisingly, two bodies—those of McCrae and Sara McNeil—were found in the grave. The bodies were exhumed again in 2005 in order to provide separate graves for both women.
