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Description
Author Keith Marshall Jones III will share a new and definitive account of inland Connecticut’s only Revolutionary War engagement, on April 27, 1777, in a lecture at New Haven Museum, “The Battle of Ridgefield” on Thursday, April 24, 2025, at 6 p.m. The free NH250 event will also stream on FB Live.
Jones’s discussion will be based on his latest book, “The Battle of Ridgefield: Benedict Arnold, the Patriot Militia, and the Surprising 1777 Battle that Galvanized Revolutionary Connecticut,” which tells how Benedict Arnold and the patriots dashed British hopes for Crown hegemony over southwestern Connecticut. According to Connecticut State Historian Emeritus Walter Woodward, Jones’s work “shows that the action was a more complex and significant Revolutionary moment than previously realized.”
“The Battle of Ridgefield was a militia action involving local farmers and merchants against a professional enemy thrice their size.” Jones notes. “It reminds us today, when democracy itself is under siege, that Independence was won at the grassroots level and that is how it must be perpetuated.”
Jones will integrate findings from a new generation of historians with the National Park Service’s 2022 Ridgefield Battlefield Protection Program Phase I Study, and a digital trove of never-before-published archival primary source material to reveal a number of new conclusions.
During the bloody, day-long battle—which involved more Redcoats than at Lexington and Concord or in Washington’s startling victories at Trenton and Princeton—American forces under the command of Major General David Wooster attacked retreating British troops under Major General William Tryon. Anticipating Tryon’s return march to Long Island Sound after the earlier attack on Danbury, General Wooster, General Benedict Arnold and General Gold Selleck Silliman moved their militia and members of the Continental Army farther westward. While Wooster attacked Tryon from the rear, Arnold and his men set up a roadblock at the north end of Ridgefield’s town center. The combined casualties and missing—up to 130 men—were higher than previously thought, Jones says.
Jones notes that Royal Governor of New York William Tryon had good reason to expect that Connecticut loyalists might rise-up if he marched an army inland to destroy Danbury’s Continental supply depot. General George Washington was warned twice in advance of Tryon’s potential incursion and would not, or could not, act.
Little more than half of the Fairfield County militia turned out, but, together with nine unsung New York militia companies, it was enough to quash Tryon’s loyalist vision and chase his British army from Connecticut.
Though clearly a British victory, Jones says, Ridgefield’s consequences – the ascendance of Benedict Arnold, freeing up local militia units to participate at Saratoga, and tightening screw on Connecticut loyalists – created conditions that helped assure Britain would lose the war.
About Keith Jones
Jones is an independent historian with a flair for coaxing fresh crop from the well-plowed fields of America’s Revolutionary Era by harvesting primary source materials. His career path includes 30 years as a corporate marketing executive in the cola wars (Pepsi), beer wars (Anheuser-Busch), and toothpaste wars (Colgate). In 2000, he summoned the nerve to jump ship and chase ghosts from the past. He became the founding president of the Ridgefield (CT) Historical Society, and two books on local history soon followed. To research life as a soldier in George Washington’s army, he served as a grunt in the 5th Connecticut re-enactor regiment. His subsequent third book, a partnership with the John Marshall Foundation, “Congress As My County,” was the first comprehensive account of the Chief Justice’s formative years as an infantry officer in George Washington’s Continental Army. His fourth book, “John Laurence: The Immigrant Founding Father America Never Knew,” earned the John Frederick Lewis Prize as Ben Franklin’s American Philosophical Society 2019 “Publication of the Year.”
About NH250
This event is part of NH250, an ongoing series of programming developed by New Haven Museum to complement “America 250.” Culminating with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the series will highlight inclusive, local, and lesser-known stories, connecting past and present.
Date & Time
Thu, Apr 24, 2025 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Venue Details
New Haven Museum
114 Whitney AvenueNew Haven, Connecticut 06510
