Up Goes Huddy

A militia captain was hanged on a beach in Monmouth County in the spring of 1782, and for the next six months the killing sat near the center of the negotiations to end the war.

The Monmouth County Historical Association frames it as precipitating what has been called the first international incident in the country's brief history.^[1] Follow the rope from the barrel on the Highlands shore and it runs to the British command in New York, to the floor of the Continental Congress, and to the court of France.

George Washington treated the hanging as a murder rather than an act of war, and demanded that the British surrender Richard Lippincott, the Loyalist who had led the party, to stand trial.^[1]

The British commander, Sir Guy Carleton, refused.

With the Continental Congress behind him, Washington resolved to answer Huddy's death with a reprisal — the execution of a British officer, chosen by lot from among the prisoners held at Lancaster, Pennsylvania.^[2]

The lot fell to Charles Asgill, a nineteen-year-old British captain.

He was not hanged.

Asgill's life was saved by an appeal from his mother, who was French, made through the French allies of the American cause.^[2] The Congress released him.

After his release he went to France, to thank Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in person for saving his life.^[2]

No one was ever hanged for Joshua Huddy. The reprisal was never carried out, the war ended, and the affair was let go.

What remains on this shore is the stone at Waterwitch and Bayside, and the water's edge below the ridge where a boat from the Hook came across one morning in April.