Joshua Huddy
Joshua Huddy was hanged from a tree in 1782 by loyalists, and George Washington nearly executed a captured British officer over it. He was a militia captain in Monmouth County, New Jersey, in the part of the war that was a neighbourhood civil war rather than a campaign - raids, burnings and reprisals between people who knew each other, conducted along the shore while the main armies sat elsewhere. In September 1780 his house was attacked by a party under Colonel Tye, the escaped Monmouth slave who led the Black Brigade. Huddy and a single companion held the building for hours by firing from different windows to suggest a garrison; the attackers set it alight and took him, and he escaped by jumping into the water when a militia party fired on the boats. Tye was shot through the wrist in the assault and died of tetanus some days later. Huddy was captured again in March 1782 and held in New York. In April a party of loyalists took him out and hanged him at Sandy Hook with a placard reading up goes Huddy for Philip White, a loyalist killed in circumstances still disputed. The war was effectively over by then and the killing enraged the American command. Washington demanded the officer responsible be handed over, was refused, and ordered that a British captain be chosen by lot to hang instead. The lot fell on Charles Asgill, a nineteen-year-old. Asgill was reprieved after months, following an appeal from the French foreign minister and a resolution of Congress. It is the last hard case of the war and it turned on a militia captain nobody outside New Jersey had heard of.
- Lived: 1735 CE – 1782 CE
- Nationality: American
- Roles: military
