Willett of the Day: Marinus Willett, Revolutionary War Hero

When my family moved to Canada in 1967 (as I think I have recounted before) we were asked, during the process of becoming landed immigrants, what our nationality was. We (or rather, my parents; I was only eight and had little to do with the process) replied that we were American. We were told we couldn’t be American. We had to give some overseas country as our nationality. So we said we were English.

But in fact, Willetts had been American as long as there’s been an America, and at least some of them fought long and hard to help create America (although others, as the large number of Willetts in the Maritimes makes clear, were British Empire Loyalists).

The most famous Willett to be involved in the War of Independence was Marinus Willett (and yes, he was a “two-T” Willett, despite the misspelling beneath the picture at left, taken from an 1877 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Nice to know that that most common misspelling of our shared name has plagued Willetts for well over a century, at least). Here’s a biography from the brochure of the The Marinus Willett Collections Management and Education Center, located at the Fort Stanwix National Monument in Rome, NY:

Marinus Willett was born July 31, 1740, in Jamaica, New York. He began to resent the Crown while still a teenager after watching British marines on the streets of New York seizing conscripts to fight against France. Oddly enough, he joined the British Army and served in the French and Indian War, part of the time protecting settlers in the Mohawk Valley against enemy raiders.

As the revolution unfolded, Willett joined the Sons of Liberty despite the Loyalist leanings of his family. The late upstate author, Walter D. Edmonds, once described Willett as “a man of simple courage and singleness of purpose: he had faith in the American cause and unlike many of his brother officers was willing to put it above his own ambitions.” Perhaps that explains why Willett, Fort Stanwix’s second in command in 1777, led a sortie on British and Indian camps while those forces were six miles away battling at Oriskany. He and another officer, soon afterward, crept through enemy lines to summon relief at Fort Dayton (Herkimer), 50 miles away.

After the war, Willett returned to New York City and served there as high sheriff and later as the city’s mayor. He died August 22, 1830, at the age of 90 and rests in the graveyard at Trinity Church in New York City.

Permanent link to this article: https://edwardwillett.com/2008/07/willett-of-the-day-marinus-willett-revolutionary-war-hero/

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