Margery Boyden, Scudder Association Foundation Historian

As John4 Hart’s biographer, Cleon E. Hammond, succinctly states: ‘Shortly before the year 1700, a settlement of English families in the vicinity of Newtown, on Long Island, began to migrate to an area ‘away over in the Jarseys’.

Two sets of Scudder siblings, whose fathers were first cousins, went to New Jersey, 1698–1749, so 2nd cousins. To make tracing their descendants accurately even more confusing, those who were brothers each went to different parts of New Jersey.

The story of Major John5 Polhemus began in the era of monarchy, when the conventional paradigm was based on the idea of sacrifices by the masses for the privilege of the one. He, with many others flipped that paradigm on its head by an example that there was a better way:

There had been little time for the Americans to rejoice over the laurels of their stunning victory in the First Battle of Trenton on December 26, 1776, and escape back to Pennsylvania. All signs were that the British would make a countermove.

The American army was in precarious condition in Pennsylvania, just across the Delaware River from New Jersey. Its numbers were estimated to have dwindled from 30,000 in the summer to 3,000. Washington’s soldiers were not well furnished, having had to leave supplies as they fled New York.

By their crucial contributions and their numbers, perhaps no other New Jersey family contributed more to the fight for independence and self-governance than the Scudders and their extended family that included John4 Hart, the signer of the Declaration of Independence.

Like many of their neighbors, the Hart and Scudder families of New Jersey in the revolutionary period had their roots in Long Island and their heritage in the Puritan immigration from England to New England.