I represent a woman identified only as “Mrs. Field.” I was the wife of a sergeant in the Provincial Corps of Pennsylvania Loyalists. Raised in Philadelphia in 1777, the corps arrived in Pensacola at the very end of 1778 and remained until the surrender of Pensacola to the Spanish on May 10, 1781. My husband was stationed at the Queen’s Redoubt at Fort George on May 8, 1781. From Robert Farmar‘s journal of the siege of Pensacola for that day: “About 9 o’clock a.m. a shell from the enemy’s front battery was thrown in at the door of the Magazine at the Advanced Redoubt (as the men were receiving powder) which blew it up and killed 40 seamen belonging to H.M. Ships the Mentor and the Port Royal and 45 men of the Pennsylvania Loyalists were killed by the same explosion.” This disaster was the final nail in the coffin of Pensacola’s defenses against the Spanish, and Gen. Campbell raised the white flag that very day. Unfortunately, my husband was one of the Pennsylvania Loyalists that was killed that day. I was left a widow, and I quickly remarried to “Sgt. Wm. Greer of the same unit, thereby continuing [my] and [my] child‘s rations.”
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