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If Mary Bolling looked across her pasture on the morning of April 25, 1781, she would have seen a ragtag line of militia dug in at the foot of East Hill. Each man furnished his own linen knapsack, his own gun, a bayonet, a belt, a cartridge box, a wooden canteen with strap, a tomahawk and a blanket. They were local militia called up for 90 days to fight the invading British. One volunteer, Daniel Trabue, wrote in a memoir that their nerves were steadied by the large ration of rum doled out to them earlier that morning.
Approximately 1,000 volunteers faced off against 2,500 British and Hessian regulars.
Looking eastward, Bolling would see that advancing British army slowly moving forward over the muddy ground. In the vanguard were German Jagers resplendent in their green coats trimmed in carmine. Behind them were red-coated English Light Infantry and Scottish Highlanders. Also on the field that day were the Loyalist Queen’s Rangers, also clad in green.
Leading the British forces was Major General William Phillips. Fate would draw Phillips and Mrs. Bolling together.
Mary Bolling
Mary Tabb was born in 1737 into a family of wealthy Virginia merchants and land owners in Amelia County, west of Richmond. In 1758, she married merchant Robert Bolling III, the owner of Bollingbrook plantation in Blandford, just east of Petersburg (Blandford is part of Petersburg today).
Both Mary Bolling and her husband supported the Patriot cause. When he died in 1775, he left her Bollingbrook, several tobacco warehouses, mills and other property, including enslaved servants. She was 38 at the time and the mother of six children.
She proved a very able manager and astute investor. The Marquis de Chastellux, who visited Bollingbrook in 1782, wrote that “she knows perfectly well how to manage her immense fortune.”
Little is known about Bolling’s day-to-day management of Bollingbrook, but we can gain insight from her neighbor and contemporary, Mary Willing Byrd. Byrd, also a widow, ran the palatial Westover plantation on the James River for 37 years.
According to Ami Pflugrad-Jackisch, professor of history at the University of Toledo, “Byrd made the decisions about what crops were planted on the plantation. She also arranged for their sale to merchants.”
In addition, “Byrd made decisions about clothing, food, and medical care for the enslaved community at Westover,” said Pflugrad-Jackisch in an email.
If Chastellux is any judge of character, it is likely that Bolling managed her property in a similar manner.
Bollingbrook
Bollingbrook stood at the summit of East Hill in today’s Petersburg. Small in comparison to some of the magnificent plantation homes of the time, Bollingbrook consisted of two rectangular, one-story, wood-framed houses aligned side by side facing south. Neither house is still standing.
The east house, built about 1750, where Mary Bolling resided, contained only four rooms: a dining room, drawing room and two bedrooms. One of the bedrooms was used as a dressing chamber and the other served as a bedroom for Mrs. Bolling and her four daughters. A central hall ran from the front entrance to the back door. It was a cramped arrangement even in the best of times, showing the close quarters in which some Virginia elite lived at the time.
The west house was slightly smaller, but of a similar layout, with at least one room used for storage. Bolling also owned a tobacco warehouse across the road from her house, and several throughout Petersburg.
Outbuildings on the property included a school, kitchen, dairy and quarters for enslaved people, whose opinion of the approaching British army would be decidedly different from Bolling’s.
The loss of human property
Most residents of Petersburg and Blandford fled before the British attack. Bolling decided to stay. Central to Mary Bolling’s decision probably was concern over losing control of her enslaved servants and workers. She couldn’t prevent their leaving, but she might negotiate to get them back. When British forces approached plantations, Blacks self-emancipated and made their way to the British lines, offering their services to soldiers and their families. Captain Johann Ewald, a Hessian officer serving in Phillips’ forces, said that Blacks were so numerous that most soldiers and even their wives traveling with them employed emancipated servants.
The difference now was that these newly liberated people had agency. Ewald relates the story of a Black man who approached him saying he had important information, and that he would impart it for two guineas. “I quickly opened my purse,” wrote Ewald, “and handed him the money.” The man reported that over 600 enemy riflemen and horsemen were nearby, prompting British troops to mount a quick attack, surprising the Americans and taking 23 prisoners and 43 horses.
Major General William Phillips
Phillips, the son and grandson of soldiers, was born in 1731, and entered the Royal Military Academy in Woolwich at age 16. Woolwich served as the training academy for artillery and engineering. He served with distinction as an artillery officer in Germany during the Seven Years’ War, fighting in the battles of Warburg and Minden. In 1774, he became a member of Parliament.
He was admired as a very able officer, but he was plagued with a violent temper that often got the better of him.
At the beginning of the American Revolution, Phillips served as General John Burgoyne’s second-in-command during the British military campaign into New York, ending with the disastrous British defeat at Saratoga in September and October 1777.
For the next three years, Phillips was out of the fight, first as a prisoner in Massachusetts and later in Virginia. Ultimately, he was paroled to New York where he awaited a prisoner exchange. That exchange finally occurred in late 1780.
Once back with the British army, Phillips was sent to Virginia with a force of about 2,000 men, landing at Portsmouth on March 21, 1781. After meeting with General Benedict Arnold, the ranking British officer in Virginia at the time, they combined their forces under Phillips’ command. One of their objectives was to capture Petersburg.
The troops welcomed the change in leaders. Although Phillips was more of a disciplinarian than Arnold, his men considered him tough and fair. Fond of fine dining and Irish claret, he traveled amply supplied with china plates and bowls, and damask napkins. Every evening he invited 20 officers to dine with him regardless of rank. And he made a point to visit the sick and the wounded, offering them encouragement and sharing food with them.
The Battle of Blandford
General Phillips landed his forces at City Point (today’s Hopewell) on April 25, 1781, after journeying up the James River from Portsmouth. The day was bright and sunny with patches of snow still visible in shady areas. Dogwoods were just starting to bud.
His plan was to overwhelm the inexperienced American militia by marching his well-trained troops overland from the James. He also ordered gunboats up the Appomattox River to aid in the assault.
Petersburg was defended by militia and a few regulars under the command of General von Steuben, who knew his ill-equipped and poorly trained troops were no match for British regulars.
Von Steuben hoped to hold off Phillips’ army as long as possible in a delaying action, and then beat an orderly retreat northward. To achieve this, he organized his troops into two lines on the south side of the Appomattox River and withdrew his artillery across the river to the heights overlooking Petersburg.
The first line of troops, placed near Poor Creek on the outskirts of Blandford near today’s East Street, engaged the enemy then moved back to the second line, dug in on the west bank of Lieutenant’s Run at the foot of the hill on which Bollingbrook stood. That line stretched from the Appomattox river south to the still extant Blandford Church, running along today’s Madison Street, west of I-95.
The second line held as long as it could, but Phillips moved his artillery to high ground greatly exposing the militia’s position. As planned, the second line retreated across the Appomattox, pulling up the planks of the bridge as they went.
Leaving Mary Bolling to her fate.
Von Steuben’s plan worked admirably, holding up the British for several hours, enough time, as it turned out, to allow troops led by the Marquis de Lafayette to arrive at Richmond, thus keeping the Virginia capital out of British hands.
Today, the battle is reenacted annually on the grounds of Battersea Plantation, a Palladian/Georgian home built in 1768 on the banks of the Appomattox. Reenactors from the 7th Virginia Regiment of the Continental follow the Patriot battle plan with two lines of militia.
“We do it in stages,” said Mike Cecere, regiment commander. “The British attack and we move back. It’s a fighting withdrawal.”
Although Battersea didn’t figure in the Battle of Blandford, today it offers one of the few locations in Petersburg unimpeded by modern buildings and traffic. The upcoming reenactment in 2026 marks the 245th anniversary of the battle, usually held on the third weekend in April.
“There’s an intimacy in the battle performed at Battersea,” said Cecere. “People are close.”
British headquarters
Bollingbrook’s size and locale atop a hill made it an ideal headquarters for the victorious Phillips. He installed his staff in the west house and himself in the east house, where Bolling lived with her four daughters. The Bolling family was allowed to remain in one of the back bedrooms. Nothing remains of either house, which stood in the vicinity of today’s Petersburg YMCA.
By all indications, the British treated Bolling and her daughters kindly, despite her pro-American sympathies, the courtly Phillips apparently addressing her as Lady Bolling. Yet, she was a prisoner in her own house. Arnold reportedly told her to avoid angering Phillips. Armed sentries guarded the doors of both houses, and by virtue of serving as British army headquarters, Bollingbrook faced the threat of American artillery from the heights north of the Appomattox River.
From Mary Bolling’s perspective, this arrangement, while not ideal, would allow her to keep an eye on her property. Her presence, though, yielded mixed results: the British confiscated her horses and burned her fencing, and most of her enslaved servants escaped to the shelter of the British army. But she was able to save her warehouses by dumping the tobacco in the streets, allowing the British to burn it there.
Phillips didn’t stay long initially at Bollingbrook. Once Petersburg was secured, his army marched northward toward Richmond. Bolling must have been relieved to see him go.
Arriving at Richmond on May 1, Phillips saw that Lafayette’s forces had already secured the Virginia capital. Not wanting to risk his army by attacking the enemy’s well-defended positions, and after venting his infamous rage, he ordered his troops southward down the James River, intending to return to his base at Portsmouth. At this point, he began to complain of feeling ill.
Phillips returns to Bollingbrook
For the next several days, sailing aboard the schooner Maria on the James River, Phillips felt worse. Around May 6, he received a message from Lord Cornwallis, whose army was engaged in North Carolina, ordering Phillips to return to Petersburg and await the arrival of Cornwallis’ army. Phillips’ forces reversed course, sailing back up the James, and disembarked at Brandon Plantation on the south bank for the 30-mile overland march to Petersburg.
Mary Bolling found herself once again housing British officers. The now comatose Phillips was placed in the west room of the east house.
Phillips never regained consciousness and died three days later on May 13, likely from typhus. He was buried in the churchyard of Blandford Church in an unmarked grave, where he remains today. In 1914, the Daughters of the American Revolution erected a marker in his honor.
Mary Bolling never remarried and continued managing her estate after the Revolution. Accounts vary whether she recaptured any of the enslaved people who had sought refuge with the British, although we know that she never freed any of the people she enslaved. She died in 1814.
For more reading:
Raymond Chester, Westward into Kentucky: The Narrative of Daniel Trabue.
Suzanne Lebsock, “Mary Marshall Tabb Bolling,” Dictionary of Virginia Biography.
Manning Voorhis ,“Bollingbrook,” The William and Mary Quarterly, v. 16., No. 4.
Charles Campbell, “Reminiscences of the British at Bollingbrook,” Southern Literary Messenger, Jan. 1840.
Capt. Johann Ewald, Diary of the American War: A Hessian Journal.
Robert P. Davis, Where a Man Can Go, Major General William Phillips.
John Graves Simcoe, Simcoe’s Military Journal.
