The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Cardinal News has embarked on a three-year project to tell the little-known stories of Virginia’s role in the march to independence. This project is supported, in part, by a grant from the Virginia American Revolution 250 Commission. Find all our stories from this project on the Cardinal 250 page. You can sign up for our monthly newsletter:
If Homer were telling the story of Peter Francisco, it might begin like this:
SING, MUSE, of the huge hero who spread Strife and Terror on the bloody fields of the American Revolution. Many brave foes he sent hurrying down to Hades, and many wounds he suffered, yet steel and lead could not kill him. Some called him the Virginia Giant, others the Hercules of American Independence.
A strange-talking boy of 4 or 5 appeared on a dock in City Point (later Hopewell) in 1765, as if wafted there by some sea god or goddess. All he could say was his name — Pedro Francisco…
The bewildered orphan — unable to explain where he came from — became an indentured servant in the household of Judge Anthony Winston, a Hanover native who later moved to Buckingham County. Winston gave Pedro — renamed Peter — a rudimentary education and put him to work in the fields. In the blacksmith’s shop, Peter learned to pound hot iron amid the heat and smoke of the forge. With physical labor, plentiful food and the fresh air of Central Virginia, the boy grew into a giant of a man, 6 and a half feet tall.
Some accounts put a teenage Peter outside the windows of St. John’s Church in Richmond on March 23, 1775. The claim is unverifiable, but plausible; Winston was a delegate from Buckingham to the Second Virginia Convention.
As Zeus thunders on a dark afternoon, even so did Patrick Henry thunder through the windows of St. John’s, and his voice rolled like a storm, shaking the foundations of the high and mighty in their throne rooms and council chambers far across the sea…
Peter would live to see Liberty — but first he came close to seeing Death.
The best record of his war service is found in his petition to the General Assembly dated Nov. 11, 1820. Francisco states that he enlisted in the Continental Army under Capt. Hughes Woodson, a claim supported by a 1777 muster roll from the 10th Virginia Regiment.
Francisco saw action in the battles of Brandywine and Germantown in 1777. At the battle of Monmouth in 1778, while detached from the main army under Col. Daniel Morgan, Francisco took an ounce ball through the right thigh. He kept fighting and the next day killed two British grenadiers.
In 1779, George Washington ordered Gen. “Mad Anthony” Wayne to capture Stony Point, a fortified outcrop above the Hudson River. Wayne led the all-volunteer Corps of Light Infantry, an elite command similar to a Special Forces unit. Francisco joined it. Washington ordered a daring midnight assault with bayonets fixed and muskets unloaded:
If, once out of the fray, a man could live forever, perhaps Peter would have hung back. But since death comes to all, coward and hero alike, he pressed to the front, resolved to win glory or yield it to another man…
The second American to clear the parapet on the right wing, he was in the thick of a hand-to-hand melee and took a nine-inch gash through the belly. In an 1829 petition to Congress, he claims to have killed a British soldier under the flagstaff.
At the end of his three-year enlistment, having seen much of war and death, Francisco returned to Virginia.
Michael Schellhammer is a military historian who served 39 years in the Army as a uniformed officer and as a Department of the Army civilian. He retired as a lieutenant colonel.
“Most people, if they had volunteered and been wounded at Stony Point, they could have gone home with honor,” Schellhammer said. “He chose to return.”
In his 1820 petition, Francisco stated that he “never felt satisfied, nor thought he did a good day’s work, but by drawing British blood, and if that was not the case, could not have a good night’s sleep.”
In 1780, Francisco joined a Prince Edward County militia regiment commanded by Col. William Mayo. At the battle of Camden in 1780, Francisco spied a grenadier about to bayonet Mayo. Francisco fired a ball and buckshot through the attacker, saving the colonel’s life.
Camden is also the setting of one of the pivotal events of the Francisco legend. As the story goes, he saw a Patriot cannon about to be captured by the enemy:
As men now are, none could lift it, but the huge hero pried it from the mud, hoisted it onto his broad shoulders and carried it to safety…
In 1975, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp commemorating the feat. But Francisco himself did not mention it in either of his two petitions. “A six-pounder cannon, which is what he is reputed to have carried off, would have weighed at least 400 to 450 pounds or more,” Schellhammer said. “If anything happened, I would find it more plausible that he hauled it away on a carriage than unbolting it from its carriage and carrying it.”
After Camden, Francisco went home, then decided to volunteer again. He was in Col. William Washington’s cavalry company at the battle of Guilford Courthouse (sometimes referred to as Court House) in 1781. During a Patriot cavalry charge, a British bayonet ripped Francisco’s thigh from knee to hip. He killed at least two and wounded many others, perhaps fatally:
As he once wielded the hammer and tongs in the blacksmith’s furnace, so did he wield the sword and musket in the inferno of battle, and his foes, flesh and not iron, fell right and left before his furious onslaught…
“When leaving the Battle ground he was very Bloody also was his Sword from point to hilt,” Lt. John Woodson recalled.
Later accounts of the Guilford fight inflated his score of dead. “By the time people keep retelling it, it turns out to be 11,” Schellhammer said. “I spent my career in the Army, and I promise you that soldiers’ tales get longer as they go down the line.”
After returning from Guilford, he encountered a party of raiders, detached from British Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton’s command, at the home of Benjamin Ward in Amelia County. A raider ordered the unarmed Francisco to fork over his watch and other items. The Virginian quickly snatched his sword:
As when a towering oak topples in the forest, uprooted by a gale — it smashes through leaf and limb to smite the earth with ground-shaking thunder — even so did huge Francisco bring the sword down on the hapless foe, and his brains gushed out with his lifeblood…
In his 1820 petition, Francisco states that after cutting off “a large portion” of the enemy’s skull, he “wounded and drove off the others, and took eight [out of nine] horses…the ninth man escaped with a large cut upon his back…this is the last favor I ever did the British.”
His service finally over, Peter Francisco, peer of Hercules and Achilles, returned to the peaceful craft of Hephaestus, blacksmith to the gods….
Unlike Achilles, Francisco enjoyed both glory and a long life, warmed by the comforts of hearth, friends and family. “Despite his huge size and corresponding strength, he was a peaceable, kind and generous man,” states a resolution by the Virginia House of Delegates. He had two children with his first wife, Susannah. When they entertained at home in Buckingham, he sang in a high tenor, rather incongruous from a giant. After Susannah died, he had more children with his second wife, Catherine. When she died, he married again and moved to Richmond. No longer able to earn a living as a blacksmith, he served as sergeant-at-arms in the House of Delegates.
War, which brings glory and grief to victor and vanquished alike, was never far from his mind, for his many wounds never stopped hurting. He died in 1831, at age 70, apparently from appendicitis. He was given a state funeral and buried with military honors in Shockoe Cemetery in Richmond. His monument stands there today. Another is in Hopewell.
Charlottesville historian John E. Manahan (1919-1990) went to the Azores, an island chain west of Portugal, to investigate stories of a Portuguese origin. On the island of Terceira, Manahan uncovered a birth record dated July 9, 1760 — and no death record — for a Pedro Francisco, making this Azorean the right age for the boy who showed up in Hopewell in 1765.
Travis Bowman is a seventh-generation descendent of Francisco. A 6-and-a-half footer himself, he was born on Feb. 23, 1973, the day the House passed the resolution declaring March 15, the anniversary of the Guilford battle, as Peter Francisco Day in the Commonwealth.
Bowman and his business partner, Hollywood actor Brian Patrick Wade, are raising money for a nine-episode miniseries called “Luso.” Luso is “a prefix that means a person of Portuguese descent,” Bowman said in an interview from his home in Charlotte.
A nine-minute proof of concept film — a sort of extended trailer — can be seen on luso.tv. Bowman and Wade hope to raise $1.8 million to film their first episode this fall, with plans to release it on Peter Francisco Day of 2026, first on their website, then on paid streaming platforms.
March 15 is also Peter Francisco Day in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. North Carolina honors him with a plaque at Guilford Court House: “TO PETER FRANCISCO, A GIANT IN STATURE, MIGHT AND COURAGE — WHO SLEW IN THIS ENGAGEMENT ELEVEN OF THE ENEMY WITH HIS OWN BROAD SWORD RENDERING HIMSELF THEREBY PERHAPS THE MOST FAMOUS PRIVATE SOLDIER OF THE REVOLUTIONARY WAR.”
New Bedford, Mass., home to a large community of Portuguese-Americans, named a square for him. A huge boulder is incised with the outline of a cannon. A plaque reads:
IN HONOR OF PETER FRANCISCO
THE HERCULES OF
AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE
“WITHOUT HIM WE WOULD HAVE LOST TWO CRUCIAL BATTLES, PERHAPS THE WAR, AND WITH IT OUR FREEDOM. HE WAS TRULY A ONE-MAN ARMY.”
GENERAL GEORGE WASHINGTON
Alas, the quote from Washington cannot be verified, nor can stories of the general commissioning a sword for him.
Even without the myths, “there’s plenty to credit him with,” Schellhammer said. “Let’s credit him with volunteering to fight. Plenty did not. He volunteered for the army multiple times. There are affidavits that he fought bravely. He had to have volunteered for the Corps of Light Infantry — that was not something that soldiers were forced to go into. We can credit him for fighting his way to the top of Stony Point. We can credit him with being a terror to the British in battle, obviously since he claimed to have killed between two and four at Guilford Court House. I would not want to have been on the receiving end of Peter Francisco galloping down on top of me with a sword. There’s no doubt in my mind he’s a true American hero. And I think just what’s documented on him is plenty to honor him as a great hero. Wounded three times, you kidding me? Come on! And he kept coming back.”
After completing his deeds on earth, Hercules was raised to heaven — the highest honor the gods can bestow on a mortal. You can see him, outlined in stars, on a summer night, between Lyra and Corona Borealis. Achilles, on the other hand, brave though he was, and the son of a goddess to boot, shared the common lot of mankind and took his place among the shades of the underworld. No doubt, when Peter entered the gates from which none return, the bravest of Greeks welcomed the bravest of Virginians with the right hand of friendship.