Monmouth Battlefield State Park
Combs Hill: Why Monmouth Was More Than a Draw
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
Listen
Transcript
Start with the argument historians still have to simplify for visitors:
Who won Monmouth?
The British army was trying to reach New York after evacuating Philadelphia.
Washington wanted to strike the marching column.
By nightfall on June 28, 1778, the British had not been destroyed.
They left during the night and continued toward Sandy Hook and New York.
So this was not a decisive American battlefield victory in the way Saratoga had been.
But calling it “just a draw” misses why contemporaries cared.
The Continental Army held the field after one of the longest and hardest single days of the war.
It absorbed repeated attacks by British regulars and did not collapse.
That mattered after Valley Forge.
Months of training under Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben had strengthened drill, discipline and battlefield coordination.
At Monmouth, the army demonstrated that improvement against the main British force.
Washington also repaired some of the political and military damage associated with the defeats of 1777.
NJDEP calls the outcome a major moral victory.
The U.S. Army history is more cautious tactically but agrees that the Continentals fought effectively.
From Combs Hill, terrain matters more than monument.
Fields roll into shallow valleys.
Wood lots interrupt sight lines.
Roads and farms shaped troop movement.
The visitor center stands where American artillery later commanded part of the battlefield.
This guide will follow the battle as a sequence of decisions rather than a patriotic pageant.
A failed morning attack.
A controversial retreat.
Washington restoring the line.
An artillery duel.
Extreme heat.
Women and civilians inside the battle.
And finally a British withdrawal that left both armies able to claim something.
The honest story is not less dramatic.
It is more useful.