Private Adam Rider: General Washington’s Improbable Spy

On March 18, 1818, the U.S. Congress enacted a law that established a lifetime pension for American veterans of the Continental army who were “in reduced circumstances.”[1] As part of the filing process for these benefits, veterans were required to submit affidavits to local courts with supporting testimonials attesting to their service record during the war. Many, if not most, of the pension claims presented were largely pro forma documents that were sometimes sketchy at best and adhered to a fairly consistent format. In some cases, however, the deponents were unusually detailed and expansive in their statements. Such was the case with the claim of Pvt. Adam Rider of the Maryland and Virginia Rifle Regiment commanded by Lt. Col. Moses Rawlings.

Four months after the passage of the congressional decree, Adam Rider of Ross County, Ohio, stood before Judge John Thompson, president of the county’s court of common pleas, and relayed an account of his time as a Continental Army rifleman during the American Revolutionary War.[2] The seventy-year-old Rider presented his transcribed testimony to Judge Thompson on July 20 in an effort to obtain federal financial assistance.

In his pension statement, Rider related that:

He inlisted in may seventeen hundred seventy five in Hugh Stevenson’s company of Riflemen for one year, in Virginia line and served out said time, and immediately on the expiration of that time he again inlisted in Capt. A. Sheppard’s company Colonel Rawling’s regiment in same line & Corps for three years—during the first inlistment he was marched to Boston, and was in several small skirmishes, in that quarter, and thence to Long island New York where we had a small engagement.[3]

Rider’s pension claim was certified to be accurate by a fellow Ross County resident and distinguished Revolutionary War veteran, Maj. Samuel Finley, who served as Private Rider’s first lieutenant in Capt. Abraham Shepherd’s Company of Rawlings’ rifle regiment starting in July 1776.[4] Both men had enlisted in the Continental Army in Virginia in Capt. Hugh Stephenson’s Independent Rifle Company of Berkeley County (now part of West Virginia) in June 1775.[5] Finley joined up as the senior sergeant, subsequently advancing to first lieutenant with the unit’s reorganization to form Shepherd’s company of Rawlings’ regiment a year later.[6]