Joseph Mulliner’s 1781 treason trial, behind the "Robin Hood" legend

A family in Little Egg Harbor, and a man barely in the record

The Mulliners were English and had settled in Little Egg Harbor Township before the Revolution. Leah Blackman’s 1880 history of the township records the emigrant brothers Moses and Joseph, and identifies Joseph as the refugee leader known in later accounts as Joe Mulliner; she adds that he left no posterity and that history is silent on who his wife was. Several Mulliners appear as householders on the township’s 1773 tax list, though the biography drawn from those records does not single out Joseph on it. He was known to be a mariner, and nothing else of his early war years survives in writing.

The documented complaints begin in November 1779, when a man with whom Mulliner had left a cow some months earlier advertised in the Pennsylvania Gazette trying to locate him. In November 1780 he was indicted for assaulting a man in Burlington; the surviving paperwork does not explain the quarrel. Neither record shows which side of the war he was on. By March 1781 the charges were far graver: waging war against the state, seizing and holding citizens as prisoners, and other acts of hostility, with Governor William Livingston also alleging robberies and capital felonies on land and depredations at sea.

Trial at Burlington and a sentence carried out

Mulliner was captured in June or July 1781; the circumstances are not described in the surviving record. He was jailed at Burlington and indicted for high treason on July 25. Chief Justice David Brearley and three associate justices presided, Attorney General William Paterson prosecuted, and Joseph Read of Burlington defended him. The jury convicted him and he was sentenced to hang.

The New-Jersey Gazette of August 8, 1781, printed the outcome in its Trenton column, reporting that at a special court lately held in Burlington “a certain Joseph Mulliner, off Weg-Tarbour, was convicted of high treason, and is sentenced to be hanged this day.” The same notice called him “the terror of that part of the country,” said he had made a practice of burning houses and robbing whoever fell in his way, and claimed that by the time of trial both Whigs and Tories were his enemies — a charge routinely made against Loyalist raiders. The compiled biography dates the execution to that day, August 8, at Burlington. Blackman, writing a century later, says he was buried in the forest near Batsto Furnace in Washington Township.

In the spring of 1782 his case became a diplomatic exhibit. As documents were exchanged during the Joshua Huddy affair, the British listed Mulliner among acts of cruelty inflicted on Loyalists, and William Franklin, the last royal governor, designated him an Associated Loyalist. The British alleged he had produced a privateer’s commission at his trial; the compiled biography notes that no such defense appears in the surviving court records.

The Robin Hood who isn’t in the record

The Mulliner of local storytelling — a large, handsome prankster who crashed dances and was generous to the people he robbed — is tradition layered onto the case long after 1781, and he was also the model for a stock villain in the 1855 historical novel Kate Aylsford. None of that character appears in the tax lists, indictments, trial record, or the 1781 newspaper notice. His politics are ambiguous in the paperwork as well: from the record alone it is hard to say whether he was a committed Loyalist or an outlaw using the war’s disorder for cover.

The grave and the ghost

Modern retellings supply the details most often repeated today, and none of them cites archival sources. A Weird NJ article and a Southampton Historical Society program notice share nearly identical wording, so they amount to one account rather than two. In it Mulliner flees his home in 1779 to avoid arrest, raids through the pines while sparing poorer people, is taken at the Indian Cabin Mill Inn at Nesco after a night of drinking and dancing, and is hanged at a place called Gallows Hill on the day of his conviction, his body carried by wagon to his wife at Sweetwater. Several of those details conflict with the documents above: the Burlington court minutes run from July 25 to August 1, the sentence was reported on August 8, the surviving record does not describe his capture, and Blackman placed his burial in the forest near Batsto Furnace rather than at Sweetwater. A 2014 SouthJersey.com feature, which presents its material as stories handed down, adds a band of about forty men and an anonymous $300 gift to a widow whose house his men had burned; neither appears in any record located here.

The grave is equally uncertain. Weird NJ describes a small granite marker on a bluff above the Mullica giving his name and the year 1781, says earlier markers with the same wording were stolen, and quotes a local historian’s claim that a 1965 marker was placed there as a prank at a time when the original grave’s location was unknown. The ghost belongs to the same late layer: the SouthJersey.com feature, the only source located for it, describes travelers hearing laughter in the woods or meeting a man resembling the outlaw standing in the road with his guns drawn. It gives no dates, witnesses or places, and no earlier account of the ghost was found.