A civil war raged throughout the colonies and separated many of the citizens of Maryland.
Chapter 4
America’s First Civil War
A low murmur ran through the crowd of Marylanders gathered for a meeting of two militia companies in Frederick County, Maryland, northwest of Baltimore on February 6, 1776. Robert Gassaway rose to his feet and began speaking. Although all present had volunteered to defend their homes from British forces if the need should arise, many retained some feelings of loyalty to the Crown. More than a few were also uneasy about the new colonial organizations that were taking on the role of government. Gassaway gave voice to their secret fears, saying that “it was better for the Poor People to lay down their Arms, and pay the Duties and Taxes laid upon them by the King and Parliament, than to be brought into Slavery and to be commanded and ordered about as they were” by rippling effects of the crisis in Boston and by the Patriot government in Maryland. He intimated that Marylanders, including his sons, were compelled to sign up for the militia because they feared what the local Committee of Observation, the group charged with suppressing Loyalists, would do if they refused to join. “My brave boys fight away,” he added with his hands clasped around his neck, “for fear their necks should be stretched.”
Angrily, the more patriotic among the group told Gassaway to keep his opinions to himself.
But the outspoken Marylander wouldn’t be silenced. Gassaway claimed he “was satisfied he was right,” and he called on the militia to lay down its arms.
Gassaway’s dissent provides an example of the stark divisions between Loyalists and Patriots that tore many colonies—and many families—apart during the war, which wasn’t only a revolution but a civil war as well.
As for Gassaway, the threat of imprisonment later convinced him to sign a poorly written confession, which said, “I confess that I am sory to think that I should have said enni thing that should have given enny purson reson to think that it was my deiser to disunite the peopel and, And acknowledge my error in so doing, and do promis for tim to cum to behave myself carfully.”
This civil war was particularly evident in Maryland, where Chesapeake Bay divided the colony in half, effectively creating two factions. Those who lived on the Eastern Shore tended to be Loyalists, or Tories, while other areas were home to more Patriots.
From Maryland’s founding in 1632, its geography had separated it into two sections. On the western shore of the Chesapeake, the towns of Annapolis, Saint Mary’s City, and Baltimore served as way stations for travelers and merchants journeying to and from other colonies. Trade flourished and residents were in regular communication with the other colonies. The Eastern Shore, by contrast, was much more isolated. The farmers, plantation owners, and fishermen of the area tended to keep to themselves, with religion often playing a major role in the colonists’ lives. Although the colony had been founded as a haven for Catholics, by the end of the seventeenth century, Protestants were asserting more control in the colony, just as they were in Britain. On the Eastern Shore, the Church of England dominated the religious landscape. The local church leaders encouraged their congregations to remain loyal to Great Britain and, in many cases, the people followed the recommendations of the clergy. However, supporters of both sides could be found throughout the state and the rest of the colonies, often living close together. In the crucible of insurgency, ethnic, religious, and secular divisions resulted in bitter rivalries, pitting neighbor against neighbor and brother against brother.
Dealing with the numerous Loyalists in Maryland fell to the colony’s Council of Safety. This euphemistically named body provided a mechanism for military planning and hoarding of supplies and weapons, as well as administering the government and clamping down on dissidents.
At the urging of the recently convened Second Continental Congress, each of the colonies formed a similar council. Marylanders who refused to sign an oath of association were labeled “Non-Associators,” and the state required them to pay fines and forfeit their firearms; in some cases it also seized their property.
At the local level, towns like Baltimore established Committees of Observation, which provided extralegal courts to administer regulations. There were approximately nine hundred such committees across Maryland. They served to intimidate Loyalists, confiscate their property, and enforce laws. Mordecai Gist and other prominent members of the Baltimore Independent Company were heavily involved with both the Council of Safety and the Committee of Observation, taking orders from both groups.
The new government organizations effectively kept many Loyalists and those with mixed allegiance in check. The committees also had a financial component; they suspended British debt laws and collection activities from Britain. In the Chesapeake region, debt owed to British factors and agents was a major issue, as many Patriot planters were overextended. After examining British Treasury records, one historian claimed that more than fifty-five members of Virginia’s House of Burgesses were in hock to the Crown. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson each owed between one thousand and five thousand pounds—a fortune at the time—and many prominent Marylanders joined their ranks. In addition, the state owed £289,000, largely from a trade deficit in which imports outstripped exports.
Loyalty to the Crown and loyalty to the Patriot cause divided several of the families of Smallwood’s Battalion. Eastern Shore native John Gunby was a fierce Patriot, but his father “was an ardent supporter of the Crown; in other words, a Tory.” Called “one of the most gallant officers of the Maryland Line under Gen. Smallwood,” John Gunby was born in Somerset County. At the age of thirty, he volunteered as a minuteman, despite the objections of his father, who warned that he could be hanged for treason. The younger Gunby replied, “I am determined to join American forces; I would sooner sink into a patriot’s grave than wear the crown of England.” Like Gist, he raised an independent company that became part of Smallwood’s Battalion.
Despite their disagreement, Gunby continued to respect and admire his father. He wrote that “Tory” was
a name to which a great deal of undeserved odium has been always attached in America. Yet Toryism in principle was nothing but a conservative attachment to the government and institutions of the Mother country. . . . This admirable sentiment of loyalty to the king was so strong that it required almost the bitterness of death to break it. All the more, we must admire the heroic manhood of the colonies, which threw off these attachments in the cause of freedom and endured all kinds of pain and suffering rather than endure oppression.
These competing desires—loyalty to the Crown and the desire to be free from oppression—warred within the hearts of many colonists, causing some of them to change their allegiance during the course of the Revolution.
One Tory who didn’t have divided loyalties was Eastern Shore mogul and pamphleteer James Chalmers, owner of an island on the Chesapeake. With his fortune of more than ten thousand pounds, he had purchased several sprawling tobacco plantations on the Eastern Shore and owned scores of slaves. He had an inner circle of many influential and wealthy Loyalists. An Englishman described the recent Scottish immigrant by saying, “The worthy proprietor lives in a manner independent of mankind, the monarch of his little fertile territory.” Zealously opposed to revolution, Chalmers published scathing rebuttals to Patriot literature, including Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. He wrote that Paine, “shamefully misrepresents facts, is ignorant of the true state of Great Britain and her Colonies, utterly unqualified for the arduous task, he has presumptuously assumed; and ardently intent on seducing us to that precipice on which himself stands trembling.” He concluded, “Volumes were insufficient to describe the horror, misery and desolation, awaiting the people at large in the Syren [Siren] form of American independence. In short, I affirm that it would be most excellent policy in those who wish for true liberty to submit by an advantageous reconciliation to the authority of Great Britain; ‘to accomplish in t
he long run, what they cannot do by hypocrisy, fraud and force in the short one.’ independence and slavery are synonymous terms.”
After refusing to sign an oath of fidelity to the Maryland Council of Safety and being beaten nearly to death by a mob in Chestertown, Chalmers prepared to “repel force by force.” Within a year he was talking to the British commander in North America. In time he became a mirror image of Gist, raising his own regiment of Loyalists, just as the Baltimore merchant had assembled his Patriots.
In the cauldron of competing ideals and with less-than-ideal training and preparation, the Marylanders went to war against people who had been their countrymen. To quash this nascent insurrection, the Crown planned to intimidate the rebellious colonies with a show of force.
1776
Chapter 5
The Otter
Water splashed against the side of the Defence as the vessel navigated the Chesapeake on March 9, 1776. Captain Samuel Smith looked around at his men who had enthusiastically volunteered for the mission to confront the British warship Otter, which lay at anchor up ahead and threatened the cities of Baltimore and Annapolis. So many of Smith’s men had wanted to take part in the action that the Defence couldn’t hold them all. Some had clambered into small boats that were now accompanying the converted merchant ship, which carried twenty guns.
Like so many of the men who made up the core of the new battalion, Smith was one of the original sixty cadets in the Baltimore Independent Company. Smith was close to Mordecai Gist and Nathaniel Ramsay and particularly close to Jack Steward. Smith and Steward actually once fought a duel, “becoming, subsequently, on the most friendly terms.”
Over a year had passed since Smith and the other cadets had formed Maryland’s first independent military company, and many dramatic events had shaped the first twelve months of the Revolution. The siege of Boston had been lifted after Patriots seized the heavy artillery at Fort Ticonderoga and hauled it hundreds of miles across the New York and Massachusetts countryside before positioning it over Dorchester Heights in south Boston. With the artillery on fortified high ground overlooking Boston harbor, the British commander saw that his position in Boston had become indefensible and withdrew his troops to Halifax, Nova Scotia. The Americans won a string of victories in 1775 and suffered one epic defeat while assaulting Quebec in the midst of a snowstorm on the last day of the year.
In the South a Patriot militia numbering nearly one thousand men crushed a Loyalist militia of equal force outside Wilmington, North Carolina, dampening the Crown’s influence in the state for years. In Virginia the colony’s firebrand governor, John Murray, also known as Lord Dunmore, attempted to disrupt Whig units outside Norfolk. In the Battle of Great Bridge, Patriot forces annihilated Dunmore’s troops, slaying or wounding nearly one hundred British regulars, while the only American casualty was a single man with a slightly wounded thumb. Trounced, Dunmore, with a small contingent of British regulars, Loyalists, and several hundred former slaves he dubbed the Ethiopian Regiment, boarded royal ships, including the man-of-war Otter. Next, Dunmore’s force bombarded and torched Norfolk, and what it didn’t destroy Whig militia finished off, burning and looting many Loyalist homes. Most Americans didn’t know the full truth of the episode and assumed it was a British atrocity. The supposed atrocity, combined with an earlier incident at Falmouth, Massachusetts, where the British torched hundreds of houses, galvanized calls for independence. With Norfolk in ashes, Dunmore’s flotilla sailed across the Chesapeake to Portsmouth, Virginia, before turning north and raiding the coastline.
In a show of force, Dunmore sent a group of warships including the Otter up the Chesapeake toward Baltimore and Annapolis in March 1776. Their arrival caused great consternation in the colony, and people who lived near the shore quickly evacuated out of fear that they would meet the same fate as Norfolk. The Council of Safety immediately sent a note to the battalion, saying, “We hear that the 44 Gun Man of War and two Sloops are on their Way up the Bay: the City [Baltimore] is now weak and we judge it necessary to have all the Men drawn to Town we can for its Defence; we should be glad you will give Directions to all the Companies and Men in your Battalion that can be got ready to repair as soon as possible to Town. We shall be glad to see you as early in the morning as you can.”
Preliminary intelligence proved to be somewhat exaggerated, as later reports counted only eighteen guns on the Otter. Nevertheless, the battalion “moved with astonishing dispatch, and as soon as the Vessels hove in Sight [the Maryland] Coast was lined with Men.” As a show of strength, the battalion mustered ranks near the shoreline. To make it appear that it had more men than it did, the same soldiers lined up over and over in different locations as the British ship moved up the coast.
Adding to the tension, the Otter had set fire to a small boat carrying a load of oats. The Otter’s captain claimed it “was done without order and done by an inconsiderate midshipman,” but the move fanned the flames of hostility in Annapolis and Baltimore. Making things worse, the captain next demanded that the governor of Maryland turn over to him the vessel Defence, which was currently being fitted out for war and which the British called a presumably hostile privateer. In addition, he wanted provisions, which he would take by force if the Marylanders refused to sell them to him.
While the negotiations were still in progress, the captain of the Defence called for volunteers to challenge the Otter and recapture other vessels that were in convoy. Samuel Smith’s company enthusiastically volunteered. The American ship, accompanied by a few others, approached the British flotilla. Surprised by such resistance, the Otter turned tail and ran to Virginia, pillaging Maryland’s Saint George’s Island on the way to get the supplies denied it at Baltimore. During this withdrawal, the Otter attempted to capture an American schooner in a nearby creek, but the local militia drove the British ship away. Meanwhile, the triumphant Marylanders returned to Baltimore with the vessels that they had retaken.
Although the encounter with the Otter had been a minor incident, the Marylanders had received their first taste of victory. The Maryland Council of Safety heralded their bravery, writing, “We cannot sufficiently commend those brave Sons of Liberty who this Day stood forth so gallantly in Defence of their Country. Be assured that we shall afford them every assistance in our power.”
The second task entrusted to the regiment was more distasteful. Virginian Patriots had intercepted some correspondence between Maryland’s British-installed governor, Sir Robert Eden, and a renowned Loyalist and close associate of firebrand James Chalmers. One Patriot general forwarded the letters to the Council of Safety, which then asked Smith’s company to arrest the governor. The Council wrote, “It evidently appears that Mr. Eden has been carrying on a dangerous Correspondence with the Ministry of Great Britain, who seem desperately bent on the Destruction of America. The Congress therefore have come to a Resolution that the Person and Papers of Governor Eden be immediately seized, from which there is Reason to believe, we may not only learn but probably defeat, the Designs of our Enemies.”
However, the governor enjoyed great popularity among the people. A consummate politician, he attempted to walk both sides of the fence; he understood their grievances yet opposed taking up arms.
Despite the fact that Eden was Britain’s representative, when Smith and his men arrived in Annapolis to carry out their duty, the Council of Safety suddenly changed its mind and ordered them back home. Eventually, an investigation found that Eden had no malicious intent, but the Council of Safety requested that the governor leave the colony, which he did. As Eden was leaving, the largest invasion of North America was about to begin.
Chapter 6
The Armada
On the cool summer morning of June 29, 1776, Marylander Private Daniel McCurtin seated himself in an outbuilding that afforded a panoramic view of the blue-green, wide-open waters cradling the lower harbor of New York City. As McCurtin turned his gaze to take in the pictu
resque vista, he instead witnessed a jarring sight. The bay seemed to resemble “a wood of pine trees trimmed,” as hundreds of ships sporting naked masts approached shore and dropped sail to anchor. Astonished by this strange development, he continued, “I declare, at my noticing this, that I could not believe my eyes, but Keeping my eyes fixed at the very spot, judge you of my surprise when in ten minutes, the whole bay was full of shipping as ever it could be. I declare that I thought all London was afloat.”
McCurtin, part of a small advance group of Marylanders in New York, saw the harbinger of a vast flotilla carrying more than twenty-three thousand British regulars and an initial complement of ten thousand Hessian allies to American shores. Over the next six weeks, more than five hundred transports and seventy British warships sailed into New York’s harbors. The show of strength comprised half of the British navy and a large portion of the British army. Some of the first ships to arrive dropped anchor off Sandy Hook, New Jersey, while others landed troops to invade Staten Island. The island contained a rebel flagstaff fort to signal the arrival of British troops. It also provided an ideal staging area for the invasion of Long Island and Manhattan. The British ships bided their time until the rest of the transports bearing the Hessians and other reinforcements arrived.5
5. Howe also put his men to work constructing landing barges, precursors of World War II’s landing craft infantry (LCI). The barges had high gunwales and a crude ramp that dropped in the front, allowing the men to exit quickly on a landing beach.
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