Tories

by Thomas B. Allen

  Brigadier Ruggles was a stubborn, committed man. When he had been appointed a mandamus councillor and set off to Boston to be sworn in by Gates, he had to cross a bridge on the road out of Hardwick. At the head of a menacing crowd stood his Patriot brother Benjamin, the captain of a royal militia that was rapidly turning rebellious. Town tradition records the scene:

  Benjamin quietly faced his older brother and said that if he crossed the bridge he would never be allowed to return.

  “Brother Benjamin,” Timothy replied, “I shall come back—at the head of five hundred soldiers, if necessary.”

  “Brother Timothy,” Benjamin replied, “if you cross that bridge, this morning, you will certainly never cross it again—alive.”

  Timothy Ruggles turned, waved his hand to the crowd, and at a brisk military pace crossed the bridge.72

  Ruggles’s proposed Loyal American Association would protect “the good people of the province.” Members of the association were to pledge that they would not submit to any rebellious assembly and would instead “enforce obedience” to the king and his laws; they would defend each other if imperiled by “any Committees, mobs, or unlawful Assemblies,” and, “if need be, will oppose and repel force with force.” Finally, if the person or property of any member of the association was injured and “full reparation” was refused, “we will have recourse to the natural law of Retaliation.”73 Within three weeks, according to an enthusiastic Loyalist, 150 men of Marshfield signed up for the association.74

  Not long after Ruggles’s plan became public, a band of Loyalists in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, signed an agreement that they would “defend and Protect Each other from Mob Riots or any unlawful attacks … to the utmost Extremity.” Those Loyalists were reacting to the storming of William and Mary Castle, a crumbling fort about three miles offshore, by Portsmouth Patriots. After easily overpowering the British guards, the raiders carried off cannons, muskets, and one hundred barrels of gunpowder. John Wentworth, the New

  Hampshire royal governor, appealed to Gage for help. Two Royal Navy warships soon appeared off Portsmouth, and from one of them the governor borrowed twenty stands of arms for his newly formed Loyalist Association.75 Wentworth boarded one of the warships and, with his wife and infant son, sailed away to Boston hoping in vain that he could persuade Gage to save New Hampshire from the Rebels.76

  On village greens from New England to South Carolina, Rebel militias were drilling. Patriot couriers were carrying messages from town to town and colony to colony. Georgia, which managed to send only one delegate to the Second Continental Congress, finally showed its solidarity in May 1775, when Sons of Liberty broke into a royal magazine in Savannah, stole gunpowder, and then shared it with South Carolina Rebels.77 The authority of the Continental Congress was spreading and showing itself, through the creation of provincial congresses and through “resolves” that ranged from military matters to social behavior. In Wilmington, North Carolina, for example, the Committee of Safety decreed that “Balls and Dancing at Public Houses are contrary to the Resolves of the General Congress” and warned a known Tory to withdraw her plans for a ball at her house. She stubbornly went on with the ball, apparently after some negotiating. But the committee issued a general warning against future dancing.78

  In Virginia delegates to the Virginia Convention met to approve acts of the Congress. To evade the royal governor—John Murray, the Earl of Dunmore—the delegates met in a church in Richmond instead of the royal capital of Williamsburg. On March 23 Patrick Henry proposed raising a Patriot militia and, to critics seeking conciliation, he declared:

  Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace—but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What wouldthey have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!79

  In London, Parliament debated conciliation and then voted against the idea, 270 to 78.80 War now seemed inevitable; indeed, as Patrick Henry said, it had actually begun. Ruggles’s Loyal Americans was only a proposal. And Gilbert’s three hundred armed Loyalists were not members of a trained armed force. But Ruggles’s and Gilbert’s plans posed a strategic question for Gage: Would the Loyalists fight against their countrymen?

  * A convening of delegates who, while lacking legal powers, discussed and voted on resolutions describing their views.

  3

  FLEE OR FIGHT

  MASSACHUSETTS, JANUARY-APRIL 1775

  The flame of Civil War is now broke out in America, and … it will rage with a Violence equil to what it has ever done in any other Country… . I think that the people … will adopt the proverb, which says, when the Sword of Rebellion is Drawn, the Sheath should be thrown away; Ocians of blood will be shed.

  —John Singleton Copley1

  Residents of Cambridge’s Tory Row who were harassed during the September Powder Alarm—William Brattle, Col. David Phips, Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver, and others—fled to Boston, Gage’s garrisoned city. The exodus from towns near Boston had begun around the time that Governor Hutchinson sailed away and General Gage arrived. Those events had produced the “Addresser” phenomenon, which identified leading Loyalists, made them certified objects of Patriot wrath, and inspired John Trumbull to give them notoriety in M’Fingal—

  And look our list of placemen all over,

  Did heaven appoint our chief Judge Oliver,

  Fill that high bench with ignoramus,

  Or has it councils by mandamus?

  Who made that wit of water-gruel

  A judge of admiralty, Sewall?

  And were they not mere earthly struggles,

  That raised up Murray, say, and Ruggles?

  … Or by election pick out from us

  That Marshfield blunderer, Nat. Ray Thomas…?2

  Some fled from real or imagined mobs, taking their families with them, and some fled alone, all hoping that the rising storm soon would pass, that the Redcoats would prevail, that they could return to their homes and reclaim their lives. Israel Williams—the Tory who had been smoked—choose to sail to England, as did Jonathan Sewall, the former Massachusetts attorney general, and, after a sojourn in Philadelphia, former judge Samuel Curwen.

  Mrs. Curwen, a descendant of the Winslows of Plymouth, chose to stay in America, because, Curwen archly observed, “her apprehensions of danger from an incensed soldiery, a people licentious and enthusiastically mad and broken loose from all the restraints of law or religion being less terrible to her than a short passage on the ocean.”3 In London, Curwen found “an army of New Englanders.” But, he added, “… My distress and anxiety for my friends and countrymen embitter every hour.”4

  John Singleton Copley, painter of Patriots and Loyalists, also sailed away, first to Italy for a tour through churches and galleries of great art, and then to London, where he became a member of the newly formed Loyalist Club. His wife sailed later. Copley, an Addresser, followed the family of his wealthy tea merchant father-in-law, who had been driven out of Boston by a mob. His half-brother, Henry Pelham, a committed Loyalist, remained awhile in Boston and started spying for Gage. “My hand trembles while I inform you that [the] Sword of Civil War is now unsheathd,” Pelham wrote in a letter to Copley. Soon after, Pelham joined Copley in London. Like many who chose refuge in England, Copley and Pelham never returned to America.5 Eventually more than seven thousand Loyalists moved to England.6 By the early spring of 1775, hundreds of Massachusetts refugees, along with some from New Hampshire,7 were living in Boston. Most of them thought that Gates and his Redcoats would quickly put down any armed rebellion that might arise. Others, like the recruits for Ruggles’s Loyal American Association, believed that Gage would need the aid of armed volunteers. And some spewed invective. One refugee described the Pat
riots as “more savage and cruel than heathens or any other creatures and it is generally thought than devils.” Another “wanted to see the blood streaming from the hearts of the leaders.”8

  Most of the refugees moved their families into the homes of Boston friends. Others rented houses that had been vacated by jittery Bostonians—Loyalists, Patriots, and the undeclared—who had headed elsewhere, hoping that the move was temporary. Some men, such as former Old Colony Club member Gideon White, Jr., struck up social acquaintances with British officers and eventually joined the British Army.

  Loyalists who fraternized with British officers put themselves at risk. One was Thomas Amory. Although an Addresser of Gage, Amory was well liked and kept his Loyalist sympathies to himself. For a time he was not harassed. A merchant like his namesake father and grandfather, he lived in Milton, bordering on Boston, in the imposing house of a former royal governor. One night word reached the Patriots that Amory was entertaining some British officers. A brick-throwing mob attacked the house. One of the bricks smashed a windowpane in his young daughter’s room and landed on her bed. Amory stepped out to his porch and tried to calm the mob while the officers slipped out the back door and in the darkness made their way down a garden path that ended at the shore of the Neponset River estuary. They boarded a boat tied up at Amory’s pier, rowed to Boston Harbor, and went to their lodgings. Amory later moved to Watertown, about eight miles west of Boston.9

  The well-documented flight of the placemen, the Addressers, and other eminent Loyalists produced for posterity a distorted image of the refugees. Many ordinary families also sought the protection of General Gage’s Redcoats and marines. But documentation is scant about these lesser Loyalists.

  John Nutting of Cambridge is an exception. Born in 1739 to a mother who was soon to become a widow, he was apprenticed to a “housewright” in Reading, Massachusetts. After serving in a royal militia during the French and Indian War, he married his master’s daughter, built a house—” two story high, three rooms on a floor”—in Cambridge, and started a family. He prospered as a builder and an entrepreneur, importing to Boston timber from land he had bought in the Maine wilderness.

  Nutting had become a Tory, and when General Gage decided to empty the Massachusetts Provincial Powder House in September 1774, Nutting somehow helped, perhaps as an informer and guide. This, in his words, “raised the resentment of the populace against him to such a Degree as obliged him to quit his House & Family, & take refuge in Boston.”10 He moved, followed shortly by his wife and six children, at a propitious time, for the chill of autumn was sweeping through the tented bivouacs of the British forces. Bostonians were not about to billet the shivering soldiers. So barracks had to be built, and few carpenters would sign on for the work.

  Nutting volunteered to serve as General Gage’s master carpenter, becoming, as he later wrote, “the first person of an American that entered into the King’s service when the troubles began.” Nutting recruited forty or so carpenters from other places, inspiring a Patriot warning that such work would “deem them as enemies to the rights and liberties of America.” Taking the warning seriously, the builders walked off the job.11

  Carpenters imported from Canada and New Hampshire worked on the most crucially needed barracks, which housed the troops assigned to fortifications built on Boston Neck. Boston was then a near-island, attached to the mainland by a slender peninsula. Boston Harbor lay to the east and south, the Charles River on the north and west. Across the river rose the heights of Charlestown, and to the southeast loomed Dorchester Heights.

  By November the Boston Neck guardrooms “were not half finished, having neither fire places or Stoves fixed,” Lt. John Barker wrote in his diary. But after their stove was repaired, “we were pretty comfortable.”12 The post at the Neck, called “the Lines,” was a choke-point for people entering and leaving Boston. Gates and his troops could control the city. But Gates realized that if the Patriots started a war and managed to muster a large-enough army, they could take the high ground of Charlestown and Dorchester and lay an effective siege.

  Gage’s basic strategy was simple: Deprive the Patriots of an army by depriving them of gunpowder, muskets, and cannons. In October the king had ordered that no gunpowder or arms be exported to America. Patriots learned of this in December and stepped up their efforts to arm their militias.13 Responding quickly, Patriots in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, attacked Fort William and Mary and made off with its store of gunpowder. Patriots in Rhode Island snatched forty-four guns from Fort George at Newport and openly began supplying arms to militiamen.14

  Gage reacted slowly. Following up on his September seizure that touched off the Powder Alarm, he ordered a strike against the Rebels of Salem, about twenty-five miles north of Boston. Gage was well informed about Rebel activities by Loyalist spies controlled by his principal intelligence officer, his brother-in-law Maj. Stephen Kemble. Like Mrs. Gage, Kemble was born in New Jersey and was more knowledgeable about Americans than typical British-born officers. Gage’s intelligence network served him well. Many of his agents were never identified.15

  Dr. Benjamin Church, a Boston physician and member of the Patriots’ Committee of Correspondence, frequently wrote Patriot prose and poetry. A native of Newport, Rhode Island, he graduated from Harvard in 1754. He later studied medicine at the London Medical College and returned to America with an English wife. He was a member of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts and the Sons of Liberty. He was also a secret Tory and Gage’s best-placed spy, an operative that a modern spymaster would call a mole or penetration agent.16

  From Church or one of his other agents, Gage learned about the Rebel arsenal in Salem, where, by February 1775, work was ending on a bold project to arm Patriots with cannons. Col. David Mason, as engineer for the Massachusetts Committee of Public Safety, had been a captain of British artillery in the French and Indian War. Somehow he had acquired about a dozen twelve-pounders, which had originally been emplaced at a French fortress in Canada. Now he was supervising their conversion to field cannons. Mason was the Renaissance man of Salem. He gilded and varnished carriages, painted portraits, tinkered with machinery, and gave paid lectures on electricity—a phenomenon he had discussed with his old friend Benjamin Franklin. Mason’s interests included the science of explosives.17

  Mason had turned the fortress cannons and some others over to Robert Foster, a militia captain and a blacksmith. In his Salem workshop, Foster added carriages and modified the cannons with ironwork to Mason’s specifications. Mason’s wife and daughters were meanwhile sewing five thousand flannel powder bags for the cannons.18

  Work on the cannons was almost completed when General Gage ordered a raid to seize the arms. He gave the mission to the 64th Infantry Regiment, which was stationed at Castle William. Members of that regiment could avoid being seen on the streets of Boston because they could directly be boarded onto a transport off Castle Island. About 250 men of the 64th sailed off on the night of Saturday, February 26, under the command of Lt. Col. Alexander Leslie.19

  The troops were to sail to Marblehead, land there, march to nearby Salem, and confiscate the cannons. Paul Revere’s counterspies heard rumors of an expedition and sent three men to the waters near Castle Island to investigate. They were spotted, seized, and confined until Monday, so that, a Patriot report said, no warning could be sent “to our brethren at Marblehead and Salem.”20

  The secrecy held until Leslie and his men began their march to Salem on Sunday, the fifes and drums playing “Yankee Doodle,” a tune that the British often played to mock the Rebels.”21 John Pederick, a Marble-head man, came upon Leslie on the road. They saluted each other and Leslie courteously parted the marching files to let Pederick through.

  Leslie had known Pederick as a royal militia officer who had been cashiered because of his Tory views when Patriots took over the militia.

  Pederick had found redemption in the Patriot cause and, when he saw the troops arriving in Marblehead, he knew he had to
get past Leslie and warn Salem. After their friendly meeting, Pederick rode slowly past the troops. Then, out of sight, he galloped down the road to Salem. The first man he met was Mason, the cannons’ owner. Many people of Salem were at afternoon worship in a meetinghouse when Mason burst through the door and ran down the aisle shouting that the Regulars were coming.22

  As church bells rang and militia drums thundered a call to arms, Mason rode off to supervise the hiding of the cannons. Men hauled some of them into a dense wood and buried them under a deep carpet of leaves. The bulky carriages were taken elsewhere. Patriots loaded other cannons onto horse-drawn wagons that headed down the road to Danvers, where they were buried in a gravel pit.23

  By the time the men of Leslie’s advance guard reached a bridge between Marblehead and the southern end of Salem, they found the planks ripped up. Soldiers quickly repaired the bridge, but the men hiding the cannons had won a few minutes. The Redcoats marched on, colors flying and drums beating, until they reached the courthouse in the town square. Leslie was soon in muted conversation with three local Loyalists. One was an Addresser. Another was the half-brother of Col. William Browne, a mandamus councillor and one of the notorious “Seventeen Rescinders” of 1768.24

  Now informed where the cannons were most likely hidden, Leslie led his troops toward an arm of the sea called the North River. Arching over the ship channel was a drawbridge. The troops—and a large, unruly escort of shouting, taunting Salem men, women, and children—were nearing the bridge when the northern leaf of the draw was raised. Everyone stopped at the southern end of the bridge.