Tories

by Thomas B. Allen

  Maclean sailed to Boston, where Gage made him, as a lieutenant colonel, commander of the regiment, which he divided into two battalions. Recruits for one of them were to come from Nova Scotia and St. John’s Island (now Prince Edward Island). The other battalion, which Maclean would directly command, was to enlist Loyalists in Canada and New York—a limitation Maclean ignored so that he could include Highlanders in the Carolinas.40

  • • •

  Maclean’s Royal Highland Emigrants regiment would be the first organized Loyalist military unit to fight in a major battle of the Revolution. When Maclean arrived in Quebec, he found, to his surprise and rage, that pro-American Québécois were expecting to surrender the city to Benedict Arnold. Carleton arrived next and reacted swiftly, proclaiming that every able-bodied man who refused to bear arms was to leave Quebec within four days. The proclamation drove out many families known to be pro-American. But Carleton knew that others remained, and he still feared that if the invaders managed to get within the walled city, they would attract sympathizers.41 He tried to stifle rebellion among Catholics by getting the local Catholic hierarchy to decree that anyone helping the invaders would be denied the sacraments.42

  Carleton assembled an army of assorted defenders. The garrison could muster only about one hundred men because most of Canada’s British Regulars had been sent to Boston as reinforcements for Gage. Added to the garrison troops were four hundred sailors and thirty-five marines of two Royal Navy warships in Quebec Harbor, along with fifty masters and mates of merchant ships. There were also nine hundred local militiamen—some British, some Canadien—and a number of Catholic seminary students.43 Carleton handed military command to Maclean, who strengthened defenses in the two-tier city, which consisted of a vulnerable lower town open to the harbor and a walled, fortresslike upper town.

  On November 14 Arnold’s men paddled and rowed across the river and encamped on the Plains of Abraham. Here had been the climactic battle of the French and Indian War, when Gen. James Wolfe defeated the Marquis de Montcalm. The fall of Quebec meant the conquest of Canada. Arnold, well aware that history could repeat itself here, boldly sent an officer toward the city under a flag of truce with a demand of surrender. Maclean’s guns fired on the officer. The next day Arnold tried again and got the same response. Prudently he withdrew about twenty miles from Quebec and awaited Montgomery.44

  Montgomery appeared with about three hundred men, including pro-American Canadian militiamen he had picked up along the way. He also brought spoils from British river forts that had fallen to him: ammunition, guns, and Redcoats’ winter uniforms. Most of Arnold’s men were half naked, shivering in the cold shortening days of December. They eagerly donned the uniforms, attaching twigs of hemlock to their hats to advertise their true identity.45

  Montgomery took command and established a camp close to the city. He immediately sent a letter to Carleton demanding surrender. Carleton refused to accept it. So Montgomery recruited an old woman to deliver a second letter, which said that the Americans came “with the professed Intention of eradicating Tyranny and giving Liberty and Security to this oppressed Province.”46 Carleton burned the note without reading it, had the woman arrested, and after she spent a night in jail, he put her outside the gates.

  Montgomery began a siege. But the enlistment of many of his men ended on New Year’s Day, and he knew he had no choice but an attack. At 2 a.m. on the last day of 1775, his men tramped through a blizzard to their places in Montgomery’s attack plan: two feints, then—on the signal of two rockets flaring in the darkness—two attacks on the lower town. Once it was taken, the combined force would advance on the upper town. All of this was known by the defenders because a deserter had slipped into the city and revealed the plan. So they were ready when they saw the rockets rising in the black sky and the dots of lanterns advancing in the whirling snow.

  Arnold, leading six hundred men into the lower town from the north, reached as far as a barricade that erupted with fierce fire. Shot in the left leg, he leaned against a wall and, waving his sword, urged his men on until, his boot filling with blood, he was taken off, still gripping his sword.47 He turned command over to Daniel Morgan, who fought his way to the rendezvous site but, instead of linking up with Montgomery, was surrounded by two hundred of Maclean’s men and was captured with most of his force.48

  On the south side of town Montgomery, leading his advance guard, charged a fortified house. He was ten yards from the house when a blast of cannon and musket fire killed him, two other officers, andten nearby men. Others were wounded.49 Suddenly leaderless, the rest turned and ran. Many of them would be among the four hundred prisoners taken that day.50 About eighty in the invading force were killed or wounded.51

  The next day British troops saw a hand sticking out of a drift of bloodied snow. They dug and found the body of Montgomery, his sword at his side. Had he not been killed, Arnold wrote in tribute, “the town would have been ours.”52

  Arnold, propped up in a hospital bed in a Quebec suburb, commanded about six hundred men who had managed to escape and regroup outside the city. They lived from day to day on diminishing rations while men deserted and Arnold sent couriers to Montreal, still in the invaders’ hands, carrying urgent requests for troops and supplies. Canadiens drifted into Arnold’s camp, hoping to arm themselves and somehow fight the British. Carleton did not attack, for he knew that in spring reinforcements would come in Royal Navy warships.

  On April 1, 1776, Arnold, promoted to brigadier general, was ordered to Montreal. There, to his surprise, he met Ben Franklin and two other commissioners dispatched by the Continental Congress in quest of the fourteenth colony. The commissioners had been told to find a way “to promote or to form a union between the United Colonies and the people of Canada.” The commissioners stayed in what Franklin called “the best built and the best furnished house in the city”—the mansion of Thomas Walker, the one-eared Canadian rebel. The commission gave Arnold permission to supply the struggling invasion force by seizing goods from the warehouses and ships of Montreal Tories. He paid in worthless Continental currency rather than gold. The authorized plundering was the sole accomplishment of the commission, which fled Canada in May.53

  Several Continental Army regiments made their way to Quebec, adding to the remnants of the invasion force. But there was little chance for a second thrust into Quebec, for in May and June, British reinforcements arrived, and the Americans and their Canadian alliesbegan to withdraw. Carleton pursued, leading a force of eight thousand Regulars and three thousand German mercenaries, collectively called Hessians. The Patriots, burning or seizing anything of value, retreated up the Richelieu River to Lake Champlain, marshaling finally at Crown Point, just above Ticonderoga.54

  “The junction of the Canadians with the Colonies,” Arnold wrote to General Schuyler, “… is at an end. Let us quit then and secure our own country before it is too late.” Arnold took command of the retreat as Carleton began building warships at the north end of Lake Champlain to speed up his chase. To fight for control of the lake and thwart or delay a British invasion, Arnold rounded up carpenters and shipwrights to build a fleet of smaller ships near Crown Point, at Skenes-borough (now Whitehall, New York).

  Skenesborough was named after a powerful local Tory, Col. Philip Skene, who was away on business in England. Arnold seized Skene’s trading schooner, the Katherine, and renamed her Liberty. Arnold’s men, searching out Tories, captured Skene’s twenty-two-year-old son Andrew, other members of the family, a dozen slaves, and fifty tenants. All but Andrew were released. He was jailed as a military prisoner, but he escaped and made his way to Quebec to become part of the growing Loyalist military presence in Canada.

  Arnold’s men took possession of Skene’s mansion and the large stone fort that he had built to guard his fiefdom. In the cellar of his house they found the body of Skene’s wife, preserved, it was said, so that he could continue to receive an annuity provided for him while his wife remained above ground. T
he soldiers buried the body at the base of what is still called Skene’s Mountain.55

  The sixteen vessels of Arnold’s little navy consisted mostly of flat-bottomed craft about fifty-three feet long propelled by oars and a fore-and-aft sail. Each carried a few small cannons. The British fleet, which sailed south in October 1776, dwarfed Arnold’s. The British could fire one thousand pounds of shot for every six hundred pounds fired by Arnold’s boats.56 In a ferocious hide-and-seek battle around

  Valcour Island near the western shore of the lake, Arnold lost eleven of his sixteen boats but thwarted Carleton’s hope for a swift drive southward.57

  Arnold took charge of a rear guard to shield the rest of his retreating force from Carleton’s advance guard. He set Skenesborough afire and got his men to the boats that would save them. As the British came into sight, Arnold galloped to the shore of Lake Champlain, shot his horse to deny it to the enemy, took his saddle, and climbed into a boat destined for Crown Point. He had vowed to be the last man out of Canada, and he was.58

  During his retreat he had stripped the land of food, impeding and slowing down a British advance toward the Hudson River, the waterway to New York City. Carleton, in the chill of a frustrating October, postponed his planned invasion and decided that the campaign season had ended. He retired to winter quarters, giving the Rebels a hard-won chance to regroup.59

  The failed invasion did not end the American fascination with the fourteenth colony. Even as Arnold was retreating, another invasion was about to begin. The leader was Jonathan Eddy, one of the many Massachusetts colonists who had migrated to Nova Scotia.

  In 1755 Eddy had joined a force formed by John Winslow (Edward Winslow’s uncle) to seize the French fort Beauséjour at the head of the Bay of Fundy. The taking of the fort began the campaign to rid British Canada of Acadians. The British distrusted the Catholic, French-speaking Acadians, most of them fishermen and farmers who declined to join Britain in its war against France.

  Winslow, at the head of a regiment consisting mostly of Massachusetts volunteers like Eddy, was one of the officers who carried out the expulsion of the Acadians, a tragedy immortalized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his poem Evangeline. Winslow began by ordering “both old men and young men, as well as all the lads of ten years of age” to assemble in a Catholic church “that we may impart to them what we are ordered to communicate … no excuse will be admittedon any pretence whatever, on pain of forfeiting goods and chattels, in default of real estate.”60

  Winslow shut the doors of the church and addressed the 418 men and boys in English, which few Acadians understood. He told them that they were all “the King’s prisoners” and that their “lands and tenements, cattle of all kinds and live stock of all sorts, are forfeited to the Crown.” Five days later, as their burned-down homes and barns smoldered behind them, more than one thousand men, women, and children were herded onto ships, with little regard for keeping families intact. They were the first of more than ten thousand Acadians who were expelled between 1775 and 1783, mostly to other American colonies.61

  Eddy served at Beauséjour—renamed Fort Cumberland—from 1759 until 1760, and after his discharge returned home to Massachusetts. Three years later, drawn by the offer of cheap land, he was among the New Englanders who settled on what had been Acadian farmland. As a member of the new landed gentry he was appointed a member of the Nova Scotia legislature.62

  As reports of rebellion arrived from Massachusetts, Eddy felt a kinship with the Rebels in his native colony. Resurrecting his old wartime title, Captain Eddy sailed to Massachusetts, leaving his family behind. In March 27, 1776, Eddy met with George Washington in Cambridge and urged him to support Patriots in Nova Scotia. Washington gave Eddy his blessing—and money to travel to Philadelphia and present his proposal to Congress.63

  Congressmen politely told him they could not give him any assistance. The failed invasion had dampened congressional enthusiasm about actions in Canada. A month before, Congress had secretly turned down a plan to put Halifax, Nova Scotia, to the torch. The arson raid had been proposed by Jeremiah O’Brien, hero of the HMS Margaretta seizure in Machias, Maine, and another man, presumably a privateer like O’Brien.64

  Eddy next went before the Massachusetts legislature, which rejected his request for troops but did give him ammunition and some supplies. He chartered a small ship and crew and sailed to Machias, where he found some followers, and then went on to Nova Scotia for more, particularly around Fort Cumberland. His grand plan was to take the fort and march on to Halifax, his force swelling with more and more devotees of the fourteenth colony. When he was ready to attack the fort, he later claimed, he had an army of 180 men, including Indians, Acadian exiles, and Maine Patriots. On November 10 he appeared before Fort Cumberland, and, under a flag of truce, as “Commanding Officer of the United Forces,” demanded surrender.65

  The fort was manned by Loyalists, the Royal Fencible Americans. The fort’s commander replied with a letter ordering Eddy to “disarm yourself and party Immediately and Surrender to the King’s mercy.” After the Loyalist force easily repulsed two feeble attacks, Eddy withdrew to await reinforcements that never came. Later in the month additional defenders arrived at the fort, including more Loyalists—the Canada-based battalion of the Royal Highland Emigrants.66 After some desultory sparring between defenders and would-be attackers, the commander of the fort ended the invasion by issuing a general amnesty that pardoned nearly all the Canadians, dissolving Eddy’s army.67

  Eddy fled to Machias, which soon was targeted for reprisal. Four British warships sailed up the Machias River to shell the town. Townspeople and Indian allies defended from both shores. To move a cannon to a strategic spot for firing on one of the ships, militiamen staged a funeral procession, with the cannon disguised as a bier draped with a blanket. When the bier began spewing cannonballs, the warship pulled away, beginning the British withdrawal.68 The raid was a lesson for British strategists, who realized that the real danger from the Rebels was on the sea. The Royal Navy sharpened its vigilance along the Nova Scotia coast, dueling with privateers like Jeremiah O’Brien.

  Washington continued to yearn for the fourteenth colony, but never again would he approve an invasion, even though he knew that a Canada in British hands would always be a menace. Ten days after getting from General Schuyler “the melancholy account” of the failed attack on Quebec, Washington wrote to Arnold, saying of Canada, “To whomsoever it belongs, in their favor, probably, willthe balance turn. If it is in ours, success I think will most certainly crown our virtuous struggles. If it is in theirs, the contest at best will be doubtful, hazardous, and bloody.”69 By the time he wrote this, in January 1776, he knew that the war had to be fought not in Canada but where he was, in Cambridge, or where the British and their Tories were, in Boston.

  * From the Latin Iacobus: James. Jacobites supported a deposed seventeenth-century king, Britain’s last Catholic monarch-James II of England (who also ruled Scotland as James VII).

  7

  THE FAREWELL FLEET

  BOSTON, JANUARY 1775-JULY 4, 1776

  This [Rebel] army, of which you will hear so much said, and see so much written, is truly nothing but a drunken, canting, lying, praying, hypocritical rabble, without order, subjection, discipline, or cleanliness; and must fall to pieces of itself in the course of three months.

  —A Royal Navy surgeon in Boston1

  Loyalists, scanning Dorchester Heights for cannon muzzles, feared that the Patriots would bombard the British troops as they left the city. Patriots, looking at the gun ports on the Royal Navy warships strung around the harbor, expected that the British would give the city a flaming farewell. Boston’s selectmen, all of them Patriots who had remained in the city, decided to make a last-minute effort to save Boston from either fate. Three Loyalists joined them in a rare show of unity.

  The Loyalists were Thomas and Jonathan Amory and their friend Peter Johonnot. Months before, Thomas Amory had faced down a crowd that attacked hi
s home because he was friendly with British officers. Soon after the attack he planned that his childless brother Jonathan would sail to England with family members while Thomas stayed behind. But, when Boston was threatened, Thomas Amoryforgot the past and sought out the Patriot selectmen. The third Loyalist, Johonnot, a wealthy distiller, had also planned to leave. Instead he agreed to work with the Amory brothers.2

  The save-the-city delegation went first to General Howe, who ordered a general on his staff to respond. Then, on March 8, the Loyalists, under a flag of truce, went to the fortified checkpoint at Boston Neck. Although borne by Loyalists, the petition was bipartisan; it carried the signatures of the selectmen as “a testimony of the truth.” A colonel on Washington’s staff accepted their petition, which said that Howe had given them, through his general, assurance “that he has no intention of destroying the town, unless the troops under his command are molested during their embarkation, or at their departure, by the armed force without”—meaning the guns of Dorchester.

  Now both sides wanted a similar assurance from Washington. If those cannons were fired on Howe’s departing troops, the appeal continued, “we have the greatest reason to expect the town will be exposed to entire destruction. Our fears are quieted with regard to General Howe’s intentions. We beg we may have some assurance that so dreadful a calamity may not be brought on …”3

  Washington’s colonel duly took the petition to Washington’s headquarters on Tory Row. The next day he returned to the checkpoint with a response: “Gentlemen,—Agreeably to a promise made to you at the lines yesterday, I waited upon his excellency General Washington, and presented to him the paper handed to me by you, from the selectmen of Boston. The answer I received from him was to this effect: ‘That, as it was an unauthenticated paper, without an address, and not obligatory upon General Howe, he would take no notice of it.’ I am, with esteem and respect, gentlemen, your most obedient servant.”4