Tories

by Thomas B. Allen

  The curt answer left the Loyalists anxious. “His excellency” General Washington seemed to be ignoring the plight of the city because his rank and command status had not been recognized by Howe. In fact, without setting forth an acknowledgment in words, Howe had agreed not to torch the city, and Washington had agreed not to shell Howe’s men and ships.

  Still, during the night of March 9, Washington ordered more cannons entrenched low enough on a Dorchester’s Nook’s Hill to increase the threat to Howe’s troops and ships. The men planting the cannons built a warming fire, which British sentinels spotted, touching off a cannonade that killed five Continentals. Washington answered the British cannons with a bombardment of his own. During a long, terrifying night, artillerymen on both sides fired more than eight hundred shots.

  The day after the cannon duel, Howe issued a proclamation and had it distributed in handbills throughout the city. It ordered “all good subjects” to turn in all linen and woolen articles because they were “much wanted by the Rebels, and would aid and assist them in their Rebellion.” There were no exceptions for clothing or blankets. People unable to turn in their goods at army headquarters were told to deliver them to Crean Brush, in care of the Minerva, which was tied up at a wharf. Brush would give receipts for the goods “and will oblige himself to return them to the Owners, all unavoidable Accidents accepted.” Anyone who did not turn in the goods, Howe warned, “will be treated as a Favourer of Rebels.”5

  Howe’s proclamation considerably extended Brush’s earlier commission for emptying Boston houses and other buildings. Patriots later told of seeing Brush, escorted by soldiers, using the proclamation as a warrant for breaking into stores and hauling the goods to the Minerva, the well-known ship whose imported sails and fittings had touched off the Falmouth troubles.

  Brush, said a witness, was stripping shops “of all their goods, though the owners were in town. There was a licentious plundering of shops, stores and dwelling houses, by soldiers and sailors, carrying destruction wherever they went; and what they could not carry away, they destroyed.”6 He accumulated so much loot that he needed another ship, the brig Elizabeth. For seven consecutive days, Brush said afterward, “my own assiduity was so great that I did not in any one night allow myself more than two hours sleep.”7 While approving Brush’s pillage, Howe issued an order saying that “the first soldier who is caught plundering will be hanged on the spot.”8

  Washington kept his troops on alert, wary of British deception. On March 10, as dragoons led their horses toward the docks for herding onto transports, there could be little doubt that evacuation had begun. But Washington was still skeptical, and Selectman Timothy Newell was still worried: He noted in his diary on March 12: “The Inhabitants [are] greatly distressed thro’ fear the Town would be set on fire by the Soldiers.”9

  The soldiers, however, were focused on leaving, not burning. Work parties loaded ships with the matériel of war, leaving behind at wharves and in warehouses hundreds of pounds of salt, five thousand bushels of wheat, six hundred bushels of corn and oats, one hundred bundles of iron hoops for barrel making, 157 pack saddles, hundreds of blankets, and paraphernalia too heavy to load rapidly: anchors, lumber, nails, four-wheel carriages. The many abandoned cannons were spiked and had their trunnions broken off, but a great deal of ammunition was abandoned, to be retrieved later by the Continental Army. The British would also leave behind a score of ships, including a brig with all its guns and another laden with a full cargo of molasses. Many of the ships were scuttled at the wharf and salvageable, as were their intact or partially destroyed cargoes.10

  Logistics officers struggled with the complex task of assigning shipboard space to unaccustomed cargo: the goods of civilian passengers. Down the wharves came carts, wagons, and wheelbarrows overflowing with clocks, tables, chairs, chests of drawers, and other possessions.11 More and more names were added to the list of the Loyalists sailing in the ships of the fleet.

  Howe had known for some time that if he had to evacuate his army he would also be obliged to take along all the Loyalists who wanted to leave. “If we are driven to the difficulty of relinquishing Boston,” Lord Dartmouth had written him, “care must be taken that the officers and friends of the government be not left exposed to the rage and insult of rebels, who set no bounds to their barbarity.” Howe had to accept Dartmouth’s order, but he did remind Dartmouth about the problem of simultaneously rescuing soldiers and civilians: “A thousand difficulties arose on account of the disproportion of transportsfor the conveyance of property, and the quantity of military stores to be carried away.”12

  Boston Loyalists were overwhelmed by the news of Howe’s decision to abandon the city. Suddenly they lost their hope for an easy triumph over the Rebels. “Not the last trump[et] could have struck them with greater consternation,” Washington noted, using the biblical allusion to the end of the world.13

  Many Boston Loyalists were well aware that they would become targets of vengeance when their Redcoat protectors left. They knew they had to flee, and they wanted to take their treasures with them. “The people of the town who were friends of the government,” a witness later wrote, “took care of nothing but their merchandise, and found means to employ the men belonging to the transports in embarking their goods; by which means several of the vessels were entirely filled with private property, instead of the king’s stores.” Another Bostonian complained that Loyalists were outbidding each other to purchase the labor of moving men.14

  For Howe’s troops the evacuation was a complex military maneuver. For the Loyalists the exodus from Boston was a panicky flight inspired by fear, despair, and rage. The Loyalists were abandoning home, possessions, and, for many, a cause that was lost. They had expected first Gage, and then Howe, to crush the rebellion. Instead the rebellion had morphed into a civil war. The city that had been the pride of some and the temporary refuge for others had become a place seething with hatred. Neighbors became enemies. Friends turned against friends. As the Loyalists headed for the Halifax-bound ships, they passed silent glares or heard a taunting chant:

  The Tories with their brats and wives Have fled to save their wretched lives.15

  Many Loyalists, believing that someday they would return, left friends or relatives behind to guard abandoned homes. Others were rich enough to commit to a permanent move; for some Halifax would be a way station en route to England. But in England fewwould find happy or productive lives. Whatever position they had attained in the colonies, in England they were simply Americans, aliens in their ancestral homeland.

  Even clergymen, expecting to be welcomed into the fold of the Church of England, found a chill reception. The Reverend Henry Caner, seventy-six-year-old rector of King’s Chapel in Boston, later told of hearing “many compassionable expressions” from the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London—but no offer of an appointment to an English parish. He said he was told, “We can’t think of your residing here. We want such men as you in America.” English clergymen, Caner decided, looked upon their American colleagues “in no better light than as coming to take Bread out of their mouths.”16

  Like most Loyalists, Caner had only short notice when he was told he could embark for Halifax. He led a final service at King’s Chapel on Sunday, March 10, and then boarded a ship for Halifax, taking with him the communion service, the church’s register of baptisms, marriages, and burials, and a book of early records.17 About one-third of the King’s Chapel congregation would be gone by the end of 1777, for “Anglican” and “Tory” were almost synonymous.

  Caner’s name appears on a list of departing Loyalists compiled for the evacuation.* The list was published in 1881 in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society. A note says that the names were “Taken from a paper in the handwriting of Walter Barrell,” but how Barrell obtained and recorded the names is unknown. He was inspector general in the Boston Customs House, and he would have had the responsibility of monitoring the manifests of the evacuation ships.r />
  The son of a merchant who was already in England, Barrell had been a member of Ruggles’s street-patrolling Loyal American Association.18 Two of his brothers were Patriots. Barrell’s own name is onthe list, which shows that he brought five people, apparently family members, with him to Halifax. The Barrell family was one of about seventy that went from Boston to Halifax and then on to join the growing Loyalist population in England.19

  One section of the list, devoted to thirteen mandamus councillors, showed that they did not sail alone. Richard Lechmere took eleven family members to England. Foster Hutchinson, brother of a former royal governor residing in England, took a dozen relatives with him to Halifax. Customs official Henry Hulton took eleven to Halifax and soon sailed on to England.20

  All names are followed by a number indicating how many people (unnamed) are leaving with that person. Many names are followed by an occupation, such as “clerk” or “merchant.” And sometimes the same surname is listed several times in a row, each with a number following it, as in the enumeration of the renowned Winslow family, whose total strongly suggests that rank had its privilege in the allotment of ship space:

  Winslow, Isaac 11

  Winslow, Pelham 1

  Winslow, John 4

  Winslow, Mrs. Hannah 4

  Winslow, Edward, Collector, Boston 1

  Hannah Loring Winslow (subject of one of John Singleton Copley’s portraits) was the thirty-three-year-old widow of Joshua Winslow, a cousin of Copley’s wife. Joshua, as one of the consignees who was to resell imported tea, was a small player in the events leading to the Boston Tea Party. He was the father of six children when he died in March 1775. His widow left for Halifax, listing three children. (The other children may have traveled with other relatives.)21

  Edward Winslow took with him the large, carved, wooden royal coat of arms that had hung on a wall of the council chamber in Boston. As he later wrote, the lion and the unicorn in the arms “are of course Refugees and have a claim for residence” in Nova Scotia.22

  Other placemen who sailed to Halifax also carried off official documents in the belief that they would bring them back when the unpleasantness was over.

  The list accounts for either 926 or 927 passengers, depending upon interpreting what was originally in Barrell’s handwriting. (Included on the list are virtually all the hundred-odd Loyalists mentioned thus far in this book.) Besides those expected refugees there were 105 residents who lived in rural areas or towns and who were not placemen; 213 merchants, and 382 farmers, smaller traders, and “mechanics,” the overall term for artisans and people who worked with their hands.

  The largest group of refugees was made up of men who most feared retribution—those who managed or worked for the customs house. They included “tidesmen,” customs officers who boarded ships to get payments of duties, and “tidewaiters,” who examined cargoes in search of contraband.23 Anglican clergymen were members of another class that left virtually as a bloc, headed by Caner.

  The grand total of the Halifax-bound “refugees,” as they were called, is estimated at about thirteen hundred men, women, and children. But before and after the evacuation others made their way to Halifax, bringing the probable total to about two thousand. Among these unlisted refugees are a few who get named in other ways. Jolley Allen, a Boston merchant, for example, left posterity an account of his attempt to reach Halifax. And, after the war, many previously anonymous refugees told of their voyages to Halifax in petitions seeking land grants or financial aid from the Crown for their loyalty.

  Also not named on the list was John Wentworth, the royal governor of New Hampshire. Wentworth, fearing the rise of Rebels, had mustered a force of Loyalists as a personal guard. He then sought refuge, with his wife and their infant son, on board the HMS Scarborough, which took them to Boston. At the time of the evacuation he sailed to Halifax in a schooner with a number of New Hampshire friends. His wife and child went on to England. Wentworth joined Howe and sailed with him to New York. He recruited a Loyalist military unit known as Governor Wentworth’s Volunteers.24 They were describedas “Persons of Education and reputable Families who have personally suffered variety of Persecutions, and appear now firmly determined to give additional Proofs of their Attachment to the Cause of Government by exerting their utmost Endeavours to suppress the Rebellion in America.”25

  Another independent traveler was Isaac Royall, one of America’s wealthiest Loyalists and one of Massachusetts’ few slaveholders. A trader in sugar, rum, and slaves, Royall was a mandamus councillor. He lived in a mansion in Medford, a few miles north of Boston. On his six hundred acres were quarters for twenty-seven slaves. He found himself in Boston on the eve of the Lexington and Concord battles, en route to the family plantation in Antigua. After a while he sailed to Halifax, where he awaited other members of the family, including George Erving, who was married to Royall’s daughter, and Erving’s brother John. The Royalls and the Ervings all went on to England.26

  Two Marblehead Tories who immigrated to Nova Scotia and later continued on to self-exile in England were Thomas Robie, an Addresser, and his wife. They were given a raucous farewell by Patriots who went to the dock and shouted taunts. Mrs. Robie, seated in the boat that would take her and her husband to the Halifax-bound ship anchored offshore, shouted back what many departing Loyalists felt in their bitter hearts: “I hope that I shall live to return, find this wicked Rebellion crushed, and see the streets of Marblehead run with Rebel blood.”27

  Many Loyalists had left before the evacuation, and many, many more would leave in the years to come. We do not know most of their names. Lorenzo Sabine, a nineteenth-century historian who collected information on thousands of Loyalists, lamented at how little the future was to know about them: “Men who, like the Loyalists, separate themselves from their friends and kindred, who are driven from their homes, who surrender the hopes and expectations of life, and who become outlaws, wanderers, and exiles—such men leave few memorials behind them. Their papers are scattered and lost, and their verynames pass from human recollection.” Some could not write, and those who did, consumed by their shattered lives, lacked the time—and sometimes even the paper—to record their hopes and fears.28

  At least three hundred families either went with the British fleet and did not give their names to Barrell or chose to make their own arrangements. Those who did sail independently probably paid passage on ships that for decades had regularly shuttled between New England and Nova Scotia. During the war that connection worked both ways. So many pro-Rebel inhabitants of Nova Scotia wanted to trade illegally with the enemies of the king that the Massachusetts legislature issued passes to them, directing commanders of American warships and privateers to allow safe passage.29

  In 1776 Washington had seen Tories merely as disillusioned people, calling them “Unhappy wretches! Deluded mortals!”30 But his attitude toward them gradually hardened. Writing to his brother, John Augustine, Washington was uncharacteristically nasty about the Loyalist departure: “All those who took upon themselves the style and title of government-men in Boston, in short, all those who have acted an unfriendly part in the great contest, have shipped themselves off in the same hurry… . One or two have done, what a great number ought to have done long ago, committed suicide.”31

  One of the Loyalists preparing to leave on his own was the merchant Jolley Allen. He had arrived in Boston from England in 1755, set up shop on a fashionable street, and prospered by selling luxury goods. “Just imported from LONDON, by Jolley Allen,” said an ad in the Boston Gazette. “A very large Assortment of English and India GOODS, fit for all Seasons, too many to be enumerated separately in an Advertisement.”32 He also ran a pawnshop and offered lodgings for people and stables for horses.33 Allen suffered financially and personally when the Sons of Liberty began to boycott British imports in the campaign against the Stamp Act.

  When the campaign focused on an embargo of tea, Allen surreptitiously bought two chests of tea from the sons of Royal Governo
r

  Thomas Hutchinson. An informer told the Sons of Liberty. Some Sons called on Allen and threatened to tar and feather him, he claimed. By his account, he outwitted them, for they were unable to connect him with English tea. His sales, however, “declined from that time” because he was marked as a Tory. His customers dwindled to “friends of Government and the Army,” including General Gage and other officers.

  Early in March 1776, as the city was plunged into the evacuation panic, Allen believed he had to leave, for he feared that if the “Americans”—his word—found him, “knowing the Disposition of the people so well for above Twenty-two Years I had lived amongst them,” they would hang him and everyone in his family. On the waterfront he found Robert Campbell, a captain willing to take aboard his ship, the Sally, Allen, his family, his household goods, and the contents of two warehouses of merchandise. Allen had married a young Irishwoman and “had seventeen children by her plus five miscarriages in thirty-seven years of marriage.” Only six children were alive in 1776.34

  Allen planned to follow the ships of the evacuation fleet wherever they sailed. Most of the available ships were under the control of the Royal Navy. But there were others, like the Sally, whose captains were ready to sail under the fleet’s protection and would evacuate anyone who could pay the cost.

  Opportunistic captains like Campbell added another complication to British Army and Royal Navy officers who were dealing with a harbor full of evacuation ships. Officers also had to cope with the plundering and heavy drinking of their men. “It was not like the breaking up of a camp, where every man knows his duty; it was like departing your country …,” an officer wrote.35 Officers who had bought furniture and other items could neither take them along nor sell them. Some, in frustration, smashed their American acquisitions.36