Tories

by Thomas B. Allen

  Army and navy officers were experienced in transporting soldiers and their supplies. But for this operation there was additional need for space to carry and feed an unknown number of Loyalist families. Their possessions had to be stowed. To make room for the civilians, soldiers had to cut back. Officers ultimately enforced a strict order: “All Household furniture and other useless Luggage to be thrown over Board.”37

  “Nothing can be more diverting than to see the town in its present situation,” a Patriot wrote, “all is uproar and confusion; carts, trucks, wheelbarrows, handbarrows, coaches, chaises, are driving as if the very devil was after them.”38 Selectman Newell wrote in his diary for March 13 that Bostonians of all persuasions were “in the utmost distress thro’ fear of the Town being destroyed by the Soldiers, a party of New York Carpenters with axes going thro’ the town breaking open houses, &c. Soldiers and sailors plundering of houses, shops, warehouses—Sugar and salt &c. thrown into the River, which was greatly covered with hogsheads, barrels of flour, house furniture, carts, trucks &c. &c.”39

  The tempo of looting increased. Soldiers and civilians broke into shops and carried off their plunder. The soldiers packed away the portable loot. The civilians bore theirs to the wharves, where ships awaited. Crean Brush’s gang loaded the Minerva and Elizabeth. One hundred fifty hogsheads of rum (a hogshead had a capacity of about fifty-five gallons) were loaded onto one of the ships under British Army control.40 The harbor was filled with transports and warships, signal flags whipping up and down the halyards. Scavengers prowled the shore, picking up the flotsam of discarded freight borne on the incoming tide.

  Men hired by Jolley Allen shuttled merchandise and household goods from his shop to the wharf where Robert Campbell’s ship was tied up. Allen allowed Campbell to take twenty-one more passengers aboard—” to put more Money in his pocket,” Jolley wrote in his account, which sputters with indignation.41

  On Saturday, March 16, Washington sent a small force to Nook’s Hill to fortify the guns. During the night, British guns fired at the hill. Washington’s men did not return the fire. To Howe the silence was ominous. Either through intelligence reports or intuition, he concluded that Washington’s patience was running out. He ordered the evacuation to be concluded the next day.

  British Army lieutenant John Barker, in his diary entry for March 17, recorded the soldiers’ last day in Boston: “At 4 oclock in the Morn. the Troops got under Arms, at 5 they began to move, and by about 8 or 9 were all embarked, the rear being cover’d by the Gren[adie]rs. and L[igh]t. Inf[antr]y. The Rebels did not think proper to molest us. We quitted Boston with a fair wind… .”42

  Within half an hour Washington sent more than one thousand men into the city—selecting only those who had had smallpox and were thus immune. Washington himself bore the facial scars of a severe case of smallpox, which had struck him at the age of nineteen. He had not only suffered the scourge, but he had also learned about its prevention. He would later insist on inoculations for every soldier in the Continental Army.43

  Washington forbade any officer or enlisted man to enter the city without permission because, he said, “the enemy with a malicious assiduity, have spread the infection of the smallpox through all parts of the town.” A “person just out of Boston” told Washington that “our Enemies … had laid several Schemes for communicating the infection of the smallpox, to the Continental Army, when they get into the town.”44 No one yet knew that smallpox had already sailed from Boston, borne by Loyalists and Redcoats. An epidemic had begun in Halifax months before the evacuation.45

  Some of the first of Washington’s men to enter Boston headed for the fortifications at Bunker Hill and saw what appeared to be sentinels. Two men were sent forward to see how many British remained. Laughing, they waved their comrades to advance. The sentinels were dummies. The redoubt was empty, a symbol of the military situation in the American colonies: There were hardly any British soldiers left on American soil.46

  While liberating the city, Washington kept watch on the fleet lingering off the Nantasket Peninsula, which formed the southeast side of Boston Harbor. “From Penn’s Hill,” Abigail Adams wrote to John, “we have a view of the largest fleet ever seen in America. You maycount upwards of a hundred and seventy sail. They look like a forest.”47 The ships off Nantasket bothered Washington. Even burdened with the civilians, Washington believed, the nine thousand troops might be heading for New York.

  There was also a small chance that the evacuation was a feint and Howe might send an invasion force back into the harbor and begin bombarding the city. Washington ordered the city’s redoubts manned and strengthened. And, in case Howe did suddenly veer south, Washington ordered five regiments to march to Norwich, Connecticut, and sail from there to New York. On March 27 most of Howe’s fleet weighed anchor and sailed off to Halifax.48 But the British left a few vessels off Nantasket for more than two months, to the annoyance of American officers in Boston.49

  Washington ordered a swarm of American privateers to follow the British fleet, which consisted of about 120 ships. The commander of “Washington’s Fleet,” as the privateer ships were dubbed, was John Manley of Massachusetts. His flagship was the Lee, a schooner transformed into a warship with the addition of six carriage guns and ten gunwale-mounted swivel guns.50 Manley spotted, pursued, and captured a major prize: Crean Brush’s loot-filled Elizabeth, which he took back to Boston. It contained a “great part of the plunder he rob’d the stores of here,” wrote a Bostonian. “… I immagine she must be the richest vessell in the fleet.”51 Brush and several henchmen found on the Elizabeth were jailed in Boston while Patriot officials drew up a case against them.

  Jolley Allen aboard the Sally, meanwhile, was making little headway toward Halifax. While the Sally was still in offshore waters, Captain Campbell twice collided with other ships in the British fleet and then ran aground. When Allen asked the captain whether the tide was coming in or going out, the captain said he did not know because he did not have an almanac aboard. Under way again, Campbell turned the wheel over to a lad who was on his first sea voyage. The captain pointed to a ship ahead and told the young helmsman simply to follow it.

  Soon a squall came up, partially tearing the mainsail off the mast. The sail fell over the side, starting to fill with water, sink, and take theship with it. Trying to recover the sail, Campbell hauled and tied a line, but—” for want of knowing how to Tye a Sailor’s knot,” according to an exasperated Jolley—the line skittered out of its belay.

  Below, the ship started taking on water. Campbell tried one pump, which did not work, and set off, unsuccessfully, to look for the other. Heavy seas carried off a cask containing all the water on board, along with the large container that contained all the food. Allen went below, “took my Wife by the hand as she lay in bed in the Cabin, and “laid myself down by her to think I should die in her Arms along with her.”

  His grim reverie was interrupted by frantic sounds and a knocking on the cabin door. The additional passengers, who had been consigned to the hold, pleaded—” for God’s sake”—to be allowed to enter. A plank, they said, “had given way, and the Sea was pouering in and the Vessel was sinking, and they beged that they might be permitted to stay in the Cabin till we all went to the Bottom together.”

  Allen, wondering how far the ship was from land, went on deck and asked Captain Campbell their position. He replied, Allen later recorded, that “it was impossible for him to tell, for he had not kept any reckoning, and the reason he gave me for it was that he had forgot to bring pens Ink and paper.” When Allen pointed out that he had those items, the captain told him “he had never learnt Navigation, and that he never was on Salt Water before, but he did know to row a Boat in a River.”

  As the sun rose, “with our Sails and Rigging torn in ten hundred thousand Pieces,” the Sally was riding a strong shoreward tide and heading for a landfall that Campbell could not identify. Campbell was for heading out to sea. But Allen, taking command of the foundering s
hip, ordered everyone on deck and insisted that the ship head toward shore. It scraped across several sandbars and, on the late afternoon of March 28, dropped anchor off Provincetown, Cape Cod, tattered sails signaling its distress.

  People ashore, fearing that the strange ship might be carrying smallpox victims, organized a rescue by selecting rowers who had survived the disease. When Allen, his family, and the other passengers were all safely ashore, someone asked where they were from. Allen answered, “From Boston with the Fleet”—marking them all as fleeing Tories.

  Allen wrote that he and his family were taken to a “Hog Sty,” a half-wrecked cottage with broken windows and a leaky roof. He did not report what happened to the others, but presumably they were confined elsewhere while the local Committee of Safety decided what to do.

  Townsmen scrambled aboard the Sally, running it aground so they could get at the cargo, which consisted almost entirely of Allen’s furniture and merchandise. He was told he would be charged a large sum for the unloading and storage of his property. According to his account, he soon learned—probably from a secret Loyalist—that people were fighting over the cargo, stealing some articles and hurrying away with them, burying others in the sand for retrieval later. Someone, he was told, had torn apart his “crimson Silk Damask Bed which cost One hundred fifty pounds Sterling.”

  He and his family were still being held in April when his wife died at the age of fifty-two. Allen, fifty-eight, attributed her death to the stress of their misadventures. In May the town selectmen gave him a pass to Watertown, where the legislature was sitting. His seventeen-year-old son was allowed to go with him on the 120-mile journey. His other children and what was left of his property were held as a guarantee of his return.

  On his way to Watertown he stopped at his home and found it occupied by his barber, who charged the pair eight shillings sterling for one bed for two nights. When Allen and his son reached Water-town, the legislature ordered them held for further investigation. He was told that the lawmakers were considering a plan to separate his children, order them kept fifty miles apart, and apprentice them to strangers to earn their room and board. He also was told that some people were looking for a tree big enough for the hanging of him and his children—with “me upon the highest Branch.”

  Finally Allen’s brother Lewis Allen learned of Jolley’s ordeal and petitioned the House and the Council, which functioned as a kindof senate, saying that he would assume care of the children, that his brother would stay in Lewis’s home on his farm in Shrewsbury, about thirty-eight miles east of Boston, and that Jolley would not “hold Correspondence with any Person knowing them to be Enemical to the Liberties of America.” The legislators agreed—but not the citizens of Shrewsbury, who said they did not want a Tory living in their town.

  A mob broke into Lewis’s home and, on a sixteen-mile march to Northborough, took Jolley before a militia officer and his men. He was told to sign a statement saying that he would be shot through the heart if he left his brother’s farm. Allen argued that he was being asked to sign his own death warrant. After some discussion the militiamen agreed to change the punishment to a lashing of five hundred strokes “on the naked Back.” That done, the mob marched him back to his brother’s farm. Sometime later, probably in 1779, he slipped away to New York and took sail to England. He died there in 1782.52

  Crean Brush was still in jail in Boston on November 5, 1777, when his wife spent the day visiting him. When the turnkey told her it was time to go, her clothes left the cell—but she was not in them. As the very unobservant turnkey later told his story, he was greatly surprised the next morning, when, after he passed Brush’s breakfast through an opening in the door, no hand appeared to take the food. He looked through the peephole and saw Mrs. Brush. She did not tell where Brush had gone. But his hunters established that Brush rode off to New York on a horse that had been hidden by Mrs. Brush. In New York he joined countless other Loyalists looking for British assistance in settling grievances. Brush wanted recovery of his disputed property, especially land in the New Hampshire Grants, which would become the state of Vermont. Depressed and penniless, in May 1778 he put a pistol bullet through his head.53

  While militiamen and members of Committees of Safety throughout Massachusetts and every other colony were grappling with the question of justice for Loyalists like Jolley Allen and Crean Brush, George Washington himself was forced to handle his own questions of justice. His issue involved a Loyalist spy posing as a staunch Patriot.

  The case began in Newport, Rhode Island, where a Patriot was shown an encrypted letter that was to have been delivered to James Wallace aboard the HMS Rose, on patrol offshore. Captain Wallace was well known as an intelligence intermediary who accepted and then passed on messages from Loyalists. Patriots had intercepted at least one, a letter sent to him by Col. Thomas Gilbert, leader of the Tory militia in Freetown.

  The encrypted letter had been given to a Newport baker by a former girlfriend who had asked him to get it to Wallace. Patriot leaders had the baker escorted to Cambridge, where Washington was shown the letter. The woman was found and brought to him. Washington began questioning her and “for a long time she was proof against every threat and persuasion to discover the author.” Then, suddenly, she broke and gave up the name of the man who wrote the letter—her secret lover, Dr. Benjamin Church, a longtime Patriot whom Washington had just appointed surgeon general of the army and the director of the army’s first hospital.54

  Washington gave the letter to the Reverend Samuel West, a Continental Army chaplain and an amateur cryptanalyst familiar with encryption techniques used by merchants who did not trust the royal mail system. Washington also asked for a separate decryption by Elbridge Gerry, a member of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and the Committee of Safety. The two codebreakers produced identical translations of the message, which was addressed “To Major Cane in Boston, On His Magisty’s Sarvice.” Cane had been on General Gage’s staff.

  “I hope this will reach you; three attempts have I made without success,” the letter began. Church told of his visit to Philadelphia, where “I mingled freely & frequently with the members of the Continental Congress.” He gave standard agent reports on the number and location of cannons and soldiers. And he provided some political observations: The Congressmen “were united, determined in opposition, and appeared assured of success” and “A view to independence gr[ows] more & more general.” Revealing his fear of being caught, Church concluded: “Make use of every precaution or I perish.”55

  Church, who for years had been trusted by leading Rebels, probably had spied for the British since the Sons of Liberty first gathered secretly at Boston’s Green Dragon Tavern. Paul Revere later recalled that during the blockade of Boston, Church had once gone into the city, ostensibly to obtain medicine. He claimed to have been captured by British soldiers and released after interrogation by Gage himself—a cover story for a meeting with his spymaster.56

  Hanging was the usual fate of spies, but Congress had not passed any laws about treason or espionage. Washington, as commander in chief of the army, decided he had the power to call and head a courtmartial. In a short trial Church insisted he was innocent, but Washington found him guilty of “holding criminal correspondence with the enemy.” Congress ordered Church put in a Connecticut prison. Later, claiming illness, he got himself transferred to Massachusetts. Finally, around 1778, he was allowed to sail to the British West Indies. His ship was lost at sea.57

  In the vacuum left by the withdrawal of the British, Congress recommended that the colonies establish new governments. Former royal legislatures became Rebel legislatures with varying views of their duties and their power, including how to deal with Tories. The Continental Congress was concerned with creating and regulating a Continental Army rather than a continental nation. So there was no national government. But, as summer came to Philadelphia, Congress inched closer to taking a first step toward nationhood by beginning to contemplate, in secret sessions,
what Church’s spying had revealed to British authorities: “a view to independence.”58

  In March, Congress sent Silas Deane, a young, ambitious Connecticut delegate, to France. Deane was under cover as “Timothy Jones,” a purchasing agent of “goods for the Indian trade” (meaning British India). Deane’s covert instructions came from Ben Franklin, a member of the Congressional Committee of Secret Correspondence. Deane was told to negotiate secretly with representatives of the French government and learn what France would do if the colonies were “forced to form themselves into an independent state.”59 Deane was given a special ink to write invisible reports between the lines of what would appear to be an innocuous letter when it was almost inevitably opened by British spies or ship captains in their hire.60

  Deane’s French counterpart was Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, a writer,* a friend of King Louis XVI, and a spy for the Comte de Vergennes, the French Foreign Minister. After conferring with Deane, Beaumarchais formed a front company, Roderigue Hortalez et Compagnie, which would buy munitions and other war supplies from the French government and ship them to America, accepting payment in tobacco, rice, cotton, and indigo. The company was financed by France, Spain, and a group of French merchants.61

  France, still stinging from its defeat in the French and Indian War, wanted to help an independent America as much as it wanted to hurt England. Supplying arms to America meant that Redcoats would be shot by French bullets from French guns—and French soldiers would not have to endanger themselves by pulling the trigger.