The idea of independence from Britain was now in the revolutionary air. Back in the pre—Stamp Act days, there had been no reason for the word “Loyalist.” Everyone involved was a British subject. They were engaged in a political row that got out of hand: The Boston Massacre. The Boston Tea Party. Lexington. Concord. Bunker Hill. Even after Bunker Hill optimists could see a way back. After all, the Continental Congress had passed the Olive Branch Petition to the “Most Gracious Sovereign.” The king’s ministers and certain members of Parliament were to blame for the lengthy crisis. Peace, if royally proclaimed, could somehow prevail.
A substantial number of subjects fled to Halifax because the oldideas of dissident and disaffected had given way to hatred and violence, to death by musket and bayonet. Some who sailed to safety believed that they would be returning after the Redcoats extinguished the rebellion. Most of those who sailed on to England believed they would never return. That dreadful place had become America; it no longer seemed to be a part of the British Empire.
Then, in July, in the wake of those transports to Halifax, came the Declaration of Independence.
To many Loyalists and Tories, the Declaration was a surprise, seemingly coming out of nowhere. But it had come, most of all, from the pen of Tom Paine, an immigrant from England who attacked not the king’s ministers but the king, writing that “a thirst for absolute power is the natural disease of monarchy… . To the evil of monarchy we have added that of hereditary succession; and as the first is a degradation and lessening of ourselves, so the second, claimed as a matter of right, is an insult and an imposition on posterity.”62
On July 18, 1776, British officers who were prisoners on parole in Boston were invited by their American captors to a ceremony at the Towne House, the handsome brick structure where the royal governor once reigned. “As we passed through the town,” one of the officers later wrote, “we found it thronged; all were in their holiday suits; every eye beamed with delight, and every tongue was in rapid motion. The streets adjoining the Council Chamber were lined with detachments of infantry tolerably equipped, while in front of the jail artillery was drawn up, the gunners with lighted matches. The crowd opened a lane for us, and the troops gave us, as we mounted the steps, the salute due to officers of our rank. “63
As the clock on the Towne House struck one, Sheriff Stephen Greenleaf, standing on the balcony below, began reading the Declaration of Independence in his weak voice: “When, in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another …” Then, sentence by sentence, the words were boomed forth by Col. Thomas Crafts, Jr.—Son of Liberty, leader of the mob that hanged a placeman in effigy from the Liberty Tree, dumper of tea in Boston Harbor, artillery officer at Bunker Hill. A “shout, begun in the hall, passed to the streets, which rang with loud huzzas, the slow and measured boom of cannon, and the rattle of musketry… . large quantities of liquor were distributed among the mob; and when night closed in, darkness was dispelled by a general illumination.”64
The British officers who listened to the Declaration being read were in a new world. When the time came for their exchange, the transaction would take place between representatives of two nations. Once their British Army had been fighting for the king to quench a rebellion, had killed British subjects, and had been killed by British subjects. Royal Navy ships had burned towns occupied by British subjects. Now the troops and the warships would be fighting citizens of a new nation that had vilified the king in its Declaration of Independence.
To Loyalists, the Declaration contained line after line of libel—hundreds of words maligning George III, making him, not his ministers, responsible for rebellion: “He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation… . He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the Lives of our People.”
And a new accusation: “He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny… .”
The words “at this time” appeared in the Declaration because members of the Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, had just received intelligence from Europe that representatives of King George had gone to Hesse-Kassel and other German states to bargain for the hiring of nearly thirty thousand troops.65 (Because most of the troops were from Hesse-Kassel, they all came to be called Hessians.)
Contracts for the German troops varied, but essentially they called for King George to bear the expense of a hired soldier killed in battle(with three wounded equaling one dead) while German rulers replaced at their own cost any soldier who deserted or died of sickness.66 King Frederick the Great of Prussia so loathed the deal that he said he would impose the customary “cattle tax” on all the hired troops who passed through Prussia “because though human beings they had been sold as beasts.”67
France could not openly give full support to colonies of Britain. But if those colonies broke off from Britain and claimed the status of a nation, then France could become an ally. To prevent that from happening, Britain had a more crucial reason to crush the Rebels. The Declaration of Independence meant that what had been armed response to a rebellion—a civil war between British subjects—had become a war between Britain and a new nation whose existence threatened Britain itself. As for the loyal subjects, their existence was also threatened, and so they must fight. And fitting Loyalist military forces into this new war presented a new challenge to the generals and the statesmen.
* The entire list can be found at ToriesFightingForTheKing.com.
* Among his writings were plays that would later become operas: Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and Rossini’s The Barber of Seville.
8
BEATING THE SOUTHERN DRUMS
NOVA SCOTIA AND NORTH CAROLINA, 1776
The southern people … have got to the highest pitch of raving madness. The best friends of Great Britain are in the back parts of the Carolinas and Georgia.
Lieutenant Governor John Moultrie of East Florida1
Nearly a month after the evacuation of Boston, Alexander MacDonald, a Loyalist recruiter, wrote to his wife, Susey, from Halifax, to assure her that the fight to quell the rebellion would go on. He knew that a new phase of the war had begun: the mustering of Loyalist military units. They would fight for King George III against fellow Americans who had traitorously turned against their monarch.
MacDonald had left Susey and their children on Staten Island in the fall of 1774 when he set forth to raise soldiers for the Crown. Now he was in Halifax, an eager ally of the British Army, which, he wrote, had “embarked on board their transports with all their baggage stores and artillery and every thing that was worth the Carrying without the Least hindrance or Mollestation, or the Loss of one Single Man… .”2 What MacDonald did not say was that Susey soon would see those Redcoats, for they would land on Staten Island to begin fighting to turn New York City and Long Island into Loyalist strongholds.
No one knew how many Tories remained in Boston after the evacuation. The city had lost many Loyalist leaders—men like Ned Winslow, Brigadier Ruggles, and Colonel Gilbert—who had been the architects of a Tory militancy. Ruggles’s three sons also went to Canada, but his wife and their four daughters stayed behind.3
In Massachusetts and beyond, “Friends of the Government,” as they once were known, now preferred the label “Loyalist,” an assertion that they staunchly supported British rule. But few openly proclaimed their allegiance to the Crown. Most of them kept covert faith in the ultimate triumph of the British Army.
Those who chose the boldest role were the Loyalists who volunteered to shoulder arms in the numerous military units that began to appear in the colonies soon after the evacuation of Boston. MacDonald was one of the recruiters of those militant Loyalists, w
ho would be seen by some British strategists as the key to squashing the rebellion. In that view the rebellion was a civil war, and the Loyalists had to be mobilized to fight the Rebels.*
MacDonald, born in Scotland, had been a lieutenant in a Highland Scots regiment eventually named the 77th Regiment of Foot, a proud unit that went to war in Highland kilt and sporran, with dirk and broadsword. He had served with the 77th in the French and Indian War and later in the French West Indies and Havana. Rather than return to England or Scotland, MacDonald and many other veterans decided to stay in America. He retained his commission as a senior lieutenant and was put on half pay, a status analogous to a ready reservist today. Some of the ex-soldiers chose to settle on the Canada—New York frontier, in the Mohawk Valley above Albany. There Sir William Johnson, Britain’s superintendent of Indian affairs, reigned like a feudal lord over an immense realm and welcomed newcomers, who added to his legion of tenants.4
MacDonald instead decided to live on Staten Island, where Susey had inherited property. She had been born into a branch of the Livingstons, one of the two powerful New York families then engaged in a political struggle. The leaders of the Patriots were Livingstons, the colony’s richest landed gentry. The De Lanceys, whose wealth came from trade, led the Tories. The families’ well-known religious affiliations added to the “hott & pepper on both Sides,” as a Livingston referred to the rivalry. The De Lanceys were Anglicans and the Livingstons were Presbyterians, like most outspoken opponents of British policy toward the colonies.5
As the New York political rivalry escalated toward rebellion, MacDonald’s Patriot in-laws urged him to join their side. But having dabbled in trade and become friendly with Tory merchants, MacDonald remained pro-British and retained his army ties, winning a promotion to captain in 1772. As a soldier and a Highlander he could not merely support the Loyalists. He wanted to raise a regiment of Highland immigrants recruited to fight alongside the British Army.
MacDonald started outlining his idea in letters to veterans in the Mohawk Valley and to an old army friend, Maj. John Small, who was on the staff of General Gage. MacDonald also wrote to his cousin, Allan MacDonald in North Carolina, a leader of that colony’s growing population of Highland immigrants. MacDonald called his recruiting drive “a beating,” evoking the traditional image of a military conscription party seeking militiamen by marching through the town with a drummer steadily beating a summons.
A recruit had to be at least seventeen years old (drummers could be as young as ten), appear healthy, possess all limbs, be no shorter than five feet three inches, have no ruptures or be troubled by fits, and have at least two teeth that met (so he could bite through the paper that wrapped the gunpowder and the ball of a musket cartridge).6 Men recruited in North Carolina were promised two hundred acres of land, to be confiscated from Rebels, and a twenty-year tax exemption. A married man received an extra forty acres for his wife and each child.7
When he had recruited more than one hundred men, MacDonald journeyed to Boston and formally presented his prospective musterroll to Gage. To his surprise MacDonald learned not only that a similar suggestion had come from Lt. Col. Allan Maclean but also that the Royal Highland Emigrant Regiment already existed and was commanded by Maclean. Gage had divided the regiment into two battalions, one to be commanded by Maclean and the other by Major Small. MacDonald was made a captain in Small’s battalion.8
Expecting regimental command, MacDonald seethed. While Maclean went off with his battalion to defend Quebec and win glory, MacDonald and Small spent most of their time in Nova Scotia training recruits and begging for supplies. In a typical appeal MacDonald wrote: “Here I am with above 300 Men and Officers, the Most of the Men almost Naked and all of them bare footed… . P.S. We have formed a Mess and a poor one it is without a drop of any kind of wine or Spirits, only Spruce beer… . I beg you would send us a pipe of Good Madeira also a hogshead of good port wine.”9
Eventually MacDonald’s men of the Mohawk Valley were joined by volunteers from Boston, New York City, North Carolina, Nova Scotia, and other parts of Canada. To get more recruits Small and MacDonald received permission to intercept immigrant ships on the high seas, go aboard, and recruit the male passengers. The New York—bound immigrant ship Glasgow, for instance, was redirected to Boston. Somehow—coercion seems probable—Small enlisted and diverted to Nova Scotia one hundred men who had expected to settle in North Carolina.10 The women and children who accompanied them were issued army rations and put in the care of the garrison at Fort Edward in Windsor, Nova Scotia.11
After Maclean’s victory in Quebec, dozens of Continental Army prisoners of war enlisted in his battalion, though they were neither Highlanders nor emigrants. Some of them, enlisting only to end their prisoner status, deserted and made their way back to America. Deserters who were captured were given the choice of severe and potentially lethal flogging or lifelong exile as Redcoats deployed to protect slave dealers and other British subjects in western Africa.12
• • •
Andrew MacDonald’s kinfolk included Flora MacDonald, who had saved Bonnie Prince Charlie after his defeat on the moors of Culloden. The prince, pursued by British soldiers to the Outer Hebrides, made a daring escape later celebrated in Scottish poetry and song. Flora disguised him as an Irish maidservant and took him from her island to the Isle of Skye on his way to safety in France. Arrested by the British, she was imprisoned in the Tower of London and released under a general amnesty in 1747.13 Three years later she married Allan MacDonald, another member of Clan MacDonald and supporter of the Jacobite cause.
Life in the Highlands, which encompassed Scotland’s Western Isles and northern mainland, had become a struggle for survival. No longer sustained by the land, bankrupted by ever-rising rents, denied their culture and even their native language by harsh British edicts after the Battle of Culloden, Highlanders headed for America. They were seeking what had become a dream, conjured up by letters from kin and friends.
Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, traveling on the Scottish mainland and the islands of the Highland realm in the fall of 1773, were entertained on the Isle of Skye by a group of couples doing a complex dance. “Each of the couples, after the common involutions and evolutions” Johnson wrote, “successively whirls round in a circle, till all are in motion; and the dance seems intended to shew how emigration catches, till a whole neighbourhood is set afloat.” The islanders called the dance “America.”14
The migration of thousands of Highlanders—the exact number is unknown—had begun about 1732, surging in the late 1760s and peaking in 1774 and 1775.15 Among the emigrants were Flora and Allan MacDonald, who sailed across the Atlantic in 1774, just in time to find themselves again choosing sides in a conflict between Rebels and the king. This time they chose the king.
Many Highlanders made the same choice, even though they could recite a long litany of mistreatment by the British: They had cleared the Highlands of farmers to make way for sheep, a better investment. They had, through blandishments and power dispensing, co-optedthe clan chiefs and shattered the clans. They had banished nearly one thousand Highland men, women, and children to America, where they were sold as indentured servants.16 The banishment was a variation on “transportation,” the euphemistic term for a judicial order that exiled a convicted felon to America. By 1776 about fifty thousand men and women, many of them guilty only of minor crimes, had been sent to America in transportation from England and Scotland.17 Still, fighting for the Crown had become a Highland tradition. The Highlanders drawn to America had sailed through a complex history that tugged many of them toward the Crown rather than toward the Rebels. Their political differences of the recent past were eclipsed by the new reality that Highlanders discovered in America.
New England was far away, geographically and politically, from the part of North Carolina where Flora and Allan MacDonald settled. An estimated twelve thousand former Highlanders lived in the colony, most of them occupying the upper Cape Fear River in Cumb
erland County. Overwhelmingly they were Loyalists.18
For the Highlanders who migrated at the beginning of the Revolution, the choice of the Loyalist side was pragmatic: The Rebels were losing. By fighting for the British the Highlanders assured their position in this promising colony of the powerful British Empire.19 The king rewarded army service with land grants; the Patriots offered nothing.
Highlanders had been welcomed into the British Army since the first Jacobite rebellion, in 1715, when warriors from loyal clans were stationed in the Highlands as peacekeepers between clans. In 1739 King George II authorized the formation of a regiment consisting of “natives of that country and none other.” The regiment was known as the Black Watch—” black” for the dark colors of the soldiers’ tartans and “watch” for the regiment’s original mission to keep watch over the Highlands.20 Impressed by the Highlanders’ soldierly qualities, British Army commanders continued to recruit men from the land that Robert Burns would call “The birth-place of Valour, the country of Worth.”
Additional Highland regiments were raised in 1756, 1757, and 1777.21 Officers and enlisted men who fought in the French and Indian War received land grants as large as twenty thousand acres in Canada and northern New York. When recruitment of the Royal Highland Emigrants began, many of those veterans joined, resuming army life.22
The recruitment of American Highlanders was so well known to the people of Scotland that a Scotswoman traveling to America in 1774 noted in her journal the military significance of the Highlander immigration. Aware of looming trouble in America and seeing hardy America-bound Highlanders aboard her ship, she wrote, “Should levys be again necessary, the recruiting drum may long be at a loss to procure such soldiers as are now aboard this Vessel, lost to their country for ever, brave fellows, who tho’ now flying from their friends, would never have fled from their foes.”23 She was right. The lack of recruits for the British Army at the beginning of the Revolution had been the principal reason that Britain hired Hessians.
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