Tories

by Thomas B. Allen

  In America, Highlanders usually retained their Gaelic language and Highland dress. And they dwelled apart from another, distinctly different immigrant group, the Scotch-Irish, who overwhelmingly joined the ranks of the Patriots. As for Highlanders, Thomas Jefferson often referred to them as “Scottish Tories.”24 In an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote a phrase denouncing the British for “permitting their chief magistrate to send over not only soldiers of our own blood, but Scotch and other foreign mercenaries.” The phrase was struck out at the urging of John Witherspoon, a Scots-born delegate from New Jersey. He was a Presbyterian minister, an eloquent champion of independence, and a signer of a Declaration that, thanks to him, was not blemished by a libel on Scots.25

  Jefferson’s distrust of the Scots stemmed from common knowledge that in the many parts of the southern colonies a “Scot” and a “Tory” were almost always one and the same. In and around Norfolk, Loyalists were often referred to as members of “the Scotch Party,” and, when the Queen’s Loyal Virginia Regiment was raised, most of its men were Scots merchants and their employees. Virginia’s tartan-clad royal governor Dunmore had served as a page to Bonnie Prince Charlie.26 His fellow Scots were merchants and placemen whose influence extended from Alexandria, Virginia, to St. Augustine, the principal city of the East Florida Colony.27 Dunmore spoke the warrior language of many a Tory Scot when he said, “I once fought for the Virginians. By God, I would let them see that I could fight against them.”28

  * A full description of the units of the Provincial Corps, the Loyalist equivalent of the Continential Army, can be found at ToriesFightingForTheKing.com.

  9

  “BROADSWORDS AND KING GEORGE!”

  SOUTHERN COLONIES, APRIL 1775-FEBRUARY 1776

  To sign, or not to sign? That is the question, Whether ‘twere better for an honest man To sign, and so be safe; or to … fly … And, by that flight, t’ escape Feathers and tar …

  —” The Pausing American Loyalist”1

  Royal governors in Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina had been urging the mobilizing and arming of Loyalists since the first hints of rebellion. The governors believed that the path to victory coursed through the southern colonies, where there were enough friends of the king to help the British Army quickly put down the revolt. Ultimately twenty-nine Loyalist military units, mostly of regimental size, would fight the Continental Army or Rebel militias in the southern colonies.2

  North Carolina governor Josiah Martin, a former lieutenant colonel in the British Army, envisioned a Loyalist army of twenty thousand men, enlisted around a core of three thousand Highlanders, along with tough backcountry settlers known as the Regulators. The Regulators had protested a corrupt system by attacking dishonest tax collectors and judges and rebelling against the royal rule of William Tryon, Martin’s predecessor.

  In May 1771 Tryon, also a former lieutenant colonel, had led a royal militia army against the Regulators in a battle near today’s Alamance, killing about twenty, hanging seven without trial, and laying waste their farms.3 The Regulators, who had seen their comrades’ bodies ripped by royal grapeshot at Alamance, were unusual candidates for a Loyalist force. But their allegiance to the king transcended all else, and many of them joined Loyalist regiments.

  As for the Highlanders, Governor Martin counted on their loyalty to the king—and his expectation that they would barter their warrior skills for generous land grants. Martin had been providing those grants to men who had only to swear “their readiness to lay down their lives in the defence of his Majesty’s government.”4 Allan MacDonald and Flora bestowed their prestige on Martin’s plan for a Loyalist force. Allan would be second in command; the commanding officer would be Donald MacDonald, a veteran of Culloden who had been commissioned a brigadier general by Martin.

  Martin was working on his plan when Janet Schaw, a sharp-eyed woman from Scotland, appeared and became an unexpected witness to the stirring of rebellion in North Carolina. After a stormy crossing in a small ship, she and her younger brother Alexander arrived at a plantation, near Wilmington, which was owned by their older brother Robert. He, like all North Carolinians, was in the midst of choosing sides. He had served in the militia when it was royal and had fought under Governor Tryon in the Battle of Alamance. When the militia came under control of the Rebels, he remained an officer and was commissioned a colonel. But revolutionary events were moving so swiftly that, coincidental with his sister’s arrival, he had to decide to support Governor Martin or go with the Rebels.

  Janet Schaw almost immediately discovered the complexity of the choice her brother Robert faced, for the Rebel—Loyalist fissure reached deep into southern society. A neighboring hostess was warned by the Rebels’ local Committee of Safety that she had to cancel a forthcoming ball because of a congressional edict against “Balls and Dancing.”

  Then, surprisingly, the committee relented, Janet got her invitation and, “dressed out in all my British airs with a high head and a hoop,” she trudged to the ball “thro the unpaved streets in embroidered shoes by the light of a lanthorn carried by a black wench half naked.”5

  The Committee of Safety may have changed its mind because of the influence of a visitor to the plantation, Robert Howe. He “has the worst character you ever heard thro the whole province,” Schaw wrote. “He is however very like a Gentleman.” A prominent Patriot related to Robert Schaw by marriage, Howe, too, had served under Tryon.6 While he was chatting and flirting with Janet Schaw, he had something else on his mind: a plot to kidnap Governor Martin.7

  Howe was with Janet Schaw one day when, by her account, he stopped a Rebel mob from tarring and feathering a hapless Tory. She, Howe, and others were watching a mustering of Rebel militiamen—”2000 men in their shirts and trousers,” she wrote, “preceded by a very ill beat-drum and a fiddler, who was also in his shirt with a long sword and a cue at his hair, who played with all his might. They made indeed a most unmartial appearance.” But, she shrewdly observed, “the worst figure there can shoot from behind a bush and kill even a General Wolfe.”8*

  She, Robert Schaw, and others on the plantation were invited by Martin and his wife to go to the governor’s palace in New Bern on June 4 to celebrate the king’s birthday. But they learned that “the Govr’s house had been attacked, himself obliged to get down to the man of war, and send off his wife, sister and children in a little vessel, with directions to land them in the first safe port. What renders these circumstances the more affecting is that poor Mrs. Martin is big with child, and naturally of a very delicate constitution.”9

  Martin escaped the kidnappers, who had been managed by Howe, and reached a fort on Cape Fear. His family sailed to New York and then journeyed to Martin’s father-in-law’s Long Island home, where Martin’s daughter Augusta was born. When Rebels were about to take and burn the fort, Martin fled to the HMS Cruizer, a British warship anchored in the Cape Fear River. Among the people who accompanied him were Janet and Alexander Schaw. While they were aboard the Cruizer, Martin asked Alexander to sail to England with dispatches that would inform Lord Dartmouth about the rebellion in North Carolina.

  Janet Schaw’s journal contains an emotional description of the Rebel martial law that pertained over much of North Carolina in the wake of Martin’s flight:

  An officer or committeeman enters a plantation with his posse. The Alternative is proposed, Agree to join us, and your persons and properties are safe; you have a shilling sterling a day; your duty is no more than once a month appearing under Arms at Wilmingtown, which will prove only a merry-making, where you will have as much grog as you can drink. But if you refuse, we are directly to cut up your corn, shoot your pigs, burn your houses, seize your Negroes and perhaps tar and feather yourself.10

  When Robert Schaw refused to take an oath supporting the Rebels, his punishment was exile and the confiscation of his land.11 But Thomas Macknight, an extremely wealthy Scottish merchant in North Carolina, suffered the kind of punishmen
ts described in Janet Schaw’s journal. Although Rebels had once labeled him “always friendly to the cause of American liberty,” when he showed a tolerance for Tory friends in New Bern, he was deemed “inimical.” Rebels plundered his house, his merchandise, and his crops, abducted his slaves, and even tried to kill him, according to his recollections. In 1776 he exiled himself to England.12

  Janet cut short her stay and boarded a ship that was returning to Britain after bringing more Scot immigrants to North Carolina.13 She bade a bitter farewell to an “unhappy land, for which my heart bleeds in pity. Little does it signify to you, who are the conquered or who the victorious; you are devoted to ruin, whoever succeeds.”14

  • • •

  Among the documents that Alexander carried to England was a letter that Martin had written Lord Dartmouth on June 30, boasting that he could “reduce to order and obedience every colony to the southward of Pennsylvania.” All he needed were ten thousand muskets and ammunition, along with some artillery “and a supply of money as might be necessary for the support of such a force.”15

  Dartmouth had been getting similarly optimistic reports from Crown officials in other colonies, especially from Dunmore in Virginia. Focusing on Martin’s proposal, Dartmouth saw the possibility of a combined offensive that would stamp out the rebellion in North Carolina and so terrify the Rebels in the other southern colonies that they would surrender. Dartmouth’s successor, Lord George Germain, enthusiastically endorsed the use of Loyalist soldiers allied with a British Army expeditionary force that would land at Wilmington, a port about fifteen miles up the Cape Fear River. The conquest of Wilmington, Dartmouth believed, would quickly lead to the surrender of the bigger port of Charleston, South Carolina, some 170 miles south. Thus began Britain’s first venture into a strategy aimed at severing the southern colonies from those in the north.

  Coincidentally, while Governor Martin was making his plans, Lt. Col. Donald MacDonald and Capt. Donald McLeod of the Royal Highland Emigrants Regiment arrived in New Bern. They had been dispatched as recruiters by General Gage. When picked up for questioning by the Rebels’ Committee of Safety, they said they were former British officers who had been wounded at Bunker Hill and had come to North Carolina with the idea of possibly settling there. The committee released the officers with a warning to refrain from aiding the Tories.16

  Martin issued a proclamation calling on all loyal North Carolinians to support the king. And he asked several prominent North Carolina Loyalists—many of them Scots—to raise a Loyalist force called the North Carolina Provincials. Between twelve and fourteen hundred volunteered. In Martin’s vision local Highlanders and Regulators would be his principal warriors.17 Martin also expected to mobilize Loyalist volunteers from other backcountry immigrants: the Scotch-

  Irish. But unlike the Highlanders, the Scotch-Irish were not dependably loyal, and most of them had, at least, Patriot leanings.

  The Scotch-Irish were descendants of transplanted Scots who in the early 1600s had been sent to Northern Ireland by King James I. He had tried to solve his problems with the Irish and the Scots by handing over to the Scots a vast Irish territory that came to be known as the Ulster Plantation. King James specifically barred Highlanders from Ulster because his plan was to introduce the ways of the British to the Irish. They, in his view, needed civilizing.18

  Early in the eighteenth century the people of Ulster began sailing to America in a flight from what a Pennsylvania newspaper called “Poverty, Wretchedness, Misery and Want.”19 By the 1750s the immigrants were being called the Scotch-Irish, a shorthand acknowledgment of Scotch descent and Northern Ireland origin. The newcomers usually called themselves Scotch, avoiding any suggestion that they were partially Irish.20

  Between 1717 and 1775, in America’s first great surge of immigration, more than two hundred thousand Scotch-Irish arrived in the colonies.21 How many others were lost at sea in the long perilous voyages will never be known. The ships were built to carry cargo, not passengers. Immigrants were stowed in the dank hold by shipowners who saw them as profitable ballast. On one ship starving survivors ate the bodies of the dead.22 In another “about 100 of them dyed,” said a Pennsylvania newspaper in 1728, reporting on the explosive growth and frequent tragedies of immigration. “Children from 1 to 7 years rarely survive the voyage,” a survivor wrote. “I witnessed misery in no less than 32 children in our ship, all of whom were thrown into the sea. The parents grieve all the more since their children find no resting-place in the earth, but are devoured by the monsters of the sea.”23

  Most of the early Scotch-Irish immigrants landed at Philadelphia and found land along Pennsylvania’s western frontier.24 Descendants of the first settlers and new waves of immigrants moved westwardalong the Great Wagon Road, which had evolved from a network of old Indian trading trails stretching from Pennsylvania to Georgia east of the Appalachians. The road took newcomers, their livestock, and their wagons to the backwoods of Virginia and the Carolinas. In North Carolina the immigrants settled along the piedmont, which extended from the fall lines of seaboard rivers westward to the foot of the Appalachians. Besides being far from the riches and power of the seacoast, the people of the piedmont were also outside the economic sphere of the coastal ruling class.25

  The immigrants built their dirt-floor log cabins near springs or streams. There were no village greens because the settlers had no time to form villages. They had to clear the land and then plant their first crops. They raised corn, wheat, flax, and cotton as well as sheep on farms whose average size was about 175 acres.26 Most clothing was made from cotton cloth woven at home.

  The Scotch-Irish were usually Presbyterians, but among them there were also evangelical Baptists. The Anglican Church, rebuffed by the toiling class back in Ulster, had not attracted the Scotch-Irish in America. To bring them the Anglican faith in the new land, missionaries were sent from Britain to the Carolina backcountry. Among the missionaries was the Reverend Charles Woodmason, a British-born Anglican clergyman who traveled the region in the 1760s.

  Woodmason was shocked by the people’s “low, lazy, sluttish, heathenish, hellish Life.” He had difficulty averting his eyes from the “Young Women,” who had “a most uncommon Practice, which I cannot break them of. They draw their Shift as tight as possible to the Body, and pin it close, to shew the roundness of their Breasts, and slender Waists (for they are generally fairly shaped) and draw their Petticoat close to their Hips to shew the fineness of their Limbs.” When he performed a church service, he wrote, most of the congregation “went to Revelling Drinking Singing Dancing and Whoring—and most of the Company were drunk before I quitted the Spot.”27

  Woodmason was seeing a new American breed: people who had migrated not from England but from Ulster, people to whom Scotland was but a folk memory, a place few of them had even seen. And, as Presbyterians, they had turned away from the hierarchical structure of the Anglican Church in favor of the democracy of the meetinghouse. As a North Carolina minister—and Patriot—explained Presbyterian beliefs: God “had long ago implanted into man’s nature a capacity for civic responsibility. God had taught men to consider themselves His stewards, had given them talents and opportunities, and expected them to make the most of those endowments.”28

  Many Loyalists believed that the Revolution itself had emerged from a conflict between Presbyterians and Anglicans: “Presbyterianism is really at the Bottom of this whole Conspiracy, has supplied it with Vigour, and will never rest till something is decided upon it,” a representative of Lord Dartmouth wrote in 1776.29 A disinterested witness in the form of a Hessian captain had noted this in a letter home: “Call this war, dearest friend, by whatever name you may, only call it not an American Rebellion; it is nothing more nor less than Irish-Scotch Presbyterian Rebellion.”30

  When word of Governor Martin’s Loyalist plan reached Patriot leaders, they sent pro-Patriot propagandists, including five Highlanders, into the Scotch-Irish backwoods to meet with “the gentlemen who have late
ly arrived from the highlands in Scotland” and “to advise and urge them to unite with the other Inhabitants of America in defence of those rights which they derive from God and the Constitution.”31 The delegation did not attempt to recruit militiamen but chose only to gain sympathy for the Rebel cause.32

  Governor Martin, meanwhile, received word that British strategists had enhanced his plan. Already at sea was a convoy bringing seven Redcoat regiments from the British Isles under the command of Lord Charles Cornwallis. Another large force was coming from Boston under Maj. Gen. Sir Henry Clinton, who said his mission was “to support Loyalists and restore the authority of the King’s government in the four southern provinces.”33

  The Loyalists were to march to the coast down the southwestern side of the Cape Fear River and at Wilmington rendezvous with the British troops coming by sea. Joined up, the combined force would then begin a campaign to fight the Rebels for control of North Carolina. That triumph was to be the inspiration for a general rising of the Loyalists and the return of the southern colonies to the Crown.

  Highlanders, expecting that the seaborne British would soon arrive, began assembling at the hub of their power, Cross Creek (now Fayetteville), about eighty miles north of Wilmington. They hoped to raise as many as five thousand men, including a large complement of Regulators. But Regulators were scarce on February 15, 1776, when about fourteen hundred men gathered at Cross Creek. And only 520 of them carried muskets. Leaders canvassed people in the area and found muskets to arm about 130 more. Raiders also took powder that had been stored by Patriots and got additional powder, along with provisions, from Loyalist merchants.34 About sixty people slipped out of the Cross Creek area to an encampment seven miles away, where some eleven hundred Patriot militiamen had mobilized. The Cross Creek refugees warned Col. James Moore, the Patriot commander, that the Loyalist troops were ready to march.