Tories

by Thomas B. Allen

  On February 19, Donald MacDonald—promoted to brigadier general by Martin—sent a messenger to Moore under a flag of truce. The message warned Moore that if he and his men did not accept the authority of the king by noon the next day, they would be attacked as enemies. Moore replied that he would continue “the defense of the liberties of mankind.” Dozens of men unexpectedly turned away from battle as MacDonald led his troops, most of them Highlanders, not toward Moore but toward the coast.35

  Moore sent some men to block one likely route and then marched off, hoping to pursue the Loyalists and force a battle. MacDonald continued at a slow pace, scouting for possible ambushes and strengthening bridges for his wagon train. Detachments of Patriots maneuvered along the Cape Fear River, seeking to close on MacDonald.

  Finally, on February 26, MacDonald learned that about one thousand Patriots were ahead, at a bridge crossing swampy Moore’s Creek, which flowed into a tributary’s confluence with the Cape Fear River. MacDonald, an ailing old soldier, sensed disaster, calleda council of war, and urged caution. The younger, bolder Donald McLeod, who was second in command, ordered an attack at dawn. Capt. John Campbell was to lead about eighty men brandishing the Highlanders’ storied weapon, the broadsword.

  About one a.m. the next day, scouts on the western side of the creek reached the bridge, a span of about fifty feet, and saw that the Patriots had removed its planks and greased the horizontal log supports, called stringers, with what smelled like tallow and soap. Entrenched on the eastern side, the Patriots guarded the road the Loyalists needed to take to Wilmington. Undaunted by the scouts’ report, McLeod readied the charge.

  The steady beating of drums and keening of war pipes broke the silence of the cool dawn. Then came three cheers from all the men, the signal for the charge. Shouting a rallying cry—” King George and Broadswords!”—the eighty bravest Highlanders, led by McLeod on one stringer and Campbell on the other, began slowly crossing the slippery logs, using their broadswords like spiked canes.36

  The Patriots held the fire of their muskets and two cannons until McLeod and Campbell reached the eastern side of the creek. Suddenly cannons and muskets fired. The cannons were loaded with swan shot—a canvas bag that burst on firing, spewing twenty or more lead pellets.37 Riddled by bullets and swan shot, McLeod and Campbell fell, both mortally wounded. McLeod, waving his broadsword, tried to rise, then died in another burst of bullets. One by one, two by two, other Highlanders fell, some to die by bullets, others by drowning. On the other side of the creek, Highlanders returned fire. Regulators and other Loyalists fled.

  Sharp Patriot fire killed at least thirty Loyalists; the exact toll is not known because the bodies of some who died in the creek were not recovered. Two Patriots were wounded, and one died of his wounds. General MacDonald and about 850 others were taken prisoner, among them Flora MacDonald’s husband, Allan.

  Many of the escaping Loyalists went into hiding, some of them for the rest of the war. At least one managed to reach Florida and join another Loyalist military organization, the East Florida Rangers.38

  An unknown number of Loyalists who were bystanders quietly disappeared, later sailing to safety in Nova Scotia and New York City.39 The most significant effect of the victory came after exuberant Patriots reported it to their delegates at the Continental Congress and urged that the colonies sever ties with Britain. Thus North Carolina became the first colony to vote for independence.40

  General Clinton had sailed out of Boston on January 10, expecting to rendezvous with Martin’s men and the Cornwallis fleet in mid-February. But, because of bureaucratic delays and the usual mishaps of eighteenth-century ocean voyages, Clinton and his two hundred infantrymen did not arrive off North Carolina until March 12. Cornwallis was not there. His fleet would not begin to appear off Cape Fear until April 18.41 Deciding that he might as well put his men to good use, Clinton broke camp, reloaded the troops aboard his ships, and sailed south to seize Charleston (then called Charles Town).

  When Clinton set sail, three royal governors were trying to run their colonies from cramped quarters aboard Royal Navy warships bobbing at anchor off rebellious shores: Martin on the HMS Cruizer in the Cape Fear River, Dunmore from HMS Fowey on the James River in Virginia, and Lord William Campbell, on HMS Tamar off Charleston, in South Carolina.

  Unlike the royal governors in New England, Dunmore and Martin reacted to rebellion in their colonies by mobilizing their Loyalists and using them as troops in a civil war aimed at regaining royal control. Campbell did not mobilize, but he had frequently urged British officials to invade his colony and link up with South Carolina’s multitude of Loyalists. “Charles Town,” Campbell wrote Lord Dartmouth, “is the fountainhead from which all the violence flows. Stop that and the rebellion in this part of the continent will, I trust, soon be at an end.”42

  Beyond the fountainhead of rebellion, both Patriots and Tories sought to win over the backcountry. In July 1775 the Patriots’ Council of Safety in Charleston sent spokesmen into the “interior parts” ofthe colony to urge people to join the Patriots’ cause “in order to preserve themselves and their children from slavery,” taking no apparent notice that they were in a colony full of slaves. The spokesmen were dispatched to counteract “the arts, frauds, and misrepresentations”43 of Moses Kirkland, a prominent South Carolina landowner who had switched sides to become a peripatetic Tory operative. He had helped Dunmore in Virginia, would serve with the British Army in Savannah, and would recruit Indians to fight Patriots in Florida.44

  Tory and Rebel leaders in the backcountry at first dueled with words and petitions, some changing sides. Finally, the local version of civil war erupted at a trading post called Ninety Six, near today’s Clemson. After Rebels seized and imprisoned a Tory leader, about fifteen hundred of his followers surged into Ninety Six, seeking revenge, surrounding a fort manned by some five hundred Rebel militiamen. In three days of fighting, one man was killed. His was the first blood of a Patriot shed in South Carolina. The battle ended with a truce, but conflict continued elsewhere.45

  Later in 1775 more than five thousand Patriot militiamen scoured the backcountry of Loyalists and captured their leaders, including one who hid in the hollow of a sycamore. In a swirling storm—ending what became known as the Snow Campaign—the Patriots made Loyalists sign pledges to lay down their arms or have their property confiscated.46 Thirty-three who were jailed in Charleston finally promised “to Endeavor to Settle Peace to Your Satisfaction.” But an added note—” there is Different Circumstances Amongst us”—reflected the reality that although peace had seemingly come to the backcountry, conflicts would continue to simmer.47

  The ferocity of the rebellion in South Carolina appalled Governor Campbell. Thomas Jeremiah, a “free negro” well known as a fisherman and pilot called Jerry, was heard to say that if British warships sailed into Charleston, he would guide them. Patriots arrested him and, in a mockery of a trial, speedily convicted him of plotting insurrection against the Rebels. He was sentenced to be hanged and his body publicly burned. Lord Campbell had the power to intervene—” my blood ran cold when I read on what grounds they had doomed afellow creature to death,” he said in a letter to Dartmouth. But Patriots warned Campbell that if he granted a pardon, “they would hang him at my door.” The sentence was carried out; he was one of several South Carolina slaves executed after conviction on similar charges.48

  For General Washington, the Revolution shifted southward after he learned of the movement of British warships and troops to Charleston. He sent Maj. Gen. Charles Lee to Charleston as an adviser to local Patriots. Lee, a former British officer who was contemptuous of the Continental Army, examined Charleston’s defenses and called the city’s key defense, the Sullivan’s Island fort, a “slaughter pen.” Lee told the commander, Col. William Moultrie, he should abandon it. Moultrie, backed by his Patriots, politely refused, though Lee seemed to have a point. The fort was made out of palmetto logs and sand, and when Clinton’s fleet appeared off t
he harbor, the fort was only partially complete.49

  In late June 1776 the British landed on unfortified Long Island (now the Isle of Palms), east of Sullivan’s Island. Clinton planned to have his men wade across an inlet to Sullivan’s Island at low tide, after the British fleet leveled the palmetto fort with an intense bombardment. But the inlet turned out to be too deep for wading, and the palmetto logs were so spongy that they absorbed cannonballs. The fort did not fall.

  Lord Campbell, a Royal Navy veteran, had spent four months of his governorship on a British warship. When the battle began he was aboard the fifty-gun Bristol, the fleet flagship. He volunteered to take command of its gun deck. Patriot fire concentrated on the Bristol, the cannon hits producing arrowlike splinters that caused painful, often lethal wounds. A lucky cannon shot severed the ship’s cable, which controlled its swing at anchor. Accurate Patriot fire raked its hull and rigging fore and aft.

  The Bristol‘s captain, John Morris, struck several times, stayed on the quarterdeck until his right arm was shot off. He died in a few days. Campbell was thrown to the deck by the blast of a cannonball. Henever recovered from his injury, and died two years later in England.50 The captain of HMS Experiment lost his left arm but survived. Forty men of the Bristol were killed; the Experiment lost twenty-three men. Of the more than 120 who were wounded, most would not survive.51 Seventeen Americans in the fort were killed and twenty wounded.

  The battered British fleet withdrew to the outer harbor, and after waiting for favorable winds, withdrew in mid-July. It then sailed north to join the British attack on New York.

  In Virginia, Dunmore had been much more successful than Martin in leading armed attacks on Rebels. He had made his first move against rebellion on the night of April 20, 1775, a month after Patrick Henry declared, “Give me liberty or give me death!” A party of Royal Marines, carrying out the governor’s order, slipped into the Virginia capital of Williamsburg, entered the powder magazine, disabled muskets that were stored there, and carried off fifteen half barrels of gunpowder to the warship HMS Fowey. The next morning, drums boomed on the streets of Williamsburg, rallying protesters, including members of the House of Burgesses.52

  The mayor and other local officials called on Dunmore and told him he had to return the powder to assure residents that the militia would have powder if their slaves rose in insurrection. Dunmore did return the powder, but he raged: “The whole country can easily be made a solitude, and by the living God, if any insult is offered to me, or to those who have obeyed my orders, I will declare freedom to the slaves, and lay the town in ashes.” Dunmore then fled to York, about twelve miles from the capital, and boarded the Fowey. 53

  Dunmore made good on part of his threat on November 7, 1775, when he proclaimed freedom for all slaves or indentured servants belonging to Rebels, as long as they “are able and willing to bear arms” and join “His Majesty’s Troops.”54

  Dunmore’s proclamation stunned Virginia, where there were nearly as many slaves as white persons. Among the Virginians who would lose slaves was Thomas Jefferson. When British forces invadedthe state in 1781, twenty-three of his slaves ran away, or, as one entry in his farm book says, “fled to the enemy.”55 Dunmore’s move induced nightmares of armed slaves rising in insurrection against their masters. Fear spread to South Carolina, where there were two slaves for each white.56 The proclamation had a profound effect on the war, transforming countless slaveholders into Rebels and drawing thousands of slaves to the Loyalist side.

  In reaction to Dunmore’s proclamation, the Continental Army had begun enlisting free blacks, who for a time had been banned from the army. More than one hundred black Americans fought at Bunker (Breed’s) Hill. But, when George Washington arrived to take command, he expelled blacks, accepting a resolution of the Massachusetts Committee of Public Safety, which said, “you are not to enlist … any stroller, negro, or vagabond” into the regiments of the “Massachusetts Bay Forces.”57 After Dunmore’s proclamation Washington partially rescinded his order, allowing free blacks, but not slaves, into the army. Rhode Island, offering freedom to slaves who enlisted with the consent of their owners, later raised what became known as the Black Regiment, which included Indians.58

  Within a month after Dunmore issued his proclamation, more than five hundred slaves left their masters and became black Loyalists. About three hundred joined Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment and donned uniforms emblazoned with “Liberty to Slaves” across the chest.59 Dunmore gathered a force of British soldiers, members of the Ethiopian Regiment, and white Virginia Loyalists, to launch an attack at Great Bridge, a shipping point for nearby Norfolk. Virginia Patriots, with allies from North Carolina, stopped the invaders with a musket barrage that killed or wounded 102 of Dunmore’s men.60 The only Patriot casualty was an officer who suffered a slight hand wound. Thirty-two members of the Ethiopian Regiment were captured and shipped off to be sold in the Caribbean.61

  On January 1, 1776, three ships in Dunmore’s impromptu navy shelled Norfolk, setting the city afire and destroying “a Work of great Value and publick Utility, with a large stock of Rum and Molasses.”62 After a short, defiant stand on a Chesapeake Bay island, Dunmore sailed away to New York, taking with him survivors of the Ethiopian Regiment.63

  For General Cornwallis, General Howe, and General Washington, the war would now shift to New York, where more Loyalists awaited a call to arms.

  * A reference to the slaying of Gen. James Wolfe, commander of the British expedition that took Quebec in 1759, assuring British victory in the French and Indian War.

  10

  WAR IN THE LOYAL PROVINCE

  NEW YORK, APRIL 1776-DECEMBER 1776

  This mob … searched the whole town in pursuit of tories … they placed them upon sharp rails with one leg on each side; each rail was carried upon the shoulders of two tall men, with a man on each side to keep the poor wretch straight and fixed in his seat. In this manner were numbers of these poor people … paraded through the most public and conspicuous streets in the town.

  —A Loyalist watches Patriots occupy New York City1

  When General Washington arrived in New York City from Boston in April 1776, the city was under the control of Patriots. But Royal Navy warships swayed at anchor in the harbor, and the colony was clinging to its Tory reputation: It was “the Loyal Province” and New York City was “Torytown.”2 The men aboard those ships, including Royal Governor William Tryon, were eating food sold to them and delivered to them by enterprising New York merchants. Tories were routinely commuting between ship and shore.

  Washington, outraged, learned that Tryon, seven months before, had won an agreement from New York Patriots, who allowed provisions to be delivered to HMS Asia, a sixty-four-gun warship intimidating the city. By the time Washington brought the war to New York, Tryon had followed the example of other royal governors bygoing to sea. Fearing kidnapping, he had fled first to a Royal Navy warship and then to the British supply ship HMS Duchess of Gordon in New York harbor.3 He continued to get water and provisions, along with visits from spies and royal placemen. He was running the Tory underground while the Patriots’ provincial congress was the government.

  Washington assumed that Tryon was supervising a network of spies and passing their information on to British military officials. Long after the war General Gates’s papers yielded a letter from Tryon containing detailed information about Continental Army plans. What Washington did not immediately discover was that his own fate—a decision to either kidnap or kill him—was being discussed by plotters who boarded Tryon’s ship as easily as they would have stepped onto a harbor ferry.4

  Washington issued a proclamation that denounced the “sundry base and wicked persons” who profited from dealing with the British ships, declaring that “if any person or persons shall hereafter presume to have, hold, or to continue to carry on such intercourse, or any kind of correspondence whatsoever, or furnish and supply the said ships of war, and other vessels in such service with provisions
and necessaries of any kind, that he or they, so offending, will be deemed and considered as an enemy or enemies.”5

  The commander in chief was combating the double standard of the New York Patriots: harshly treating Loyalists in general while exempting certain merchants from anti-Loyalist policies. The unwieldy, jittery provincial congress had 119 members; at least 19 were Tories, enough of a division to slow down the Patriots’ ability to govern.6

  Washington had seen for himself the Tory-Patriot split in New York when he passed through the city in June 1775 on his way to Cambridge to take command of the Continental Army. On the same day Governor Tryon, who had been on leave in England, happened to return to New York. In the afternoon, when Washington stepped off the boat that carried him to New York from New Jersey, members of the provincial congress and leaders of both Tory and Patriot factions greeted him with huzzahs and flowery speeches.

  A few hours later a boat from Tryon’s ship deposited the governor in Manhattan, where he received huzzahs from many of the same people who had welcomed Washington. The two generals accompanying Washington—Charles Lee and Philip Schuyler—joined in the welcome, shaking Tryon’s hand and wishing him long tenure in his royal post.

  The next day Washington, Lee, and their entourage went on their way to war while Schuyler remained behind to arrange for the forwarding of ammunition and other Rebel supplies to Albany for use in the imminent invasion of Canada. Schuyler was lodging with his cousin, whose house was across the street from Tryon’s. Donning his splendid new blue-and-buff uniform of the Continental Army, Schuyler decided to call on Tryon. The governor, not wishing to continue the choreography of make-believe, coolly rejected the visit, saying that he did not know anyone named General Schuyler.7