Tories

by Thomas B. Allen

  “Keep a watchful eye upon Governor Tryon,” Washington had told Schuyler, adding that he should also “watch the movements of the Indian Agent and prevent, as far as you can, the effect of his influence to our prejudice with the Indians.”8 This was a reference to Col. Guy Johnson, the powerful British viceroy to the Indians who, even as Washington wrote his orders, was recruiting a Loyalist force along New York’s northern frontier.

  Royal governors had shifted in 1771, Tryon of North Carolina replacing Lord Dunmore as governor of New York, and Dunmore moving to Virginia. Dunmore did not take the switch gracefully, for he believed that his noble title trumped Tryon’s mere military background and familial links with the British aristocracy.

  Tryon liked New York, especially its Loyal Province status. He had been tough enough to shoot and hang dissident constituents in North Carolina, and he was ready to do the same if rebellion came to his new colonial post. Tryon had served as an officer in the elite Foot Guards and had been wounded in France during what the French and British called the Seven Years’ War. His sister was lady-in-waiting to Queen Charlotte, wife of King George. His wealthy wife was the daughter of a merchant who, because of his ties to the East India Company, had served as governor of the Bombay Colony.9

  Before Tryon took over as governor, back in the Stamp Act days, New York Sons of Liberty had followed the lead of compatriots in Massachusetts. As soon as news of the Lexington and Concord battles reached New York City, the Sons had stoked the rebellion. They broke into the armory at City Hall, carrying off more than five hundred muskets, along with hundreds of bayonets and boxes of ball cartridges. They responded to a recommendation from the Continental Congress by convening a provincial congress. Acting as New York’s real government, the provincial congress moved aggressively at first, taking control of militias, manufacturing gunpowder, and even hiring gunsmiths to produce gun barrels, bayonets, and musket ramrods.10

  But revolution in the New York Colony was slowed down by a large Tory presence. Adjoining New York City was another Loyalist stronghold: Queen’s County (which then encompassed what are now Queens, Brooklyn, Long Island’s Nassau County, and part of Suffolk County). In September 1775, two Patriot militias, ordered to enter the county to disarm the Tories, called off the mission as too dangerous. There were also large and militant Tory populations in Poughkeepsie, in Albany, and on the frontier of the New York—Canada border, where Col. Guy Johnson was ruling over an ever-growing and well-armed Loyalist realm.11 By one estimate, half of the colony’s two hundred thousand people were Loyalists, most of whom kept their allegiance to themselves.12

  In the region dominated by the great harbor of New York City, Tories had long wielded enormous influence, especially through the machinations of the De Lancey family. De Lancey Toryism evolved from political squabbling with Whigs to the commissioning of family members in Loyalist regiments that would bear the De Lancey name and carry it onto battlefields from New York to Yorktown. Oliver De Lancey, a member of the Governor’s Council, met with Tryon aboard the Duchess of Gordon as part of a floating Loyalist government, notonly preparing to resume power after a British victory but also mobilizing Tories to fight the Rebels in battle.13

  The New York Patriots who had forced Tryon to leave dry land faced a complex task. In March 1776, for example, the Continental Congress recommended the disarming of all “who are notoriously disaffected to the cause of America, or who have not associated, and refuse to associate to defend by arms these United Colonies.” The New York Committee of Safety reacted by passing along its own recommendation to its Patriots: Ask for an oath to defend New York against the British “until the present unhappy controversy between the two countries shall be settled.” As for the disarming, the Committee of Safety mildly urged “all possible prudence and moderation.”14

  Now came Washington and his ten thousand troops, introducing New Yorkers—both Patriots and Tories—to the reality of war in their colony.

  In anticipation of a British assault, Washington’s troops built fortifications on the Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan, on Brooklyn Heights, and on the shores of Long Island. The defenses did not reassure New Yorkers. Nor did the Continental reinforcements, a motley force streaming in from Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and New Jersey. New Yorkers saw menace on all sides. The Continental Army’s invasion of Canada had failed, leaving a route for a British attack from the north. The geography of New York Harbor offered another threat: Washington did not have the ships needed to defend a city whose every shore lay open to the world’s mightiest navy.

  Patriots beyond New York bristled at the lenience being shown British sympathizers in a city girding for war. Frustration inspired the taunting and torturing of Tories, especially by newly arrived troops from other colonies. “Here in town very unhappy and shocking scenes were exhibited,” Gustavus Shewkirk, a Loyalist who was a Moravian minister, wrote in his diary. “On Munday night some men called Tories were carried and hauled about through the streets, with candles forced to be held by them, or pushed in their faces, and their heads burned; but on Wednesday, in the open day, the scene was by far worse; several, and among them gentlemen, were carried on rails; some stripped naked and dreadfully abused. Some of the generals … had enough to do to quell the riot, and make the mob disperse.”15

  In October 1775 the Continental Congress had made a drastic recommendation for Patriot governments like the New York provincial congress: “arrest and secure every person who, going at large, might, in their opinion endanger the safety of the colony or liberties of America.”16 Shortly later, Washington gave his endorsement to the Tory roundup in a letter to Jonathan Trumbull, governor of Connecticut, urging him to seize dangerous Tories in his state.17 Isaac (“King”) Sears, a volatile New York Patriot and somewhat of a provocateur, took it upon himself to carry out the arrest-and-secure order.

  Sears went to Connecticut, rounded up about one hundred mounted Patriots, and led his posse across the border to arrest three leading New York Tories. One of them was the Reverend Samuel Seabury, rector of Saint Peter’s Anglican Church in Westchester (now The Bronx). He was known to be the anonymous author of Letters of a Westchester Farmer, in which he had written, “[I] f I must be enslaved, let it be by a KING at least, and not by a parcel of upstart, lawless committee-men. If I must be devoured, let me be devoured by the jaws of a lion, and not gnawed to death by rats and vermin!” He had joined with other New York Loyalists in a vow to support the king “at the hazard of our lives and properties.”18 To Sears, the Reverend Seabury was a major catch.

  Seabury later complained that the Patriot raiders had pawed through his desk, thrust a bayonet through his daughter’s cap, and cut up the quilt she was making. Some of the raiders hauled Seabury and their two other captives off to prison in Connecticut. The rest had a new target: the printing shop of James Rivington, at the foot of Wall Street in Manhattan. They destroyed his press, and carried off his type. He called himself “Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty” and published Rivingtons New-York Gazetteer, a pro-Tory newspaper that bore the royal arms on its masthead.19

  Rather than cheer for the raid and the silencing of the Gazetteer, the New York Provincial Congress indignantly protested to the Connecticut governor, Jonathan Trumbull. Deciding to keep the peacebetween his state and New York, Trumbull ordered the release of the three prisoners.20

  While moving against public Tories like Seabury, neither the provincial congress nor Washington realized the size and effectiveness of the Tory underground that Tryon was running from the Duchess. Tryon directed an organization so well connected with Tory supporters ashore that a New York shoemaker could run a pick-up-and-deliver service repairing the shoes of Royal Navy sailors. Agents stationed on the Duchess routinely carried messages to and from prisoners held in Rebel jails.21

  The Continental Army did not yet have a formal intelligence-gathering organization, but talkative prisoners can sometimes substitute for counterintelligence agents. On th
e evening of June 22 Lt. Col. David Mason wrote a terse report to his commanding officer, Maj. Gen. Henry Knox. “I just Recd Intelligence from a Gent in the City,” Mason said. He had been told that Lara Fraga, a Continental Army private jailed on charges of attempted counterfeiting, had important information. Fraga claimed that a number of men “have inlisted in the minesterall Troops,” as the British Army was sometimes called. Fraga, who was in an artillery unit commanded by Capt. Alexander Hamilton, said he would point out the men whom he knew had gone over to the British.22

  That jail-cell tip led to the discovery of a widespread plot whose mastermind was Tryon. His principal assistant was David Matthews, the Tory mayor of New York, described by a Tory writer as “a person low in estimation as a lawyer, profligate, abandoned, and dissipated, indigent, extravagant, and luxurious, over head and ears in debt, with a large family as extravagant and voluptuous as himself.”23 When Continental officers and Patriot civilians began to unravel the plot, they found that Tryon’s key agent on board the Duchess was a “Mulotto Coloured Negro dressed in blue Cloathes.”24

  Few knew that the man in blue was John Thompson, a freeborn black servant of Edmund Fanning, Tryon’s private secretary and closefriend. Fanning had been a key aide to Tryon in North Carolina. As a corrupt judge, he was the type of royal magistrate who inspired the rise of the Regulators.25 Tryon depended upon Thompson to pass out money and instructions to Matthews. The cash was used to bribe Continental soldiers and to buy weapons that were to be distributed to Tories when they rose against fellow Americans.

  When the battle for New York began, the bribed soldiers were to change sides and fight for the British as guerrillas. They would blow up magazines, disrupt Continental Army strategic plans, and seize a battery of artillery—probably Hamilton’s—to turn the cannons against their comrades. A murky phase of the plot involved the kidnapping or assassination of officers, including Washington. Many aspects of the plot were kept secret at the time, presumably to prevent local Patriots from realizing how vulnerable Washington was and how susceptible Continental soldiers were to bribery.26

  At Washington’s request the provincial congress’s newly created Committee to Detect Conspiracies sent a detachment of troops to arrest Matthews and confiscate his papers. John Jay, the future chief justice of the Supreme Court, turned a Wall Street tavern into a hearing room and questioned witnesses rounded up by Continental soldiers. Isaac Ketchum, a jailed counterfeiter, testified that two soldiers, Sgt. Thomas Hickey and Pvt. Michael Lynch, had attempted to recruit him for the British. Like Fraga, they were in jail on suspicion of counterfeiting. As members of the Life Guard unit that protected Washington, they were uniquely placed for a kidnapping or assassination attempt.

  Hickey, an Irish-born deserter from the British Army, was quickly charged with “exciting and joining in a mutiny and sedition, and of treacherously corresponding with, inlisting among and receiving pay from the enemies of the United American Colonies.” Apparently for security reasons, no mention was made of a plot to kidnap Washington or the plan to subvert as many as seven hundred American soldiers. Jay’s hearing implicated other soldiers and many Tory civilians. Only Hickey was court-martialed.

  Four Continental Army brigades marched to a field near the Bowery on the morning of June 28 and formed ranks around a newly erected gallows. Thousands of civilians gathered behind the troops. Eighty soldiers, twenty from each brigade, escorted Hickey to the gallows. “He appeared unaffected and obstinate to the last,” a witness wrote, “except that when the Chaplains took him by the hand under the Gallows and bad him adieu, a torrent of tears flowed over his face; but with an indignant scornful air he wiped ‘em with his hand from his face, and assumed the confident look.“27

  Word of the plot spread through the ranks of the Patriots, unleashing an anti-Tory campaign that focused on Queen’s County, especially the areas of Long Island where British landings were anticipated. Action against Queen’s had been simmering since 1775 when most Queen’s voters refused to send delegates to the New York Provincial Convention.

  King Spears had tried to force Long Islanders to make their commitment known by having them sign an oath, swearing by the “Almighty and Tremendous God” not to “convey any intelligence” to the British and to do nothing “to intimidate or dissuade other men, from embarking in the cause of their country and liberty.”28 Nothing much came of Spears’s campaign, but it did launch a war of oaths that both the Patriots and the Loyalists would wage alongside the shooting war. When territory was conquered by one side or the other, residents could expect a proclamation demanding that they swear fidelity to the latest conqueror.

  The Continental Congress rejected a military proposal to round up all the Tories and exile them to a place where they could not harm the Patriot war effort. The idea was unreasonable because of the size of the Tory population. The roundup proposal was modified to a recommendation that known Tories be disarmed. In one swoop on Long Island, Continental troops gathered about two hundred muskets and ammunition.29

  Washington, anticipating a British invasion, later sent men to Long Island with orders to root out Tory leaders. But the hunt did little to tame the Tories. Brig. Gen. Nathanael Greene, commander of Continental forces on Long Island, joined other ranking officers ina report that said: “With regard to the disaffected inhabitants who have lately been apprehended, we think that the method at present adopted by the County Committee, of discharging them on their giving bonds as a security for their good behavior, is very improper and ineffectual.”30

  A more detailed description of the Tory hunt came from a contemporary Tory historian, who wrote that “all fled and hid themselves in swamps, in woods, in barns, in holes, in hollow trees, in corn-fields, and among the marshes. Numbers took refuge in the pine barrens in Suffolk, while others in small boats kept sailing about the Sound, landing in the night, sleeping in the woods, and taking to the water again in the morning.”31 One of the hunted who escaped would have been a prize catch: John Harris Cruger, who was married to Ann De Lancey, the daughter of Oliver De Lancey. Cruger later found his way to General Howe, who commissioned him as a lieutenant colonel in one of the major Loyalist military units, the De Lancey Brigade.32

  On July 4 the Continental Congress in Philadelphia voted, by a unanimous tally of the delegates of twelve colonies, to adopt the Declaration of Independence. The New York delegates, unsure of their colony’s sentiments, did not vote to accept the Declaration until five days later. Coincidentally, on that same day Washington ordered his brigade officers to pick up copies of the Declaration at the office of the adjutant general and have it read in full to their men. Civilians gathered around the troops, listening to the words that indicted the king and severed the colonies from his royal rule.33

  One sentence in the Declaration would soon come to life across the Narrows: “He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny.” Anyone looking toward Staten Island could see a forest of Royal Navy masts. More ships were coming, and among them would be transports carrying to America thousands of foreign mercenaries—Germans, drawn from many principalities but all known as Hessians.

  “He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.” As New Yorkers heard the words of the Declaration, many of them pictured a golden King George III, enshrined on a golden horse and wearing a golden laurel wreath as an incarnation of Marcus Aurelius. When the last words were spoken, a mixed mob of soldiers and civilians headed for Bowling Green, at the foot of Broadway, where the golden statue stood.

  They slung ropes around the statue—four thousand pounds of gilded lead—and pulled it off its pedestal. They cut the fallen king and his horse into pieces and chopped off the king’s head, putting it aside with the intention of impaling it later on a pole. Most of the pieces were loaded onto a wagon and taken to Litchfield, Connecticut, where Patriots cast from the royal lead more than 42,000 bu
llets. Before the head could be exhibited, however, Tories stole it and buried it to hide it from the desecrating Rebels.34

  Anglican clergymen agreed that praying openly for the king was too dangerous to them and their congregations. So they shut their churches rather than continue services without the prayers for the king. “To have prayed for him had been rash to the last degree—the inevitable consequence had been a demolition of the churches, and the destruction of all who frequented them,” one of the clergymen wrote. Even closing churches “was attended with great hazard; for it was declaring [in] the strongest manner our disapprobation of independency, and that under the eye of Washington and his army.” Later, when the Continental Army began its retreat from New York, the provincial council authorized Washington to remove and melt down all bells from Anglican churches because the council did not want “the fortune of war … to … deprive this State … resource for supplying our want of cannon.”35

  Ever since late June the British troops had been streaming from their transports and setting up camps on Staten Island. There was no armed resistance. Local Tories, as Patriots expected, welcomed the occupation. Many who had previously posed as Rebels were among “the first to join the British as soon as they appeared in force,” Elias Boudinot, a young New Jersey lawyer and a future president of the Continental Congress, noted in his journal.36

  Desperate Tories from New York and Connecticut, telling of friends and relatives who had been jailed and mistreated by the Rebels, arrived on Staten Island in search of refuge. Flight to the Loyal Province would continue throughout the Revolution. And Tory civilians were not the only refugees. Noting the influx of Continental Army deserters, a Staten Island man wrote a friend in London: “Some of their Rifle-men have joined our army, and many more are watching a convenient opportunity to come over.”37