Tories
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Washington’s force by then numbered some twenty-three thousand men. But disease and desertion kept whittling down the number of able-bodied troops to about nineteen thousand, scattered about fortifications along New York and New Jersey shores.38 While Washington maintained control over stretches of New York and Connecticut territory, New York’s islands—Manhattan itself, Staten Island, Long Island—were so well guarded by the Royal Navy that they became not only British Army strongpoints but also places where Tories could find refuge and raise regiments.
One day in August, when British warships headed up the harbor toward the mouth of the Hudson River, Patriot shore batteries began firing. The British answered with a swift bombardment, damaging a few houses. “This affair caused a great fright in the city,” Gustavus Shewkirk wrote in his diary. “The smoke of the firing drew over like a cloud, and the air was filled with the smell of powder.”39
Now well aware of Tryon’s spy and sabotage network, Washington ordered the posting of troops along the harbor shores and sent out patrols in whaleboats—narrow vessels about thirty-six feet long, with pointed bows and sterns, sometimes armed with small cannons. He also ordered his men to seize or destroy every small boat and canoe they saw. Still, numerous Tories managed to reach the British warships. Among them was Oliver De Lancey, who, like Cruger, made his way to join Howe on Staten Island, where he would become Brigadier General De Lancey, commanding officer of his own Tory brigade.40 Another New Yorker, charged with conspiracy by the Rebels, swore that he had not been recruiting for the Loyalists but “had advised and persuaded men to enlist in the Continental service.” He was released—and then became a commander of the De Lancey Brigade.
General Howe had assembled more than thirty thousand men: his own, brought from Halifax; the Redcoats and Hessians brought across the Atlantic by his brother, Admiral Sir Richard Howe, and the troops who had returned after their failed invasion of Charleston, under the command of Maj. Gen. Sir Henry Clinton. On the morning of August 22 Howe landed fifteen thousand men from all of these troops on Long Island, beginning an offensive that drove the defenders off Long Island and won him a knighthood.
Many Long Island Tories who had sought refuge on Staten Island joined the invasion, landing with the British and Hessian troops. They wore red rags tied to their hats to distinguish themselves from Rebels. Some “red rag men” became informers, pointing out real or suspected Patriots and targeting their homes for looting.41 The red rag men were also prime recruits for the Loyalist regiments being raised in areas now occupied by British troops. A major recruiter was Brigadier Ruggles, who began enlisting Loyalists on Staten Island and Long Island soon after he arrived in New York from Halifax. Some of his three hundred men built camps, cut wood for the British Army’s cooking and heating fires, or foraged for hay and food supplies. Others served on privateer ships prowling Long Island Sound.42
General Howe did not include the newly raised Loyalist regiments in his invasion force when he landed about fifteen thousand men at Gravesend Bay on Long Island on August 22. But Loyalists proved invaluable to him, for Tory spies found a weak spot in Washington’s defense line and quickly passed the intelligence to the British. Howe flanked the Continentals and began to drive them back in the first act of what would be the evacuation of Long Island and a retreat across the East River to Manhattan.
A storm held back Royal Navy warships as Washington’s men crossed the river in small, wind-buffeted boats.43 In his epic nighttime retreat, Washington succeeded in loading all of his 9,500 men into boats, canoes, and sloops—” every kind of water craft … that could be kept afloat”44—bound for Manhattan.45
Of Washington’s men 1,012 were killed or wounded on Long Island, compared with British losses of 392.46 Washington lost more men as soon as his army reached Manhattan and deserters began to disappear. “Great numbers of them have gone off, in some instances almost by whole Regiments, by half ones and by Companies at a Time,” Washington wrote to the president of Congress.47
As four thousand British troops made an amphibious landing at Kips Bay (near the foot of today’s East Thirty-third Street), Washington’s broken army retreated north, pursued by Howe at a leisurely pace. Accompanying Howe as both a civil and military aide was Governor Tryon, finally ashore from the Duchess of Gordon. When Washington reached the dense woodland of Harlem Heights,* he dug in, creating a triple defense line of trenches and earthworks to hold off the British and gain time.48
Washington had wanted to burn down New York City, which he saw as a nest of Tories, but Congress had refused to give him permission. On the night of September 20 flames had swept the heart of the city, blackening a mile-long path and destroying nearly five hundred homes. Enraged Loyalists and British soldiers attacked suspected arsonists, hanging at least two and tossing another into the flames. Some Loyalists blamed vengeful Patriots. The modern verdict is that the conflagration began with an accidental fire in a dockside house.49
Loyalists celebrated the liberation of New York City, which would be the capital of Tory America throughout the war. As British troops marched down Broadway, a two-way exodus was under way: Patriots out of the city and Loyalists into it. “Joy and gladness seemed to appear in all countenances,” the Reverend Shewkirk wrote in his diary, “and persons who had been strangers one to the other formerly, were now very sociable together, and friendly.” People were painting the letters GR, for George Rex, on Rebels’ houses so that, as Shewkirk gloated, “all the houses of those who have had a part and a share in the Rebellion were marked as forfeited.”50
Loyalist military units patrolled the streets of New York City while Howe and his staff planned strategy. He and his successors governed New York as an occupied, rather than liberated, Loyalist city—” in fact, a Garrison,” a British official said.51 Soldiers turned houses into barracks and Presbyterian churches into stables. High-ranking British officers appropriated the finest homes, vacated by the Rebels. The poorest civilians, many of them black Loyalists, moved into the burned section, putting tents over the foundations of gutted buildings, creating a large neighborhood called “Canvas Town.”52
People endured food shortages and inflation: Flour that cost twenty shillings a barrel in 1775 would cost seventy shillings by 1781; a barrel of pork doubled in price. Smugglers and privateers of both sides so disrupted commerce that the only coffee and sugar in the city came from the holds of blockade-running Rebel ships captured by British privateers. Firewood became so scarce that residents walked on the ice of the frozen harbor to tear apart derelict ships.53
Howe enjoyed New York, where he presided over a fine table, spent evenings with fellow gamblers, and had the company of the lovely wife of Joshua Loring, a Massachusetts Loyalist. Elizabeth and Joshua Loring had gone from Boston to Halifax with the British Army. By the time Howe took his army to New York, she was Howe’s mistress. Loring himself certainly benefited from his wife’s relationship with Howe. The grateful general made Loring the commissioner of prisoners of war, a post that promised a fortune in bribes from sellers of provisions.54
Howe drew other Americans into his military command. Edward Winslow, whose Loyalist life had begun with the demise of the Old Colony Club in Plymouth, had fled Boston with Howe, offered his services in Halifax, and now in New York was Lieutenant Colonel Winslow, muster master general of all Loyalist forces in North America. Serving with him as provincial commander in chief was Governor Tryon, an old soldier who eagerly changed roles from civilian to martial and began planning military expeditions.55
Winslow looked prosperous and resplendent in his uniform—” a blue coat, scarlet cape, and a scarlet lining, with plain white buttons.”
But he was in great need of extra cash. After learning that Rebels had given his aged father the choice of joining the Continental Army or going to jail, Winslow had paid a fine to release his father and then provided the money to bring both his parents and his two spinster sisters to New York, where they lived with him, his wife, and their thre
e young children.56 Loring and his brother-in-law (one of the socially prominent Lloyds of Lloyd Neck, Long Island) had founded a company for selling rum and wine to Howe’s officers. To get some extra income, Winslow, who traveled often to Loyalist outposts garrisoned by thirsty officers, became a partner in the enterprise.57
Among the Tories sojourning in New York was Lord Dunmore, back in the colony he had once governed. He leased a house on Broadway for the winter and would later sail to England.58 Dunmore took some members of his Ethiopian Regiment with him to New York. The unit, decimated by smallpox and other diseases during its service in Virginia, was disbanded in New York, but many of the black Loyalists continued to serve in guerrilla units in New York and New Jersey.59 A new military unit awaited the regiment’s veterans: the Black Pioneers, founded by General Clinton during his aborted 1776 invasion of North Carolina. After Clinton’s fleet had gone up the Cape Fear River, the British controlled the area around Wilmington for two months. During that time, about seventy slaves, responding to Dunmore’s freedom proclamation, approached the ships to enlist. One of Clinton’s officers, Capt. George Martin of the Royal Marines, organized them into a Loyalist military organization called the Black Pioneers. Clinton admired the ex-slaves. He took only one Loyalist unit—the Black Pioneers—with him when he led the invasion and occupation of Newport, Rhode Island, in the fall of 1776.60
In the British Army, a pioneer was a soldier-engineer who cleared grounds for camps, dug latrines (called necessaries), and built bridges and fortifications. Separate detachments served in various regiments so that the black soldiers’ activities usually did not appear in regimental histories. The scant records on the Black Pioneers indicate that they served as spies, couriers, and guides. They also wrangled livestock, mended uniforms, and played in army bands.61
So much Loyalist recruiting was going on among blacks that a Connecticut slaveholder noted the phenomenon in a Connecticut Courant advertisement:
TO BE SOLD
This country born NEGRO WENCH, 24 years old, now pregnant, and bids fair to make more recruits for Lord Dunmore. Any person, or family, where that is esteemed no fault, can make an easy bargain with her present mistress.
Enquire of the PRINTERS62
Washington chose as his Harlem Heights headquarters the country mansion of Roger Morris, a former British Army officer. Morris had abandoned the home when he and his wife, along with other prominent New York Tories, fled to England before the arrival of Continental troops.63 The home, on a hill with a strategic view of the Harlem and Hudson rivers, was chosen with a soldier’s eye for terrain.64 The house also held poignant memories for Washington.
In 1756, on the eve of the French and Indian War, when Washington was a young officer in the Virginia militia, he twice stopped in New York to visit Beverley Robinson, a friend he had known back home. Robinson had moved to New York from Virginia and prospered by becoming a merchant partner of Oliver De Lancey and the husband of Susannah Philipse, heiress of a great Hudson River estate. When Washington dropped by, he met Susannah’s beautiful sister Mary.
At the time romantic stories circulated that he was smitten, had seen her again and later proposed, only to be turned down. In 1758 Mary married Morris, who had known Washington during the French and Indian War.65 Now, eighteen years later, Washington was the temporary master of their house; Mary and Roger Morris were among theLoyalist refugees in England; and Robinson was an enemy, a Loyalist leader spying for Howe and raising a Loyalist regiment.66
Washington lacked the kind of spy network that served Howe. Hoping to get some actionable intelligence on Howe’s future strategy, Washington sent a large raiding party across Long Island Sound to pick up Tories for interrogation. A British naval patrol spotted the raiders, attempted to capture their boat, and thwarted the operation. Washington then turned to a veteran of the Battle of Bunker Hill, Lt. Col. Thomas Knowlton, the commander of the Ranger regiment, a new, elite reconnaissance unit. Washington asked Knowlton to find a volunteer for a spy mission.67
Knowlton’s officers refused to volunteer for a task that they considered dishonorable. One of them said that he was willing to die in battle, but he refused to be caught as a spy and then be “hung up like a dog.”68 But a newly arrived twenty-one-year-old captain named Nathan Hale was troubled by the officers’ response. Hale turned to Capt. William Hull, a Yale classmate, for friendly advice. Hull tried to talk him out of volunteering. But Hale believed that he could not avoid a call to service. He told Knowlton that he would accept the mission.
A sloop sailing out of Norwalk, Connecticut, deposited Hale ashore at Huntington, Long Island, on the night of September 15—16. He gave himself the cover of a Connecticut schoolteacher who, like so many real Loyalists, was fleeing Rebel persecution. He wore a brown suit, a round broad-brimmed hat, and had removed the silver buckles from his shoes so he looked more like a poor refugee. As teaching credentials he carried his Yale diploma. He did not seem to realize that “Nathan Hale” on the diploma might alert any curious British officer who knew that Maj. Samuel Hale was General Howe’s deputy commissioner of prisoners. Samuel, a Loyalist from New Hampshire, was Nathan’s first cousin.69
Hale apparently spent about five days as a spy before he was caught. The only British document containing information about the end of his mission is an orderly book kept by a British officer. There is one sentence, dated September 22: “A spy from the Enemy (by his ownfull Confession) Apprehended Last night, was this day Executed at 11 o’Clock in front of the Artilery Park.”70
Most accounts of Nathan Hale’s execution assume that Samuel Hale had recognized his cousin and betrayed him. But a dramatically different narrative surfaced in 2000 when the Library of Congress received a manuscript history of the Revolution, written during or shortly after the end of the war. The author was Consider Tiffany, a cantankerous, well-educated Tory under house arrest in the town of Barkhamstead in northwestern Connecticut. The manuscript had been handed down by one Tiffany generation to the next until a family member donated it to the library. Because the manuscript was written by a Tory, the library said, it presented “a point of view virtually absent from the literature of the American Revolution.”71
According to Tiffany, Lt. Col. Robert Rogers, commander of Rogers’ Rangers, was looking for American spies on Long Island when he spotted Hale as a suspect. Rogers, posing as a spy for the Patriots, “invited Captain Hale to dine with him,” Tiffany says, continuing:
Capt Hale repaired to the place agreed on, where he met his pretended friend, with three or four men of the same stamp, and after being refreshed, began the same conversation as hath been already mentioned. But in the height of their conversation, a company of soldiers surrounded the house, and by orders from the commander, seized Capt Hale in an instant. But denying his name, and the business he came upon, he was ordered to New York. But before he was carried far, several persons knew him and called him by name.
Those several persons were probably some of the many Connecticut Tories who had fled to New York.
Details of Hale’s death and an enduring story about his last words—” I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country”—came in an odd way. On the evening of September 22, Capt. John Mon-trésor, Howe’s chief engineer, approached Washington’s lines under a flag of truce. Montrésor—creator of the map that Arnold had used in the invasion of Canada—had spent more time in America than most British officers. He had been wounded in the French and Indian War and later lived for a time in America. He owned an East River property (Montrésor Island, now Randall’s Island) and had married a stunning New York woman; they both had their portraits done by John Singleton Copley.72 Perhaps it was Montrésor’s connections with America, along with his basic decency, that inspired him to pass on the tragic news about Hale.
Montrésor’s journals show him to be a faithful subject of the king and an officer disgruntled by the army’s failure to promote him. He had been in many battles, had built many forti
fications—and had helped New York Tories take and hide the head of the fallen statue of King George III. As soon as the British began occupying New York, he had the relic dug up and arranged for it to be delivered to Lord Townshend, whose notorious Townshend Acts were the roots of the Revolution. Montrésor said he sent the head to Townshend “in order to convince them at home of the Infamous Disposition of the Ungrateful people of this distressed Country.”73
Under the flag of truce Montrésor said that General Howe had ordered him to present General Washington with a formal protest about the use of an inhumane weapon: musket balls with pieces of nails inserted into them. Many had been found when the British searched abandoned American quarters in New York City. Washington officially apologized for the “wicked and infamous weapon,” and Montrésor’s mission was over.
But he lingered so that he could, unofficially, report Hale’s execution, which he said he had witnessed (though the hanging is not mentioned in his journals). Captain Hull, who had tried to discourage Hale from the mission, was at headquarters. He heard the British officer’s news, introduced himself, and got the details of Hale’s final hours: that he had been sentenced to death without a trial; that he had not been allowed a Bible or a visit from a clergyman; that he had uttered those storied last words. After the war Hull reported what hehad been told. Without Montrésor, we might never have known about Hale’s noble death.74
Tiffany’s manuscript, bringing together Rogers and Hale, adds a new piece to the puzzle of Hale’s capture. The account also illumines Rogers’s role in the New York campaign to create Loyalist regiments.
Rogers, born in 1731 in northeastern Massachusetts to Scotch-Irish parents, had gone from a farm in New Hampshire to fame in the French and Indian War. He became the commander of the Rogers’ Rangers, warriors who fought in the wilderness, scouting, ambushing, and introducing the British Army to guerrilla warfare. Rangers wore green jackets and moccasins, and stuck tomahawks in their belts as advertisements that Indians were not the only scalpers.75 After the war Rogers returned to New Hampshire but soon appeared in England, where he publicized himself in bestselling journals, got into debt, and, after a stint in debtor’s prison, returned to America in 1775.