Tories

by Thomas B. Allen

  Soon after his arrival the Committee of Safety in Philadelphia arrested and briefly jailed him. The committee released him after giving him a parole that said he “solemnly promised and engaged on the honor of a gentleman and soldier, that he would not bear arms against the American United Colonies in any manner whatsoever, during the American contest with Great Britain.” He then wrote to Washington, saying, “I love America; it is my native country and that of my family, and I intend to spend the evening of my days in it.” Washington, suspecting that Rogers was a spy, rejected his request for a permit to visit American military encampments. Rogers then slipped away, passed through American lines, and offered his services to the British Army, which commissioned him as a lieutenant colonel.76

  In August 1776, making his headquarters on Staten Island, Rogers began raising the Queen’s American Rangers, a Loyalist regiment of about four hundred officers and men, most of them from Westchester County and Long Island.77 In a printed circular he promised recruits “their proportion of all Rebel-lands,” a promise he had no authorityto make.78 But he had discovered what would later become a standard recruitment pledge. British officials came to realize that Loyalists would more speedily take up arms if they were promised a grant of land as a reward. And, as one officer put it, land grants would “at once detach from the Rebels, the common Irish and other Europeans who make the Strength of their armys.”79

  Tryon, though still officially governor, was spending most of his time trying to find the five thousand armed Loyalists he had promised Howe. Tryon rallied several recruiters, including Rogers, De Lancey, Robinson, and other leading New York Loyalists. Fanning, Tryon’s faithful secretary, became a colonel in command of a battalion in Brigadier General De Lancey’s brigade.80

  Encounters between Patriots and Loyalists often ended swiftly and fatally. One of Rogers’s Westchester recruits, Capt. William Lounsbury, was accused by the Committee of Safety of leading a group of Tories who spiked Continental cannons in Westchester County. Rebels tracked Lounsbury down and told him to surrender. The Tories with him fled but he stood his ground. When the Patriots threatened him with bayonets, he tried to defend himself with a club and was fatally stabbed. In his pockets were found a commission signed by Rogers and a muster roll of the men he had enlisted, all of them potential targets of Rebel retribution.81

  By December 1776 seven hundred Rogers’ Rangers were raiding Patriot outposts in Westchester. And Colonel Fanning had a commission to raise two more Ranger battalions.82 Recruitment was so successful that the Committee of Safety appealed to Washington for help. “Nothing can be more alarming than the present situation of our State,” the letter said. “We are daily getting the most autheritick intelligence of bodies of men inlisted and armed, with orders to assist the enemy. We much fear that those cooperating with the enemy will seize such passes as will cut off all communication between the Army and us, and prevent your supplies. We do not trust any more of the Militia out of this County.”83

  Nor, certainly, could the Patriots trust the great Hudson River Valley landowners and their tenants—especially the tenants. In 1775,New York Patriots circulated a petition, called Articles of Association, supporting the actions of the Continental Congress. Robert R. Livingston, Jr., owner of an immense Hudson River estate, noted that “many of our Tenants here refused to sign … and resolved to stand by the King.” One tenant, Livingston said, vowed that if he were armed and put in a Rebel militia, “the first person he would shoot would be his captain.”84 In those days the tenants had hoped for British victory and postwar land-grant rewards to loyal subjects. Soon, as the war produced defeat after defeat for the Continental Army, their envisioned rewards seemed just over the horizon. Emboldened Tory tenants roamed the valley in bands. Livingston’s mother, Margaret Beekman Livingston, wrote, “Some say their number is 4000… . They … have three boxes of gun powder that has been sent to them by some as bad as themselves.”85

  Frederick Philipse III, who called himself “Lord of the Manor of Philipsburg,” presided over an estate that ran along the eastern bank of the Hudson River for about twenty-four miles, from the Croton River to Yonkers and much of the rest of Westchester County almost as far as south New York City. In 1776 he refused to sign an oath of allegiance to the Patriot cause and rallied many of his tenants and his neighbors to the Tory side. A detachment of armed Patriots arrested him and sent him to house confinement in Connecticut. He appealed to the New York Committee of Safety, asserting that he had “done nothing (upon the Strictest Examination) Inimical to the Liberty’s of My Country.” The Patriots relented and allowed Philipse to return to his manor in Yonkers. But he broke his parole and took his wife and children to New York City. Even though his estate lay within the theoretical control of the Patriots, he continued to receive rents on some of his properties.86

  By the end of 1776 recruiters had sworn in about eighteen hundred Loyalist soldiers, most of them from Staten Island, Long Island, and Westchester County.87 Colonel Fanning later became commander of the King’s American Regiment, one of the war’s most active Loyalist units. For the chaplain of his regiment, Fanning chose the Reverend Samuel Seabury, who had been the victim of a Rebel kidnapping.88

  Long Island was a magnet for Loyalist families, especially those who could easily sail there from Connecticut coastal towns across from Long Island’s northern shore. Many of these displaced Loyalists clustered around Lloyd Neck or Eaton’s Neck, towns that jutted into Long Island Sound, opposite Stamford. Eaton’s Neck harbored a large Tory community that included 118 refugees from Connecticut. At first they lived “free from the tumultuous bustling world.” But their freedom gave way to martial law, and they were ordered to aid the British Army by gathering wood or moving military supplies. They endured a constantly growing feeling of exile—and fear, both of their Rebel foes and their British Army guardians.89

  A local civil war soon broke out between the Connecticut refugees and the “whaleboat men”—Connecticut Patriots who sailed across the Sound on raids. They struck the Loyalist communities, plundering homes and kidnapping people for ransom or to swap for prisoners taken by the British or by Loyalists conducting their own raids.

  Every Loyalist family was a potential target for looting or abduction.90 Supposedly British soldiers, quartered on Long Island, protected them. But, as a contemporary Tory later wrote, the soldiers

  Robbed, plundered, and pillaged the inhabitants of their cattle, hogs, sheep, poultry, and in short of every thing they could lay their hands upon. It was no uncommon thing of an afternoon, to see a farmer driving a flock of turkeys, geese, ducks, or dunghill fowls, and locking them up in his cellar for security during the night… . It was no uncommon thing for a farmer, his wife, and children, to sleep in one room, while his sheep were bleating in the room adjoining, his hogs grunting in the kitchen, and the cocks crowing, hens cackling, ducks quacking, and geese hissing, in the cellar. Horned cattle were for safety locked up every night in barns, stables, and outhouses. This robbing was done by people sent to America to protect loyalists against the persecution and depredations of Rebels. To complain was needless; the officers shared in the plunder.91

  • • •

  The depredation did not go entirely unpunished. Records of De Lancey’s battalions show, for example, that two soldiers found guilty of robbery were sentenced to one thousand lashes each (remitted to five hundred by General Clinton). And two other soldiers, found guilty of robbery, murder, and rape, were hanged.92

  While Nathan Hale was sailing across the Sound, Colonel Knowlton was killed leading an attack on a British outpost near Harlem Heights. So Knowlton died not knowing what had happened to Hale. The deaths of Knowlton and Hale profoundly changed Washington’s attitude about the gathering of intelligence. Instead of relying entirely on military officers, he would use civilians, primarily Patriots who could spy while posing as Tories.93 Eventually, Washington would oversee an elaborate and productive spy network centered on New York City.

&
nbsp; Fearing that Howe would attack him from the rear, Washington decided to withdraw from Manhattan, leaving a force behind at Fort Washington, near the northern end of the island, to block Howe’s advance. Connecticut’s Governor Trumbull had set up a supply depot at White Plains, a Westchester town about twenty-five miles north of Manhattan. The town became Washington’s goal.94 He also ordered a detachment of Virginia and Delaware Continentals, guided by local Patriots, to the village of Mamaroneck, about seventeen miles south of White Plains.95

  For some time Tories had been “getting the upper hand” in Mamaroneck, which lay within the De Lancey fiefdom.96 As a Patriot told the Provincial Congress in November 1775, Tories walked around the village in small, armed groups and warned Rebels that soon “there would be bad times,” including kidnappings. The threat seems to have been inspired by the furor over the killing of William Lounsbury, the Tory leader.97

  On October 21 the Continentals approached Mamaroneck at night, hoping for a surprise attack on the armed Loyalist unit known to bebivouacked there. Due to the local guides’ negligence or treachery, the Loyalists discovered the attackers and, in a hand-to-hand clash, two Continentals were killed and fifteen were wounded; about twenty Loyalists were killed or wounded. The Continentals withdrew, taking thirty-six Loyalist prisoners with them.98

  The skirmish was overshadowed a week later by the Battle of White Plains, which ended in another defeat and another retreat for Washington. But the clash by night at Mamaroneck introduced Patriots to the mixed fighting skills of Rogers’s regiment: Some men fought savagely when Rogers directly rallied them, shouting, “Steady, boys, steady! Fire! Fire!” Others, reeling back, submitted to capture. Rogers himself managed to escape with his survivors.99

  Rogers, exploiting his fame in the French and Indian War as the founder of Rogers’ Rangers, promised better pay and better food as he recruited in New York, Maine, and Canada. He even bragged about the skills of the tailor who made the Rangers’ uniforms. Gen. Frederick Haldimand, royal governor of Quebec, complained about Rogers, saying, “He has totally given himself up to the lowest debauchery and unworthy motives of obtaining money to gratify it.”100 A few months after the Mamaroneck battle, an inspector general ordered to examine Loyalist units found the Rangers below standard, a verdict that led to Rogers’s forced retirement. But under a new name, the Queen’s American Rangers, and a new commanding officer, Lt. Col. John G. Simcoe, the unit went on to fight in battles throughout the war.101

  Fort Washington, on the highest point of Manhattan Island, was thought to be impregnable. But Howe captured the fort, on November 16, 1776, because a Continental officer went over to the enemy. He slipped out of the fort and sent Howe plans showing the fort’s vulnerable points. When Howe attacked, the defenders fought gallantly but were overwhelmed. About 150 were killed and wounded and three thousand taken prisoner. British Regulars and Hessians lost about five hundred men, including wounded.

  The fall of the fort meant that Patriot authority over the Island of Manhattan had ended for the rest of the war. The traitorous officer, in a petition for a reward after the war, said he had “Sacrificed all I was Worth in the World to the Service of my King & Country.”102 His words reflected the sentiments of many Americans. In December 1776, when Governor Tryon reviewed the royal militia in Queen’s County, 820 men were mustered. And when Tryon circulated a statement supporting the Crown, nearly three thousand men signed it.103 For George Washington, the rise of Tory militancy in the Loyal Province was a foretaste of what awaited him when, following the fall of Fort Washington, he crossed the river and entered New Jersey.

  * Now called Morningside Heights, near Columbia University.

  11

  TERROR ON THE NEUTRAL GROUND

  NEW YORK AND NEW JERSEY, NOVEMBER 1776-SPRING 1777

  Why is it that the enemy have left the New England provinces, and made these middle ones the seat of war? The answer is easy: New England is not infested with Tories, and we are. I have been tender in raising the cry against these men… . The period is now arrived, in which either they or we must change our sentiments, or one or both must fall.

  —Tom Paine, The Crisis1

  General Howe sent Lord Cornwallis and 4,500 men in pursuit of Washington, hoping to trap him in New Jersey and end the war. Cornwallis first had to take Fort Lee, on the western side of the Hudson. Braced for a British invasion, Continental patrols in New Jersey kept watch along the river. But the Continental lookouts ignored Closter Dock Landing, a patch of shore with a steep, narrow path leading up the sheer Palisades, about six miles north of Fort Lee. The Continentals did not believe that an army could climb that steep trail.

  Cornwallis and his men did. They landed on the scrap of land from boats that shuttled between the riverbanks. Then, in a driving rain, they began their ascent. They had been led to that unguarded landing by Maj. John Aldington of Bergen County, commander of the Guides & Pioneers, a Loyalist unit raised for reconnaissance missions.2

  Aldington had a personal stake, for he owned a brewery that the Continentals had taken over to use as a storehouse. But Aldington, called “a zealous Loyalist” by Cornwallis, was not merely interested in recovering his property. Through much of the war he would stay in command of his unit, which was later attached to Beverley Robinson’s Loyal American Regiment.3 With him were two other Tories serving as guides—William Bayard, who ran a Hudson River ferry, and John Ackerson, who owned the Closter dock. In peacetime, farmers used the dock to ship produce to New York City; during the war the site was a popular connection for Tories slipping in and out of New York.4 The Guides & Pioneers, who served in several places during the war, rarely mustered more than 150 men at a time. Each man had invaluable local knowledge about terrain and people. Some of the Guides had commissions as officers but did not command the Guides or any other unit. They were spies who hoped that if they were caught the commissions in their pockets would give them the status of prisoners of war and save them from the gallows.5

  The fall of Fort Washington so jeopardized the weaker Fort Lee that General Washington ordered Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene to abandon the fort and lead the two-thousand-man garrison toward Hackensack, where Washington waited. Greene was unaware of Cornwallis’s bold nighttime climb until morning, when word reached him, probably from a British deserter.6 He hastened the evacuation and led his men southwestward as Cornwallis began his march on the fort.

  When the British reached the fort, they found breakfast teakettles boiling, fifty cannons unspiked, and three hundred tents still standing. Some soldiers—sick or drunk—had been left behind by their fleeing comrades. Food and other stores were scattered about the fort, and knapsacks littered the road that led to Washington’s headquarters. He was six miles south in Hackensack, staying in the home of Peter Zabriskie, a Patriot whose mansion on the village green was surrounded by the homes and farms of Loyalists.7

  About two thousand Continentals were still on the eastern side ofthe Hudson because their commander, the arrogant, self-aggrandizing Maj. Gen. Charles Lee, refused to obey orders that Washington had politely proffered. “There are times when we must commit treason against the laws of the State for the salvation of the State,” Lee explained. “The present crisis demands this brave, virtuous kind of treason.”8

  General Lee finally crossed the river and moved slowly southward along a road about twenty miles west of the British Army. Instead of camping with his men, Lee chose to stay in a tavern about three miles away. Tories routinely kept British officers aware of the movement of Lee and his men.

  Before his military career took him to colonial America and into the Continental Army, Lee had been in Portugal as commander of the British Army’s 16th Light Dragoons. Now, fourteen years later, local Tories gave men of the 16th the location of Lee’s vulnerable quarters. Cornet Banastre Tarleton, a cavalry officer of the lowest commission (comparable to ensign in the British infanty), began his own illustrious career in America that day. He would become the commander of
the Loyalist British Legion—later called Tarleton’s Legion. At least one of his Tory guides that day would become an officer in the legion, whose horsemen, later in the war, would spread terror wherever they rode.9

  After British cavalrymen quickly routed or killed Lee’s sentinels, they shot up the tavern and threatened to burn it. Lee surrendered and was taken away, tied hand and foot to a Tory guide’s horse and reputedly still in his nightshirt. As a deserter from the British Army, he faced execution. But he would live in a comfortable captivity that would raise questions about his views of treason.10

  Lee’s host, General Howe, treated Lee as a fellow general and gave him relatively free range in New York City. Lee was confined in the council chamber in the City Hall and provided with firewood and candles. He was allowed to order dinner for six with “what liquor he wanted, and of what kind he pleased,” wrote an eyewitness, Tory historian Thomas Jones. “He had the privilege of asking any five friends he thought proper to dine with him each day. This was all furnishedat the expense of the [British] nation.” Robert Hull, who ran a popular tavern on lower Broadway, “waited on him by General Howe’s orders, with a bill of fare every morning, and Lee ordered his own dinner and his own liquors. It was cooked at Hull’s, and always on the table at the time appointed. His servant had free access to him at all times.”11

  Lee was talkative during his sojourn as Howe’s guest. Suspicions arose that he had helped himself by helping the British. But not until the nineteenth century did stunning evidence of his treason appear among Howe’s papers: a sixteen-hundred-word “Plan,” in which Lee stoked the British faith in a Loyalist rising and gave Howe a strategy that would “bring matters to a conclusion.” As second in command of the Continental Army, Lee had great authority in British eyes.