The label was made famous in the postwar generation by James Fenimore Cooper. His Revolutionary War novel, The Spy, was published in 1821 with the subtitle A Tale of the Neutral Ground. Cooper, who had married into the still-powerful De Lancey family in 1811, wrote the book while living in Scarsdale, a Westchester County town that had been part of the Neutral Ground. Cooper’s hero, Harvey Birch, was based, at least partially, on Enoch Crosby, a true spy of the Neutral Ground. Crosby, masquerading as a Tory recruiter, secretly worked for John Jay, chairman of the New York State Committee and Commission for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies. Jay had the power to send Tories to the notorious “fleet prison,” a string of former privateer ships anchored off Kingston, New York.50
Cooper never publicly linked the real Crosby and the fictional Birch. But he did say that Jay had told him spy stories, and presumably Cooper learned about Loyalist activities from his wife and in-laws. In his petition for a federal pension, Crosby told his own story, which began in the summer of 1776, when his eight-month enlistment in a Connecticut regiment ended and he found himself in the Neutral Ground. On his way to join another regiment, he met a stranger who took him to be a Tory. Realizing that the stranger “intended to go to the British,” Crosby instantly decided to string the Tory along. The talkative stranger told Crosby where and by whom a Loyalist regiment was secretly being raised.
Crosby took his information to a member of the Westchester County Committee of Safety. After being vetted by the committee, Crosby became an agent. Among the Tories he found were some thirty men recruited by Lt. Col. Beverley Robinson, Jr., son of the commander of the Loyal American Regiment.51 Crosby’s true status was withheld from the principal hunter of Tory spies in the area, Capt. Micah Townsend of Westchester, commander of Townsend’s Rangers. Townsend did capture Crosby as a genuine spy. And Crosby genuinely escaped, risking his life to preserve his secret identity. The escape helped to establish his reputation among Tories.
Crosby’s real and staged escapes, under various names and in various Neutral Ground places, did not raise suspicions. In the Neutral Ground war, many real Tories were captured and did get away from inept Rebel guards. But the ruse could not last forever, and, after nine months as a secret agent, Crosby enlisted in a new regiment and served as a sergeant on regular service.52
While Crosby was hunting Tories in the Neutral Ground, a small but brutal civil war was being fought by the Dutch Tories and the Dutch Rebels of New Jersey. British forces, Loyalist volunteers, and Patriot militiamen launched hit-and-run raids, keeping residents jittery. No one ever knew when a Tory or a Rebel might shatter the night. Bergen County was particularly split because of a schism in the Dutch Reformed Church, with some congregations supporting American-trained clergy and the Rebels, while others, backing the more conservative faction, favored the Loyalists. Many spoke only Dutch. When local broadsides on the Revolution were published, they were often in English and Dutch.53
An American officer, writing about the “good people of Bergen County,” said they “lay greatly exposed to both internal and external enemies, and the internal enemies have a free recourse to New York, the center and head of all British activity in America.” Tories, allying with Quakers, won elective offices. Patriot governor William Livingston complained, “I have seen tories members of Congress, judges upon tribunals, tories representing in our Legislative councils, tory members of our Assemblies.”54
In New York’s Orange County, which bordered on Bergen County, a militia leader reported that “matters are come to such a height that they who are friends of the American Cause, must (for their own safety) be cautious how they speak in public” and that some of those “who have been active in favour of our Cause, will soon (if any opportunity offers) be carried down to New York.” Patriots who were carried down to New York City faced imprisonment in a prison ship or confinement in the Sugar House, a sugar refinery turned into a dank stone prison where many Patriots died.55
Several British prison ships lay at anchor in a small Brooklyn bay. The ships were the dreaded dungeons of thousands of captured Continental Army soldiers, Rebel militiamen, and Patriot civilians. Loring, the commissioner of prisoners, showed little interest in his captives, except as a source of income from contractors’ kickbacks. Prisoners were jammed into holds, where so many died of disease or starvation that each day guards would open the hatches and yell down, “Turn out your dead!” Bodies were either tossed into the sea or buried ashore in shallow graves. Estimates of the total death toll ran as high as 11,500.56
The Sugar House, although less notorious than the prison ship, was as horrifying. “Cold and famine were now our destiny,” a survivor wrote. “Not a pane of glass, nor even a board to a single window in the house, and no fire but once in three days to cook our small allowance of provision. There was a scene that truly tried body and soul. Old shoes were bought and eaten with as much relish as a pig or a turkey; a beef bone of four or five ounces, after it was picked clean, was sold by the British guard for as many coppers.”57
Tory historian Thomas Jones, who lived in New York and knew Loring, wrote that he “was determined to make the most of his commission and, by appropriating to his own use nearly two thirds of the rations allowed the prisoners, he actually starved to death about three hundred of the poor wretches before an exchange took place.” Noting General Howe’s fondness for Mrs. Loring, Jones wrote, “Joshua made no objections. He fingered the cash: the General enjoyed Madam.”58
• • •
As Cornwallis pursued Washington across New Jersey, a guerrilla war was declared. In a special order Howe empowered his troops, including Loyalist forces, to treat their retreating foes as outlaws: “Small stragling parties, not dressed like Soldiers and without Officers, not being admissable in War, who presume to Molest or fire upon Soldiers, or peaceable Inhabitants of the Country, will be immediately hanged without Tryal as Assassins.”59
Vicious little actions, hardly noticed in the chronicles of the Washington-Cornwallis saga, cost uncounted lives. Kidnappings were common. One had a famous Patriot as its victim: Richard Stockton, a member of Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
When the British were about to capture Princeton, Stockton fled with his family to a friend’s house in Monmouth County, New Jersey. Local Loyalists kidnapped him and handed him over to the British. A descendant of an old and distinguished Quaker family and a member of Princeton’s first graduating class, Stockton was a prize catch. He was jailed as a criminal and cruelly treated until he broke under duress and signed an oath of allegiance to the king—an act that disavowed his signature on the Declaration.
Sometime around mid-March 1777, Stockton was released without any public explanation and returned to his magnificent Princeton home, Morven. The mansion—Cornwallis’s headquarters during his occupation of Princeton—had been ruined. Hessians were blamed for making firewood of fine furniture, drinking their way through the wine cellar, bayoneting family portraits, and stealing Stockton’s horses and livestock. Tories had led the looters to hastily buried silver plate and other treasures.
Stockton had returned from captivity under a cloud because congressmen possessed unpublicized knowledge that he had foresworn the Declaration. Later an ailing Stockton tried to recant his oath to the king by signing oaths of adjuration and allegiance prescribed by the New Jersey legislature as a way to redeem tainted citizens.60
• • •
Tryon joined in the guerrilla war by organizing a troop of Westchester County horsemen, under the command of Col. James De Lancey, for raiding in the Neutral Ground. The cavalry soon became known as De Lancey’s Cow-boys, a term that started out meaning cattle and horse rustlers and soon became a name for raiders.61 A typical raid, as reported in the Tory New York Gazetteer: “Last Sunday Colonel James DeLancey, with sixty of his Westchester Light Horse went from Kingsbridge to the White Plains, where they took from the Rebels, 44 barrels of flour, and two ox teams, near 100 head of black ca
ttle, and 300 fat sheep and hogs.”62
Patriots savagely retaliated against De Lancey’s Cow-boys by attacking Oliver De Lancey’s country home at Bloomingdale, about seven miles up the Hudson from New York City. As the victims later recounted, strange noises awakened De Lancey’s teenage daughter Charlotte and her friend Elizabeth Floyd, daughter of a Long Island Loyalist. They ran to a window, opened it, and shouted, “Who is there?” From below a gruff voice answered, “Put in your heads, you bitches!”
Men entered the house from front and rear and, prodding the teenagers with muskets, ordered them out of the house “as fast as you can.” The elder Mrs. De Lancey got out on her own, but, able only to hobble, she hid in a dog kennel under the stoop. The girls fled into a swampy wood (today’s Central Park) and spent the night “sitting upon their feet to keep a little warmth in them” and watching the house burn to the ground.63
Stephen De Lancey’s horsemen also foraged on Long Island, another site of clashes between mounted Tories and amphibious Rebels. In one of the biggest whaleboat attacks Col. Return Jonathan Meigs led 170 men across the Sound to Sag Harbor, pounced on the foragers, and killed six of them. After burning the Tory boats and forage, Meigs took ninety prisoners back to Connecticut. The entire operation lasted twenty-five hours. Congress rewarded Meigs with a commendation and a sword.64 The British soldiers had just been paid andwere “pretty well boozey,” wrote a Rebel raider. “Some had nothing but his shirt on, some a pair of trowsers others perhaps 1 stocking and one shoe.”65
Governor Tryon, acting as General Tryon, waged what he called “desolation warfare.” He sent the Cow-boys and Emmerich’s Chasseurs, another mounted Loyalist unit, on terror raids, torching the homes of leading Patriots, whom he believed he disparaged by calling them mere “committeemen.” During one of the horsemen’s most terrifying raids, they burned down parts of Tarrytown, a Hudson River community split between Loyalists and Patriots.66
The participation of Emmerich’s Chasseurs in the raids added European cavalrymen to the Loyalist guerrilla forces. The unit was raised by Andreas Emmerich, a native of Germany, where he began his military career. He emigrated to England, then to America, where he was commissioned a lieutenant colonel and raised a corps of light troops named after himself. About half of the officers were Europeans, who did not get along with their American counterparts.
Mutinous American officers asked General Clinton to court-martial Emmerich for “employing Soldiers, Negroes, & [Tory] Refugees, to robb and plunder” civilians, taking a cut of the loot from the looters. The officers also accused him of “imprisoning, Whipping and cruelly beating the inhabitants without cause or trial,” selling British Army horses, and stealing army funds. Clinton sidestepped the courtmartial by transferring the men into other regiments. Emmerich somehow managed to keep his colonelcy.67
For a time Major General Putnam had his headquarters at Peekskill, New York. Putnam tried to rein in Tory raiders by sending Colonel Meigs down the Hudson to attack pillagers. Rumors circulated that, in retaliation, Tryon planned to kidnap Putnam. Coincidentally Patriots reported a sudden surge of Tory spies in the area. One of them, a Loyalist lieutenant named Nathan Palmer, managed to infiltrate the headquarters encampment. Soldiers discovered him, and Putnam brought him before a court-martial to be tried as a spy. Tryon tried to intercede, threatening Putnam personally if he did not release Palmer.
Putnam replied:
Sir—Nathan Palmer, a lieutenant in your king’s service, was taken in my camp as a spy. He was tried as a spy; he was condemned as a spy, and you may rest assured, sir, he shall be hanged as a spy.
I have the honor to be, &c.
Israel Putnam.
P. S. Afternoon. He is hanged.68
Casual malice like Putnam’s laid bare the fact that gentlemanly warfare had disappeared in the Neutral Ground. Joseph Galloway, a leading Tory, charged that marauding and even rape was officially tolerated by the British and the Loyalists. Galloway said that “indiscriminate and excessive plunder” was witnessed by “thousands within the British lines.” In a “solemn inquiry,” backed by affidavits, he said, “it appears, that no less than twenty-three [rapes] were committed in one neighborhood in New Jersey; some of them on married women, in presence of their helpless husbands, and others on daughters, while the unhappy parents, with unavailing tears and cries, could only deplore the savage brutality.”69 Similarly, in New York City, citizens and officers accused Hessians, Redcoats, and Loyalists of robbing houses, raping women, and murdering civilians. Thomas Jones wrote that even murderers sentenced to death were set free. The crimes stirred futile demands for an end of martial law and the return of civil courts.70
Tryon’s desolation warfare shocked many British officers and outraged Patriots. Justifying his tactics, he said, “Much as I abhor every principle of inhumanity or ungenerous conduct, I should, were I in more authority, burn every Committee Man’s house within my reach, as I deem, those Agents the wretched instruments, of the continued calamities of this Country.”71
The Neutral Ground expanded, if not geographically, then psychologically, so that the label was applied to whatever territory that armed Loyalists were trying to control. The ebb and flow of Loyalists, Continentals, and Patriot militias created a climate of lawlessness. At times anarchy ruled much of the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey and the Hudson Highlands along both banks of the river.72
New dens for refugees appeared as Washington, retreating across New Jersey, left in his wake more of the Neutral Ground and more weathervane Tories who changed allegiance with the winds of victory. When General Howe issued a proclamation offering pardon and protection to anyone who within sixty days should swear allegiance to the Crown, three thousand persons did so.73 People sensed the death of the Continental Army. They were seeing what a British officer had seen a few days before the proclamation: “The fact is their army is broken all to pieces … it is well nigh over with them.”74
In December 1776 Washington reached the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River, directly across from Trenton. He sent men thirty miles up the icy river and thirty miles down to collect all the boats they could take back to camp and then destroy the rest. Washington especially wanted Durham boats. Flat-bottomed and forty to sixty feet long, they hauled freight to and from Philadelphia. Each boat, Washington figured, could hold as many as forty armed men.75
Amidst his planning there was anguish. “I think the game is pretty near up,” he wrote to his brother John, “owing, in a great measure, to the insidious Arts of the Enemy, and disaffection of the Colonies … but principally to the accursed policy of short Inlistments, and placing too great a dependence on the Militia, the Evil consequences of which were foretold 15 Months ago with a spirit almost Prophetick.”76 Enlistments for many of his troops would end on January 1, 1777.
In the first hours of December 26, through wind-whipped snow and hail, Washington launched his complex plan to cross the Delaware and take Trenton by overwhelming the city’s Hessian guard. The morning was still dark when the Americans struck, startling the sleeping Hessians. In a short, furious battle the Americans killed twenty-two Hessians, wounded eighty-four, and took 918 prisoners. Four Americans were wounded and two were killed.77 On January3, 1777, Washington outmaneuvered the British and led an audacious attack on Princeton, thirteen miles north of Trenton. His exhausted troops—including many volunteers who fought even though their enlistments had expired—improbably won another battle.
The Hessians were shocked at how quickly Trentonians, who had hailed their occupiers and sold them provisions, became newly hatched Rebels. “When the Hessians entered Trenton and occupied the region, the inhabitants swore their allegiance to the King of Britain,” a Lutheran minister wrote. “But as soon as the American troops attacked on Christmas, the inhabitants shot at the Hessians from their houses. In fact, even a woman fired out of a window and mortally wounded a Captain.”78
From Princeton, Washington led his army to winter quarters
in the heights of Morristown, New Jersey. The Continentals’ camp, a two-day march from New York City, lay behind the Watchung Mountains, which formed a natural barrier. Washington sent out orders to militiamen in the Neutral Ground to wage guerrilla war and “harass their troops to death.”79 In another letter to his brother, Washington wrote, “Our Scouts, and the Enemy’s Foraging Parties, have frequent skirmishes; in which they always sustain the greatest loss in killed and Wounded, owing to our Superior skill in Fire arms.”80
While Howe enjoyed another pleasant winter in New York and Washington watched his army shrink to barely eight hundred men, the recruitment of Loyalist soldiers continued from New England to Georgia.81 Howe had given Col. Edmund Fanning, Governor Tryon’s confidant, a warrant to raise the King’s American Regiment.82 Fanning then bestowed officers’ commissions on recruiters who set out in search of volunteers in New York and New England.
One of Fanning’s recruiters was Capt. John McAlpine, who, while seeking enlistees in the upper Hudson Valley, was captured by Rebels and imprisoned in Poughkeepsie. He was awaiting trial and a probable sentence of execution when nineteen of his recruits attacked the jail and freed him. Aided by Loyalists along the way, the Tory rescuers and McAlpine spent twenty-six days eluding Rebels until they reached the safety of regimental headquarters on Long Island.83
Most of the regiment’s men came from Long Island and the lower Hudson Valley, where some fathers and sons enlisted together, as did a number of brothers. Recruiters were less successful in New England. Recruiting in Connecticut was Capt. Moses Dunbar, a thirty-one-year-old native of Wallingford. Like so many other Loyalists from that state, Dunbar had fled to Long Island after the British conquest of New York.84 Dunbar twice slipped back into Connecticut, first to get married and then to bring his pregnant wife back to Long Island. On the second trip, in his words, “I accepted a captain’s warrant for the King’s service in Colonel Fanning’s regiment.”
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