Tories

by Thomas B. Allen

  Tory hunters caught Captain Dunbar and charged him with recruiting for the British. He later was indicted for waging war against Connecticut, under a new state treason law that carried the death penalty. He was denounced by his Patriot father, who was said to have declared when his son was arrested that he would furnish the hemp to make a rope for him.85

  Dunbar was tried and hanged in Hartford before a “prodigious concourse of people,” including his wife, who was forced to attend.86 The Tory press reported the hanging of six other recruiters in Connecticut.87

  Around this time, a Loyalist spy identified only as “The Woman” reported “a very considerable Store of Provisions & cloathing and 80 pieces of Cannon” in Danbury, Connecticut, near the New York border, about twenty-five miles from the coast.88 General Howe authorized Tryon to lead a fleet of twenty-six ships to the mouth of the Saugatuck River, at Norwalk, where he landed more than eighteen hundred men, including both Regulars and the Prince of Wales’s American Volunteers Brigade. Tryon’s style of pitiless warfare did not appeal to Howe, but this time he gave Tryon a sizable force because pilfering or destroying the Rebels’ supplies made military sense.

  Tryon met little opposition as his men marched to Danbury, where local Loyalists guided them to supply caches. The troops invaded and pillaged Patriots’ homes, careful to spare the Anglican church and Loyalists’ homes. Great piles of tents and provisions and thousands of shoes went up in flames. His mission accomplished, Tryon led his troops back toward the coast. But he discovered that his way was blocked by militiamen who had been hastily mobilized and led by Brig. Gens. David Wooster and Benedict Arnold.

  Arnold was home in New Haven, brooding about the Congress’s failure to promote him to major general, when at three o’clock one morning a messenger came with the report that a large force of Regulars and Tories had landed near Westport and were bivouacked in Weston, obviously on their way to Danbury. Arnold galloped off and was soon joined by sixty-six-year-old David Wooster, commander of the Connecticut militia. They quickly gathered one hundred mounted militiamen. Meanwhile Brig. Gen. Gold Selleck Silliman, commander of the Fairfield militia, had rounded up about five hundred more.

  The next day Tryon left a burning Danbury behind him as he led his troops back to the shore and the waiting transports. He stopped at Ridgefield, where he supervised the torching of a Presbyterian church and several Patriots’ homes. Local Loyalists were said to have been spared because they had painted black and white stripes on their chimneys.89 Militiamen trailed Tryon’s force, starting a short, fierce battle in which Wooster was fatally shot. A Continental soldier saw Arnold ride “to our front line in the full force of the Enemy’s fire, of Musquetry & Grape shot.” His horse, riddled by nine shots, fell, trapping Arnold, who had been lamed in Quebec when a musket ball struck his left leg. As he struggled to free himself, a Redcoat demanded surrender at bayonet point. Arnold fatally shot him with a pistol and managed to escape.90

  Fighting continued on the third day, when Arnold, Silliman, and scores of additional militiamen arrived, firing at the invaders from houses, stone walls, and barricades. Arnold had another horse shot from under him as Royal Marines from the fleet landed and turned the battle, opening the way for the invaders to make it to boats that took them to the ships. In the three days of the invasion, about two hundred men in Tryon’s forces were killed or wounded, as were about sixty militiamen.91

  Congress rewarded Arnold for his bravery by promoting him to major general. And Washington, responding to the start of a British offensive in northern New York, told Congress that “an active, spirited officer,” a man who is “judicious and brave,” was needed on the imperiled northern frontier. That man, Washington said, was Benedict Arnold. He was swiftly on his way to what would be an epic battle. His foes would include not only the British Army but two new enemy forces.92

  A prophecy about those new enemies came in a curious way. Beyond the Neutral Ground, in the Highlands of northern New Jersey, the most notorious Tory raider was Claudius Smith. A young thief before the war, he became a guerrilla who profited from his loyalty to the king. The victim of his most infamous raid was Maj. Nathaniel Strong, a well-known militia officer who lived in Blooming Grove, a town on the Hudson. Smith had publicly vowed to kill Strong, along with several other prominent Patriots.

  One night Smith and four Cow-boys plundered one house, and then, about midnight, invaded Strong’s home. Smith told Strong that his life would be spared if he gave up his musket and surrendered. As Strong turned to set his gun against a wall, he was fatally shot in the back. That crime inspired Governor George Clinton of New York to offer a twelve-hundred-dollar reward for the capture of Smith and six hundred dollars for the capture of his outlaw sons.93

  A wanted poster called Smith “a fierce looking man nearly 7 ft. tall, wearing a suit of rich broadcloth adorned with silver buttons,” a “Notorious leader of a lawless band of men.” Besides the murder of Strong, Smith was accused of stealing “money, pewter & silver plate, saddles, guns, oxen, cattle & horses from the American colonists and turning them over to the British in New York City.” His leading confederate in the city was Mayor David Matthews, who had been implicated in the plot to kidnap or assassinate George Washington.94

  After the wanted posters were tacked up, Smith fled to the protection of British-occupied Long Island, leaving his oldest son, William, in charge of the Cow-boy gang. Patriots stormed the gang’s mountain hideout and fatally shot William and another Cow-boy. Several others, including Richard Smith, Claudius’s youngest son, got away.

  In a daring whaleboat raid, other avenging Patriots rowed to Long Island from Connecticut, captured Claudius Smith in his bed, bound and gagged him, and carried him off to the hidden boat. They took him, under heavy Patriot guard, to Goshen, New York, about twenty miles west of West Point. There he was chained to a prison cell floor while awaiting trial. Convicted not of murder but of robbery and breaking and entering, he was nevertheless sentenced to death, along with members of his gang.

  He and two other Cow-boys were taken in a cart to a gallows surrounded by a large crowd. When the nooses were put around the necks of the three men, according to witnesses, Smith kicked off his shoes, with the observation that his mother, scolding him for his evil behavior, had often told him that he would die with his shoes on: By dying barefoot he would make her a liar.95 The cart was then driven off, and the three men dangled from their nooses.

  Soon after the execution Claudius’s son Richard Smith went on a rampage, singling out Patriots for death. The first known victim was found with a note pinned to his body:

  A Warning to Rebels

  You are hereby forbid at your peril to hang no more friends to government as you did Claudius Smith… . We are determined to hang six for one, for the blood of the innocent cries aloud for vengeance… . There is particular companies of us that belongs to Col. Butler’s army, Indians as well as white men and particularly numbers from New York that is resolved to be revenged on you for your cruelty and murders… . This is the first and we are determined to pursue it on your heads and leaders to the last till the whole of you is massacred.96

  Smith’s vengeful warning reminded the Patriots of the two new enemies who were waging the new war in the north: Colonel Butler’s Loyalist Rangers and Britain’s Loyalist Indians.

  * John G. Simcoe, a successor to Lt. Col. Robert Rogers, added the Huzzars (Hussars)—a light cavalry troop—to the Rangers, named in honor of Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III

  12

  “INDIANS MUST BE EMPLOYED”

  NEW YORK FRONTIER, SPRING 1775-OCTOBER 1777

  Col Johnson’s Conduct in Raising Fortifications round his house, keeping a Number of Indians and other armed men constantly about him, and stopping and searching Travellers upon the King’s Highway, and stopping our Communication with Albany is very alarming to this County, and… confirms us in our Fears, that his Design is to keep us in awe, and to oblige us to Submit to a S
tate of Slavery.

  —Tryon County Committee of Safety1

  By the spring of 1777 the Revolution had spawned two wars. One was being fought primarily by the British Army and the Continental Army on battlefields in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The other, along the northern frontier, was just beginning. It would be a war of terror and vengeance that pitted Indians and Tories against Patriot settlers, Loyalist neighbors against Patriot neighbors, Indians’ tomahawk and torch against the muskets of farmers and militiamen.

  The war in the borderland would be sudden bloody encounters in Indian villages or isolated Rebel settlements. On the frontier between Canada and western New York, soldiers of the Continental Army would fight wilderness battles not only against the British Army and Loyalist regiments but also against what the Declaration of Independence called “the merciless Indian Savages.” Left unsaid was the fact that Patriots tried as hard as the British and the Loyalists to gain the support of Indians.

  The roots of Indian-settler conflict were deep along the Canada—New York border, where many Patriots, remembering how the French had forged an alliance with Indians in a previous war, now feared that Britain would do the same. France had led the Indians into white man’s warfare by transforming tribal alliances made for the fur trade into a military strategy that gave its name to the French and Indian War. To American colonists of the time, the Indians were the most fearsome foes. Ben Franklin’s “Join or Die” drawing of a snake in eight pieces, often cited as a symbol for the Revolution, was a much earlier warning, urging the colonies to unite against the French and their Indian allies.2

  But Britain had an ambiguous policy toward the Indians. Robert Dinwiddie, royal governor of Virginia, saw the wisdom of seeking Indian aid in 1753 when he sent young Maj. George Washington of the Virginia militia into the wilds of the Ohio Country. Washington met with Indian leaders and told them, “I was destined, brothers, by your brother, the governor, to call upon you, the sachems of the nations… . His Honor likewise desired me to apply to you for some of your young men to … be a safeguard against those French Indians who have taken up the hatchet against us.”3

  Both the British and the French used a scalp as proof that an Indian had slain a foe and deserved a bounty. The British superintendent of Indian affairs for the southern colonies once noted that “large publick Rewards for Scalps given by Provincial Laws to Indians, are attended with very pernicious Consequences to his Majesty’s Service.” Indians, the superintendent said, were killing each other merely to collect bounty scalps, producing the possibility of unnecessary intertribal warfare that would jeopardize alliances with tribes favorable to the British.4

  Victory in the war presented Britain with more land, more Indians, and more problems over colonists’ incursions into Indian land. In 1768 British officials met with leaders of the powerful Iroquois at Fort Stanwix (near the Mohawk River and today’s Rome, New York). The Iroquois agreed, in a formal treaty, to give up claim to all of their lands east and south of the Ohio River in return for a guarantee that they could retain their land in western New York. Less powerful tribes, including the Delaware, Mingo, and Shawnee, did not accept the treaty.5

  Shawnee and Mingo attacked white settlers, who struck back in isolated encounters. Then, in May 1774, settlers killed eleven Mingo near today’s Steubenville, Ohio. As Mingo and Shawnee sought revenge, Lord Dunmore sent one thousand militiamen into what is now West Virginia. After a daylong battle between militiamen and more than one thousand Shawnee warriors, Dunmore and tribal leaders parleyed and the Shawnees essentially agreed to abide by the Fort Stan-wix treaty.6 Dunmore’s War, as his critics dubbed it, made Tories of many western Pennsylvania frontiersmen. They endorsed his attempt to settle the boundary quarrel between Virginia and Pennsylvania by seizing Fort Pitt, the predecessor of Pittsburgh, in January 1774.7

  Soon after the Battles of Concord and Lexington, the Continental Congress received reports that the British were plotting to make Loyalist allies of the Indians along the New York—Canada border. Congress attempted to counter that move by negotiating a treaty with the Six Nations (Mohawk, Oneida, Tuscarora, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca). The confederacy, which dated to the time before the arrival of Europeans in North America, included English-speaking Indian leaders familiar with British ways and wary of Rebels.

  The congressional delegation and tribal leaders met at Fort Pitt, at the forks of the Ohio River, then under control of Virginia’s Rebel government. “This is a family quarrel between us and Old England,” the Indian leaders were told. “You Indians are not concerned in it. We don’t wish you to take up the hatchet against the king’s troops. We desire you to remain at home, and not join either side, but keep the hatchet buried deep.”8 The delegates returned to Philadelphia believing that the Six Nations would remain neutral. But the nationssplit. Oneida and Tuscarora broke away to support the Patriots, while the other tribes agreed to become warriors for the British and their Loyalist allies.9

  The Indians mystically imagined their confederacy as “the Long House,” with the Seneca of the Susquehanna and Ohio valleys guarding the western entrance, and the Mohawk the eastern door, while the Onondaga watched over the council fire in the center. The Six Nations raised maize and beans and lived in large wooden houses encircled by palisades. These they called by a word that was translated as “castle.” Not by chance the Mohawks’ principal castle stood near a fortified mansion that was the nerve center for the rapidly evolving alliance between the British and the Mohawk. The mansion was Johnson Hall, built by a man who owned more land in the Mohawk Valley than anyone before or since: William Johnson, Britain’s regional superintendent of Indian affairs.

  Johnson was born a Roman Catholic near Dublin, in 1715, and, planning his future in a British world, became an Anglican around 1738. This was about the time he sailed to America to manage his uncle’s frontier estate in New York’s Mohawk Valley. The uncle, Admiral Sir Peter Warren, had grown rich by seizing French and Spanish vessels for prize money—and by shady maritime trading in wine, rum, and slaves. As a successful trader he was welcomed into the great De Lancey family, marrying Susannah De Lancey, daughter of Stephen De Lancey, an influential, well-connected fur trader.10

  Warren became a major New York property owner, acquiring tracts of land in Manhattan and Westchester. His showcase home at 1 Broadway would become the residence of New York City’s successive commanding generals of the Revolution, including Washington, Howe, and Clinton.11 He also owned some fourteen thousand acres near the junction of the Mohawk and Schoharie rivers, about 180 miles north of Manhattan. Warren invited William Johnson, affectionately called Billy, to come to New York with some prospective tenants and manage the vast northern property. While developingthe wilderness into prosperous farmland, Johnson also set up his own trading business with the Mohawk. Operating independently of his uncle, Johnson grew wealthy himself.12

  Johnson won acclaim from colonial officials in the prelude to the French and Indian War by leading Mohawk warriors on raids into border territory claimed by France, often taking the scalps of French defenders. The Lords of Trade in London put Johnson on the New York Governor’s Council, and the Mohawk made him a sachem, giving him a name that meant something like “Chief Much Business.”13 He successfully straddled the two worlds of councillor and sachem, though to some compatriots in London and New York City he seemed more Mohawk than Briton.

  Johnson’s uncle resented the way Johnson had struck out on his own, and, when his uncle died in 1752, Johnson did not inherit the estate.14 But Johnson had no need of any more land. And he had prospered as a trader who dealt honestly with Indians and spoke their languages. Colonial officials appointed him “Colonel, agent, and sole superintendent of all affairs of the Six Nations and other Indians.”15

  Johnson often wore Indian dress, painted his face, joined in tribal dances,16 and took several Indian mistresses. One was the beautiful Molly Brant, sister of Joseph Brant, a shrewd and powerful Six Nations leader. Molly,
a high-ranking Mohawk, bore Johnson eight children, seven of whom survived.17 Both Joseph and Molly had Mohawk names and adhered to Mohawk customs. Their English names came with their British education, which introduced them to the world that Johnson represented and that they cautiously accepted.18

  During the French and Indian War, Johnson met John Butler, the son of a British Army officer who had been stationed at Fort Hunter on the Mohawk River. Butler, like Johnson, was an officer in command of Indian allies. He was with Johnson when his British and Indian forces captured Fort Niagara. Butler knew Indian languages and had spent much of his life on the frontier. He married into a Dutch family that traced its American roots to 1637 and was well known on the Mohawk.19 A postwar associate of Sir William, Butler lived in an imposing house on a hill overlooking the Mohawk River.

  He had inherited his five-thousand-acre estate, near today’s Fonda, New York, from his father.20

  Nearby was Johnson’s domain, named John’s Town (today’s Johnstown, New York), in honor of his son, one of his three white children. They had been born to Catharine Weisenberg, a teenage German immigrant who had come to America as an indentured servant. She had run away from her master in New York City and became Johnson’s wife without a wedding ceremony.21 Commoners could climb socially and politically on the frontier, whose rough-hewn leaders lacked the credentials of those who ruled the British establishment in New England and New York City.

  Sir William Johnson died in 1774 during a conference with representatives of the Six Nations. His son, John Johnson, then thirty-two years old, inherited the family’s fiefdom and retained a noble title via a knighthood bestowed by King George III. Educated in Philadelphia, widely traveled in England, and married to an Albany heiress, he was far more polished than his father.22 While making John Johnson his heir, Sir William, confidently exceeding his authority, had bequeathed the royal post of superintendent of Indian affairs to his ambitious, Irish-born nephew Guy Johnson. Sir William correctly assumed that the king would confirm the choice.