On a litter made of a British tent and ridgepoles, he was carried off in the last hour of the battle that was the turning point of the war.
The next day Burgoyne withdrew, pursued by Gates’s men closing in for the kill. Finally convinced that Clinton would not come to his rescue, Burgoyne surrendered on October 17. France, which had been clandestinely supplying arms to the Patriots for some time, would now openly begin the process that would lead to French recognition of the United States as an independent nation and a partner in a military alliance against Britain.85
• • •
Under the terms of the surrender’s “Convention”—Burgoyne preferred that word rather than “capitulation”—some 5,600 troops and hundreds of soldiers’ wives and children were to be marched to Boston, where they would be shipped to England and the soldiers permanently kept out of the American war. But only Burgoyne and his staff sailed to England. Congress refused to accept Gates’s agreement. So the “Convention Army” eventally was marched from Boston to Charlottesville, Virginia, confined there for a while and then herded elsewhere. In a five-year odyssey of misery and despair, the Convention Army continually lost men to death and desertion. An unknown number of German prisoners freed themselves by becoming indentured to American farmers, joining the Continental Army, or simply straying away to a quiet welcome in some German-speaking village.86 On the night before Burgoyne and Gates signed the Convention, most Loyalists slipped into the woods and headed for Canada. Peters, suffering from a bayonet wound and a foot grazed by a musket ball, led out his son and, by his count, about 117 survivors of the Queen’s Loyal Rangers.87 Peters said Burgoyne had given him written permission to leave with other Loyalists because he was not sure whether he would be able to protect them from the Rebels when he handed the army over to Gates.88
Lieutenant Simmons, the New York Loyalist who had left his wife and children to march with Burgoyne, escaped with twenty-eight men, many of them teenagers. Traveling on foot and by bateaux, all of them reached Canada.89 Loyalists were covered by the Convention, which forbade them to fight again in the war. But, reacting to the congressional rejection, Governor Guy Carleton declared that because the Convention was invalid, Loyalist veterans could fight again.90
Burgoyne’s attitude toward his Loyalists mirrored the disdain that was typical of British officers. Writing to Lord Germain, the secretary of state for North America, on August 20, Burgoyne underplayed the importance of Tory soldiers, claiming to have only “about 400,” of whom fewer than half were armed and could be “depended upon.” The rest, he said, were “trimmers merely actuated by interest,” “trimmers” being his word for the loyalty that drove them to risktheir lives. An official count, given to a parliamentary investigation of Burgoyne’s campaign, put the number at 680 prior to the battles near Saratoga. In fact the Queen’s Loyal Rangers alone mustered 643 men, of whom 80 had been killed or captured before the Convention was signed.91
Neither Burgoyne nor his American foes realized that his surrender at Saratoga, hailed by Congress as a turning point in the war, produced a crisis close to home for the people of the borderland. Rebels watched Stark, Arnold, and Gates as they headed back to General Washington and the main war against General Howe. They were now on their own in their own war.
* An ornament worn with officers’ uniforms. It evolved from medieval armor that protected the throat.
13
TREASON ALONG THE CHESAPEAKE
PENNSYLVANIA AND NEW JERSEY, AUGUST 1777-JUNE 1778
The Country is very much draind. The Inhabitants cry out and beset me from all quarters. but like Pharoh I harden my heart. Two men were taken up carrying provisions into the Enemy yesterday morning. I gave them an hundred [lashes] each by way of Example… . I am determin to forage the Country very bare.
—Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene to General Washington at Valley Forge1
When Gen. Sir William Howe set forth to capture Philadelphia, he sailed from the Loyalist city of New York to a loyal shore on Chesapeake Bay. His nineteen thousand invaders were unopposed when they disembarked at the Head of the Elk on the northern end of the bay. Their arrival was not a surprise. Howe’s fleet of some 250 ships had been spotted long before, and Patriots had been able to carry off supplies that had been cached at the Head of the Elk. But there was no organized resistance when Howe arrived or when he began his march to the Rebel capital, about fifty miles to the northeast.2
Three Loyalist military units were in Howe’s invasion force. And with Howe was a prominent Loyalist: a son of William Allen, the former chief justice of Pennsylvania and one of the wealthiest men inthe colony. William Allen, Jr., had been a member of the Pennsylvania Committee of Safety and, as a lieutenant colonel in the Continental Army, had fought in the invasion of Canada. Unable to support the idea of independence, he became a Loyalist. As an aide to Howe he would raise a corps called the Pennsylvania Loyalists and become its commanding officer with the same rank he had had in the Continental Army.3
Andrew Allen, a brother of William Allen, Jr., had been a delegate to the Continental Congress. Andrew had resigned because he opposed independence and would be part of the British occupation of Philadelphia, a city long controlled by rich old families like the Allens.4 The elder Allen had gone to England as the Revolution drew near. His son John had also started out as a cautious Patriot and ended up a Loyalist.5
Accompanying Howe as his principal civilian aide was Joseph Galloway, once a protégé and friend of Ben Franklin. Galloway, as a delegate to the First Continental Congress, had tried unsuccessfully to get supporters for his “Plan of a Proposed Union between Great Britain and the Colonies,” which would have created an American parliament and a royally appointed “president general.”6 He also called for loyalty oaths for colonial teachers, students, and lawyers, pledging “faithful obedience” to the British Parliament.7 The failure of his plan awakened his dormant Tory leanings. He went to New York and put himself at the service of Howe.
On hand to welcome Howe to Maryland was Robert Alexander, a prominent politician who owned a large piece of land, crowned by his mansion, the Hermitage. Three days before, Alexander had been the host of a dinner for General George Washington, who knew Alexander as a Patriot and a deputy delegate to the Continental Congress. Washington, in Head of the Elk on a reconnissance mission, expected an imminent British invasion. When he asked Alexander whether he was going to flee, Alexander said he preferred to stay.
Washington apparently did not know that Alexander had resigned as an officer in a Maryland militia after the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed. For some time, he had been conferring with British officers aboard one of the Royal Navy warships that patrolled the bay and served as floating meeting places for the state’s Tory underground.8
Alexander genially allowed Howe the use of the Hermitage as a temporary headquarters and turned a bit of a profit by selling the invaders livestock and grain.9 Local farmers with Tory inclinations followed Alexander’s example, supplying the invaders during the two weeks that Howe spent preparing for the march on Philadelphia.10 Others, aided by militiamen, showed their anti-British stance by squirreling away produce and hiding their cattle, horses, and wagons.
Howe offered a general pardon to “officers and private men, now actually in arms against his Majesty,” who “shall voluntarily come and surrender themselves.”11 In fact there were few armed men except for Loyalists, who had been organizing for months on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. In 1776 the Rebel-controlled Maryland legislature passed a law defining Tories as traitors and making execution the punishment for treason against the state.12 Maryland’s Rebel government considered the Eastern Shore to be in insurrection. But the coastal Tories were so powerful and well organized that they were not easily tamed.
Brig. Gen. William Smallwood, the commander of the Maryland militia, called the Eastern Shore “a Place which becomes the Reception of Deserters, escaping prisoners, and most of the Disaffectted who have been expelled [fr
om] the neighbouring states.”13 Delaware contributed many Tories to the bands formed in the Eastern Shore, where state boundaries meant little. A Tory force of two hundred was formed by men from both states. They had three cannons delivered from a Royal Navy man-of-war.14
Months before Howe’s arrival Patriots in the area had appealed directly to Congress for military aid.15 Congress responded with stern resolutions against Eastern Shore Tories but had few resources to offer.16 The Maryland militia, much as its men wanted to fight Howe on Maryland’s shore, lacked firearms. General Washington himself could do little more than sympathize, writing that “it gives me pleasure to hear that your people are so unanimously bent upongiving opposition to the Enemy. I wish it was in my power to furnish every man with a firelock that is willing to use one, but that is so far from being the Case that I have scarcely Sufficient for the Continental Troops.”17
James Chalmers, a wealthy Scotland-born planter, added to the armed Tories on the Eastern Shore by raising three hundred men for a battalion he named the Maryland Loyalists. He was commissioned a lieutenant colonel. One of his officers was Capt. Philip Barton Key, whose nephew, Francis Scott Key, would write “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Chalmers, as “Candidus,” was famous among Loyalists for Plain Truth, a pamphlet he wrote as a Loyalist answer to Tom Paine’s Common Sense18
Chalmers’s raising of the Maryland Loyalists augmented the recruiting drives of the three Tory units that arrived with Howe at the Head of the Elk.* Howe issued a proclamation promising land to all of “his Majesty’s faithful and well-disposed subjects” who signed up for two years or the length of the war: two hundred acres for a noncommissioned officer, fifty acres for each private.
Another Howe proclamation promised protection to anyone who swore allegiance to the Crown within the next sixty days.19 Concerned about the looting habits of his men, Howe issued warrants authorizing his provost marshal to waive courts-martial and “execute upon the Spot any Soldier or follower of the Army” caught plundering any Loyalist home or farm.20
Howe was still at the Hermitage when Tory spies informed him that Washington was planning to block the invaders at Brandywine Creek, about thirty miles south of Philadelphia.21 Howe marched there, his troops harassed along the way by the few militiamen who had muskets. In Philadelphia, responding to an order from the Supreme Executive Council, Patriots were arresting prominent Tories, sending some off to confinement in Virginia and offering paroles for those who promised they would not do anything injurious to “the united free States of North America.”22
At Brandywine, Howe outmaneuvered the Continentals in a battle that raged through the day and ended with hand-to-hand combat as night was falling over a battlefield strewn with the dead and dying. The Continentals and their comrades in the Pennsylvania militia lost some one thousand men killed and wounded—about twice the casualties suffered by their foes. The Marquis de Lafayette, newly arrived to the Continental Army and about to mark his twentieth birthday, was shot in the leg but continued to fight.
Stephen Maples Jarvis, a Connecticut Tory and a Queen’s American Ranger, went into battle at Brandywine. “We came in sight of the enemy at sunrise,” he wrote in his journal. “The first discharge of the enemy killed the horse of Major Grymes who was leading the column, and wounded two men in the Division directly in my front, and in a few moments the Regiment became warmly engaged and several of our officers were badly wounded.” (Maj. John Randolph Grymes was a descendent of one of the first families of Virginia.)23
The Rangers crossed the creek—” water took us up to our breasts, and was much stained with blood”—and fought into the darkness. “In this day’s hard fought action,” Jarvis wrote, “the Queen’s Rangers’ loss in killed and wounded were seventy-five out of two hundred fifty rank and file which composed our strength in the morning.”24
A few days later Washington sent Brig. Gen. “Mad Anthony” Wayne and fifteen hundred men to the Paoli Tavern, on the Lancaster Road, where Wayne was to ambush Howe’s baggage train as its wagons rumbled toward Philadelphia. Howe learned the details of Wayne’s plans from local Tories25—intelligence that helped to produce a bloody surprise attack.
British major general Charles Grey, wanting to approach Wayne at midnight as quietly as possible, ordered his men to remove flints from their muskets so that when he ordered a bayonet charge, no Regular would accidentally fire and give an alarm. Aiding Grey in his planning was his principal aide, Capt. John André, who had a personal reason not to like Rebels. André had been captured in 1775 during the abortive invasion of Canada. Expecting to be treated like an officer merely awaiting exchange, he had been handled roughly. Tories seen befriending him were arrested, and André’s guards once threatened to kill him. But through his captivity André never lost the savoir-faire and keen wit that marked him as a bright and rising officer. When he was finally exchanged, he was assigned to Grey’s staff.26
On September 21, 1777, Grey’s men, who probably had been given the password by a Continental deserter, got past Wayne’s sentinels and pounced on the camp. “I stuck them myself, like so many pigs, one after the other, until the blood ran out of the touch-hole of my musket,” a Hessian sergeant later wrote.27 Seeing men hacked and pierced by cold steel, Wayne’s soldiers panicked. Patriots called the battle the “Paoli Massacre” and dubbed its perpetrator “No Flint Grey.” Propagandists on both sides claimed two hundred Rebels had been killed by bayonets or sabers. Eventually the likely count came down to fifty-three.28
Although more maneuvering and fighting would go on for a few days, nothing could now stop Howe from taking and holding Philadelphia. Hundreds of Patriots fled the city, as did members of Congress, who sought safety first in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and then in York. Washington took his army to the hills around Whitemarsh, a small town north of Philadelphia. General Howe tried to attack him there but failed and pulled back, deciding to make British winter quarters in the comfort of Philadelphia, the largest and wealthiest city in America, and, like New York, a bastion of Loyalists.
On the night of December 11, Washington’s men left the camp in the hills of Whitemarsh and began pushing wagons into the Schuylkill River and placing boards between them. Through the night the army crossed the river on the wagon bridge. Washington led his men to a hamlet called Gulph Mills, where the army camped for several days.29
Albigence Waldo, an army doctor from Connecticut, looked around the Gulph Mills camp and wrote in his diary: “There comes a Soldier, his bare feet are seen thro’ his worn out Shoes, his legs nearly naked from the tatter’d remains of an only pair of stockings, his Breeches not sufficient to cover his nakedness, his Shirt hanging in Strings, his hair dishevell’d, his face meager… . exhausted by fatigue, hunger & Cold.” In the face of that soldier Waldo saw the faces of all the men, whipped by a “cold & piercing” wind, who followed General Washington down a steep frozen road to a place called Valley Forge.30
Philadelphians hailed the arrival of Howe’s army “by loudest acclamations of joy.” There was no armed resistance. Tories led the invaders to Rebels still in the city, and hundreds were imprisoned. Galloway and the Allens protected upper-class Rebels they knew, leaving them to an uneasy life in a city that belonged to the British and their Loyalist friends.31 The editor of the Pennsylvania Evening Post switched the newspaper from pro-Patriot to pro-Loyalist.32
Quakers, whose faith condemned war and earned Rebel distrust, felt more comfortable under British rule. Merchants, unenthusiastic about the Revolution, believed that the British would bring stability to the city—and payments in gold rather than near-worthless Continental currency. Young men, eager to join the winning side, signed up for the Queen’s American Rangers, which needed replacements after Brandywine, and three newly formed units: the Roman Catholic Volunteers, the Maryland Loyalists, and the Pennsylvania Loyalists led by Lt. Col. William Allen, Jr.33
British officers easily entered high society, and upper-class families were soon inviting their amiable oc
cupiers to parties and dances. A pretty, flirtatious teenager, sixteen-year-old Peggy Shippen, was overjoyed when a handsome British officer named John André called at her family’s Society Hill mansion and sketched her.34 “You can have no idea of the life of continued amusement,” eighteen-year-old Rebecca Franks wrote a friend. “… . Most elegantly am I dressed for a ball this evening… . I spent Tuesday evening at Sir William Howe’s, where we had a concert and dance.” At one ball Howe shocked his hostess by appearing with his mistress, the beautiful Mrs. Joshua Loring, on hisarm. (Her husband was in New York, making money as commissioner of prisoners.)35
Galloway became Howe’s spymaster, the supervisor of police, and the superintendent of the port, controlling imports and exports and setting up regulations for pricing and selling liquor, molasses, salt, and medicines.36 He also worked at preventing goods from reaching Washington’s army. He recruited spies from the ranks of the hundreds of soldiers who were deserting Valley Forge.37 By one estimate his intelligence network consisted of eighty agents who gathered information and twenty counterintelligence agents who ferreted out Continental Army spies. He also performed such intelligence chores as administering and recording oaths of allegiance and producing a map of all the roads in the area.38
About two hundred Tories served in Galloway’s police force, called the “night watch.” Galloway selected other Tories to control the entrances to the city, with the power to issue passports, and assigned men to disarm Rebels, act as couriers, oversee the care of prisoners, find quarters for troops (usually in abandoned Rebel homes), guide troops on missions in and around the city, and run a lottery for the relief of the poor. Galloway issued tavern licenses and supervised the takeover by Tories of stores that had been owned by Rebels. Among the new storeowners were Virginians and other Tory refugees who flocked to a Loyalist-controlled city under the protection of British troops.39
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