Tories

by Thomas B. Allen

  Beginning with his support of the Stamp Act and continuing through his colony’s growing mood of rebellion, William skillfully warded off critics and held on to his post. He was proudly Loyalist, declaring that “the most heinous Rage of the most intemperate Zealots” could not “induce me to swerve from the Duty I owe His Majesty.”5 Nor, obviously, could his father.

  In 1775 Ben Franklin returned from his long stay in London to take up the work of the Revolution. With him was William’s son, William Temple Franklin (always called Temple), born in London around 1759. His mother, like his grandmother, was unacknowledged, except for his middle name, which suggests that he had been conceived while his father was studying at the Middle Temple court of law in London. Temple was put in a foster home, his raising and education paid for by his grandfather. Temple’s father ignored him and married a wealthy, well-connected British woman in 1762, as the governorship was about to come to him.6

  Temple accompanied his grandfather when Ben Franklin left London, arriving in Philadelphia on May 5, less than a month after the Battles of Concord and Lexington. Shortly after, Ben, William, and Galloway met at Trevose Manor, Galloway’s palatial seventeenth-century home about twenty miles north of Philadelphia. The meeting banished any hope of reconciliation. Only Galloway and William Franklin had any common ground. Ben had already rejected Galloway’s Plan of Union, and William Franklin had already begun defying his provincial assemblymen as they marched toward revolution.7

  On June 15, 1776, the New Jersey Provincial Congress declared Franklin “an enemy to the liberties of this country” and ordered him arrested. Franklin, using arguments both legal and vituperative, protested. But the Continental Congress confirmed the arrest order and put Franklin in the custody of Governor Jonathan Trumbull of Connecticut. By chance he was brought before Trumbull on America’s first Fourth of July.8 Franklin partisans claimed that he was placed in the notorious New-Gate Prison (named after the London original)in East Granby, Connecticut. Prisoners were kept in cells carved into the shafts of what had been a copper mine. Many Tories were jailed there, and Washington was said to have personally sent a few “flagrant and atrocious villains” to New-Gate. Franklin, however, was not one of them.9

  He signed a parole drawn up by Trumbull, who put him in the first of a series of residences, giving him freedom to walk around town. He started openly acting as a Tory leader, issuing long-distance pardons to Loyalists in Connecticut and New Jersey to broaden his power base. The politicking violated his parole. So Trumbull put him in the Litchfield town jail. He was there when he learned that his wife, a refugee in New York, had died. He became so melancholy that he was released to a private residence. In October 1778 he was exchanged for John McKinley, the president (governor) of Delaware, who had been captured in Wilmington after a battle in September 1777.10 Franklin headed straight for New York City, offered his services to Clinton, and founded, without Clinton’s blessing, a Loyalist movement innocuously named the Refugee Club. Members of the club showed that they were not conspirators by announcing their meetings at Hicks’s Tavern in newspapers. They appeared to be no more than socializing Loyalists. But Franklin had more than chatting in mind.11

  Loyalists, particularly those whose property had been seized by Rebels, had begun calling themselves refugees to advertise their woeful status. New York City officials appointed an “Inspector of the Claims of the Refugees” and later a four-man board “to regulate the bounty of government to the refugees.”12 Both Loyalists and Patriots used “Refugees” for Tories who had fled New Jersey to join the British in New York, often returning to their native state as marauders. Some refugees had come from as far away as Georgia to find sanctuary and work for the Loyalist cause.13

  Franklin’s youthful fondness for the military life bloomed anew in New York. He had enough sense and experience to realize there was no possibility of creating an actual Loyalist army. Clinton was absolutely in charge, signing himself “General and Commander in Chief of all his Majesty’s Forces within the Colonies laying on the Atlantic

  Ocean, from Nova Scotia to West-Florida, inclusive, &c. &c.”14 Clinton was not against Tory military units, and he did authorize their deployment alongside his British Regulars in battle. But the kind of military organization that Franklin envisioned was a guerrilla force that would terrorize Rebels and rouse Loyalists. Clinton spurned the use of terror.

  Another former royal governor, Maj. Gen. William Tryon, gave Clinton a rationalization for terrorizing the Rebels. Tryon pointed out that the Rebels’ own tactics were based on terror—” the general Dread of their Tyranny” and expectation of “our forbearance.” So, Tryon went on, he joined others who “apprehend no Mischief … if a general Terror and Despondency can be awaked among a People already divided.” Tryon wrote about his views on terror after practicing his beliefs in a devastating raid on Connecticut civilians.

  On July 2, 1779, Tryon assembled about twenty-six hundred soldiers—Regulars, Hessians, and a major Loyalist military unit, the King’s American Regiment. The regiment, originally known as Fanning’s Corps, was led by Tryon’s secretary, Col. Edmund Fanning.15 Among the black Tory soldiers in the unit was John Thompson, the secret courier who had worked for Tryon when he ran a Loyalist underground from his cabin on board the Duchess of Gordon.

  One of Fanning’s officers in the Connecticut raiding party was Capt. John McAlpine, who had been jailed by Rebels for recruiting. His recruits, in an early display of their fidelity, had broken into the jail and freed him.16 His would be a fighting regiment, destined to serve on many battlefields. But on this day, as they boarded ships in New York City, they were part of a terror force.

  The first target was New Haven, Connecticut. At dawn, atop the campus chapel, Yale president Ezra Stiles surveyed the raiders’ fleet through his telescope and later saw soldiers landing and advancing from shore. Stiles immediately gathered college records and hid them away. Tryon had planned to burn down Yale and the rest of New Haven. But Fanning, a Yale graduate (class of 1757), persuaded Tryon not to torch the town.17

  As the invaders disembarked, Yale students joined a volunteer company of about one hundred men who rushed to West Haven to delay the invaders while women and children fled from New Haven. Fifty-one-year-old Napthali Daggett, a professor of divinity and a former Yale president, got off a few shots from his ancient fowling piece. His moments on the battlefield would go down in Yale history:

  A British officer yelled, “What are you doing there, you old fool, firing on His Majesty’s troops?”

  “Exercising the rights of war,” Daggett professorially answered.

  “If I let you go this time, you old rascal, will you ever fire again on the troops of His Majesty?”

  “Nothing more likely,” he replied. British soldiers then bayoneted and clubbed him. They probably would have killed him if one of his former students, William Chandler, a classmate of Nathan Hale, had not intervened. Chandler, a Tory officer, and his brother, Thomas, were guiding Tryon’s men during their all-day looting of the city. William and Thomas were the sons of Joshua Chandler, a Yale alumnus and a wealthy New Haven Tory whom Rebels had briefly jailed for his outspoken support of the Loyalist cause.18

  The muskets of the Yale volunteers and militiamen slowed down the raiders for a short time. At least one Tory officer was killed and seven enlisted men wounded; twenty-three Patriots were killed and fifteen wounded.19 Tryon made no effort to stop the looting or harassing of townspeople as his force took possession of the port. The next morning they burned ships, goods, and whatever ordnance they could find and then withdrew to their fleet. The entire Chandler family went with them. A neighbor said he entered the vacant Chandler house, untouched by looters, and saw on a dining table a meal laid out and uneaten. The Connecticut government seized Chandler’s estate.20

  Next the troops sailed for Fairfield, a smaller town about twenty-five miles to the south. Alarm cannons fired on the foggy morning of July 7, after lookouts in a small hilltop fort
spotted the Tryon fleet nearing Fairfield. The fleet’s pilot was a Fairfield man, George Hoyt, who would accompany them ashore and guide them as they destroyed his town.

  Townspeople—mostly women, children, and elderly men—drove livestock into the woods and hid their silver in wells or within the clefts of stone walls. In midafternoon the soldiers began landing on Fairfield’s beach. Two columns separated and marched to the parade ground in the center of town, where Tryon himself posted a proclamation calling on all residents to swear allegiance to the king. No one seems to have paid any attention to the piece of paper. As in New Haven, militiamen fired on the invaders with muskets and cannons. But the overwhelmingly outnumbered defenders fell back before the raiders’ intense musketry and cannon fire from the offshore ships. Tryon easily took control of the town, setting up his headquarters in a large house near the parade ground.21

  Again Tryon did not prevent his troops from terrifying the civilians, especially women. Several told later of being menaced, their silver shoe buckles and silver buttons torn away, their homes pillaged, their furniture smashed. One woman said soldiers “attempted, with threats and promises, to prevail upon me to yield to their unchaste and unlawful desires.” After she “obstinately denied them my body, these men then and there dragged me to bed and attempted violence, but thanks to God there appeared that instant two persons who rescued me.” After hearing what happened, Tryon posted two men to guard her from further outrages.22

  Tryon sought out the house of Thaddeus Burr, a town judge. Finding the judge absent, Tryon demanded the judge’s official papers from his wife, Eunice Burr. “I told him,” she later recounted, “there were none but of very old dates, which related to the old estates. The general said, those are what we want, for we intend to have the estates. Upon which he ordered an officer to take them… .” After Tryon left, she said, “a pack of the most barbarous ruffians” entered the house. The woman ran into the yard, where the men threw her to the ground and began searching her for a watch they thought she had, “pulling and tearing my clothes from me in a most barbarousmanner.” Capt. Thomas Chapman of the King’s American Regiment, whom she knew socially, appeared and stopped the assault.23

  Tryon then ordered the burning of houses, one by one, including the Burr home. As the day was reddening with sunset and flames, a thunderstorm broke and lightning laced the sky. One resident felt it was enough to make a person believe that “the final day had arrived.” The sudden rain did not quench the flames, which were visible for miles around.24

  The Reverend John Sayre, who had come to Fairfield as its Anglican minister in 1774, was such an unremitting Loyalist that Rebels had declared him to be “a person inimical and dangerous to the interests of the United States” and exiled him to Farmington, Connecticut, fifty-six miles inland. Rebels later relented and allowed him back. Now, on this day of fiery invasion, Sayre went to Tryon and pleaded with him to stop the torching of the town. Tryon promised to spare certain homes, including Sayre’s.25 Local legend held that Tory homes were marked with black chimney stripes. Other residents and servants fled their houses. At one, raiders began their arson by snatching burning coals from a large fireplace and tossing them onto the wooden floor. As soon as they left, a slave slipped in, scooped up the coals, and threw them out, saving the house. The floor’s burn marks can still be seen.26

  The next morning Tryon withdrew, his troops burdened with loot. They left behind the smoldering embers of many houses and the bodies of several slain residents, including three men bayoneted to death and another fatally shot for ignoring a soldier’s order. Sayre, his wife, and eight children all joined Tryon on the path to shore and waiting boats, as did George Hoyt, the Tory guide. Furious militiamen aimed a cannon at the home of Hoyt’s kin, a suspected Tory. A militia officer intervened, and the cannon was not fired.

  Tryon assigned Hessians to be his rear guard, shielding his guests and the rest of the force as it withdrew. The departing Hessians put a final touch to the raid, setting fire to Sayre’s church and home, the Congregational Meetinghouse, and the Congregational minister’shome.27 Tryon and his men destroyed ninety-seven houses, seventeen barns, forty-eight stores, two schools, a county building, and three churches.28

  The raiders sailed on to Norwalk, a few miles south of Fairfield, and began disembarking troops for an attack on that busy port. Again, after driving off a small militia force, Tryon took possession of the town. His men stole whatever they considered valuable and burned everything else, including whaleboats and small vessels in the harbor. The toll was 135 houses, two churches, eighty-seven barns, twenty-two storehouses, seventeen shops, four mills, and tons of newly harvested hay and wheat.29

  Tryon’s fleet sailed next across the Sound to Huntington, Long Island, where he was refitting and resupplying his ships for continued raiding when he received orders to cancel further raids and report back to General Clinton. Tryon’s infuriated superior had two reasons to reprimand Tryon for acting “contrary to his … Orders.” First, the casualties. For no apparent military gain, the terror raids left twenty-six of Tryon’s men killed, ninety wounded, and thirty-two missing. And second, the raids produced a fuming reaction among Patriots, who would turn that anger into revenge.30

  Tryon’s raid against Danbury two years before had had a military rationale because the town was the site of a Continental Army supply depot. This time Clinton had approved attacks along the Connecticut coast because he believed they would compel Washington, whose army was in New Jersey, to send troops to the rescue, giving Clinton an opportunity to strike across the Hudson at a diminished foe.31 Washington saw through Clinton’s strategy and outwitted him by ordering Brig. Gen. Anthony Wayne to lead a raid on Stony Point, the British “Little Gibraltar” on the Hudson. Washington knew from his spies that Clinton had withdrawn men from the fort to add to Tryon’s force.

  On his march to Stony Point, Wayne arrested civilians to keep any Tories from warning the British. In the swift midnight attack a bullet grazed Wayne’s brow. His men took more than four hundred prisoners, along with several cannon and other military booty in what was the war’s last major battle in the North.32

  The attack on Stony Point emphasized Clinton’s blunder in authorizing Tryon’s raids, which Clinton had vaguely viewed as harassment, not terrorism. Although he had neither suggested nor forbidden arson, in the words of his critic and adviser, William Smith, “Sir Henry wished the Conflagrations, and yet not to be answerable for them.”33

  Clinton demanded a written report from Tryon, presumably so that he could prepare an explanation for anticipated criticism from London. In his report Tryon insisted that the Rebels had to be punished for their rebellion “if possible without injury to the loyalists.” By terrorizing the Rebels, he said, he had instilled in them fear of reprisals. He expected “no mischief to the public from the irritation of a few in rebellion if a general terror and despondency can be awakened among a people already divided … and easily impressible.”34

  If Clinton feared censure from London, he was wrong. Lord Germain approved the raids, signaling what Tryon and William Franklin already knew: The conduct of the war was changing. What Tryon had labeled “desolation warfare” had been renewed, not by Clinton’s soldiers but by William Franklin and his creation, the Board of Associated Loyalists. Tryon backed Franklin’s Associated Loyalists, his instrument for taking the waging of the war away from Clinton and the “Parcel of Blockheads” around him.35

  Tryon was a Briton of high military and social class. Franklin was a Loyalist and a son who was not only rebelling against the Patriots but also against his own father. Franklin felt that as a Loyalist he better understood the realities of the war and the Rebels than the British Army or its German hirelings. He had governed one of the mightiest Tory strongholds in America. By one estimate about a third of New Jersey’s population—some five thousand people—were Tories. In Bergen County, just across the river from New York City, Franklin believed he could create an army.36 Eventual
ly more than two thousand men would serve in the New Jersey Volunteers.37

  While Tryon was preparing for his Connecticut raids, Franklin presented to him—as commander of the provincial forces in America—aplan that would make the Board of Associated Loyalists an independent, quasi-military force whose operations would “distress the Enemy in any Quarter not expressly forbid by the Commander in Chief.”

  The distress would include pillage, for Franklin adopted a practice of Tryon’s desolation warfare: The raiders had the right to keep all “the plunder they take, which is to be only from rebels.”38 Tryon endorsed the plan, which called for battalions of about 250 men and a fleet of ships and whaleboats. Nine prominent New York and New Jersey Loyalists began recruiting for Franklin.39

  Public notice of Franklin’s organization came on December 30, 1780, in Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer, which published the “Declaration of the Board of Directors of Associated Loyalists.” The group, it noted, had been established “for embodying and employing such of his Majesty’s faithful subjects in North America, as may be willing to associate under their direction, for the purpose of annoying the sea-coasts of the revolted Provinces and distressing their trade, either in co-operation with his Majesty’s land and sea forces, or by making diversions in their favor, when they are carrying on operations in other parts.”40

  The announcement made clear to any discerning reader that the Associated Loyalists were to wage an independent war. Franklin’s Associators, as they were called, got British Army benefits but not British Army control. The Associators would be commanded by their own officers, recommended by the board and commissioned by Clinton. He would furnish them with arms, ammunition, and rations, along with vessels that they would crew. If they were sick or wounded, they would be treated in royal army hospitals. Each Associator would “receive a gratuitous grant of Two Hundred Acres of Land in North America.” In a reluctant concession to Franklin, Clinton also gave him the right to handle his own prisoners, rather than place them in the regular British Army prisoner-of-war system.41