The ten-man board of directors, headed by Franklin and approved by Clinton, included Josiah Martin, who had succeeded Tryon as governor of North Carolina. Back in 1775 Martin had deliriously foreseen stamping out rebellion in his colony with a Loyalist forcenumbering in the thousands, especially “throughout all the very populous western counties of this Province.”42 Also on the board was Brigadier Timothy Ruggles, who had pioneered the idea of organizing armed Loyalists. Other members were Daniel Cox, who had been a royal councillor in New Jersey, and George Duncan Ludlow, victim of a Rebel home plundering and superintendent of police on Tory Long Island.43
George Leonard, who had been a volunteer Tory combatant in the Battle of Lexington, was the maritime member of Franklin’s board. Leonard had gone to England and won from the king himself approval of a new Loyalist organization, the Loyal Associated Refugees, which provided the ships, boats, crews, and forces for seagoing raids.44 Franklin’s fleet intensified the whaleboat war being waged in the Sound, where Rebels in Connecticut and Refugees in Long Island raided each other’s shores, plundering and kidnapping.
In a short time more than four hundred Loyalists became Associators. Franklin began feeling like an important placeman again. But he also felt “shackled,” because, despite Germain’s endorsement of the Board of Associated Loyalists, Clinton insisted on approving every mission that Franklin and his board planned. In reality, however, there seems to have been little British control over the amphibious Associators’ raids and privateering along the New Jersey coast.
New Jersey had become an odd kind of battleground, on which vengeful partisans warred while their respective armies remained essentially above the fray. Since the Battle of Monmouth, the war had been deadlocked in the North, each army so entrenched that it dared not attack the other. But once again the armies were foraging in the Neutral Ground.
Occasionally there were large-scale foraging raids. In March 1780, for instance, about three hundred British Regulars and Hessians attacked Hackensack, “a large and beautiful settlement consisting of about two hundred houses,” as Johann Conrad Dohla, a Hessian soldier, wrote in his diary.
All the houses “were immediately broken into and everything ruined… . All the male[s] were taken prisoners, and the town hall andsome other splendid buildings were set on fire. We took considerable booty, money, silver pocket watches, silver plate and spoons, as well as furniture, good clothing, fine English linen, good silk stockings, gloves, and neckcloths, as well as other expensive silks, satins, and other materials.”45 Dohla was disappointed because he and his men had to abandon so much loot after being harassed by Rebel militiamen. Still, they did carry off about fifty or sixty men for future prisoner ransoming and exchanging.46
“There was no trusting of the inhabitants, for many of them were friendly to the British, and we did not know who were or who were not,” wrote Private Joseph Plumb Martin, that intrepid chronicler of the Revolution. Assigned to a Continental Army guard force along the New Jersey shore, Martin told of a night when armed Refugees came ashore, killed a Continental guard, and burst into a house where guardsmen were quartered. “After they had done all the mischief they could in the house,” Martin wrote, “they proceeded to the barn and drove off five or six head of Mr. Halstead’s young cattle, took them down upon the point and killed them, and went off in their boats, that had come across from the island for that purpose, to their den among the British.”47
Vicious warfare was continual between armed Loyalists and the Rebel militias—along with an assortment of freebooters, Cow-boys, Skinners, highwaymen, and robbers who knew no other cause than the filling of their own purses. A peculiar New Jersey breed was the Pine-Banditti, who operated out of the dense forests of the Pine Barrens in the southern coastal plain. Typically justice was dispensed without judges. Three Pine-Banditti, for example, were simply put to death after being caught by Rebel militiamen in Monmouth County.48 Joseph Mulliner, the most notorious of the Pine-Banditti, raided from a base near Little Egg Harbor. Mulliner, a newspaper reported, “made practice of burning houses” and robbing “all who fell in his way, so that when he came to trial it appeared that the whole country, both whigs and tories, were his enemies.” Mullinerwas hanged for high treason against New Jersey on August 8, 1781.49 By one reliable count, from the time of the Battle of Monmouth to the end of the war, there were 266 raids and other clashes in New Jersey and 108 attacks or other incidents between June 1778 and 1783 along the state’s coast or on its rivers. Most actions were Rebel privateer attacks on British shipping.50
The Associators staged many hit-and-run operations, but none of them was militarily significant because Clinton, a professional dealing with an amateur, manipulated the British Army bureaucracy to thwart Franklin. Then, in December 1779, General Clinton sailed south with about seven thousand British, Hessian, and Loyalist troops to launch the southern strategy, once again anticipating a rising of Loyalists. Before leaving, Clinton put a Hessian officer, Lt. Gen. Wilhelm von Knyphausen, in command. If Knyphausen agreed, Franklin, Smith, and Tryon would now have their chance to show that Loyalists could rise in New Jersey, too.
Washington and the Continental Army were in winter quarters in Morristown, New Jersey, about thirty-five miles west of New York. Hunger—and mutiny—stalked the encampment. Starving, freezing men were trying to live through a winter so cold that, for the first time in memory, both the Hudson River and Long Island Sound were frozen solid.51 “At one time it snowed the greater part of four days successively, and there fell nearly as many feet deep of snow,” wrote Private Martin, who had lived through a milder winter at Valley Forge. “… . We were absolutely, literally starved… . I saw several of the men roast their old shoes and eat them.”52
An attack on Washington’s dwindling mutinous army looked easy on the map: Cross from Staten Island to Elizabethtown Point, which was within British lines. Then across about ten miles of fairly friendly territory to Springfield, which was at the threshold of the Hobart Gap, a pass through the Watchung Mountains. Behind those natural ramparts was Washington’s encampment. An enemy force massing at Springfield would surely draw him out to a decisive battle.
William Smith, Franklin’s ally and Clinton’s secret enemy, became the intelligence chief for a possible thrust toward Springfield. Smithinterviewed deserters from the Continental Army and Loyalist spies. Another source was Christopher Sower, a Pennsylvanian who was a member of the Board of Associated Loyalists. He said that he had been told that Loyalists from his state and from Maryland would flock to join a British Army marching to attack Washington.53 All this positive information was presented to Maj. George Beckwith, a British Army intelligence officer. He translated for Knyphausen, who could not speak English.
Some of the intelligence pouring in to Beckwith was false. George Washington, who often acted as spymaster of the Continental Army, ordered the commander at West Point to “magnify the present force on the North [Hudson] river, but keep it within the bounds of what may be thought reasonable or probable.” Whatever other misinformation Washington may have spread is not known. But documents show he was getting good intelligence from his own agents. As early as March 11 he had received an intelligence report that “the enemy have it in contemplation to pay us a visit (and in a very short time).” He was also aware that “the enemy have taken up a large number of vessels (it seems for an expedition against this quarter). All the houses on the western and northern sides of Staten Island are taken for barracking troops.”
In anticipation of an attack he ordered the inspection of “certain Signals established for alarming the Militia in case of a serious movement.” These were tall log towers filled with brush and set afire to bespeak alarm. Seeing the flames—or hearing alarm cannons boom on Mount Hobart and elsewhere—militiamen would muster at prearranged sites.54
Knyphausen kept authorizing sporadic raids while building up forces for a major offensive, a change in tempo that Washington’s agents had noted. Finally, on the night
of June 6, 1780, with Clinton still in the South, Knyphausen sent six thousand men, including Loyalist units, into New Jersey. The force outnumbered Washington’s army nearly two to one.55 Washington kept most of his Continental men in Morristown, leaving defense of their homeland to the New Jersey Continental Brigade and local militiamen. Responding to themustering alarms, they tracked the invaders, sniping at them as they slowly headed west, finally stopping at a village called Connecticut Farms (now Union).
The pastor of the Presbyterian church in Connecticut Farms was the Reverend James Caldwell, who had moved there from Elizabeth-town (now Elizabeth) after Tory raiders torched his church and tried to kidnap him. When Knyphausen’s Tories arrived in Connecticut Farms, the minister was in Morristown serving as a chaplain. His wife, Hannah, was home with their nine children. Militiamen and civilians were firing from their houses at the invaders. The invaders began setting fire to the houses and to Caldwell’s church. Someone—perhaps a militiaman, perhaps a Redcoat, perhaps a Tory—fired through the window of Caldwell’s house, killing Hannah Caldwell instantly.
The next morning, Knyphausen, shadowed by militamen, withdrew to Elizabethtown Point. He had just learned that General Clinton, having taken Charleston, South Carolina, was sailing home with most of his men. For the next thirteen days the invaders camped in Elizabethtown, fought off skirmishing militiamen, and awaited Clinton. Newspapers spread the word about the torching of Connecticut Farms and the killing of Hannah Caldwell, denounced as murder by “one of the barbarians.”56 The possibility of an accidental shooting was quickly eclipsed by propaganda and outrage over the Tory murderers.
On June 23 Knyphausen set out for Springfield again, this time under orders from Clinton, who would take his own southern army up the Hudson, hoping to split Washington’s forces and destroy the Continental Army. Rebel fury, rather than Tory fervor, rose along the path that Knyphausen was now taking for the second time. New Jersey Volunteers and the Queen’s American Rangers, marching in the advance guard, got no new Tory recruits. This time, however, British artillery backed up the infantry, and fierce fighting forced Washington to send more Continentals into battle at Springfield, about a dozen miles from Morristown.
Stymied, Knyphausen pulled back, setting fire to houses as he withdrew. Enraged militiamen, some of whom saw their own homesburning, pursued the retreating rear guard, which included Queen’s Rangers and a German unit of Jägers, who suffered heavy casualties. In the two battles, some twenty militiamen and Continentals were killed. About three hundred of Knyphausen’s men were killed, wounded, or missing. The commander of the Jägers, writing home to Germany, summed up the seemingly pointless battles: “I regret from the depths of my heart that the great loss of the Jägers took place to no greater purpose.57
But the battles had achieved unexpected results. The Loyalists lost their hold on much of New Jersey, as Patriots in Springfield immediately demonstrated: They ordered their Tory neighbors to get out of town with only whatever they could carry. The Springfield exiles became refugees and headed for Staten Island, well behind the invaders, who were going to the same place.58 The fiasco should have wiped out William Franklin and his Board of Associated Loyalists, but his influence among Loyalists extended beyond New York and New Jersey.
Sometime in the spring of 1781 the Associated Loyalists sent an agent to Maryland to set in motion a plot aimed at raising a large force of Loyalists who would spearhead a British strike into Chesapeake Bay, peeling off Maryland and Virginia from the North. Local Patriots learned of the plot and obtained documents bearing the names of the Maryland Tories involved. In July 1781 seven of the accused plotters were put on trial before a three-man tribunal, which found them guilty of high treason against Maryland.
After telling the men to make their peace with God, the presiding judge handed down the sentence: “You shall be carried to the gaol of Frederick town and be hanged therein; you shall be cut down to the earth alive and your entrails shall be taken out and burnt while you are yet alive, your heads shall be cut off, your body shall be divided into four parts and your heads and quarters shall be placed where his excellency the Governor shall appoint. So the Lord have mercy upon your poor souls.” Four of the sentences were commuted, but three were hanged. Contemporary accounts do not confirm the drawing and quartering, except to say the three men “suffered the full vigor ofthe law.”59 In Delaware jurors condemned another plotter, “seduced by the instigation of the Devil as a false rebel and traitor,” and ordered him executed in a similarly gruesome manner.60
It would take an international incident to finally bring down Franklin’s Associators. The incident traced to a day in September 1780 when two notorious New Jersey terrorists fought a gun battle. Joshua Huddy, a captain in the Monmouth County militia, was in a house in the village of Colts Neck, about a dozen miles west of Long Branch. Surrounding the house was Colonel Tye, a runaway slave, and his gang of armed Tories. Huddy called himself a refugee hunter, using New Jersey Patriots’ favorite term for targeted Tories. And Tye, a pillaging Tory guerrilla, was the kind of refugee that Huddy hunted.
In November 1775, after Lord Dunmore offered freedom to any slave who joined the British, Tye, twenty-one years old and six feet tall, fled to freedom from his master in Shrewsbury, New Jersey.61 He somehow made his way to Virginia and became a member of Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment. When the regiment disbanded, Tye returned to New Jersey, where he fought in the Battle of Monmouth. He then became a renegade refugee, leader of a quasi-military gang of Continental Army deserters and fugitive ex-slaves who looted Rebel homes and farms, kidnapped Rebel and militia leaders, and stole livestock and provisions for the British Army. British officers gave Tye the honorary rank of colonel and dubbed his gang the Black Brigade.62
One of the brigade’s white commanders was Maj. Thomas Ward of the Loyal Refugee Volunteers, whose slaves included at least one of his black soldiers. Their headquarters was a timber-built fortress at Bull’s Ferry, New Jersey, across the Hudson from New York City. On their numerous raids they stole cattle, gathered intelligence, and helped fugitive slaves and refugees reach British lines. On wooded Rebel land they harvested firewood, vitally needed for the cook fires and fireplaces in the vast British establishment in New York. Ward was a law unto himself. Three of his black soldiers were hanged aftera British Army court-martial found them guilty of murdering a man; Ward was accused of ordering the killing but was never charged.63
Washington, irritated by the Bull’s Ferry raids, sent Brigadier General Wayne and about one thousand troops to wipe out the Loyalist base. About seventy Loyalists—a number of them probably Franklin’s Associators—were in the crude fortress, built against a sheer cliff. Wayne cannonaded the redoubt and tried to storm it. Finally, after fifteen of his men were killed and forty-nine wounded, he withdrew. Twenty-one Loyalists were killed or wounded.64 The rest lived on to continue pillaging and terrorizing the area.
Huddy, meanwhile, accused of murdering several refugees, became a target for Tory vengeance. One of his victims was a Tory hanged from a tree limb after being charged with spying for the British. When asked about the hanging, Huddy said that all he had done was “slush” (grease) the rope and pull it.
In the summer of 1780 Huddy took to the sea. The Continental Congress gave him a privateer’s commission to “set forth … in a warlike manner” against the British in “the Armed boat called Black Snake.”65 He had been a privateer for about a month, when, one day, an hour before dawn, Colonel Tye and his men surrounded Huddy’s house. One of them broke a window, hoping to get in, seize Huddy, and get out quickly. The breaking glass awakened Huddy, who grabbed a musket and began firing.
The raiders pulled back. A musket was fired from another window, then another. Tye was convinced that some of Huddy’s men were with him. Inside the house Huddy was acting like several shooters, moving from window to window, firing muskets. They were loaded and handed to him by the only other occupant, a young woman variously described as his hou
sekeeper and mistress.
One shot hit Tye in the wrist. He bandaged the wound and continued the attack, ordering some men to creep up to the house and set it afire. Huddy shouted that he would surrender if they extinguished the fire. They did, and he walked out. Tye led him away to a waiting whaleboat, which would take him through “the lines,” a wavering boundary along the New Jersey coast that marked the border betweenrefugees and Rebels. But militiamen, rushing toward the sound of musketry, saw the motley refugee gang pulling away and fired at the boat. In the confusion Huddy jumped overboard and escaped.66
Gangrene developed in Tye’s wound and he died. Stephen Blucke, a free black from Barbados, succeeded to Tye’s title and command, and the refugee raiding went on. To fight the refugee gangs, a group of citizens formed the Monmouth County Committee of Retaliation, headed by David Forman, a brigadier general in the state militia and a former judge. The committee, unattached to militias or the Continental Army, resembled Franklin’s unrestrained Board of Associated Loyalists.
Acting as a shadow government, the Committee of Retaliation plundered and murdered refugees, often settling private grudges in the name of the Patriots. Forman owned a piece of property in Freehold that was known as the Hanging Place, where at least a dozen Loyalists were hanged before Forman saw reason to leave the state. The state legislature condemned the Retaliators as “utterly subversive of the Law” but could not stop them.67 Refugee and Retaliator raids continued until the end the war.
On March 20, 1782, a mixed force of Franklin’s Associators and Pennsylvania Tories set off in whaleboats from New York City, escorted by the Arrogant, an armed brigantine, and sailed for the village of Toms River, New Jersey, about sixty miles south. They landed at the mouth of the river on Saturday, March 23, and were met by a group of local armed Tories. Just before dawn they all set off for their objective: a blockhouse at the edge of the village.
Tories Page 35