The blockhouse was a stockade made of logs about seven feet tall, pointed on top, forming a square with no openings. The only way to enter or leave was by a scaling ladder. Every few feet there was an opening in the logs just large enough to sight and fire a musket. The blockhouse included a barracks and a partially underground room that was the powder magazine. On each of the corners was a small, pivoting cannon.
The blockhouse guarded a saltworks, which produced salt from ocean water under a contract with the Continental Army. A vital military commodity, the salt was used in curing meat for shipment to soldiers. The workers, exempted from militia service, were armed and expected to aid in the defense of the works, a prime objective of Associated Loyalist raids. The saltworks also provided nearby residents with a chance to become war profiteers, buying a bushel of salt at fifteen dollars and then selling it to the Continental Army at Morristown for thirty-five dollars.68
The commander of the Toms River blockhouse was Joshua Huddy in a new incarnation as a captain of a state regiment attached to the Continental Army. When the raiders approached and demanded surrender, the defenders responded with muskets and cannons. In a short firefight several raiders were killed or wounded. But Huddy could see that he and his men were outnumbered about four to one. After seven defenders were killed or mortally wounded, Huddy surrendered the blockhouse. He was taken prisoner, along with sixteen others, four of them wounded. The Tories set fire to the blockhouse, killed a local militiaman, and then torched the saltworks and the entire village of Toms River.
The prisoners were put aboard the Arrogant and taken off to the Sugar House Prison in New York City, where British prisoners of war were held. But Clinton had reluctantly given Franklin control over his prisoners. Capt. Richard Lippincott of the New Jersey Volunteers, on assignment from the Board of Associated Loyalists, transferred Huddy to a British warship in New York Harbor. Lippincott was carrying out secret verbal instructions from Franklin.
A few days later Lippincott and a party of other Tories were rowed out to the warship. Lippincott went aboard, took custody of Huddy, put him in the boat, and beached at a desolate stretch of shore near Sandy Hook. Lippincott walked Huddy to a makeshift gallows, put a noose around his neck, pointed to a barrel under the gallows, gave him a piece of foolscap, and told him he could write his will.
Using the barrelhead as a desk, Huddy made his will. A note on the back of the foolscap says, “The will of Captain Joshua Huddy, madeand executed the same day the Refugees murdered him, April 12th, 1782.” He then climbed onto the barrel and a black Tory—probably one of Blucke’s men—kicked it over. When Huddy was dead, someone attached to his body a statement that began, “We, the refugees” and ended, “Up goes Huddy for Philip White.”69
Philip White had been a refugee raider captured by Rebels in a skirmish at Long Branch, New Jersey. According to the Rebel account, White was killed while attempting to escape. One of White’s guards was the son of a man White had killed, and so questions arose about the circumstances of White’s death. But Huddy was not involved. He was in prison in New York when White was killed. Clearly, up went Huddy because Franklin wanted a sacrificial atonement for White’s death.70
Even the Presbyterian minister who preached at Huddy’s funeral joined other Rebels in a demand for retribution. The roar of outrage quickly reached George Washington, who called the hanging an “instance of Barbarity.” Backed by Congress, Washington wrote to Clinton, warning that he would execute a British prisoner if Clinton did not turn over Lippincott. Clinton responded by ordering that Lippincott be court-martialed.
Washington ominously directed that a British officer of similar rank to Huddy be selected by lot from prisoners of war and sent to the Continental Army encampment in Chatham, New Jersey. Thirteen officers confined in Pennsylvania were selected. Each drew from a hat a piece of paper. Twelve papers were blank. The paper with “unfortunate” written on it was drawn by Capt. Charles Asgill of the 1st Regiment of Foot, the twenty-year-old son of Sir Charles Asgill, a former lord mayor of London.
It was also an unfortunate selection for Washington. Not only was Asgill from an illustrious family and famed regiment but his prisoner status was tied to an article of the surrender agreement at Yorktown, which stipulated that surrendered prisoners would be protected.71 Washington had accepted the surrender of General Cornwallis at
Yorktown on October 19, 1781, ending the British southern campaign and effectively ending the war.
By May 1782, when the Huddy crisis was flaring, informal talks between the British and an American Commission led by Ben Franklin were under way in Paris. If Washington ordered Asgill’s execution, William Franklin’s diehard Loyalists could wreck the peace negotiations.
While the Lippincott court-martial was going on, Gen. Sir Guy Carleton replaced Clinton as commander of British forces in America, and Clinton sailed for home. Carleton, condemning “unauthorized acts of violence,” disbanded the Board of Associated Loyalists. But he could do nothing about the court-martial, whose members included such leading Loyalist officers as Brig. Gen. Cortlandt Skinner, founder of the New Jersey Volunteers, and Col. Beverley Robinson, commander of the Loyal American Regiment. Not waiting for the outcome of the court-martial, Franklin left for England, never to return.
Carleton had been in command little more than a month when the verdict came in. The court found that Lippincott was convinced that “it was his Duty to obey the Orders of the Board of Directors of Associated Loyalists.” He said he had not committed murder and thus was not guilty.72 The verdict stunned Washington. He knew that he had to make good his threat of retaliation, a decision that “has distressed me exceedingly,” he said in a letter.73 Then, unexpectedly, came a reprieve for both Asgill and Washington.
Asgill’s mother, Lady Asgill, had written a pleading letter to the Comte de Vergennes, the French foreign minister, asking him to intercede. Vergennes sent his own plea to Washington, along with the mother’s letter. Washington, touched by both maternal love and French diplomacy, submitted the appeal to Congress, which told Washington to free Asgill. Because of the long time it took for letters to travel, Asgill was not released until November.74 By then a preliminary peace treaty had been negotiated.
The last major event of the war in the North came in September 1781 when Benedict Arnold burned down New London, about twelvemiles from his Connecticut birthplace. There was an apocalyptic air to this final act in Arnold’s long war—five years in the Continental Army, one year in the British Army—as he led turncoats to their deaths on his native soil. The core of his invasion force was his American Legion, which included more than two hundred deserters from the Continental Army.75 Arnold’s force of about seventeen hundred men also included New Jersey Volunteers and some refugees attached to the Volunteers.
Local Tories—called “friends to Government” in Arnold’s report to Clinton—told him that the two forts guarding New London Harbor were undermanned. But the Patriots fought ferociously, even resorting to spears when Arnold’s force stormed Fort Griswold. Lt. Col. Abraham Van Buskirk, a founder of the Volunteers back in New Jersey, entered the fort. In his report, Arnold said that most of the Patriot officers, among them the fort commander, Lt. Col. William Ledyard, “were found dead in Fort Griswold, and 60 wounded, most of them mortally.” Arnold was glossing over an atrocity.76
A bayoneted survivor, lying in a puddle of blood at Fort Griswold, regained consciousness and later told what had happened: “The first person I saw afterwards was my brave commander, a corpse by my side, having been run through the body with his own sword.” Other witnesses said that Ledyard was bayoneted to death as, surrendering, he handed his sword to Van Buskirk. Other soldiers, identified as Tories, bayoneted the surrendering soldiers and the wounded. “After the massacre,” the bayoneted survivor remembered, “they plundered us of every thing we had, and left us literally naked.” About 115 Patriots were killed. One out of every four men in Arnold’s force was killed or wounded, one of th
e highest casualty rates of any battle in the war.77 As Arnold was destroying New London, a French fleet, commanded by Admiral François de Grasse, was defeating a British squadron off Yorktown, Virginia. The victory would give the French control of the Chesapeake and trap General Cornwallis’s army on the Yorktown Peninsula. A combined army, led by Washington and French general Jean-Baptiste de Rochambeau, was on the way to besiege and defeat Cornwallis.
Cornwallis’s surrender on October 19 at Yorktown meant the Revolution was almost certainly over. But the civil war went on. In Pennsylvania, where two Quakers had been hanged earlier in the Revolution, 490 people were accused of high treason and put on a “Black List.”78 New York’s Committee (later, Commission) for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies had tried more than one thousand people for Loyalist activities, and trial was tantamount to conviction, a heavy fine, and confiscation of property.79 Delaware, perceiving a rebellion within the state itself, charged forty-eight Tories with treason against the state; the ringleader, convicted of murder, was finally hanged in 1788.80
Along the New York frontier, after General Cornwallis’s surrender, Maj. Walter Butler led a group of Rangers and Indians into the Mohawk Valley on a routine foray for prisoners and plunder. He was killed during a skirmish with Patriot pursuers. A Continental officer later wrote that “the inhabitants expressed more joy at the death of Butler than the capture of Cornwallis.”81
18
AND THEY BEGAN THE WORLD ANEW
YORKTOWN, OCTOBER 1781—NEW YORK CITY, APRIL 1783
… If cats should be chased into holes by the mouse, If mammas sold their babies to gypsies for half a crown, If summer were spring and the other way round, Then all the world would be upside down.
—Nursery rhyme, “The World Turned Upside Down”1
During the negotiations for the surrender of Cornwallis at York-town, a British officer brought up the uneasy topic of Loyalists, for he knew that many armed Tory units were among the troops who had laid down their arms. He also knew that those troops were not in the British Army and not affected by the terms of surrender. Finally negotiators hammered out an article of capitulation that attempted to give them legal immunity: “Natives or Inhabitants of different Parts of this Country … are not to be punished on Account of having joined the British Army.” Washington, well aware of the anti-Tory laws passed by every state, took a look at the article and insisted that those laws be somehow acknowledged. So an awkward sentence was added: “This Article cannot be assented to being altogether of Civil Resort.”2 Those words would be the grounds for hunting down the fifteen hundred Tories suspected of having served at Yorktown.
Still, a way was found to get some of them out safely. In another article of capitulation, Washington allowed the Royal Navy sloop Bonetta to be “permitted to sail without Examination …,” ostensibly so that Cornwallis could send a report to New York.3 Lt. Col. John G. Simcoe was allowed to board because he was in poor health. Some of his Rangers also slipped aboard, as did other Tories who rowed out as the Bonetta set sail. Among them were ex-Rebels who had served in state militias, viewed by Patriots as deserters who could be executed for taking up the king’s arms. The fate of other Tories at Yorktown is not known. Some men were caught and executed for desertion. Some Loyalist muster rolls show the surrender of 241 officers and men of the British Legion, including a lieutenant colonel.4
That would seem to be Lt. Col. Banastre Tarleton, who had commanded the British force at Gloucester Point, across the river from Yorktown. A captain, a lieutenant, and two enlisted men of the New Jersey Volunteers were also captured at Gloucester. They presumably became prisoners, like the men of the British Legion, indicating that at least some Loyalist soldiers were treated as prisoners of war. Tarleton, who feared he would be attacked at the time of the surrender, did reach New York and eventually England, as did Simcoe. Many Rangers and veterans of Tarleton’s Legion, presumably using Tory safe houses along the way, did get to New York and would sail away to Nova Scotia during the British evacuation of the city.
In the days before and after the surrender, many of the runaway slaves who had fled to Cornwallis were dying of smallpox. As the British troops had marched north from the Carolinas, slaves had joined the invaders in a bid for freedom. Many carried smallpox and died along the road. “Within these days past,” a Connecticut soldier wrote, “I have marched by 18 or 20 Negroes that lay dead by the way-side, putrifying with the small pox… . infecting the air around with intolerable stench & great danger.”5 Cornwallis, who had put the former slaves to work on his redoubts, could not feed them as the siege tightened. So he sent them out to fend for themselves. Private Joseph Plumb Martin, ever a witness, wrote, “During the siege, we saw in the woods herds of Negroes which lord Cornwallis … had turned adrift, with not other recompense for their confidence in his humanity than the small pox for their bounty and starvation and death for their wages. They might be seen scattered about in every direction, dead and dying, with pieces of ears of burnt Indian corn in the hands and mouths, even of those that were dead.”6
Soldiers then, as well as Benjamin Franklin later, speculated that the British were deliberately using dead and dying blacks to infect the Continental Army with smallpox. Buttressing the speculation in her 2001 work, Pox Americana, the historian Elizabeth A. Fenn quotes from a letter written to Cornwallis by Maj. Gen. Alexander Leslie: “Above 700 Negroes are come down the River in the Small Pox,” he wrote. “I shall distribute them about the Rebell Plantations.”7 Under Washington’s edicts the soldiers of the Continental Army were inoculated, but few militiamen were. It will probably never be known whether Leslie’s suggestion was carried out and, if so, whether any Rebels were struck down.
By the time Sir Guy Carleton succeeded Clinton in May 1782, there was no doubt that the war was lost. Carleton promptly ordered the evacuation of Savannah and Charleston—” a deplorable necessity in consequence of an unsuccessful war.”8 The evacuation of Savannah, which came in July, was supposed to be primarily a military operation, carried out under terms laid down by Major General Wayne, who had arrived in Georgia in January with orders to drive the British out of the state.
As in Boston in 1776 and Philadelphia in 1778, Tories wanted to leave with the British soldiers. And Wayne, who had fought Tories on his road to Savannah, had to deal with Tory militiamen, who were not leaving. Georgia, the only colony to be conquered by the British, had reestablished royal militias; they had to be disbanded.
Wayne had already broken the royal militias by encouraging desertions to Rebel militias. He made sure that the deserters were well treated when they changed sides, inspiring further defections. Working closely with Wayne, Patriot governor John Martin, in a proclamation of February 1782, promised two hundred acres of land, a cow, and two breeding swine to every Tory who defected. Scores of Tory militiamen immediately deserted. Copies of the proclamation, translated into German, were slipped into Hessian encampments, and twenty-six deserted immediately. British officers in the South lost whatever confidence they might have had in Georgian and Hessian soldiers.9
Shortly before the evacuation of Savannah, Wayne promised that he would exert every influence “in my power with the Civil Authority, that all past offences (except murder) shall be buried in Oblivion”—providing that the militiamen enlisted in the Georgia Continental Infantry for two years or for the duration of the war in Georgia.10 More than two hundred militiamen joined, switching sides with ease.11 Eventually many of the civilians in Savannah’s swelling refugee population chose to go to New York with the British Army. Wealthy families could book passage to England. Others, particularly families with large numbers of slaves, chose to go on army transports to Jamaica or the British colony of East Florida.
Some two thousand white Tories and five thousand slaves left Savannah. Most of them headed for St. Augustine in Florida; others sailed to Charleston.12 In Florida the newcomers could expect grants of land, “upon which,” in the words of the Loyalist historian Thomas
Jones, “they sat down and began the world anew.”13 Nearly seven thousand Tories from Georgia and the Carolinas were already in East Florida, which since 1775 had been giving free land to Loyalists. Many of them had been driven there by confiscation-and-banishment laws.14
In December 1782 came the evacuation of Charleston, which completed the British withdrawal of all troops from the southern colonies. Thousands of civilians chose to leave with the troops. By one accounting, 9,127 Charleston Loyalists became exiles. A total of 1,278 whites went to Jamaica, accompanied by 2,613 slaves. East Florida was chosen by 1,615 white evacuees, who took with them 3,826 slaves. England was the destination of 274 whites; they sailed to England with 56 slaves, who probably would be called house servants in England. Twenty men took 350 slaves to the sugar plantations of St. Lucia in the West Indies. About 190 people, with 50 slaves, went to New York, and 417 men, women, and children, with 53 slaves, picked a new destination being suggested by Carleton: Nova Scotia.15
The evacuations were preludes to the spreading dread among Loyalists that they and Britain, having lost the war, now were about to lose the peace. For Britain, life would go on much as before, but America’s Loyalists now were aliens and, to the most vindictive winners, enemies. “The Rebels breathe the most rancorous and malignant Spirit everywhere,” a New York Tory wrote. “Committees and Associations are formed in every Colony and Resolves passed that no Refugees shall return nor have their Estates restored. The Congress and Assemblies look on tamely and want either the Will or the Power to check those Proceedings. In short, the Mob now reigns as fully and uncontrolled as in the Beginning of our Troubles and America is as hostile to Great Britain at this Hour as she was at any Period during the War.”16
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