Part II. Suppressing the Tories

PART II

Suppressing Tories

13

The Suppression of Tories Begins

Throughout the rebellious colonies developed the pattern of governmental authority, largely devoted to fighting the war of the Revolution and exercised by illegal representative bodies, provincial congresses, or conventions. Realizing that the executive function should be inherently subordinate to the lawmaking function, the rebels created a highly democratic system: making committees of safety—operating committees of the legislature—the major executive arms of the provinces, which could function when the legislatures were not in session. On the local level, the old committees of inspection, observation, and correspondence, which had enforced the Continental Association, naturally evolved into new city and rural committees to run the war, specifically to raise and operate the militia and especially to crush dissenting Tories.

The Americans had had no chance to hear present-day opinion that they were merely fighting a conservative and moderate revolution; hence they went at the Tories with a zeal that went beyond the bounds of libertarian principle. The concept of “enemy of American liberty” was quickly extended from violators of the continental boycott to anyone critical of the Revolution. Known and suspected Tories were hauled before the local committees, and as Professor Miller puts it, “If the committees failed to persuade, the mob took over. Thus was created a police system, secret, efficient, and all-powerful.”*

Letters, especially to England, were seized at the post offices and carefully examined; spies eagerly took on the task of keeping watch on suspected Tories. And in contrast to enforcement of the Continental Association, committees did not try to confine punishment of Tories to voluntary boycott and ostracism; instead, fines, imprisonment, confiscation, and banishment came increasingly into play. Persons were hauled before local committees for criticizing the Continental Congress, belittling the Massachusetts Army, criticizing Presbyterian prominence in the Revolution, and a host of other “errors of opinion.” The new extralegal Massachusetts General Court urged Harvard College to dismiss all faculty members having Tory views. Individual Tories were not only boycotted and forced to recant their heresies; stronger methods of punishment were adopted as soon as the rebel committees became the effective authorities in their areas. As early as May 1775, the Massachusetts Provincial Congress recommended to local selectmen and committees that they confiscate the arms of all unfriendly to the rebel cause and forbid anyone to leave the province without special permission of the local committee or the Congress. The following month, the provincial congress directed the town committees and selectmen to confiscate and take charge of the property of all Tories who had fled behind the British lines at Boston or elsewhere. In New Hampshire, the provincial congress, as the supreme judicial body of the province, sentenced Tory Col. John Fenton to indefinite imprisonment as “an enemy to the liberties of America.” In September, the New York Provincial Congress created a hierarchy of penalties for Tories, including fines, disarming, prison, and banishment. And in November, the Rhode Island General Assembly passed a law decreeing death and forfeit of property to anyone assisting the British army with information or supplies.

One of the critical litmus tests used by the local committees to smoke out Tories was a public oath of loyalty to a defense association succeeding the old Continental Association. As historian Alexander C. Flick concluded, the association

became the first decisive test of the politics of individuals.... It stamped the individual as a Whig or Tory in the eyes of his neighbors, and treatment was meted out to him accordingly.... Hesitation [to sign] involved suspicion; refusal, guilt. The Loyalist who was true to his convictions, creed, and king was detested, reviled and if prominent, ruined in business, tarred and feathered, mobbed, ostracized, or imprisoned; and all this at the will of a committee, self-constituted and responsible to no one.*

Thus, a Revolution and revolutionaries dedicated to the cause of liberty moved to suppress crucial liberties of their opposition—an ironic but not unsurprising illustration of the inherent contradiction between Liberty and Power, a conflict that can all too readily come into play even when Power is employed on behalf of Liberty.

Hesitant to take any steps that might lead irrevocably to independence, the Continental Congress refused to do anything about hunting and combatting Tories, leaving the task to the separate towns and provinces—this despite the requests from Massachusetts and Maryland for a general congressional test oath for all the colonies. In October 1775, however, Congress learned that Dr. Benjamin Church, one of the top revolutionary leaders of Massachusetts and chief surgeon of the Continental Army, was a traitor in the pay of the British. This grave shock led Congress to urge the various local committees to crack down on everyone who might “endanger the safety of the colony or liberties of America.” The committees redoubled their efforts in rounding up suspects, imposing test oaths and punishing recalcitrants with disfranchisement or prison. The Continental Army was also authorized to aid in suppressing Tories. Even as conservative a man as George Washington wondered why the Tories, “abominable pests of society... who are preying upon the vitals of their country [should] be suffered to stalk at large, whilst we know that they will do us every mischief in their power.”

In their grave concern with the American Tories, the American revolutionaries were not striking at phantoms. While the idea that Tory and rebel sentiment among the people was equally matched is a historical misreading of John Adams, it remains true that the Tories constituted a real and substantial threat to the Revolution.* About one-third of politically interested Americans were Tories, or “Loyalists,” while the Revolution held the allegiance of the other two-thirds.**

The population of the rebelling colonies at the time of outbreak totalled approximately 2.5 million. Of these, about half a million were Negro slaves, who certainly were potential rebels against the revolutionaries and hence potential aids to the British. If we consider one-third of the whites to have been politically apathetic, then we have a mighty reservoir of another half million pro-British inhabitants. Such a huge reservoir of active or potential defectors inexorably turned the American Revolution into a civil war as well.

Who were the Tories? This question has suffered from insufficient research; too many historians, in their eternal search for an American “consensus” of sweetness and light, have preferred to forget about the hard knot of American Tories and what was done to them during the Revolutionary War.*

The first thing to be said is that the Tories were not at all uniformly distributed geographically. For example, the two major centers of population, New England and Virginia, were relatively Tory-free. The few thousand Virginia Tories were concentrated among Ulster Scots on the frontier in western Virginia, settlers on the Eastern Shore (the Chesapeake Peninsula), and native Scottish merchants and factors concentrated on the coast near Norfolk. New England Tories were to be found in scattered pockets: many in Newport, in the coastal towns of the Maine region, New Hampshire, Cape Cod, parts of western Massachusetts. Western Connecticut, near the New York border, was the only one of these regions where Tories approached a majority, even though the bulk of Connecticut was overwhelmingly rebel. All in all, New England Tories barely reached one-tenth of the population.

There were more Tories in the other colonies of the South than in Virginia, and these were mainly concentrated in the back country of the Carolinas—the pockets of Highland Scots near Wilmington and Cape Fear in North Carolina and the city of Charleston—and in royal-bureaucrat-ridden and subsidized Georgia. However, in none of the major population areas of the South did the Tories constitute a majority, and all in all, they totalled about 30 percent of southerners.

The most ominous and threatening center of Tory strength lay in the middle colonies, which were almost evenly divided between Whig and Tory. This equal strength was particularly true of New York, the greatest Tory stronghold outside of Georgia. In such areas as western Long Island, upstate, and the lower Hudson valley, Tory adherence was almost overwhelming. New Jersey, in Bergen County and in the south, was almost as fertile Tory ground. Toryism was particularly strong in Philadelphia and the surrounding counties, especially among the Quakers. Tories were also strong in Delaware and on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Ethnic and religious minorities within a region tended to oppose the dominant majority and hence to side with Great Britain. Thus, while Anglicans in the low-church Anglican South were solidly revolutionary, the minority of Anglicans in the North, far more high church and attached to Britain, were predominantly Tory. Also in the North, many Baptists and the budding Methodist movement were restive and Tory. Most Dutch in New York and New Jersey, and Quakers in southern New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, and many native-born Scots tended to be Tories. The Ulster Scots, however, at least in the South, were rather evenly divided.

Had the British acted early and energetically to mobilize the Tories, to organize their scattered centers of strength, and to exploit the potential conflicts within American society, they might have been able to deal the Revolution a crippling blow. The Negro slaves, as we have pointed out, were a huge potential reservoir of discontent to mobilize against the Revolution. And New York, a fertile field, lay available for exploitation. The Revolution split the landed oligarchy of the province, with the Anglican DeLanceys of New York City and the lower Hudson valley turning Tory, while the Presbyterian Livingstons of the northern Hudson valley supported the break with England, though only meekly. As a result, the disgruntled tenants of the Livingstons and their fellow Whig landlords naturally gave their support to the Tory cause. And many Ulstermen of the back-country Carolinas, long unhappy about underrepresentation and governmental discrimination against them, were Tories or lukewarm to a revolution made by the planters of the lowlands. *

The Tories, as we have seen, ranged, through all social classes and occupations, from the aristocratic DeLanceys of New York to the lowly tenants of the Whig landlords and the back-country settlers of the Carolinas. Neither were they dominantly concentrated within any broad social class. It is therefore impermissible to identify them with any particular economic or social group. However, neither can we discard social-class analysis altogether. While most of the wealthy were rebels and the Tories ranged through all social classes, it is also true that the proportion of the upper class was greater among the Tories than among the rebels, and a far greater proportion of Tories was concentrated among such well-to-do groups as royal bureaucrats and officials, British factors in the South, and Georgia planters. Thus, almost two-thirds of the councillors—members of the royally appointed upper houses of the colonial assemblies—became Tories.

For the British to have organized and welded together all the disparate threads of Tory and anti-Whig potential would have required energy and ability that the British did not have. For one thing, the British, like all counter-revolutionaries always and everywhere, scoffed at the Revolution as being a movement of a small fanatical minority rather than a majority, and as a movement of a weak and inferior breed of men. All counterrevolutionaries tend to gravely underestimate their enemies by treating rebellion as the work of a small subversive band of dogmatic and fanatical ideologues. The vast majority, these archconservatives typically feel, are deeply loyal to the constituted government. Therefore, the British confidently believed that no intensive coordination of the Tories was necessary. Surely, they need only call, or land, and the great majority of loyal folk would rise up and help their rulers smite the traitors!

A second cause of chronic British optimism, as we have seen, was the chauvinist contempt for the Americans as a people and for their martial abilities—a contempt redoubled by the British devotion to orthodox military prescriptions and ignorance of guerrilla forms of warfare. The defeat of the Revolution also required an indomitable will, but General Howe, the commander-in-chief of the British armies after the removal of the disgraced Gage, in October 1775, was an ardent Whig opposed to the war. These inner convictions kept him valiantly trying for a compromise political peace rather than a repressive military solution to the conflict, thereby substantially weakening the resolve of the counter-revolution.*

* John C. Miller, Triumph of Freedom, 1773–1783 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), p. 40.

* Alexander C. Flick, Loyalism in New York During the American Revolution (New York: Columbia University, 1901), pp. 47–48. Also see Harold M. Hyman, To Try Men’s Souls (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), pp. 70ff.

* A letter by John Adams has been traditionally interpreted by historians as judging that one-third of the Americans supported the Revolution, one-third were opposed, and one-third were neutral. In fact, Adams was referring to American attitudes toward the later French, not the American, revolution. In another letter, Adams estimated that the American Revolution was supported by two-thirds of those taking sides one way or the other. For the facts of the Adams letter, see John R. Alden, The American Revolution, 1775–1783 (New York: Harper & Row, 1954), p. 87.

**Also neglected is what the Tories did during the Revolutionary War. For even the historians concentrating on the Tories have been so sympathetic to them as to highlight their status as refugees and to play down their considerable role as armed and militant warriors of counter-revolution. See Albert T. Klyberg, “The Armed Loyalists as Seen by American Historians,” Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society (1964), pp. 101–108.

* Cf., William H. Nelson, The American Tory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), p. 92.

* However, the long-held view of historians that the old rebel Regulators of the Carolinas later became Tories has been refuted by the recent researches of Johnson, Barnwell, and Brown. The former Regulators of both North and South Carolina were predominantly Whig revolutionaries; indeed, it was only the old South Carolina Moderators who became largely Tory. See Richard Maxwell Brown, The South Carolina Regulators (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1963), pp. 123–26, 213–14.

* Howe’s leniency toward the rebels was considerably strengthened by the arrival in the summer of 1776 of his Whig brother, Richard Lord Howe, as commander of the British fleet in North America. See Ira D. Gruber, “Richard Lord Howe: Admiral As Peacemaker,” in George A. Billias, ed., George Washington’s Opponents: British Generals and Admirals in the American Revolution (New York: William Morrow, 1969), pp. 235–41.

14

Suppressing Tories in Rhode Island and Connecticut

While the Tories stood disunited and lacking firm British leadership, the revolutionaries in colony after colony struck with keen efficiency and dispatch to disarm the actual and potential traitors in their midst. In Massachusetts, support for the Revolution was so ardent and widespread that there was little organized Tory opposition, and the local revolutionary committees could work their will on individual Tories, unchecked. Most Massachusetts Tories were concentrated in the west, in the towns of the upper Connecticut River valley, including Amherst, Hatfield, and especially Deerfield. Other concentrations were to be found in the town of Worcester (which was, however, predominantly revolutionary) and among the Baptists of the town of Ashfield. Tories were particularly numerous among the royal judges and bureaucrats, and it has been estimated that fully half the lawyers in western Massachusetts were Tories. However, no special measures had to be taken against the Massachusetts Tories since they were few in number relative to the total population.

Toryism was much more threatening in Rhode Island, where Newport abounded in Loyalists. Particularly embarrassing was Rhode Island’s Gov. Joseph Wanton, who became an active Tory and urged the Rhode Island Assembly to seek a separate peace with England. In June 1775, the powerful assembly, moving toward deposing Wanton, quickly forbade the oath of office from being administered to him, and commissioned militia officers without his signature. In November, it deposed Wanton as governor and replaced him with the radical Nicholas Cooke of Samuel Ward’s old faction.

Throughout 1775, Rhode Island, particularly Newport, suffered from the plunder of a fleet of British warships in lower Narragansett Bay commanded by Capt. James Wallace. Wallace disrupted and plundered Rhode Island’s foreign trade and shipping and continually threatened Newport with fire and destruction if the citizens did not furnish food and supplies to the British army and fleet. Wallace finally did shell the defenseless town of Bristol and thoroughly plundered and partially burned Jamestown in 1775.

Eventually, the months of British terror and imposed starvation took their toll; the people of Newport began to flee the city. By early November, nearly half of its citizens—largely women and children—had fled northward from the city. Most of these were rebels, so the revolutionary morale of Newport—never high at best—was weakened still further. With the consent of the Rhode Island government and the Continental Congress, Newport agreed in the autumn of 1775 to supply the British fleet with provisions and to withdraw the colony’s militia from the town.

In the meanwhile, however, the Rhode Island Assembly intensified its ardor to take stern measures against the Tories; thus it decreed the punishment of death and confiscation of property for anyone betraying the cause to the enemy or providing him with supplies—the Newport agreement, of course, excepted. In December, Rhode Island authorities, alarmed at growing Tory power in Newport and fearful of a British attack from Boston, begged Washington for help. Washington sent down his best man, General Lee, with a handful of troops. Lee heartened the rebels and thoroughly frightened the Tories, enforcing upon them a public oath in support of the Continental Congress and arresting three Tories who refused to take it. His energetic activities at the end of the year, including arrests of Tory leaders and issuance of mass loyalty oaths, succeeded in cowing the Loyalists in Newport.

Tory opposition to the Revolution in New England centered in southwestern Connecticut, in sharp contrast to the fierce revolutionary fervor of the bulk of that colony. Indeed, at the end of 1775, Connecticut became the first colony to enact a systematic body of law against Tories, including such severe punishment as forfeiture of all property and three years’ imprisonment. For the first time in America, serving the king was officially branded a crime to be severely punished. Connecticut’s fervor was such that it was the best place to imprison Tories from neighboring provinces. One of the principal prison sites in the colonies was the dank, abandoned copper mine at Simsbury. The New Haven Town Meeting opposed taking up arms against Britain, and the meetings of Litchfield and Danbury condemned the Continental Congress. In Reading and New Milford, the majority of the inhabitants went so far as to swear to Loyalist oaths. The most acute Tory threat to Connecticut appeared in May 1775, when the bulk of the Waterbury militia, officers and enlisted men alike, declared their refusal to follow the policy advised by the Continental Congress. This threat was swiftly and efficiently countered by a secretly conducted night raid upon southwestern Connecticut by several hundred Whig militiamen from revolutionary eastern Connecticut. The Tories of the entire area were disarmed by the raiders, and a dozen Tory leaders were taken prisoner.

15

Suppressing Tories in New York

New York, as we have indicated, was a hotbed of Toryism, and even the Whigs were dominated by highly conservative oligarchs. The colony was therefore held in understandable suspicion by the other colonies, and Isaac Sears, the leading New York radical who had left in disgust for Connecticut, was one of the first to realize that any radical action in New York would have to be accomplished from outside its borders. In late November, Sears, appointed a military commander by the Connecticut Assembly, collected 100 men from Connecticut and conducted a daring raid into New York City, smashing the Tory print shops. They seized three leading Westchester Tories, including the Reverend Samuel Seabury, and hauled them back to New Haven.

Only Suffolk County in eastern Long Island, part of Ulster County, and New York City were largely revolutionary, but even in those places the action meted out to the local Tories was negligible. Indeed, of 104 merchant members of the Chamber of Commerce of New York City, no fewer than 78 were Tories. Westchester County was largely Tory, and Dutchess County predominantly so. Indeed, in Dutchess, the Loyalists armed themselves openly, condemned the Continental Congress, interfered with the regular militia, and openly enlisted men for the British armed forces. Leading the Tories were the rivermen, who used their boats to convey enlistees to the British forces and threatened to carry the leading rebels off as well. During October 1775, many Tories of the lower Hudson valley were planning to join the British forces. Some, in the Peekskill area, tried to rise up in arms, but were quickly disarmed by the local militia.

The heavily Tory Staten Island sent no delegates to the provincial congress and was embargoed by the adjoining area of New Jersey for its “unfriendly disposition toward the liberties of America.” But the staunchest Tory region in New York was Queens County, covering most of western Long Island. The Queens towns not only refused to send delegates to the provincial congress, but passed Loyalist resolutions in defiance of the Revolution. In the November 1775 elections to the provincial congress, the freeholders of Queens County voted by three and a half to one against sending a delegate. The following month, the bulk of the county’s voters declared their neutrality in the war and decided to arm in their own defense. The British fleet proved more than willing to supply them with arms. Rising Tory activity in Queens so alarmed even such conservatives as Jay and McDougall that the latter held it imperative to disarm the Tories of the county. Even the conservative provincial congress recommended embargoing those counties that continued to refuse to send any delegates. However, the congress refused to agree to the urgings of its Committee of Safety to disarm all the province’s Tories.

The Continental Congress, however, angrily resolved to smash this resistance movement, and declared the virtual outlawry of Queens County, denouncing its citizens as “incapable of resolving to live and die free men.” It declared that the Queens Tories should be disarmed, the dangerous ones imprisoned, and the names of all be published throughout the country. No inhabitant of Queens was to be allowed to leave the county without a passport issued by the New York Committee of Safety. It was clear, however, that any chastening of Queens Tories would have to be accomplished from outside the province. Under the Continental Congress’ direction, Nathaniel Hurd of New Jersey was sent into New York with 1,200 men in late January 1776. Hurd succeeded in disarming 600 armed but disorganized Queens Tories without a fight. Seventeen Tory ringleaders were marched off to prison in Philadelphia.

Succeeding Hurd was that great scourge of Tories and Toryism, Gen. Charles Lee, increasingly in use as a radical military trouble-shooter. With the Canadian campaign heading toward defeat and the siege of Boston moving towards victory, it was becoming ever more clear that the next problem was the expected transfer of the British army from Boston to some more congenial spot on the Atlantic seaboard. Probably they would pick New York City. From there they might, in a combined pincers movement with forces in Canada, try to split the colonies in two, and riddled with Tories and neo-Tories as it was, New York might prove a hospitable haven for the British troops. Lee was among the first to press for more radical and vigorous measures against the British and the Tories. By the summer of 1775 he was advocating the independence of America and wondered “why in the name of Satan” New York’s Governor Tryon had not been seized. During the autumn, Lee urged McDougall to seize Tryon and to inform the British naval captain in New York harbor that, if he bombarded the city, “the first house he sets on fire shall be the funeral pile of his Excellency [Tryon].” In short, Tryon should be held as hostage for British good behavior. In October 1775, Lee pioneered in proposing two radical steps: that the war be partly financed by the confiscation of Tory property, and that American ports be thrown open to all European commerce, defiantly shedding the last American allegiance to the British laws of trade.

In early January 1776, deeply worried about New York, Lee urged Washington to allow him to raise a body of Connecticut volunteers and Jersey militia in order to cleanse New York City of Tories and to fortify it. Washington hesitated for political reasons, but finally agreed when John Adams approved the plan. Lee promptly went to Connecticut and there collected 1,200 men recruited by Isaac Sears, whom Lee hailed and picked as his assistant for the expedition with the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Approaching the border, Lee was met by hysterical pleas not to cross into the city, lest the British navy bombard it. He characteristically replied that, if they did, “the first house set in flames by their guns shall be the funeral pile of some of their best friends.” His arrival in New York in early February coincided with the arrival of British Gen. Sir Henry Clinton in the harbor with several hundred troops. Lee took command and successfully threatened the British that opening fire on the town would mean the death of 100 Tories. He also cut off the supplies that the New Yorkers had been generously furnishing the British.

The New York Provincial Congress protested with particular bitterness at the hard treatment Lee was meting out to the Tories. It is curious that the congress took time out in the midst of a dire revolutionary crisis and a fight for survival to complain about the fact that the Tory Samuel Gale had been imprisoned by Lee in Connecticut and his property invaded. Or perhaps it is not so curious, when we reflect that Gale was an English surveyor, allied to the landed New York oligarch and highly conservative Whig, James Duane. Lee paid no attention to the carping. Instead, he sent out the eager Isaac Sears to tame the Tories of Queens County. Sears swept through Queens denouncing the New York Congress and forcing a strong public oath of allegiance upon everyone. All noncompliers were arrested and sent to Connecticut. Lee was soon called elsewhere, but his activities did have the effect of shoring up the Patriots and chastening the Tories. An indigenous New York Left could not be restored, however, and the raid provoked such a storm of conservative New York protest that the Continental Congress and army weakly withdrew from suppressing Tories.

New York was where the British first tried to exploit another contradiction within American society: the disaffected Indians on the frontier. In any conflict between English and Americans, the tendency of the Indians would be to side with Britain, for it was the land-grabbing American settlers who constituted their supreme enemy, whereas the British had played a relatively mollifying role with the Indians, for example, in decreeing the Proclamation Line of 1763. The most that the Americans could hope for, therefore, was Indian neutrality in the war; it was that promise that General Schuyler had gained from the Iroquois in the summer of 1775.

Fortunately for the American cause, Sir William Johnson, Indian trader, superintendent of Indian affairs at Albany, and uncrowned king of the Iroquois, had died in 1774. But Johnson’s nephew and son-in-law, Col. Guy Johnson, succeeded him, and William’s son, Sir John Johnson, ruled an enormous estate in up-country Tryon County with the aid of a fierce private army of his tenant Highland Scots. Furthermore, Tryon County, covering most of up-country New York, was predominantly Tory, and rumors persisted of a plan for the Johnson Highlanders to join pro-British Iroquois and march down the Hudson valley, raising Tories as they came. But the ardor of the several thousand pro-British Iroquois was dampened by the British themselves in the spring of 1775, when General Carleton, fearful of provoking an American invasion of Canada, advised them to lie low for the time being. And in January 1776, General Schuyler took several thousand militiamen into Tryon County in a surprise attack, thoroughly disarming Johnson’s Scots and shipping six of their leaders to prison in Philadelphia. Thus, by early 1776, the rebels, with the use of surprise and skilled organization, had managed to disarm the Tories in the areas of their greatest support.

Many of the Highland Scots, along with most of the other Tories of upper New York, fled to Canada, there to work for vengeance and return. Back home, their property was confiscated, and the Tories who remained behind were imprisoned, flogged, and sometimes executed. Sir John Johnson managed to hold Fort Stanwix, at the extreme western point of the Mohawk River, until late spring of 1776, when he was forced to abandon his properties and flee to Canada.

16

Suppressing Tories in the Middle Colonies

New Jersey had nearly as great a proportion of Loyalists as New York, and southern New Jersey was notoriously loyal to Great Britain. Its royal governor, William Franklin, illegitimate son of Benjamin, was particularly active in the British cause. In the spring of 1775, he tried to persuade the New Jersey Assembly to negotiate a separate peace with Britain. Failing this, he continued to organize Tory sentiment. Prodded by a series of petitions organized by him, the assembly vehemently instructed its delegates to the Continental Congress against any attempt at independence. Indeed, Franklin was almost able to induce the assembly to beg the king for peace, and only lengthy harangues by moderate delegates from the Continental Congress were able to dissuade New Jersey from such separate action. It was only in June 1776 that Franklin was finally arrested by the New Jersey Assembly and sent to prison in the recesses of Connecticut.

Apart from Franklin’s political activity, by the spring of 1776 the province was plagued with imminent insurrections in Monmouth, Hunterdon, and Bergen counties. Negroes were reported arming themselves to join the British cause and later to be intriguing with British prisoners of war.

In conservative Pennsylvania, the Tory cause had been crippled by Joseph Galloway’s decision not to run for the Second Continental Congress and his withdrawal from political life. The bulk of the Tories continued to be the Quakers in the Philadelphia area. The Philadelphia Meeting sent dispatches to Quakers throughout the middle colonies urging them to abstain from all forms of rebellion and to remember that it was their religious duty to “honor the King.” From their old anarchic individualism, the Quakers had now evolved into a nonviolent bulwark of state and crown; it was not their business, the meeting warned, “to plot and contrive the ruin or overturn of any” government. The Toryism of the Quakers remained passive, however, and there was no worry about their taking up arms against the Revolution.

In Maryland, a sharp geographical split prevailed, with the tobacco-growing regions on the western shore of Chesapeake Bay being staunchly revolutionary, while the maritime Eastern Shore was predominantly Tory. In heavily Tory Worcester County on the Atlantic Coast, the Loyalists, led by a Hugh Kelly, obtained arms during the fall of 1775 from a vessel of Lord Dunmore, royal governor of Virginia. Meeting in secret and signing a joint oath, 1,900 Tories formed an association, met for military drill, declared themselves for the king and “against Boston,” and pledged themselves to resist any conscription into the Continental Army. They also managed to seize some local Whigs and hustle them aboard Dunmore’s ship in a futile quest for recruits.

In adjoining Somerset County, one Isaac Atkinson led over half the local militia into a counter-revolutionary force for the king, and he threatened one day to “fight it out.” He also denounced the Revolution as a Presbyterian plot. Several companies of militia in Caroline and Dorchester counties on the Eastern Shore laid down their arms in defiance of the revolutionary cause.

The colony of Delaware, almost wholly on the Chesapeake Peninsula, was riddled with Tory sentiment; by the spring of 1776, 1,000 Tories were under arms in Sussex County in the south; and in northern New Castle County, British ships on the Delaware River were regularly furnished supplies by the inhabitants.

17

Virginia Battles Lord Dunmore

Virginia had only a few thousand Tories at most, but they were concentrated in a few strategic areas. Aided by Lord Dunmore, the highly energetic royal governor, they gave the American rebels a good deal of trouble. Apart from the Tory predominance on the Eastern Shore, the Loyalists were concentrated among the Scottish merchants in Virginia’s commercial city of Norfolk and on the extreme northwestern frontier around Pittsburgh. After the rejection by the Virginia Assembly of Lord North’s conciliation scheme in June 1775, Dunmore fled with over a hundred British regulars to a British ship in the harbor of congenial Norfolk.

Toryism was strong though not predominant on the American frontiers, undoubtedly in part because of a suspicion that the American governments might not be able or eager to supply armed forces to push back the Indians. Toryism on the Virginia frontier was concentrated around Pittsburgh (now in Pennsylvania), near where Fort Pitt had been dismantled three years before. Under Dunmore, Virginia, during 1773 and 1774, had aggressively expanded its territory. Dunmore had seized control of the Pittsburgh region, arresting and expelling Pennsylvania officials and creating a new West Augusta County there for Virginia. Furthermore, in “Dunmore’s War,” the governor had defied the Proclamation Line of 1763 and had driven the Shawnee Indians out of Kentucky.

When the Revolutionary War began, John Connolly, a physician, Tory militia official, and faithful ally of Dunmore and Britain, conceived an audacious plan. Visiting Dunmore on his ship during August 1775, Connolly brought with him a pledge of loyalty to Dunmore and the crown from several hundred inhabitants of West Augusta County, including the Indian traders Alexander McKee and Simon Girty. More important, Dunmore and Connolly agreed to the latter’s scheme (the “Connolly Plot”), in which Dunmore would raise a troop of Tories in the east, while Connolly, made a lieutenant colonel, would winter at the British fort of Detroit. There Connolly would form a regiment of British regulars and Tory militia into the Royal Foresters, after which he and McKee, with a troop of Indians, would march up the Ohio and seize Pittsburgh. Dunmore would march west, and Connolly east, perhaps enlisting oppressed indentured servants as he went, to meet at Alexandria in northern Virginia, cutting the American colonies in two. In early October a peace conference at Pittsburgh between Indians and representatives of Virginia and Pennsylvania had resulted in an agreement that provided for Indian neutrality in exchange for an American pledge to maintain the Proclamation Line of 1763 as the limit of western settlement. This agreement defied the fact that the line had already been rendered de facto obsolete by the white victory of Dunmore’s War over the Shawnees and by the subsequent beginning of the settlement of Kentucky. McKee and Connolly were agreeable to this arrangement as a short-term tactic until their proposed campaign could begin.

It was an ambitious and undeniably unworkable scheme; but at any rate, it never had a chance, as Connolly and two aides were arrested shortly afterward by alert militia at Frederick, Maryland. Connolly was brought before the Continental Congress for trial and promptly imprisoned. As for McKee, he was soon confined to Pittsburgh by the local Committee of Correspondence, headed by George Croghan, for corresponding with an official of the British army.

The collapse of the Connolly Plot left Lord Dunmore with his forces based upon the sea. For the first time in the war, the British now found themselves a small armed force facing a large, unorganized, hostile population. Except for the initial shock at Concord, the British forces had encountered regular American armies (as at Boston) or fought in friendly or neutral territory (in Canada), but now Lord Dunmore was facing the essence of counter-revolutionary warfare. Since it is waged by relatively small though heavily armed forces of the government or its supporters against the mass of the civilian population, counter-revolutionary warfare must needs be mobile, swift, and devoted to hit-and-run raiding. Even so, it is a grave mistake, made by many analysts and historians, to confuse this kind of raiding with true guerrilla warfare.

Guerrilla warfare must rest on the active support of the bulk of the populace; the guerrilla troop is the armed spearhead of the revolutionary masses. Its fire is directed in pinpoint fashion against government troops and installations, and sometimes against their relatively few allies and sympathizers. Its aim is to dislodge the rulers from the backs of the people. Its long-run chances of victory are excellent. But counter-revolutionary raiding is necessarily conducted in wild and haphazard fashion, by an armed minority against the bulk of the people. Its aim is not simply to dislodge a ruling group, but to spread terror among the people, to injure, harass, and disrupt the economy. Its long-run chances of victory are slight. The strategies proper to the two types of warfare reinforce these differences. The more scrupulously the guerrillas refrain from harming the civilian population, the more solemnly and securely the populace will support them, while the more vigorous the counter-revolutionary terror raids, the more bitterly hostile will the populace become. Short-term successes for guerrillas therefore promote victory in the long run; short-term gains for counter-revolutionary bands anger the people still further and insure long-run defeat.

It was this sort of harassing force that Lord Dunmore established on the Virginia coast. Dunmore began in June 1775 with 100 regulars and a few ships anchored off Norfolk, where he was kept supplied by the preponderantly Tory town, dominated by Scots merchants and their factors and clerks. When in early October Dunmore was angered by rebel newspapers in Norfolk, he sent a detachment of soldiers ashore to seize the press and paper as well as the persons of two of the printers. The local militia was called out to stop the outrage, but the apathetic militiamen failed to lift a finger to protect the printers. The mayor and aldermen of Norfolk sent the governor a feeble pro forma protest; so mild, indeed, was Norfolk’s indignation, that shortly afterward a Town Meeting invited Dunmore to occupy the town.

The Virginia rebels decided to take action against renegade Norfolk, and soon 300 local militia of adjoining Norfolk and Princess Anne counties met at Kempsville, in Princess Anne. Dunmore, adding some Negroes and Scottish clerks to his forces, marched against the rebels. The Americans skillfully trapped him in an ambush, but they fled in panic at the sight of the British. Greatly emboldened by his victory, Dunmore proclaimed martial law on November 7 and set up the king’s standard for the colony. In a few days, 300 citizens took an oath of allegiance to the crown at Kempsville, as did 500 more at Norfolk. Soon, 3,000 took the oath in Princess Anne, Norfolk, and Nansemand counties, the inhabitants of Princess Anne pledging themselves to support Dunmore and the crown to the last drop of their blood.

On November 17, with imagination and daring lacking in his fellow British commanders, Lord Dunmore decided to exacerbate the contradictions in American society by offering freedom to any Negro slaves who would join his armed forces, thereby permanently enraging the conservative slave-holding Virginia planters who would probably not have supported the British in any case. Soon he was able to organize two regiments of Tory militia, the Queen’s Own Loyal Virginia Regiment and the Ethiopian Regiment, composed of runaway slaves. The conservative Committee of Safety leading the rebel cause at Williamsburg was now finally forced to act, sending two regiments of militia against Norfolk with the aid of a regiment of North Carolina militia. The rebels, over 900 men led by Col. William Woodford, faced Dunmore’s 500 at Great Bridge, near Norfolk, on December 11, 1775. Dunmore, in the foolish European manner exemplified by Howe at Bunker Hill, chose to make a direct, massed, frontal assault on the entrenched rebel positions. Rebel musket and rifle fire thoroughly smashed the British as they came forward, and the British suffered sixty casualties, while only one rebel was wounded. Dunmore, decisively defeated, fell back to his ships, and Norfolk was recaptured by the rebel forces.

The Virginia army, on occupying the Norfolk area, recommended that the entire population of the region be forcibly removed to the interior, to prevent any trade or intercourse with Dunmore’s ships. While this recommendation was never really put into effect, a reign of terror was launched against the Tories in the area. Their homes destroyed and plantations seized, the bulk of them fled the colony. Some went to Scotland, others to England and the West Indies. Many joined the British army in Boston.

The Tories were angered at being so callously abandoned by Lord Dunmore, who paid little attention to them and treated even those who fled to his ship with scant consideration. The case of the Sprowle family is a particularly poignant one. One of the wealthiest men in Virginia and for several decades president of the Court of Virginia Merchants, the ardently Tory Andrew Sprowle fled to Dunmore’s ship as the rebels entered Norfolk. The revolutionaries destroyed his urban properties and confiscated his plantation. This was too much for old Sprowle, who died soon after. His wife Katherine, also on Dunmore’s ship, obtained permission from Dunmore to visit her son, imprisoned as a Tory in a North Carolina jail. When she landed, the Williamsburg Committee of Safety refused to allow her the visit and sent her back, but now Dunmore cruelly refused to let her board the vessel. Booted back and forth between the two sides, and not allowed a resting place, she was finally able to obtain passage to Scotland. She was placed on a modest British pension list, but was arbitrarily cut off by Lord Dunmore, while her Virginia plantations were sequestered and sold by the Virginia government.

On New Year’s Day, Dunmore received well over a hundred regulars and much arms from Boston and St. Augustine. Emboldened by the reinforcements, he promptly shelled Norfolk, deliberately firing warehouses on the docks used for cover by the rebel forces. The revolutionaries used this incident as a convenient cover for brutally putting a large portion of Tory Norfolk to the torch. It is estimated that Dunmore’s naval fire that day destroyed fifty houses valued at over 3,600 pounds sterling, but that the rebels deliberately destroyed nearly nine hundred houses valued at over 110,000 pounds sterling. In February, the ruling Virginia Convention made it official; at its order, the rest of Norfolk—over four hundred houses—was deliberately and savagely burned to prevent Dunmore from ever again using it as a base. Thus did these “moderate” revolutionaries in a “consensus” America pass a harsh collective sentence upon the people of Norfolk. Yet, in the propaganda war, the rebels were able to lay the blame for the burning of the city upon Dunmore, who, the previous October, had desperately but unsuccessfully tried to burn the coastal town of Hampton as punishment for the people’s burning of a grounded British warship.

Outside of Norfolk, the Virginia rebels tended to be more lenient, and in December 1775 the Virginia assembly offered pardon from arrest and confiscation if the Tories would take an oath of allegiance to the new Virginia government. However, enforcement often differed in accordance with race. Thus, in May 1776, thirteen whites and twelve Negroes were arrested for Tory activity and sent to Williamsburg for trial. The Virginia Convention tried the cases in June; the Negroes were sent to forced labor in Virginia’s lead mines, while the whites were either freed or given parole.

Ousted from his Norfolk base and failing to rouse the west, Dunmore intensified his plunder and terror raids up and down Chesapeake Bay and along the Virginia coast. He ardently intercepted shipping, seized tobacco, and burned plantations, and many Negroes seized the opportunity to supply the British and to join Dunmore’s forces, naturally enraging still further even the most conservative planters. All in all, nearly two thousand Negroes ran away to join his fleet, even though only the Negro soldiers, and not their families, had been offered freedom. The slave exodus from coastal Warwick and Northampton counties was particularly heavy, but a severe smallpox epidemic decimated their ranks and ruined their potential effectiveness.

His troops thus ravaged and his supplies running low, Dunmore decided in the summer of 1776 to give up and join the British fleet in the north. Several hundred of the healthiest remaining Negroes were taken north with the fleet, but Dunmore perfidiously shipped many others into slavery in Florida and the West Indies.

18

Battling Tories in the South

North Carolina confronted concentrations of Tories among Highland Scots in the Wilmington-Fayetteville area, who owed their land to the crown’s largesse and who included a number of retired British army officers. There were also strong but not dominant clusters of Tories in the back country. Perhaps fully half of the North Carolina population was Tory or at least lukewarm to the rebel cause. Furthermore, fear of Negro uprisings aiding the British led the North Carolina Provincial Congress in the spring of 1776 to urge all slave owners on the south side of the Cape Fear River to remove far into the interior all slaves capable of bearing arms for the British. In Wilmington, Negroes began to escape in droves into the woods, and whites enforced a nine o’clock curfew on them.

In January 1776, Josiah Martin, the royal governor of North Carolina, who had fled to a British warship, decided to mobilize the Tories of the province. Overoptimistically expecting 9,000 Tories to rise in arms, Martin urged the Highlanders and all other Tories to rally in arms for the king and march to the sea to join him and expected reinforcements from Great Britain.

Soon, 1,600 Tories gathered under the veteran British general Donald MacDonald at Cross Creek (now Fayetteville). The Tory response was weakened, however, by the failure of Governor Martin to sail his ship past enemy fire to arrive at the Cross Creek rendezvous. Reaching Moore’s Creek Bridge near Wilmington on February 27, the Tories encountered a smaller force of 1,000 militiamen under Cols. Richard Caswell and John Lillington. The Americans held strongly entrenched positions, but in the absence of the ailing MacDonald, the new commander, the young and reckless Col. Donald McLeod, was able to override the advice of older officers. Once again, as in Virginia, the Tories hurled themselves heedlessly but in orthodox fashion against entrenched rebel positions and were crushed even more effectively than at Great Bridge. The Tories suffered thirty casualties, whereas the revolutionaries enjoyed the incredible casualty rate of none killed and only two slightly wounded.

The surviving Tories fled inland, pursued by relentless bands of American rebels, who captured no fewer than 850 of the enemy. Among the killed were Colonel McLeod, and among the captured, General Mac-Donald and the political leader of the Highland Scots, Maj. Allan Mac-Donald. Armed Toryism in North Carolina had suffered a crippling blow.

After commiserating with their families and pledging them its protection, the North Carolina Provincial Congress decided to disperse the hundreds of captured Tories to all the provinces, so as to guard against their “pernicious influence.” The rank-and-file prisoners were shipped to Maryland and Virginia, the leaders to remote Philadelphia. The people of North Carolina were solemnly warned that the treatment meted out to the prisoners would largely depend on the good behavior of the remaining Tories of the province.

The year before, during the summer and fall of 1775, the English government had worked out a plausible plan: British troops would invade the South from the sea, and the charismatic presence of the redcoats would inspire Tory risings by the Highland Scots and other Loyalists, to follow their royal governors, Dunmore and Martin. British troops were to embark from Ireland to be led by General Clinton, who would join the expedition at Boston. However, bureaucratic bumbling and adverse weather delayed the expedition until April 1776, by which time Dunmore had been routed off the continent and Martin’s premature Tory uprising crushed. When Clinton arrived near the Cape Fear River in mid-April, he was forced to abandon his projected invasion of the South.

Tory disaffection was even stronger in South Carolina than in its northern neighbor, for there both British support and neutralism abounded among low-country merchants and planters as well as the back-country frontiersmen. The revolutionist low-country planters were in constant fear of pro-British insurrections by the numerous Negro slaves, and a Negro named Jerry was executed in the summer of 1775 for saying he would help pilot British warships into Charleston. Furthermore, John Stuart, the British Indian agent in the South, was plotting to raise the powerful Cherokee tribe in attack against the frontier settlements. This buildup was originally part of General Gage’s plan for a concerted Indian attack on the entire American frontier, but the arrest of Connolly in Virginia and McKee in Pittsburgh in October 1775 and the disarming of Johnson in New York in January 1776 wrecked that plan. Even so, Stuart and the Cherokees were still all too dangerous.

Despite the great potential of Tory strength in South Carolina, lack of intelligent organization crippled its impact. In particular, the royal governor, Lord Campbell, instead of going to the back country to rouse his supporters, chose to conduct operations from British warships in Charleston Harbor. Seizing the opportunity presented by Campbell’s caution, the rebels of Charleston sent their leader, William Henry Drayton, and the Reverend William Tennent, Charleston’s leading Presbyterian minister, to the back country in August 1775 to organize the rebel forces there. By September, two large contending back-country forces had gathered at Ninety-Six, 1,000 rebel militiamen under Drayton confronting a larger Tory force under Col. Thomas Fletchall. Remarkably, Drayton and Tennent managed to sweet-talk Fletchall into signing a “Treaty of Neutrality” and to disband. The treaty pledged the neutrality of Fletchall and his men and even partially acknowledged the authority of the South Carolina Provincial Congress.

Soon, however, the Tories rose again, led this time by Robert Cunningham. Over 1,800 of them gathered at Ninety-Six, where in mid-November they unsuccessfully attacked a fort manned by one-third their number.

In the meanwhile, the South Carolina Council of Safety, the arm of the provincial congress entrusted with executive powers, decided to crush the Tories posthaste, and sent Col. Richard Richardson to do the job. Richardson sped westward, collecting revolutionary militia from both North and South Carolina as he went. By late November, he had amassed over 4,000 men. Richardson’s force crushed all Tory resistance before it, and hundreds of Tories were disarmed and compelled to pledge peaceful behavior in the future. An amnesty the following March completed the rout of the South Carolina Loyalists. South Carolina, any more than its sister province to the north, could not now lend Tory assistance to an invasion by General Clinton.

In Georgia, which had been the colony least enthusiastic for the opposition to Great Britain, armed Tory resistance was at first avoided by the very mildness of the Whig response to the Revolution. Indeed, only the rebel enclave of St. John’s sent a delegate to the Second Continental Congress. The opening of hostilities at Lexington and Concord, however, coupled with the angry boycott of Georgia by the other colonies, could only push Georgian opinion into a more active course. The development also advanced the fortunes of the Liberty Boys, who, on hearing the news, broke into the public powder magazine. Realizing that Gov. James Wright’s power could only be nullified and eliminated by force, the Liberty Boys organized an effective “Savannah Mob,” headed by young Joseph Habersham, son of the president of the Georgia Council. This spearhead of the liberty militants in the province consisted of a cross section of the town’s activists: aristocrats, laborers, and town rowdies alike. The blows of the mob soon wrecked the authority and morale of the royal government, and Governor Wright soon saw that his cause was lost; this was no longer his snug Tory Georgia. This campaign was capped in early July 1775 by Habersham and others openly and boldly carrying off the government’s store of munitions.

On June 13, several hundred Liberty Boys assembled at Savannah, put up a Liberty Tree, established a Savannah committee to enforce the Continental Association, which Georgia had never joined, and called a provincial congress for the following month. This congress, meeting on July 4, ratified the program and circulated a defense association around Savannah. The congress became the de facto legislature of the colony and a council of safety its chosen executive; the joining of the other American colonies in revolt was particularly symbolized by Georgia’s finally choosing a full slate of delegates to the Continental Congress. Soon the provincial congress took over rule of the militia and the courts in Georgia. Thus the Georgia rebels were fully occupied during 1775 with catching up to the other American colonies.

In mid-January, British warships appeared at the mouth of the Savannah River to aid Governor Wright, who had been shorn of all authority by the rebel provincial congress. The Council of Safety promptly decided to seize Wright and other officials to prevent them from rallying the Georgia Tories. He was arrested by Habersham, but a few weeks later he escaped to flee to a British warship. Georgia Toryism, like its counterparts in the other southern provinces, had been outmaneuvered and effectively suppressed.