Conceived in Liberty (219 page)

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.

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.