10

WAR IN THE LOYAL PROVINCE NEW YORK, APRIL 1776-DECEMBER 1776

This mob … searched the whole town in pursuit of tories … they placed them upon sharp rails with one leg on each side; each rail was carried upon the shoulders of two tall men, with a man on each side to keep the poor wretch straight and fixed in his seat. In this manner were numbers of these poor people … paraded through the most public and conspicuous streets in the town.

—A Loyalist watches Patriots occupy New York City¹

When General Washington arrived in New York City from Boston in April 1776, the city was under the control of Patriots. But Royal Navy warships swayed at anchor in the harbor, and the colony was clinging to its Tory reputation: It was “the Loyal Province” and New York City was “Torytown.”² The men aboard those ships, including Royal Governor William Tryon, were eating food sold to them and delivered to them by enterprising New York merchants. Tories were routinely commuting between ship and shore.

Washington, outraged, learned that Tryon, seven months before, had won an agreement from New York Patriots, who allowed provisions to be delivered to HMS Asia, a sixty-four-gun warship intimidating the city. By the time Washington brought the war to New York, Tryon had followed the example of other royal governors bygoing to sea. Fearing kidnapping, he had fled first to a Royal Navy warship and then to the British supply ship HMS Duchess of Gordon in New York harbor.³ He continued to get water and provisions, along with visits from spies and royal placemen. He was running the Tory underground while the Patriots’ provincial congress was the government.

Washington assumed that Tryon was supervising a network of spies and passing their information on to British military officials. Long after the war General Gates’s papers yielded a letter from Tryon containing detailed information about Continental Army plans. What Washington did not immediately discover was that his own fate—a decision to either kidnap or kill him—was being discussed by plotters who boarded Tryon’s ship as easily as they would have stepped onto a harbor ferry.⁴

Washington issued a proclamation that denounced the “sundry base and wicked persons” who profited from dealing with the British ships, declaring that “if any person or persons shall hereafter presume to have, hold, or to continue to carry on such intercourse, or any kind of correspondence whatsoever, or furnish and supply the said ships of war, and other vessels in such service with provisions and necessaries of any kind, that he or they, so offending, will be deemed and considered as an enemy or enemies.”⁵

The commander in chief was combating the double standard of the New York Patriots: harshly treating Loyalists in general while exempting certain merchants from anti-Loyalist policies. The unwieldy, jittery provincial congress had 119 members; at least 19 were Tories, enough of a division to slow down the Patriots’ ability to govern.⁶

Washington had seen for himself the Tory-Patriot split in New York when he passed through the city in June 1775 on his way to Cambridge to take command of the Continental Army. On the same day Governor Tryon, who had been on leave in England, happened to return to New York. In the afternoon, when Washington stepped off the boat that carried him to New York from New Jersey, members of the provincial congress and leaders of both Tory and Patriot factions greeted him with huzzahs and flowery speeches.

A few hours later a boat from Tryon’s ship deposited the governor in Manhattan, where he received huzzahs from many of the same people who had welcomed Washington. The two generals accompanying Washington—Charles Lee and Philip Schuyler—joined in the welcome, shaking Tryon’s hand and wishing him long tenure in his royal post.

The next day Washington, Lee, and their entourage went on their way to war while Schuyler remained behind to arrange for the forwarding of ammunition and other Rebel supplies to Albany for use in the imminent invasion of Canada. Schuyler was lodging with his cousin, whose house was across the street from Tryon’s. Donning his splendid new blue-and-buff uniform of the Continental Army, Schuyler decided to call on Tryon. The governor, not wishing to continue the choreography of make-believe, coolly rejected the visit, saying that he did not know anyone named General Schuyler.⁷

“Keep a watchful eye upon Governor Tryon,” Washington had told Schuyler, adding that he should also “watch the movements of the Indian Agent and prevent, as far as you can, the effect of his influence to our prejudice with the Indians.”⁸ This was a reference to Col. Guy Johnson, the powerful British viceroy to the Indians who, even as Washington wrote his orders, was recruiting a Loyalist force along New York’s northern frontier.

Royal governors had shifted in 1771, Tryon of North Carolina replacing Lord Dunmore as governor of New York, and Dunmore moving to Virginia. Dunmore did not take the switch gracefully, for he believed that his noble title trumped Tryon’s mere military background and familial links with the British aristocracy.

Tryon liked New York, especially its Loyal Province status. He had been tough enough to shoot and hang dissident constituents in North Carolina, and he was ready to do the same if rebellion came to his new colonial post. Tryon had served as an officer in the elite Foot Guards and had been wounded in France during what the French and British called the Seven Years’ War. His sister was lady-in-waiting to Queen Charlotte, wife of King George. His wealthy wife was the daughter of a merchant who, because of his ties to the East India Company, had served as governor of the Bombay Colony.⁹

Before Tryon took over as governor, back in the Stamp Act days, New York Sons of Liberty had followed the lead of compatriots in Massachusetts. As soon as news of the Lexington and Concord battles reached New York City, the Sons had stoked the rebellion. They broke into the armory at City Hall, carrying off more than five hundred muskets, along with hundreds of bayonets and boxes of ball cartridges. They responded to a recommendation from the Continental Congress by convening a provincial congress. Acting as New York’s real government, the provincial congress moved aggressively at first, taking control of militias, manufacturing gunpowder, and even hiring gunsmiths to produce gun barrels, bayonets, and musket ramrods.¹⁰

But revolution in the New York Colony was slowed down by a large Tory presence. Adjoining New York City was another Loyalist stronghold: Queen’s County (which then encompassed what are now Queens, Brooklyn, Long Island’s Nassau County, and part of Suffolk County). In September 1775, two Patriot militias, ordered to enter the county to disarm the Tories, called off the mission as too dangerous. There were also large and militant Tory populations in Poughkeepsie, in Albany, and on the frontier of the New York—Canada border, where Col. Guy Johnson was ruling over an ever-growing and well-armed Loyalist realm.¹¹ By one estimate, half of the colony’s two hundred thousand people were Loyalists, most of whom kept their allegiance to themselves.¹²

In the region dominated by the great harbor of New York City, Tories had long wielded enormous influence, especially through the machinations of the De Lancey family. De Lancey Toryism evolved from political squabbling with Whigs to the commissioning of family members in Loyalist regiments that would bear the De Lancey name and carry it onto battlefields from New York to Yorktown. Oliver De Lancey, a member of the Governor’s Council, met with Tryon aboard the Duchess of Gordon as part of a floating Loyalist government, notonly preparing to resume power after a British victory but also mobilizing Tories to fight the Rebels in battle.¹³

The New York Patriots who had forced Tryon to leave dry land faced a complex task. In March 1776, for example, the Continental Congress recommended the disarming of all “who are notoriously disaffected to the cause of America, or who have not associated, and refuse to associate to defend by arms these United Colonies.” The New York Committee of Safety reacted by passing along its own recommendation to its Patriots: Ask for an oath to defend New York against the British “until the present unhappy controversy between the two countries shall be settled.” As for the disarming, the Committee of Safety mildly urged “all possible prudence and moderation.”¹⁴

Now came Washington and his ten thousand troops, introducing New Yorkers—both Patriots and Tories—to the reality of war in their colony.

In anticipation of a British assault, Washington’s troops built fortifications on the Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan, on Brooklyn Heights, and on the shores of Long Island. The defenses did not reassure New Yorkers. Nor did the Continental reinforcements, a motley force streaming in from Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and New Jersey. New Yorkers saw menace on all sides. The Continental Army’s invasion of Canada had failed, leaving a route for a British attack from the north. The geography of New York Harbor offered another threat: Washington did not have the ships needed to defend a city whose every shore lay open to the world’s mightiest navy.

Patriots beyond New York bristled at the lenience being shown British sympathizers in a city girding for war. Frustration inspired the taunting and torturing of Tories, especially by newly arrived troops from other colonies. “Here in town very unhappy and shocking scenes were exhibited,” Gustavus Shewkirk, a Loyalist who was a Moravian minister, wrote in his diary. “On Munday night some men called Tories were carried and hauled about through the streets, with candles forced to be held by them, or pushed in their faces, and their heads burned; but on Wednesday, in the open day, the scene was by far worse; several, and among them gentlemen, were carried on rails; some stripped naked and dreadfully abused. Some of the generals … had enough to do to quell the riot, and make the mob disperse.”¹⁵

In October 1775 the Continental Congress had made a drastic recommendation for Patriot governments like the New York provincial congress: “arrest and secure every person who, going at large, might, in their opinion endanger the safety of the colony or liberties of America.”¹⁶ Shortly later, Washington gave his endorsement to the Tory roundup in a letter to Jonathan Trumbull, governor of Connecticut, urging him to seize dangerous Tories in his state.¹⁷ Isaac (“King”) Sears, a volatile New York Patriot and somewhat of a provocateur, took it upon himself to carry out the arrest-and-secure order.

Sears went to Connecticut, rounded up about one hundred mounted Patriots, and led his posse across the border to arrest three leading New York Tories. One of them was the Reverend Samuel Seabury, rector of Saint Peter’s Anglican Church in Westchester (now The Bronx). He was known to be the anonymous author of Letters of a Westchester Farmer, in which he had written, “[I] f I must be enslaved, let it be by a KING at least, and not by a parcel of upstart, lawless committee-men. If I must be devoured, let me be devoured by the jaws of a lion, and not gnawed to death by rats and vermin!” He had joined with other New York Loyalists in a vow to support the king “at the hazard of our lives and properties.”¹⁸ To Sears, the Reverend Seabury was a major catch.

Seabury later complained that the Patriot raiders had pawed through his desk, thrust a bayonet through his daughter’s cap, and cut up the quilt she was making. Some of the raiders hauled Seabury and their two other captives off to prison in Connecticut. The rest had a new target: the printing shop of James Rivington, at the foot of Wall Street in Manhattan. They destroyed his press, and carried off his type. He called himself “Printer to the King’s Most Excellent Majesty” and published Rivingtons New-York Gazetteer, a pro-Tory newspaper that bore the royal arms on its masthead.¹⁹

Rather than cheer for the raid and the silencing of the Gazetteer, the New York Provincial Congress indignantly protested to the Connecticut governor, Jonathan Trumbull. Deciding to keep the peacebetween his state and New York, Trumbull ordered the release of the three prisoners.²⁰

While moving against public Tories like Seabury, neither the provincial congress nor Washington realized the size and effectiveness of the Tory underground that Tryon was running from the Duchess. Tryon directed an organization so well connected with Tory supporters ashore that a New York shoemaker could run a pick-up-and-deliver service repairing the shoes of Royal Navy sailors. Agents stationed on the Duchess routinely carried messages to and from prisoners held in Rebel jails.²¹

The Continental Army did not yet have a formal intelligence-gathering organization, but talkative prisoners can sometimes substitute for counterintelligence agents. On the evening of June 22 Lt. Col. David Mason wrote a terse report to his commanding officer, Maj. Gen. Henry Knox. “I just Recd Intelligence from a Gent in the City,” Mason said. He had been told that Lara Fraga, a Continental Army private jailed on charges of attempted counterfeiting, had important information. Fraga claimed that a number of men “have inlisted in the minesterall Troops,” as the British Army was sometimes called. Fraga, who was in an artillery unit commanded by Capt. Alexander Hamilton, said he would point out the men whom he knew had gone over to the British.²²

That jail-cell tip led to the discovery of a widespread plot whose mastermind was Tryon. His principal assistant was David Matthews, the Tory mayor of New York, described by a Tory writer as “a person low in estimation as a lawyer, profligate, abandoned, and dissipated, indigent, extravagant, and luxurious, over head and ears in debt, with a large family as extravagant and voluptuous as himself.”²³ When Continental officers and Patriot civilians began to unravel the plot, they found that Tryon’s key agent on board the Duchess was a “Mulotto Coloured Negro dressed in blue Cloathes.”²⁴

Few knew that the man in blue was John Thompson, a freeborn black servant of Edmund Fanning, Tryon’s private secretary and closefriend. Fanning had been a key aide to Tryon in North Carolina. As a corrupt judge, he was the type of royal magistrate who inspired the rise of the Regulators.²⁵ Tryon depended upon Thompson to pass out money and instructions to Matthews. The cash was used to bribe Continental soldiers and to buy weapons that were to be distributed to Tories when they rose against fellow Americans.

When the battle for New York began, the bribed soldiers were to change sides and fight for the British as guerrillas. They would blow up magazines, disrupt Continental Army strategic plans, and seize a battery of artillery—probably Hamilton’s—to turn the cannons against their comrades. A murky phase of the plot involved the kidnapping or assassination of officers, including Washington. Many aspects of the plot were kept secret at the time, presumably to prevent local Patriots from realizing how vulnerable Washington was and how susceptible Continental soldiers were to bribery.²⁶

At Washington’s request the provincial congress’s newly created Committee to Detect Conspiracies sent a detachment of troops to arrest Matthews and confiscate his papers. John Jay, the future chief justice of the Supreme Court, turned a Wall Street tavern into a hearing room and questioned witnesses rounded up by Continental soldiers. Isaac Ketchum, a jailed counterfeiter, testified that two soldiers, Sgt. Thomas Hickey and Pvt. Michael Lynch, had attempted to recruit him for the British. Like Fraga, they were in jail on suspicion of counterfeiting. As members of the Life Guard unit that protected Washington, they were uniquely placed for a kidnapping or assassination attempt.

Hickey, an Irish-born deserter from the British Army, was quickly charged with “exciting and joining in a mutiny and sedition, and of treacherously corresponding with, inlisting among and receiving pay from the enemies of the United American Colonies.” Apparently for security reasons, no mention was made of a plot to kidnap Washington or the plan to subvert as many as seven hundred American soldiers. Jay’s hearing implicated other soldiers and many Tory civilians. Only Hickey was court-martialed.

Four Continental Army brigades marched to a field near the Bowery on the morning of June 28 and formed ranks around a newly erected gallows. Thousands of civilians gathered behind the troops. Eighty soldiers, twenty from each brigade, escorted Hickey to the gallows. “He appeared unaffected and obstinate to the last,” a witness wrote, “except that when the Chaplains took him by the hand under the Gallows and bad him adieu, a torrent of tears flowed over his face; but with an indignant scornful air he wiped ‘em with his hand from his face, and assumed the confident look.“²⁷

Word of the plot spread through the ranks of the Patriots, unleashing an anti-Tory campaign that focused on Queen’s County, especially the areas of Long Island where British landings were anticipated. Action against Queen’s had been simmering since 1775 when most Queen’s voters refused to send delegates to the New York Provincial Convention.

King Spears had tried to force Long Islanders to make their commitment known by having them sign an oath, swearing by the “Almighty and Tremendous God” not to “convey any intelligence” to the British and to do nothing “to intimidate or dissuade other men, from embarking in the cause of their country and liberty.”²⁸ Nothing much came of Spears’s campaign, but it did launch a war of oaths that both the Patriots and the Loyalists would wage alongside the shooting war. When territory was conquered by one side or the other, residents could expect a proclamation demanding that they swear fidelity to the latest conqueror.

The Continental Congress rejected a military proposal to round up all the Tories and exile them to a place where they could not harm the Patriot war effort. The idea was unreasonable because of the size of the Tory population. The roundup proposal was modified to a recommendation that known Tories be disarmed. In one swoop on Long Island, Continental troops gathered about two hundred muskets and ammunition.²⁹

Washington, anticipating a British invasion, later sent men to Long Island with orders to root out Tory leaders. But the hunt did little to tame the Tories. Brig. Gen. Nathanael Greene, commander of Continental forces on Long Island, joined other ranking officers ina report that said: “With regard to the disaffected inhabitants who have lately been apprehended, we think that the method at present adopted by the County Committee, of discharging them on their giving bonds as a security for their good behavior, is very improper and ineffectual.”³⁰

A more detailed description of the Tory hunt came from a contemporary Tory historian, who wrote that “all fled and hid themselves in swamps, in woods, in barns, in holes, in hollow trees, in corn-fields, and among the marshes. Numbers took refuge in the pine barrens in Suffolk, while others in small boats kept sailing about the Sound, landing in the night, sleeping in the woods, and taking to the water again in the morning.”³¹ One of the hunted who escaped would have been a prize catch: John Harris Cruger, who was married to Ann De Lancey, the daughter of Oliver De Lancey. Cruger later found his way to General Howe, who commissioned him as a lieutenant colonel in one of the major Loyalist military units, the De Lancey Brigade.³²

On July 4 the Continental Congress in Philadelphia voted, by a unanimous tally of the delegates of twelve colonies, to adopt the Declaration of Independence. The New York delegates, unsure of their colony’s sentiments, did not vote to accept the Declaration until five days later. Coincidentally, on that same day Washington ordered his brigade officers to pick up copies of the Declaration at the office of the adjutant general and have it read in full to their men. Civilians gathered around the troops, listening to the words that indicted the king and severed the colonies from his royal rule.³³

One sentence in the Declaration would soon come to life across the Narrows: “He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny.” Anyone looking toward Staten Island could see a forest of Royal Navy masts. More ships were coming, and among them would be transports carrying to America thousands of foreign mercenaries—Germans, drawn from many principalities but all known as Hessians.

“He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.” As New Yorkers heard the words of the Declaration, many of them pictured a golden King George III, enshrined on a golden horse and wearing a golden laurel wreath as an incarnation of Marcus Aurelius. When the last words were spoken, a mixed mob of soldiers and civilians headed for Bowling Green, at the foot of Broadway, where the golden statue stood.

They slung ropes around the statue—four thousand pounds of gilded lead—and pulled it off its pedestal. They cut the fallen king and his horse into pieces and chopped off the king’s head, putting it aside with the intention of impaling it later on a pole. Most of the pieces were loaded onto a wagon and taken to Litchfield, Connecticut, where Patriots cast from the royal lead more than 42,000 bullets. Before the head could be exhibited, however, Tories stole it and buried it to hide it from the desecrating Rebels.³⁴

Anglican clergymen agreed that praying openly for the king was too dangerous to them and their congregations. So they shut their churches rather than continue services without the prayers for the king. “To have prayed for him had been rash to the last degree—the inevitable consequence had been a demolition of the churches, and the destruction of all who frequented them,” one of the clergymen wrote. Even closing churches “was attended with great hazard; for it was declaring [in] the strongest manner our disapprobation of independency, and that under the eye of Washington and his army.” Later, when the Continental Army began its retreat from New York, the provincial council authorized Washington to remove and melt down all bells from Anglican churches because the council did not want “the fortune of war … to … deprive this State … resource for supplying our want of cannon.”³⁵

Ever since late June the British troops had been streaming from their transports and setting up camps on Staten Island. There was no armed resistance. Local Tories, as Patriots expected, welcomed the occupation. Many who had previously posed as Rebels were among “the first to join the British as soon as they appeared in force,” Elias Boudinot, a young New Jersey lawyer and a future president of the Continental Congress, noted in his journal.³⁶

Desperate Tories from New York and Connecticut, telling of friends and relatives who had been jailed and mistreated by the Rebels, arrived on Staten Island in search of refuge. Flight to the Loyal Province would continue throughout the Revolution. And Tory civilians were not the only refugees. Noting the influx of Continental Army deserters, a Staten Island man wrote a friend in London: “Some of their Rifle-men have joined our army, and many more are watching a convenient opportunity to come over.”³⁷

Washington’s force by then numbered some twenty-three thousand men. But disease and desertion kept whittling down the number of able-bodied troops to about nineteen thousand, scattered about fortifications along New York and New Jersey shores.³⁸ While Washington maintained control over stretches of New York and Connecticut territory, New York’s islands—Manhattan itself, Staten Island, Long Island—were so well guarded by the Royal Navy that they became not only British Army strongpoints but also places where Tories could find refuge and raise regiments.

One day in August, when British warships headed up the harbor toward the mouth of the Hudson River, Patriot shore batteries began firing. The British answered with a swift bombardment, damaging a few houses. “This affair caused a great fright in the city,” Gustavus Shewkirk wrote in his diary. “The smoke of the firing drew over like a cloud, and the air was filled with the smell of powder.”³⁹

Now well aware of Tryon’s spy and sabotage network, Washington ordered the posting of troops along the harbor shores and sent out patrols in whaleboats—narrow vessels about thirty-six feet long, with pointed bows and sterns, sometimes armed with small cannons. He also ordered his men to seize or destroy every small boat and canoe they saw. Still, numerous Tories managed to reach the British warships. Among them was Oliver De Lancey, who, like Cruger, made his way to join Howe on Staten Island, where he would become Brigadier General De Lancey, commanding officer of his own Tory brigade.⁴⁰ Another New Yorker, charged with conspiracy by the Rebels, swore that he had not been recruiting for the Loyalists but “had advised and persuaded men to enlist in the Continental service.” He was released—and then became a commander of the De Lancey Brigade.

General Howe had assembled more than thirty thousand men: his own, brought from Halifax; the Redcoats and Hessians brought across the Atlantic by his brother, Admiral Sir Richard Howe, and the troops who had returned after their failed invasion of Charleston, under the command of Maj. Gen. Sir Henry Clinton. On the morning of August 22 Howe landed fifteen thousand men from all of these troops on Long Island, beginning an offensive that drove the defenders off Long Island and won him a knighthood.

Many Long Island Tories who had sought refuge on Staten Island joined the invasion, landing with the British and Hessian troops. They wore red rags tied to their hats to distinguish themselves from Rebels. Some “red rag men” became informers, pointing out real or suspected Patriots and targeting their homes for looting.⁴¹ The red rag men were also prime recruits for the Loyalist regiments being raised in areas now occupied by British troops. A major recruiter was Brigadier Ruggles, who began enlisting Loyalists on Staten Island and Long Island soon after he arrived in New York from Halifax. Some of his three hundred men built camps, cut wood for the British Army’s cooking and heating fires, or foraged for hay and food supplies. Others served on privateer ships prowling Long Island Sound.⁴²

General Howe did not include the newly raised Loyalist regiments in his invasion force when he landed about fifteen thousand men at Gravesend Bay on Long Island on August 22. But Loyalists proved invaluable to him, for Tory spies found a weak spot in Washington’s defense line and quickly passed the intelligence to the British. Howe flanked the Continentals and began to drive them back in the first act of what would be the evacuation of Long Island and a retreat across the East River to Manhattan.

A storm held back Royal Navy warships as Washington’s men crossed the river in small, wind-buffeted boats.⁴³ In his epic nighttime retreat, Washington succeeded in loading all of his 9,500 men into boats, canoes, and sloops—” every kind of water craft … that could be kept afloat”⁴⁴—bound for Manhattan.⁴⁵

Of Washington’s men 1,012 were killed or wounded on Long Island, compared with British losses of 392.⁴⁶ Washington lost more men as soon as his army reached Manhattan and deserters began to disappear. “Great numbers of them have gone off, in some instances almost by whole Regiments, by half ones and by Companies at a Time,” Washington wrote to the president of Congress.⁴⁷

As four thousand British troops made an amphibious landing at Kips Bay (near the foot of today’s East Thirty-third Street), Washington’s broken army retreated north, pursued by Howe at a leisurely pace. Accompanying Howe as both a civil and military aide was Governor Tryon, finally ashore from the Duchess of Gordon. When Washington reached the dense woodland of Harlem Heights,* he dug in, creating a triple defense line of trenches and earthworks to hold off the British and gain time.⁴⁸

Washington had wanted to burn down New York City, which he saw as a nest of Tories, but Congress had refused to give him permission. On the night of September 20 flames had swept the heart of the city, blackening a mile-long path and destroying nearly five hundred homes. Enraged Loyalists and British soldiers attacked suspected arsonists, hanging at least two and tossing another into the flames. Some Loyalists blamed vengeful Patriots. The modern verdict is that the conflagration began with an accidental fire in a dockside house.⁴⁹

Loyalists celebrated the liberation of New York City, which would be the capital of Tory America throughout the war. As British troops marched down Broadway, a two-way exodus was under way: Patriots out of the city and Loyalists into it. “Joy and gladness seemed to appear in all countenances,” the Reverend Shewkirk wrote in his diary, “and persons who had been strangers one to the other formerly, were now very sociable together, and friendly.” People were painting the letters GR, for George Rex, on Rebels’ houses so that, as Shewkirk gloated, “all the houses of those who have had a part and a share in the Rebellion were marked as forfeited.”⁵⁰

Loyalist military units patrolled the streets of New York City while Howe and his staff planned strategy. He and his successors governed New York as an occupied, rather than liberated, Loyalist city—” in fact, a Garrison,” a British official said.⁵¹ Soldiers turned houses into barracks and Presbyterian churches into stables. High-ranking British officers appropriated the finest homes, vacated by the Rebels. The poorest civilians, many of them black Loyalists, moved into the burned section, putting tents over the foundations of gutted buildings, creating a large neighborhood called “Canvas Town.”⁵²

People endured food shortages and inflation: Flour that cost twenty shillings a barrel in 1775 would cost seventy shillings by 1781; a barrel of pork doubled in price. Smugglers and privateers of both sides so disrupted commerce that the only coffee and sugar in the city came from the holds of blockade-running Rebel ships captured by British privateers. Firewood became so scarce that residents walked on the ice of the frozen harbor to tear apart derelict ships.⁵³

Howe enjoyed New York, where he presided over a fine table, spent evenings with fellow gamblers, and had the company of the lovely wife of Joshua Loring, a Massachusetts Loyalist. Elizabeth and Joshua Loring had gone from Boston to Halifax with the British Army. By the time Howe took his army to New York, she was Howe’s mistress. Loring himself certainly benefited from his wife’s relationship with Howe. The grateful general made Loring the commissioner of prisoners of war, a post that promised a fortune in bribes from sellers of provisions.⁵⁴

Howe drew other Americans into his military command. Edward Winslow, whose Loyalist life had begun with the demise of the Old Colony Club in Plymouth, had fled Boston with Howe, offered his services in Halifax, and now in New York was Lieutenant Colonel Winslow, muster master general of all Loyalist forces in North America. Serving with him as provincial commander in chief was Governor Tryon, an old soldier who eagerly changed roles from civilian to martial and began planning military expeditions.⁵⁵

Winslow looked prosperous and resplendent in his uniform—” a blue coat, scarlet cape, and a scarlet lining, with plain white buttons.”

But he was in great need of extra cash. After learning that Rebels had given his aged father the choice of joining the Continental Army or going to jail, Winslow had paid a fine to release his father and then provided the money to bring both his parents and his two spinster sisters to New York, where they lived with him, his wife, and their three young children.⁵⁶ Loring and his brother-in-law (one of the socially prominent Lloyds of Lloyd Neck, Long Island) had founded a company for selling rum and wine to Howe’s officers. To get some extra income, Winslow, who traveled often to Loyalist outposts garrisoned by thirsty officers, became a partner in the enterprise.⁵⁷

Among the Tories sojourning in New York was Lord Dunmore, back in the colony he had once governed. He leased a house on Broadway for the winter and would later sail to England.⁵⁸ Dunmore took some members of his Ethiopian Regiment with him to New York. The unit, decimated by smallpox and other diseases during its service in Virginia, was disbanded in New York, but many of the black Loyalists continued to serve in guerrilla units in New York and New Jersey.⁵⁹ A new military unit awaited the regiment’s veterans: the Black Pioneers, founded by General Clinton during his aborted 1776 invasion of North Carolina. After Clinton’s fleet had gone up the Cape Fear River, the British controlled the area around Wilmington for two months. During that time, about seventy slaves, responding to Dunmore’s freedom proclamation, approached the ships to enlist. One of Clinton’s officers, Capt. George Martin of the Royal Marines, organized them into a Loyalist military organization called the Black Pioneers. Clinton admired the ex-slaves. He took only one Loyalist unit—the Black Pioneers—with him when he led the invasion and occupation of Newport, Rhode Island, in the fall of 1776.⁶⁰

In the British Army, a pioneer was a soldier-engineer who cleared grounds for camps, dug latrines (called necessaries), and built bridges and fortifications. Separate detachments served in various regiments so that the black soldiers’ activities usually did not appear in regimental histories. The scant records on the Black Pioneers indicate that they served as spies, couriers, and guides. They also wrangled livestock, mended uniforms, and played in army bands.⁶¹

So much Loyalist recruiting was going on among blacks that a Connecticut slaveholder noted the phenomenon in a Connecticut Courant advertisement:

TO BE SOLD

This country born NEGRO WENCH, 24 years old, now pregnant, and bids fair to make more recruits for Lord Dunmore. Any person, or family, where that is esteemed no fault, can make an easy bargain with her present mistress.

Enquire of the PRINTERS⁶²

Washington chose as his Harlem Heights headquarters the country mansion of Roger Morris, a former British Army officer. Morris had abandoned the home when he and his wife, along with other prominent New York Tories, fled to England before the arrival of Continental troops.⁶³ The home, on a hill with a strategic view of the Harlem and Hudson rivers, was chosen with a soldier’s eye for terrain.⁶⁴ The house also held poignant memories for Washington.

In 1756, on the eve of the French and Indian War, when Washington was a young officer in the Virginia militia, he twice stopped in New York to visit Beverley Robinson, a friend he had known back home. Robinson had moved to New York from Virginia and prospered by becoming a merchant partner of Oliver De Lancey and the husband of Susannah Philipse, heiress of a great Hudson River estate. When Washington dropped by, he met Susannah’s beautiful sister Mary.

At the time romantic stories circulated that he was smitten, had seen her again and later proposed, only to be turned down. In 1758 Mary married Morris, who had known Washington during the French and Indian War.⁶⁵ Now, eighteen years later, Washington was the temporary master of their house; Mary and Roger Morris were among theLoyalist refugees in England; and Robinson was an enemy, a Loyalist leader spying for Howe and raising a Loyalist regiment.⁶⁶

Washington lacked the kind of spy network that served Howe. Hoping to get some actionable intelligence on Howe’s future strategy, Washington sent a large raiding party across Long Island Sound to pick up Tories for interrogation. A British naval patrol spotted the raiders, attempted to capture their boat, and thwarted the operation. Washington then turned to a veteran of the Battle of Bunker Hill, Lt. Col. Thomas Knowlton, the commander of the Ranger regiment, a new, elite reconnaissance unit. Washington asked Knowlton to find a volunteer for a spy mission.⁶⁷

Knowlton’s officers refused to volunteer for a task that they considered dishonorable. One of them said that he was willing to die in battle, but he refused to be caught as a spy and then be “hung up like a dog.”⁶⁸ But a newly arrived twenty-one-year-old captain named Nathan Hale was troubled by the officers’ response. Hale turned to Capt. William Hull, a Yale classmate, for friendly advice. Hull tried to talk him out of volunteering. But Hale believed that he could not avoid a call to service. He told Knowlton that he would accept the mission.

A sloop sailing out of Norwalk, Connecticut, deposited Hale ashore at Huntington, Long Island, on the night of September 15—16. He gave himself the cover of a Connecticut schoolteacher who, like so many real Loyalists, was fleeing Rebel persecution. He wore a brown suit, a round broad-brimmed hat, and had removed the silver buckles from his shoes so he looked more like a poor refugee. As teaching credentials he carried his Yale diploma. He did not seem to realize that “Nathan Hale” on the diploma might alert any curious British officer who knew that Maj. Samuel Hale was General Howe’s deputy commissioner of prisoners. Samuel, a Loyalist from New Hampshire, was Nathan’s first cousin.⁶⁹

Hale apparently spent about five days as a spy before he was caught. The only British document containing information about the end of his mission is an orderly book kept by a British officer. There is one sentence, dated September 22: “A spy from the Enemy (by his ownfull Confession) Apprehended Last night, was this day Executed at 11 o’Clock in front of the Artilery Park.”⁷⁰

Most accounts of Nathan Hale’s execution assume that Samuel Hale had recognized his cousin and betrayed him. But a dramatically different narrative surfaced in 2000 when the Library of Congress received a manuscript history of the Revolution, written during or shortly after the end of the war. The author was Consider Tiffany, a cantankerous, well-educated Tory under house arrest in the town of Barkhamstead in northwestern Connecticut. The manuscript had been handed down by one Tiffany generation to the next until a family member donated it to the library. Because the manuscript was written by a Tory, the library said, it presented “a point of view virtually absent from the literature of the American Revolution.”⁷¹

According to Tiffany, Lt. Col. Robert Rogers, commander of Rogers’ Rangers, was looking for American spies on Long Island when he spotted Hale as a suspect. Rogers, posing as a spy for the Patriots, “invited Captain Hale to dine with him,” Tiffany says, continuing:

Capt Hale repaired to the place agreed on, where he met his pretended friend, with three or four men of the same stamp, and after being refreshed, began the same conversation as hath been already mentioned. But in the height of their conversation, a company of soldiers surrounded the house, and by orders from the commander, seized Capt Hale in an instant. But denying his name, and the business he came upon, he was ordered to New York. But before he was carried far, several persons knew him and called him by name.

Those several persons were probably some of the many Connecticut Tories who had fled to New York.

Details of Hale’s death and an enduring story about his last words—” I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country”—came in an odd way. On the evening of September 22, Capt. John Mon-trésor, Howe’s chief engineer, approached Washington’s lines under a flag of truce. Montrésor—creator of the map that Arnold had used in the invasion of Canada—had spent more time in America than most British officers. He had been wounded in the French and Indian War and later lived for a time in America. He owned an East River property (Montrésor Island, now Randall’s Island) and had married a stunning New York woman; they both had their portraits done by John Singleton Copley.⁷² Perhaps it was Montrésor’s connections with America, along with his basic decency, that inspired him to pass on the tragic news about Hale.

Montrésor’s journals show him to be a faithful subject of the king and an officer disgruntled by the army’s failure to promote him. He had been in many battles, had built many fortifications—and had helped New York Tories take and hide the head of the fallen statue of King George III. As soon as the British began occupying New York, he had the relic dug up and arranged for it to be delivered to Lord Townshend, whose notorious Townshend Acts were the roots of the Revolution. Montrésor said he sent the head to Townshend “in order to convince them at home of the Infamous Disposition of the Ungrateful people of this distressed Country.”⁷³

Under the flag of truce Montrésor said that General Howe had ordered him to present General Washington with a formal protest about the use of an inhumane weapon: musket balls with pieces of nails inserted into them. Many had been found when the British searched abandoned American quarters in New York City. Washington officially apologized for the “wicked and infamous weapon,” and Montrésor’s mission was over.

But he lingered so that he could, unofficially, report Hale’s execution, which he said he had witnessed (though the hanging is not mentioned in his journals). Captain Hull, who had tried to discourage Hale from the mission, was at headquarters. He heard the British officer’s news, introduced himself, and got the details of Hale’s final hours: that he had been sentenced to death without a trial; that he had not been allowed a Bible or a visit from a clergyman; that he had uttered those storied last words. After the war Hull reported what hehad been told. Without Montrésor, we might never have known about Hale’s noble death.⁷⁴

Tiffany’s manuscript, bringing together Rogers and Hale, adds a new piece to the puzzle of Hale’s capture. The account also illumines Rogers’s role in the New York campaign to create Loyalist regiments.

Rogers, born in 1731 in northeastern Massachusetts to Scotch-Irish parents, had gone from a farm in New Hampshire to fame in the French and Indian War. He became the commander of the Rogers’ Rangers, warriors who fought in the wilderness, scouting, ambushing, and introducing the British Army to guerrilla warfare. Rangers wore green jackets and moccasins, and stuck tomahawks in their belts as advertisements that Indians were not the only scalpers.⁷⁵ After the war Rogers returned to New Hampshire but soon appeared in England, where he publicized himself in bestselling journals, got into debt, and, after a stint in debtor’s prison, returned to America in 1775.

Soon after his arrival the Committee of Safety in Philadelphia arrested and briefly jailed him. The committee released him after giving him a parole that said he “solemnly promised and engaged on the honor of a gentleman and soldier, that he would not bear arms against the American United Colonies in any manner whatsoever, during the American contest with Great Britain.” He then wrote to Washington, saying, “I love America; it is my native country and that of my family, and I intend to spend the evening of my days in it.” Washington, suspecting that Rogers was a spy, rejected his request for a permit to visit American military encampments. Rogers then slipped away, passed through American lines, and offered his services to the British Army, which commissioned him as a lieutenant colonel.⁷⁶

In August 1776, making his headquarters on Staten Island, Rogers began raising the Queen’s American Rangers, a Loyalist regiment of about four hundred officers and men, most of them from Westchester County and Long Island.⁷⁷ In a printed circular he promised recruits “their proportion of all Rebel-lands,” a promise he had no authorityto make.⁷⁸ But he had discovered what would later become a standard recruitment pledge. British officials came to realize that Loyalists would more speedily take up arms if they were promised a grant of land as a reward. And, as one officer put it, land grants would “at once detach from the Rebels, the common Irish and other Europeans who make the Strength of their armys.”⁷⁹

Tryon, though still officially governor, was spending most of his time trying to find the five thousand armed Loyalists he had promised Howe. Tryon rallied several recruiters, including Rogers, De Lancey, Robinson, and other leading New York Loyalists. Fanning, Tryon’s faithful secretary, became a colonel in command of a battalion in Brigadier General De Lancey’s brigade.⁸⁰

Encounters between Patriots and Loyalists often ended swiftly and fatally. One of Rogers’s Westchester recruits, Capt. William Lounsbury, was accused by the Committee of Safety of leading a group of Tories who spiked Continental cannons in Westchester County. Rebels tracked Lounsbury down and told him to surrender. The Tories with him fled but he stood his ground. When the Patriots threatened him with bayonets, he tried to defend himself with a club and was fatally stabbed. In his pockets were found a commission signed by Rogers and a muster roll of the men he had enlisted, all of them potential targets of Rebel retribution.⁸¹

By December 1776 seven hundred Rogers’ Rangers were raiding Patriot outposts in Westchester. And Colonel Fanning had a commission to raise two more Ranger battalions.⁸² Recruitment was so successful that the Committee of Safety appealed to Washington for help. “Nothing can be more alarming than the present situation of our State,” the letter said. “We are daily getting the most autheritick intelligence of bodies of men inlisted and armed, with orders to assist the enemy. We much fear that those cooperating with the enemy will seize such passes as will cut off all communication between the Army and us, and prevent your supplies. We do not trust any more of the Militia out of this County.”⁸³

Nor, certainly, could the Patriots trust the great Hudson River Valley landowners and their tenants—especially the tenants. In 1775,New York Patriots circulated a petition, called Articles of Association, supporting the actions of the Continental Congress. Robert R. Livingston, Jr., owner of an immense Hudson River estate, noted that “many of our Tenants here refused to sign … and resolved to stand by the King.” One tenant, Livingston said, vowed that if he were armed and put in a Rebel militia, “the first person he would shoot would be his captain.”⁸⁴ In those days the tenants had hoped for British victory and postwar land-grant rewards to loyal subjects. Soon, as the war produced defeat after defeat for the Continental Army, their envisioned rewards seemed just over the horizon. Emboldened Tory tenants roamed the valley in bands. Livingston’s mother, Margaret Beekman Livingston, wrote, “Some say their number is 4000… . They … have three boxes of gun powder that has been sent to them by some as bad as themselves.”⁸⁵

Frederick Philipse III, who called himself “Lord of the Manor of Philipsburg,” presided over an estate that ran along the eastern bank of the Hudson River for about twenty-four miles, from the Croton River to Yonkers and much of the rest of Westchester County almost as far as south New York City. In 1776 he refused to sign an oath of allegiance to the Patriot cause and rallied many of his tenants and his neighbors to the Tory side. A detachment of armed Patriots arrested him and sent him to house confinement in Connecticut. He appealed to the New York Committee of Safety, asserting that he had “done nothing (upon the Strictest Examination) Inimical to the Liberty’s of My Country.” The Patriots relented and allowed Philipse to return to his manor in Yonkers. But he broke his parole and took his wife and children to New York City. Even though his estate lay within the theoretical control of the Patriots, he continued to receive rents on some of his properties.⁸⁶

By the end of 1776 recruiters had sworn in about eighteen hundred Loyalist soldiers, most of them from Staten Island, Long Island, and Westchester County.⁸⁷ Colonel Fanning later became commander of the King’s American Regiment, one of the war’s most active Loyalist units. For the chaplain of his regiment, Fanning chose the Reverend Samuel Seabury, who had been the victim of a Rebel kidnapping.⁸⁸

Long Island was a magnet for Loyalist families, especially those who could easily sail there from Connecticut coastal towns across from Long Island’s northern shore. Many of these displaced Loyalists clustered around Lloyd Neck or Eaton’s Neck, towns that jutted into Long Island Sound, opposite Stamford. Eaton’s Neck harbored a large Tory community that included 118 refugees from Connecticut. At first they lived “free from the tumultuous bustling world.” But their freedom gave way to martial law, and they were ordered to aid the British Army by gathering wood or moving military supplies. They endured a constantly growing feeling of exile—and fear, both of their Rebel foes and their British Army guardians.⁸⁹

A local civil war soon broke out between the Connecticut refugees and the “whaleboat men”—Connecticut Patriots who sailed across the Sound on raids. They struck the Loyalist communities, plundering homes and kidnapping people for ransom or to swap for prisoners taken by the British or by Loyalists conducting their own raids.

Every Loyalist family was a potential target for looting or abduction.⁹⁰ Supposedly British soldiers, quartered on Long Island, protected them. But, as a contemporary Tory later wrote, the soldiers

Robbed, plundered, and pillaged the inhabitants of their cattle, hogs, sheep, poultry, and in short of every thing they could lay their hands upon. It was no uncommon thing of an afternoon, to see a farmer driving a flock of turkeys, geese, ducks, or dunghill fowls, and locking them up in his cellar for security during the night… . It was no uncommon thing for a farmer, his wife, and children, to sleep in one room, while his sheep were bleating in the room adjoining, his hogs grunting in the kitchen, and the cocks crowing, hens cackling, ducks quacking, and geese hissing, in the cellar. Horned cattle were for safety locked up every night in barns, stables, and outhouses. This robbing was done by people sent to America to protect loyalists against the persecution and depredations of Rebels. To complain was needless; the officers shared in the plunder.⁹¹

• • •

The depredation did not go entirely unpunished. Records of De Lancey’s battalions show, for example, that two soldiers found guilty of robbery were sentenced to one thousand lashes each (remitted to five hundred by General Clinton). And two other soldiers, found guilty of robbery, murder, and rape, were hanged.⁹²

While Nathan Hale was sailing across the Sound, Colonel Knowlton was killed leading an attack on a British outpost near Harlem Heights. So Knowlton died not knowing what had happened to Hale. The deaths of Knowlton and Hale profoundly changed Washington’s attitude about the gathering of intelligence. Instead of relying entirely on military officers, he would use civilians, primarily Patriots who could spy while posing as Tories.⁹³ Eventually, Washington would oversee an elaborate and productive spy network centered on New York City.

Fearing that Howe would attack him from the rear, Washington decided to withdraw from Manhattan, leaving a force behind at Fort Washington, near the northern end of the island, to block Howe’s advance. Connecticut’s Governor Trumbull had set up a supply depot at White Plains, a Westchester town about twenty-five miles north of Manhattan. The town became Washington’s goal.⁹⁴ He also ordered a detachment of Virginia and Delaware Continentals, guided by local Patriots, to the village of Mamaroneck, about seventeen miles south of White Plains.⁹⁵

For some time Tories had been “getting the upper hand” in Mamaroneck, which lay within the De Lancey fiefdom.⁹⁶ As a Patriot told the Provincial Congress in November 1775, Tories walked around the village in small, armed groups and warned Rebels that soon “there would be bad times,” including kidnappings. The threat seems to have been inspired by the furor over the killing of William Lounsbury, the Tory leader.⁹⁷

On October 21 the Continentals approached Mamaroneck at night, hoping for a surprise attack on the armed Loyalist unit known to bebivouacked there. Due to the local guides’ negligence or treachery, the Loyalists discovered the attackers and, in a hand-to-hand clash, two Continentals were killed and fifteen were wounded; about twenty Loyalists were killed or wounded. The Continentals withdrew, taking thirty-six Loyalist prisoners with them.⁹⁸

The skirmish was overshadowed a week later by the Battle of White Plains, which ended in another defeat and another retreat for Washington. But the clash by night at Mamaroneck introduced Patriots to the mixed fighting skills of Rogers’s regiment: Some men fought savagely when Rogers directly rallied them, shouting, “Steady, boys, steady! Fire! Fire!” Others, reeling back, submitted to capture. Rogers himself managed to escape with his survivors.⁹⁹

Rogers, exploiting his fame in the French and Indian War as the founder of Rogers’ Rangers, promised better pay and better food as he recruited in New York, Maine, and Canada. He even bragged about the skills of the tailor who made the Rangers’ uniforms. Gen. Frederick Haldimand, royal governor of Quebec, complained about Rogers, saying, “He has totally given himself up to the lowest debauchery and unworthy motives of obtaining money to gratify it.”¹⁰⁰ A few months after the Mamaroneck battle, an inspector general ordered to examine Loyalist units found the Rangers below standard, a verdict that led to Rogers’s forced retirement. But under a new name, the Queen’s American Rangers, and a new commanding officer, Lt. Col. John G. Simcoe, the unit went on to fight in battles throughout the war.¹⁰¹

Fort Washington, on the highest point of Manhattan Island, was thought to be impregnable. But Howe captured the fort, on November 16, 1776, because a Continental officer went over to the enemy. He slipped out of the fort and sent Howe plans showing the fort’s vulnerable points. When Howe attacked, the defenders fought gallantly but were overwhelmed. About 150 were killed and wounded and three thousand taken prisoner. British Regulars and Hessians lost about five hundred men, including wounded.

The fall of the fort meant that Patriot authority over the Island of Manhattan had ended for the rest of the war. The traitorous officer, in a petition for a reward after the war, said he had “Sacrificed all I was Worth in the World to the Service of my King & Country.”¹⁰² His words reflected the sentiments of many Americans. In December 1776, when Governor Tryon reviewed the royal militia in Queen’s County, 820 men were mustered. And when Tryon circulated a statement supporting the Crown, nearly three thousand men signed it.¹⁰³ For George Washington, the rise of Tory militancy in the Loyal Province was a foretaste of what awaited him when, following the fall of Fort Washington, he crossed the river and entered New Jersey.

* Now called Morningside Heights, near Columbia University.