11
Why is it that the enemy have left the New England provinces, and made these middle ones the seat of war? The answer is easy: New England is not infested with Tories, and we are. I have been tender in raising the cry against these men… . The period is now arrived, in which either they or we must change our sentiments, or one or both must fall.
—Tom Paine, The Crisis1
General Howe sent Lord Cornwallis and 4,500 men in pursuit of Washington, hoping to trap him in New Jersey and end the war. Cornwallis first had to take Fort Lee, on the western side of the Hudson. Braced for a British invasion, Continental patrols in New Jersey kept watch along the river. But the Continental lookouts ignored Closter Dock Landing, a patch of shore with a steep, narrow path leading up the sheer Palisades, about six miles north of Fort Lee. The Continentals did not believe that an army could climb that steep trail.
Cornwallis and his men did. They landed on the scrap of land from boats that shuttled between the riverbanks. Then, in a driving rain, they began their ascent. They had been led to that unguarded landing by Maj. John Aldington of Bergen County, commander of the Guides & Pioneers, a Loyalist unit raised for reconnaissance missions.2
Aldington had a personal stake, for he owned a brewery that the Continentals had taken over to use as a storehouse. But Aldington, called “a zealous Loyalist” by Cornwallis, was not merely interested in recovering his property. Through much of the war he would stay in command of his unit, which was later attached to Beverley Robinson’s Loyal American Regiment.3 With him were two other Tories serving as guides—William Bayard, who ran a Hudson River ferry, and John Ackerson, who owned the Closter dock. In peacetime, farmers used the dock to ship produce to New York City; during the war the site was a popular connection for Tories slipping in and out of New York.4 The Guides & Pioneers, who served in several places during the war, rarely mustered more than 150 men at a time. Each man had invaluable local knowledge about terrain and people. Some of the Guides had commissions as officers but did not command the Guides or any other unit. They were spies who hoped that if they were caught the commissions in their pockets would give them the status of prisoners of war and save them from the gallows.5
The fall of Fort Washington so jeopardized the weaker Fort Lee that General Washington ordered Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene to abandon the fort and lead the two-thousand-man garrison toward Hackensack, where Washington waited. Greene was unaware of Cornwallis’s bold nighttime climb until morning, when word reached him, probably from a British deserter.6 He hastened the evacuation and led his men southwestward as Cornwallis began his march on the fort.
When the British reached the fort, they found breakfast teakettles boiling, fifty cannons unspiked, and three hundred tents still standing. Some soldiers—sick or drunk—had been left behind by their fleeing comrades. Food and other stores were scattered about the fort, and knapsacks littered the road that led to Washington’s headquarters. He was six miles south in Hackensack, staying in the home of Peter Zabriskie, a Patriot whose mansion on the village green was surrounded by the homes and farms of Loyalists.7
About two thousand Continentals were still on the eastern side ofthe Hudson because their commander, the arrogant, self-aggrandizing Maj. Gen. Charles Lee, refused to obey orders that Washington had politely proffered. “There are times when we must commit treason against the laws of the State for the salvation of the State,” Lee explained. “The present crisis demands this brave, virtuous kind of treason.”8
General Lee finally crossed the river and moved slowly southward along a road about twenty miles west of the British Army. Instead of camping with his men, Lee chose to stay in a tavern about three miles away. Tories routinely kept British officers aware of the movement of Lee and his men.
Before his military career took him to colonial America and into the Continental Army, Lee had been in Portugal as commander of the British Army’s 16th Light Dragoons. Now, fourteen years later, local Tories gave men of the 16th the location of Lee’s vulnerable quarters. Cornet Banastre Tarleton, a cavalry officer of the lowest commission (comparable to ensign in the British infanty), began his own illustrious career in America that day. He would become the commander of the Loyalist British Legion—later called Tarleton’s Legion. At least one of his Tory guides that day would become an officer in the legion, whose horsemen, later in the war, would spread terror wherever they rode.9
After British cavalrymen quickly routed or killed Lee’s sentinels, they shot up the tavern and threatened to burn it. Lee surrendered and was taken away, tied hand and foot to a Tory guide’s horse and reputedly still in his nightshirt. As a deserter from the British Army, he faced execution. But he would live in a comfortable captivity that would raise questions about his views of treason.10
Lee’s host, General Howe, treated Lee as a fellow general and gave him relatively free range in New York City. Lee was confined in the council chamber in the City Hall and provided with firewood and candles. He was allowed to order dinner for six with “what liquor he wanted, and of what kind he pleased,” wrote an eyewitness, Tory historian Thomas Jones. “He had the privilege of asking any five friends he thought proper to dine with him each day. This was all furnishedat the expense of the [British] nation.” Robert Hull, who ran a popular tavern on lower Broadway, “waited on him by General Howe’s orders, with a bill of fare every morning, and Lee ordered his own dinner and his own liquors. It was cooked at Hull’s, and always on the table at the time appointed. His servant had free access to him at all times.”11
Lee was talkative during his sojourn as Howe’s guest. Suspicions arose that he had helped himself by helping the British. But not until the nineteenth century did stunning evidence of his treason appear among Howe’s papers: a sixteen-hundred-word “Plan,” in which Lee stoked the British faith in a Loyalist rising and gave Howe a strategy that would “bring matters to a conclusion.” As second in command of the Continental Army, Lee had great authority in British eyes.
To “unhinge or dissolve … the whole system or machine of resistance, or in other terms, Congress Government,” Lee wrote, the British should look for aid from Loyalists. “If the Province of Maryland or the greater part of it is reduced or submits, and the People of Virginia are prevented or intimidated from marching aid to the Pensylvania Army, the whole machine is dissolved and a period put to the War.”12 Lee’s plan centered on Howe’s taking a major force into Maryland via Chesapeake Bay, where he would find pro-Loyalist residents. Howe’s subsequent maneuvers seem to have been at least partially based on Lee’s advice.
In New Jersey, Washington was racing time as well as Cornwallis, for the enlistments of many Continentals would soon expire. With the addition of Greene’s men, Washington had a force of about three thousand troops. But they were “much broken and dispirited men.”13 A Patriot saw the soldiers who had fled from Fort Lee entering Hackensack: “The night was dark, cold and rainy, but I had a fair view of Greene’s troops from the light of the windows as they passed on our side of the street. They marched two abreast, looked ragged, some without a shoe to their feet and most of them wrapped in their blankets.”14
Deciding to march without Lee’s men, Washington bade Zabriskie farewell. According to family tradition, Zabriskie asked the generalwhere he was heading. And, the story goes, Washington leaned down from his saddle and whispered, “Can you keep a secret?” Zabriskie assured him that he could, and Washington said, “I can, too.”15
The story underlined the Patriots’ distrust of New Jersey people. “A large part of the Jerseys,” Washington bitterly observed, “have given every proof of disaffection that a people can do.”16 As Washington led his troops out of Hackensack and headed toward Newark, the eyes of countless Tories watched. Some of them belonged to members of the big Zabriskie family.
As soon as Washington’s troops left Hackensack, young men from local homes and outlying areas began to appear around the village green. They were Loyalists who had secretly enlisted in the Fourth Battalion of New Jersey Volunteers, the state’s first Loyalist regiment, which had been raised soon after the British landed on Staten Island.17 The regiment was one of New Jersey’s three major Loyalist units.
Now the men of the Fourth Battalion emerged to receive their weapons and the green uniforms that would give them—and many armed Loyalists to come—the nickname Greencoats. Lt. Col. Abraham Van Buskirk, a former lukewarm Patriot who commanded the Fourth Battalion, appeared with his officers. The overwhelming majority of enlisted men were of Scotch-Irish stock; the officers were all scions of old Dutch families, known as the Tory Dutch.18
The members of the battalion could parade around in their new uniforms without fear because Hackensack had become, literally overnight, a Tory village. Worrisome Patriots, especially farmers, tried to earn a living while wondering where and when Tory raiders would strike. Sometimes men of the Fourth Battalion staged small-scale raids, picking up some cattle here, a few horses there. Or there might be a major foraging expedition, when several hundred British troops and members of the Fourth Battalion would put Patriots in jail and then plunder their homes and farms.
Reporting on one of those raids, a Patriot militia officer wrote, “I keep out large patrolling parties every night in that neighborhood for the protection of the inhabitants, but the enemy have so good intelligence of our thoughts and every motion that it is beyond my powerto give protection.”19 Patriots retaliated by ambushing small foraging parties. “Not a stick of wood, a spear of grass, or a kernel of corn, could the troops in New Jersey procure without fighting for it,” a Tory wrote. “… Every foraging party was attacked in some way or another.” Each side was losing men in sudden skimishes on this strange, unexpected battlefield called the Neutral Ground.20
As Washington retreated into New Jersey, taking the war westward, the allegiance of Loyalists also began to turn. In parts of New Jersey, as Washington would learn, Tories were in the majority and in control. Back in New York there were so many Loyalists in some areas that they pinned down Patriot militiamen who might otherwise be aiding Washington in New Jersey. One Westchester unit, the King’s American Regiment, expanded its horizon by going to sea and becoming privateers. They made Lloyd’s Neck, the Loyalist refugee community on Long Island, their home port.21
Washington assumed that all his movements were being reported to the British by Loyalist spies. He knew that Loyalists stole powder from magazines and drove horses and cattle through the American lines to be sold to the British. From presses operated by the British Army came counterfeit versions of “Continentals,” the paper money that helped to finance the Revolution. British operatives passed great wads of the bogus bills to Loyalists, who circulated them in a campaign that depreciated the value of the money.22And the phrase “not worth a Continental” entered the American language.
In his writings Washington once alluded to “half tories,” saying they might be useful as spies, for, in his low view of Tories, he believed that they were amoral and would just as well work for the Americans as for the British. That idea of half loyalty permeated the areas where the Continental Army had fought and retreated, fought and retreated, passing through defeats from New York into New Jersey.23 Each defeat produced more Loyalists not only in the area of the defeat but in the territory beyond. New Jersey’s government was under Patriot control, but the state’s population included thousands of Tories.
In Washington’s army fleeing across New Jersey was Tom Paine, whose Common Sense had stirred the Rebels and thrust them towardindependence. Now, in a dark December of defeats, in “times that try men’s souls,” when the “summer soldier and the sunshine patriot … shrink from the service of their country,” he looked around and began to envision what he soon would write in The Crisis. He saw an infestation of Tories, and he realized that the time had come when Rebels and Tories would repeatedly fight each other, no matter whether the British Army was present.
There were truly and clearly two Americas, one governed by the British military operating from New York and the other a group of colonies in rebellion but not quite governed. “The Declaration of Independence,” wrote Thomas Jones, the Loyalist historian, “… was the first act that put an end to the courts of law, to the laws of the land, and to the administration of justice under the British crown… . The revolt was now complete… . A usurped kind of Government took place; a medley of military law, convention ordinances, Congress recommendations and committee resolutions.”24 Every American now had a choice: to remain a subject of King George III and thus a traitor to a new regime called the United States of America or to support the rebellion and become a traitor to the Crown.
Loyalists by the thousands signed loyalty oaths administered by Tryon, who traveled to territory occupied by British troops. Few people refused to swear allegiance to the Crown.25 And those who chose the king had another way to show their choice; in taverns and meeting halls throughout New York City, Tryon’s recruiters signed up wealthy and well-connected young men for commissions in Loyalist regiments. For enlistments in the ranks there were many—among them farmhands, men without jobs, and ambitious sons turning away from their Rebel kin. The Loyalist recruits were issued weapons and uniforms, usually designed by their regimental commanders.
Eventually New York would send more men into Loyalist regiments than into the Continental Army.26 Tory Dutch farmers in New Jersey found a lucrative market in the British garrison in New York. The area closest to Manhattan, around Leonia and Englewood, contained Dutch farms whose farmers who could speak English, and this enclave became known as the English Neighborhood, a place where no Patriot could openly live. A New Jersey merchant fleet carried produce and goods to Tory New York. Vessels ranged from schooners to Dutch pettiaugers, small ships without keels; they could sail in shallows but had leeboards that could be lowered when a keel was needed.27
James Rivington, the Tory publisher driven out of America by Rebels who smashed his press, had returned from England to a New York City much more to his liking. He began publishing Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer, which produced such recruiting advertisements as this one:
ALL ASPIRING HEROES
have now an opportunity of distinguishing themselves by joining
THE QUEEN’S RANGERS HUZZARS,
Commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Simcoe*
Any spirited young man will receive every encouragement, be immediately mounted on an elegant horse, and furnished with clothing, and accoutrement, &c to the amount of forty guineas, by applying to Cornet Spencer, at his quarters No. 133 Water Street, or his rendezvous, Hewett’s Tavern, near the Coffee-house… .
Whoever brings a recruit shall instantly receive two guineas.
Vivant Rex et Regina28
As soon as the British Army took root on Long Island, scores of young Connecticut men sailed across the Sound to enlist. Many described themselves as “Churchmen,” Anglicans who equated service for the king with their religious beliefs. The names of men from Fair-field, Stratford, Stamford, Norwalk, New Haven, Newtown, Waterbury, Middletown, and Redding appeared on the musters of the Queen’s Rangers, the King’s American Regiment, and the Prince of Wales’s American Volunteers.29 By July 1777 the King’s American Regiment alone had enlisted twenty-six sergeants, nine drummers and fifers, and 415 rank and file, the military label for noncommissioned troops.30
The Prince of Wales’ American Volunteers brigade was the creation of Montfort Browne, a prisoner of war. Governor General of His Majesty’s Bahamas, Browne had been captured in March 1776 on the island of New Province when Cmdr. Esek Hopkins, commander in chief of the fledgling Continental Navy, in its first amphibious operation, landed 280 marines from whaleboats.
Among the island residents were several Loyalists, described by Browne as “licentious, poor, haughty and insolent.”31 No one offered resistance when the Continental sailors cleared the island’s fort of military stores—including eighty-eighty cannons and a ton of gun-powder—and took Browne prisoner.
Browne was placed under house arrest in Middletown, Connecticut, which was considered far enough inland to keep the governor from mischief. But Browne managed to raise a Tory regiment by smuggling out invitations to friends and friends of friends, much as he might have arranged a dinner party on New Province. He dispatched two young Connecticut Loyalists, who easily passed through the porous Continental lines, to New York City, where they conferred with General Howe. He arranged the exchange of Browne for Continental Army general William Alexander (who claimed the disputed title of Lord Stirling despite his Patriot fervor). He had been captured during the Battle of Brooklyn.32
Browne set up his headquarters in Flushing, Long Island, and began issuing warrants to recruiters, claiming that he had been commissioned by “His Majesty’s Commissioners for Restoring Peace and Tranquility to the Deluded Subjects in America.”33 In a letter to Muster Master General Winslow, Browne said that he had “about eighty or ninety men” who had agreed to serve without pay. Soon, he said, he would get many more, thanks to a nautical recruiter who was sailing along the Connecticut coast in an armed sloop and picking up Browne’s enlistees.34
In New Jersey, Cortlandt Skinner, a member of one of the state’s oldest and wealthiest families, raised six battalions of New Jersey Volunteers. Patriots, unaware that Skimmer had long spied for the British,35 had offered him command of Rebel forces in New Jersey. He chose instead to accept a brigadier general commission from General Howe.36 Skinner originally envisioned a force of three thousand men. But four battalions of four hundred men each were raised, and they fought in battles from New Jersey to Virginia.37 A merchant and shipowner who had been a member of New Jersey’s Provincial Congress was commissioned a major and recruited two hundred men for one of the battalions.38
Officers and men were outfitted in green uniforms—a frequent color selection for Loyalist units—and became known as Skinner’s Greens.39 Skinner, besides commanding the Volunteers, would continue to spy as British troops marched across New Jersey in pursuit of Washington. He once wrote as his own testimonial that “there was scarcely any Material Information of the Encampment of the Rebel Army which I did not obtain the first Intelligence of.”40
Loyalists in Bergen County, adjacent to Staten Island, provided the British in New York City not only with food but also with spies and recruits, many of whom Tryon secretly signed up while he was aboard the Duchess of Gordon. Those shipboard enlistees were told to return home and tell no one about their enlistments until British troops arrived in New Jersey. This was an unprecedented move, going beyond usual British military doctrine by setting up advance Loyalist units in places that the British Army had yet to invade.41
Volunteers signing up for Loyalist regiments were given their equipment and were paid in gold-backed British money, not in theever-declining currency printed by the Continental Congress. Some Loyalist recruiters promised a prospective soldier a five-guinea signing bonus, rather than the advertised forty guineas, but added the lure of two hundred acres of land, with an extra one hundred acres for his wife and fifty acres for each child. A Patriot enlisting in a Rebel militia typically had to provide his own musket and bayonet, a sword or tomahawk, cartridge box and belt, twenty-three rounds of cartridges, twelve flints, a knapsack, a pound of gunpowder, and three pounds of bullets in reserve. All this was an expensive outlay for a poor farmer.42 Stephen De Lancey, of the powerful Tory clan, was commissioned a lieutenant colonel of the Volunteers’ 1st Battalion. His commissioning had been delayed by a brief encounter with Patriots. On the evening of June 4, 1776, he and several others had been celebrating King George’s birthday at a Tory tavern in Albany, New York. The Committee of Correspondence denounced the birthday party as an “indecent meeting” and ordered De Lancey and five others deported to Connecticut, a frequent venue for the safekeeping of Tories, whose crimes ranged from not accepting Continental currency to taking up arms against the Revolution. Patriots usually charged them for their rooms and meals.43 When De Lancey was released in December, he went to New York and received his commission.44
Each battalion had, in addition to its complement of commissioned officers, a surgeon and a chaplain, all drawn from New York and New Jersey. The most distinguished of the chaplains was the Reverend Charles Inglis, assistant minister at Trinity Church, New York City’s most esteemed Anglican congregation. Inglis was a passionate Loyalist who, after the occupation of the city, became an eloquent propagandist.45 Responding to Tom Paine’s Common Sense, for example, Inglis wrote, “The Americans are properly Britons. They have the manners, habits, and ideas of Britons… . Limited monarchy is the form of government … which is best adapted to the genius and temper of Britons; although here and there among us a crack-brained zealot for democracy or absolute monarchy, may be sometimes found.”46
• • •
Loyalists who enlisted or were commissioned in areas under Patriot control had to make their way to safe grounds in New York City or Long Island. These traveling new soldiers of the “Provincial Corps,” as the British Army collectively called the Loyalist units, were treated by Patriots sometimes as spies and sometimes as armed foes. One of the largest packs of recruited Loyalists, numbering about fifty, was assembled in northern New York’s Ulster County. At Wallkill, about eighty-five miles north of New York City, militiamen spotted them, and in a brief firefight three Patriots were wounded and the Loyalists got away.
An alarm spread through the countryside. The recruits, supported by local Loyalists, hid out in the woods or in the cellars or barns of sympathizers by day and slogged through creeks and along old trails by night. They had not gone far before a militia patrol found them and captured about thirty. Eleven were accused of “levying war against the United States of America” and five of “aiding and assisting [and] giving Comfort” to the enemy. They were brought before a court-martial ordered by Gen. George Clinton, a former member of the Continental Congress and soon to become governor of New York.
The court-martial, after listening to Patriots who told of encounters with the armed Tories, resolved that “an immediate Example was necessary and requisite to deter intestine Enemys from continuing Treasonable Practices against the State.” Fourteen men “were adjudged to suffer the Pains and Penalties of Death by being hanged by the neck until they are dead.” But after hearing petitions and statements the provisional state government (the Convention of the Representatives of the State of New York) ruled that only the leader and his assistant were to be executed. The others received various sentences, ranging from immediate parole to confinement until the end of the war.47
One of the black veterans brought to New York by Dunmore was a former slave known as Titus. He had run away from his Quaker master in Colt’s Neck, New Jersey, and managed to reach Virginia, where he enlisted in Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment. Under the nomde guerre “Colonel Tye,” Titus became a leader of guerrilla warriors who fought on the Neutral Ground.48
When the New York Provincial Congress in October 1775 described widespread Tory recruiting as a “conspiracy from Haverstraw [New York] to Hackensack [New Jersey],” the phrase roughly encompassed the Neutral Ground. It stretched along both banks of the Hudson River from above the New York—New Jersey border south to Sandy Hook. In Westchester County, the term referred to the land between the British-held Bronx and American-held Peekskill. The label was ironic, for on this so-called Neutral Ground both sides would fight, not to gain territory but to forage for food and firewood, to demand loyalty oaths, to kill each other in skirmishes—and to spy.49
The label was made famous in the postwar generation by James Fenimore Cooper. His Revolutionary War novel, The Spy, was published in 1821 with the subtitle A Tale of the Neutral Ground. Cooper, who had married into the still-powerful De Lancey family in 1811, wrote the book while living in Scarsdale, a Westchester County town that had been part of the Neutral Ground. Cooper’s hero, Harvey Birch, was based, at least partially, on Enoch Crosby, a true spy of the Neutral Ground. Crosby, masquerading as a Tory recruiter, secretly worked for John Jay, chairman of the New York State Committee and Commission for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies. Jay had the power to send Tories to the notorious “fleet prison,” a string of former privateer ships anchored off Kingston, New York.50
Cooper never publicly linked the real Crosby and the fictional Birch. But he did say that Jay had told him spy stories, and presumably Cooper learned about Loyalist activities from his wife and in-laws. In his petition for a federal pension, Crosby told his own story, which began in the summer of 1776, when his eight-month enlistment in a Connecticut regiment ended and he found himself in the Neutral Ground. On his way to join another regiment, he met a stranger who took him to be a Tory. Realizing that the stranger “intended to go to the British,” Crosby instantly decided to string the Tory along. The talkative stranger told Crosby where and by whom a Loyalist regiment was secretly being raised.
Crosby took his information to a member of the Westchester County Committee of Safety. After being vetted by the committee, Crosby became an agent. Among the Tories he found were some thirty men recruited by Lt. Col. Beverley Robinson, Jr., son of the commander of the Loyal American Regiment.51 Crosby’s true status was withheld from the principal hunter of Tory spies in the area, Capt. Micah Townsend of Westchester, commander of Townsend’s Rangers. Townsend did capture Crosby as a genuine spy. And Crosby genuinely escaped, risking his life to preserve his secret identity. The escape helped to establish his reputation among Tories.
Crosby’s real and staged escapes, under various names and in various Neutral Ground places, did not raise suspicions. In the Neutral Ground war, many real Tories were captured and did get away from inept Rebel guards. But the ruse could not last forever, and, after nine months as a secret agent, Crosby enlisted in a new regiment and served as a sergeant on regular service.52
While Crosby was hunting Tories in the Neutral Ground, a small but brutal civil war was being fought by the Dutch Tories and the Dutch Rebels of New Jersey. British forces, Loyalist volunteers, and Patriot militiamen launched hit-and-run raids, keeping residents jittery. No one ever knew when a Tory or a Rebel might shatter the night. Bergen County was particularly split because of a schism in the Dutch Reformed Church, with some congregations supporting American-trained clergy and the Rebels, while others, backing the more conservative faction, favored the Loyalists. Many spoke only Dutch. When local broadsides on the Revolution were published, they were often in English and Dutch.53
An American officer, writing about the “good people of Bergen County,” said they “lay greatly exposed to both internal and external enemies, and the internal enemies have a free recourse to New York, the center and head of all British activity in America.” Tories, allying with Quakers, won elective offices. Patriot governor William Livingston complained, “I have seen tories members of Congress, judges upon tribunals, tories representing in our Legislative councils, tory members of our Assemblies.”54
In New York’s Orange County, which bordered on Bergen County, a militia leader reported that “matters are come to such a height that they who are friends of the American Cause, must (for their own safety) be cautious how they speak in public” and that some of those “who have been active in favour of our Cause, will soon (if any opportunity offers) be carried down to New York.” Patriots who were carried down to New York City faced imprisonment in a prison ship or confinement in the Sugar House, a sugar refinery turned into a dank stone prison where many Patriots died.55
Several British prison ships lay at anchor in a small Brooklyn bay. The ships were the dreaded dungeons of thousands of captured Continental Army soldiers, Rebel militiamen, and Patriot civilians. Loring, the commissioner of prisoners, showed little interest in his captives, except as a source of income from contractors’ kickbacks. Prisoners were jammed into holds, where so many died of disease or starvation that each day guards would open the hatches and yell down, “Turn out your dead!” Bodies were either tossed into the sea or buried ashore in shallow graves. Estimates of the total death toll ran as high as 11,500.56
The Sugar House, although less notorious than the prison ship, was as horrifying. “Cold and famine were now our destiny,” a survivor wrote. “Not a pane of glass, nor even a board to a single window in the house, and no fire but once in three days to cook our small allowance of provision. There was a scene that truly tried body and soul. Old shoes were bought and eaten with as much relish as a pig or a turkey; a beef bone of four or five ounces, after it was picked clean, was sold by the British guard for as many coppers.”57
Tory historian Thomas Jones, who lived in New York and knew Loring, wrote that he “was determined to make the most of his commission and, by appropriating to his own use nearly two thirds of the rations allowed the prisoners, he actually starved to death about three hundred of the poor wretches before an exchange took place.” Noting General Howe’s fondness for Mrs. Loring, Jones wrote, “Joshua made no objections. He fingered the cash: the General enjoyed Madam.”58
• • •
As Cornwallis pursued Washington across New Jersey, a guerrilla war was declared. In a special order Howe empowered his troops, including Loyalist forces, to treat their retreating foes as outlaws: “Small stragling parties, not dressed like Soldiers and without Officers, not being admissable in War, who presume to Molest or fire upon Soldiers, or peaceable Inhabitants of the Country, will be immediately hanged without Tryal as Assassins.”59
Vicious little actions, hardly noticed in the chronicles of the Washington-Cornwallis saga, cost uncounted lives. Kidnappings were common. One had a famous Patriot as its victim: Richard Stockton, a member of Congress and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
When the British were about to capture Princeton, Stockton fled with his family to a friend’s house in Monmouth County, New Jersey. Local Loyalists kidnapped him and handed him over to the British. A descendant of an old and distinguished Quaker family and a member of Princeton’s first graduating class, Stockton was a prize catch. He was jailed as a criminal and cruelly treated until he broke under duress and signed an oath of allegiance to the king—an act that disavowed his signature on the Declaration.
Sometime around mid-March 1777, Stockton was released without any public explanation and returned to his magnificent Princeton home, Morven. The mansion—Cornwallis’s headquarters during his occupation of Princeton—had been ruined. Hessians were blamed for making firewood of fine furniture, drinking their way through the wine cellar, bayoneting family portraits, and stealing Stockton’s horses and livestock. Tories had led the looters to hastily buried silver plate and other treasures.
Stockton had returned from captivity under a cloud because congressmen possessed unpublicized knowledge that he had foresworn the Declaration. Later an ailing Stockton tried to recant his oath to the king by signing oaths of adjuration and allegiance prescribed by the New Jersey legislature as a way to redeem tainted citizens.60
• • •
Tryon joined in the guerrilla war by organizing a troop of Westchester County horsemen, under the command of Col. James De Lancey, for raiding in the Neutral Ground. The cavalry soon became known as De Lancey’s Cow-boys, a term that started out meaning cattle and horse rustlers and soon became a name for raiders.61 A typical raid, as reported in the Tory New York Gazetteer: “Last Sunday Colonel James DeLancey, with sixty of his Westchester Light Horse went from Kingsbridge to the White Plains, where they took from the Rebels, 44 barrels of flour, and two ox teams, near 100 head of black cattle, and 300 fat sheep and hogs.”62
Patriots savagely retaliated against De Lancey’s Cow-boys by attacking Oliver De Lancey’s country home at Bloomingdale, about seven miles up the Hudson from New York City. As the victims later recounted, strange noises awakened De Lancey’s teenage daughter Charlotte and her friend Elizabeth Floyd, daughter of a Long Island Loyalist. They ran to a window, opened it, and shouted, “Who is there?” From below a gruff voice answered, “Put in your heads, you bitches!”
Men entered the house from front and rear and, prodding the teenagers with muskets, ordered them out of the house “as fast as you can.” The elder Mrs. De Lancey got out on her own, but, able only to hobble, she hid in a dog kennel under the stoop. The girls fled into a swampy wood (today’s Central Park) and spent the night “sitting upon their feet to keep a little warmth in them” and watching the house burn to the ground.63
Stephen De Lancey’s horsemen also foraged on Long Island, another site of clashes between mounted Tories and amphibious Rebels. In one of the biggest whaleboat attacks Col. Return Jonathan Meigs led 170 men across the Sound to Sag Harbor, pounced on the foragers, and killed six of them. After burning the Tory boats and forage, Meigs took ninety prisoners back to Connecticut. The entire operation lasted twenty-five hours. Congress rewarded Meigs with a commendation and a sword.64 The British soldiers had just been paid andwere “pretty well boozey,” wrote a Rebel raider. “Some had nothing but his shirt on, some a pair of trowsers others perhaps 1 stocking and one shoe.”65
Governor Tryon, acting as General Tryon, waged what he called “desolation warfare.” He sent the Cow-boys and Emmerich’s Chasseurs, another mounted Loyalist unit, on terror raids, torching the homes of leading Patriots, whom he believed he disparaged by calling them mere “committeemen.” During one of the horsemen’s most terrifying raids, they burned down parts of Tarrytown, a Hudson River community split between Loyalists and Patriots.66
The participation of Emmerich’s Chasseurs in the raids added European cavalrymen to the Loyalist guerrilla forces. The unit was raised by Andreas Emmerich, a native of Germany, where he began his military career. He emigrated to England, then to America, where he was commissioned a lieutenant colonel and raised a corps of light troops named after himself. About half of the officers were Europeans, who did not get along with their American counterparts.
Mutinous American officers asked General Clinton to court-martial Emmerich for “employing Soldiers, Negroes, & [Tory] Refugees, to robb and plunder” civilians, taking a cut of the loot from the looters. The officers also accused him of “imprisoning, Whipping and cruelly beating the inhabitants without cause or trial,” selling British Army horses, and stealing army funds. Clinton sidestepped the courtmartial by transferring the men into other regiments. Emmerich somehow managed to keep his colonelcy.67
For a time Major General Putnam had his headquarters at Peekskill, New York. Putnam tried to rein in Tory raiders by sending Colonel Meigs down the Hudson to attack pillagers. Rumors circulated that, in retaliation, Tryon planned to kidnap Putnam. Coincidentally Patriots reported a sudden surge of Tory spies in the area. One of them, a Loyalist lieutenant named Nathan Palmer, managed to infiltrate the headquarters encampment. Soldiers discovered him, and Putnam brought him before a court-martial to be tried as a spy. Tryon tried to intercede, threatening Putnam personally if he did not release Palmer.
Putnam replied:
Sir—Nathan Palmer, a lieutenant in your king’s service, was taken in my camp as a spy. He was tried as a spy; he was condemned as a spy, and you may rest assured, sir, he shall be hanged as a spy.
I have the honor to be, &c.
Israel Putnam.
P. S. Afternoon. He is hanged.68
Casual malice like Putnam’s laid bare the fact that gentlemanly warfare had disappeared in the Neutral Ground. Joseph Galloway, a leading Tory, charged that marauding and even rape was officially tolerated by the British and the Loyalists. Galloway said that “indiscriminate and excessive plunder” was witnessed by “thousands within the British lines.” In a “solemn inquiry,” backed by affidavits, he said, “it appears, that no less than twenty-three [rapes] were committed in one neighborhood in New Jersey; some of them on married women, in presence of their helpless husbands, and others on daughters, while the unhappy parents, with unavailing tears and cries, could only deplore the savage brutality.”69 Similarly, in New York City, citizens and officers accused Hessians, Redcoats, and Loyalists of robbing houses, raping women, and murdering civilians. Thomas Jones wrote that even murderers sentenced to death were set free. The crimes stirred futile demands for an end of martial law and the return of civil courts.70
Tryon’s desolation warfare shocked many British officers and outraged Patriots. Justifying his tactics, he said, “Much as I abhor every principle of inhumanity or ungenerous conduct, I should, were I in more authority, burn every Committee Man’s house within my reach, as I deem, those Agents the wretched instruments, of the continued calamities of this Country.”71
The Neutral Ground expanded, if not geographically, then psychologically, so that the label was applied to whatever territory that armed Loyalists were trying to control. The ebb and flow of Loyalists, Continentals, and Patriot militias created a climate of lawlessness. At times anarchy ruled much of the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey and the Hudson Highlands along both banks of the river.72
New dens for refugees appeared as Washington, retreating across New Jersey, left in his wake more of the Neutral Ground and more weathervane Tories who changed allegiance with the winds of victory. When General Howe issued a proclamation offering pardon and protection to anyone who within sixty days should swear allegiance to the Crown, three thousand persons did so.73 People sensed the death of the Continental Army. They were seeing what a British officer had seen a few days before the proclamation: “The fact is their army is broken all to pieces … it is well nigh over with them.”74
In December 1776 Washington reached the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River, directly across from Trenton. He sent men thirty miles up the icy river and thirty miles down to collect all the boats they could take back to camp and then destroy the rest. Washington especially wanted Durham boats. Flat-bottomed and forty to sixty feet long, they hauled freight to and from Philadelphia. Each boat, Washington figured, could hold as many as forty armed men.75
Amidst his planning there was anguish. “I think the game is pretty near up,” he wrote to his brother John, “owing, in a great measure, to the insidious Arts of the Enemy, and disaffection of the Colonies … but principally to the accursed policy of short Inlistments, and placing too great a dependence on the Militia, the Evil consequences of which were foretold 15 Months ago with a spirit almost Prophetick.”76 Enlistments for many of his troops would end on January 1, 1777.
In the first hours of December 26, through wind-whipped snow and hail, Washington launched his complex plan to cross the Delaware and take Trenton by overwhelming the city’s Hessian guard. The morning was still dark when the Americans struck, startling the sleeping Hessians. In a short, furious battle the Americans killed twenty-two Hessians, wounded eighty-four, and took 918 prisoners. Four Americans were wounded and two were killed.77 On January3, 1777, Washington outmaneuvered the British and led an audacious attack on Princeton, thirteen miles north of Trenton. His exhausted troops—including many volunteers who fought even though their enlistments had expired—improbably won another battle.
The Hessians were shocked at how quickly Trentonians, who had hailed their occupiers and sold them provisions, became newly hatched Rebels. “When the Hessians entered Trenton and occupied the region, the inhabitants swore their allegiance to the King of Britain,” a Lutheran minister wrote. “But as soon as the American troops attacked on Christmas, the inhabitants shot at the Hessians from their houses. In fact, even a woman fired out of a window and mortally wounded a Captain.”78
From Princeton, Washington led his army to winter quarters in the heights of Morristown, New Jersey. The Continentals’ camp, a two-day march from New York City, lay behind the Watchung Mountains, which formed a natural barrier. Washington sent out orders to militiamen in the Neutral Ground to wage guerrilla war and “harass their troops to death.”79 In another letter to his brother, Washington wrote, “Our Scouts, and the Enemy’s Foraging Parties, have frequent skirmishes; in which they always sustain the greatest loss in killed and Wounded, owing to our Superior skill in Fire arms.”80
While Howe enjoyed another pleasant winter in New York and Washington watched his army shrink to barely eight hundred men, the recruitment of Loyalist soldiers continued from New England to Georgia.81 Howe had given Col. Edmund Fanning, Governor Tryon’s confidant, a warrant to raise the King’s American Regiment.82 Fanning then bestowed officers’ commissions on recruiters who set out in search of volunteers in New York and New England.
One of Fanning’s recruiters was Capt. John McAlpine, who, while seeking enlistees in the upper Hudson Valley, was captured by Rebels and imprisoned in Poughkeepsie. He was awaiting trial and a probable sentence of execution when nineteen of his recruits attacked the jail and freed him. Aided by Loyalists along the way, the Tory rescuers and McAlpine spent twenty-six days eluding Rebels until they reached the safety of regimental headquarters on Long Island.83
Most of the regiment’s men came from Long Island and the lower Hudson Valley, where some fathers and sons enlisted together, as did a number of brothers. Recruiters were less successful in New England. Recruiting in Connecticut was Capt. Moses Dunbar, a thirty-one-year-old native of Wallingford. Like so many other Loyalists from that state, Dunbar had fled to Long Island after the British conquest of New York.84 Dunbar twice slipped back into Connecticut, first to get married and then to bring his pregnant wife back to Long Island. On the second trip, in his words, “I accepted a captain’s warrant for the King’s service in Colonel Fanning’s regiment.”
Tory hunters caught Captain Dunbar and charged him with recruiting for the British. He later was indicted for waging war against Connecticut, under a new state treason law that carried the death penalty. He was denounced by his Patriot father, who was said to have declared when his son was arrested that he would furnish the hemp to make a rope for him.85
Dunbar was tried and hanged in Hartford before a “prodigious concourse of people,” including his wife, who was forced to attend.86 The Tory press reported the hanging of six other recruiters in Connecticut.87
Around this time, a Loyalist spy identified only as “The Woman” reported “a very considerable Store of Provisions & cloathing and 80 pieces of Cannon” in Danbury, Connecticut, near the New York border, about twenty-five miles from the coast.88 General Howe authorized Tryon to lead a fleet of twenty-six ships to the mouth of the Saugatuck River, at Norwalk, where he landed more than eighteen hundred men, including both Regulars and the Prince of Wales’s American Volunteers Brigade. Tryon’s style of pitiless warfare did not appeal to Howe, but this time he gave Tryon a sizable force because pilfering or destroying the Rebels’ supplies made military sense.
Tryon met little opposition as his men marched to Danbury, where local Loyalists guided them to supply caches. The troops invaded and pillaged Patriots’ homes, careful to spare the Anglican church and Loyalists’ homes. Great piles of tents and provisions and thousands of shoes went up in flames. His mission accomplished, Tryon led his troops back toward the coast. But he discovered that his way was blocked by militiamen who had been hastily mobilized and led by Brig. Gens. David Wooster and Benedict Arnold.
Arnold was home in New Haven, brooding about the Congress’s failure to promote him to major general, when at three o’clock one morning a messenger came with the report that a large force of Regulars and Tories had landed near Westport and were bivouacked in Weston, obviously on their way to Danbury. Arnold galloped off and was soon joined by sixty-six-year-old David Wooster, commander of the Connecticut militia. They quickly gathered one hundred mounted militiamen. Meanwhile Brig. Gen. Gold Selleck Silliman, commander of the Fairfield militia, had rounded up about five hundred more.
The next day Tryon left a burning Danbury behind him as he led his troops back to the shore and the waiting transports. He stopped at Ridgefield, where he supervised the torching of a Presbyterian church and several Patriots’ homes. Local Loyalists were said to have been spared because they had painted black and white stripes on their chimneys.89 Militiamen trailed Tryon’s force, starting a short, fierce battle in which Wooster was fatally shot. A Continental soldier saw Arnold ride “to our front line in the full force of the Enemy’s fire, of Musquetry & Grape shot.” His horse, riddled by nine shots, fell, trapping Arnold, who had been lamed in Quebec when a musket ball struck his left leg. As he struggled to free himself, a Redcoat demanded surrender at bayonet point. Arnold fatally shot him with a pistol and managed to escape.90
Fighting continued on the third day, when Arnold, Silliman, and scores of additional militiamen arrived, firing at the invaders from houses, stone walls, and barricades. Arnold had another horse shot from under him as Royal Marines from the fleet landed and turned the battle, opening the way for the invaders to make it to boats that took them to the ships. In the three days of the invasion, about two hundred men in Tryon’s forces were killed or wounded, as were about sixty militiamen.91
Congress rewarded Arnold for his bravery by promoting him to major general. And Washington, responding to the start of a British offensive in northern New York, told Congress that “an active, spirited officer,” a man who is “judicious and brave,” was needed on the imperiled northern frontier. That man, Washington said, was Benedict Arnold. He was swiftly on his way to what would be an epic battle. His foes would include not only the British Army but two new enemy forces.92
A prophecy about those new enemies came in a curious way. Beyond the Neutral Ground, in the Highlands of northern New Jersey, the most notorious Tory raider was Claudius Smith. A young thief before the war, he became a guerrilla who profited from his loyalty to the king. The victim of his most infamous raid was Maj. Nathaniel Strong, a well-known militia officer who lived in Blooming Grove, a town on the Hudson. Smith had publicly vowed to kill Strong, along with several other prominent Patriots.
One night Smith and four Cow-boys plundered one house, and then, about midnight, invaded Strong’s home. Smith told Strong that his life would be spared if he gave up his musket and surrendered. As Strong turned to set his gun against a wall, he was fatally shot in the back. That crime inspired Governor George Clinton of New York to offer a twelve-hundred-dollar reward for the capture of Smith and six hundred dollars for the capture of his outlaw sons.93
A wanted poster called Smith “a fierce looking man nearly 7 ft. tall, wearing a suit of rich broadcloth adorned with silver buttons,” a “Notorious leader of a lawless band of men.” Besides the murder of Strong, Smith was accused of stealing “money, pewter & silver plate, saddles, guns, oxen, cattle & horses from the American colonists and turning them over to the British in New York City.” His leading confederate in the city was Mayor David Matthews, who had been implicated in the plot to kidnap or assassinate George Washington.94
After the wanted posters were tacked up, Smith fled to the protection of British-occupied Long Island, leaving his oldest son, William, in charge of the Cow-boy gang. Patriots stormed the gang’s mountain hideout and fatally shot William and another Cow-boy. Several others, including Richard Smith, Claudius’s youngest son, got away.
In a daring whaleboat raid, other avenging Patriots rowed to Long Island from Connecticut, captured Claudius Smith in his bed, bound and gagged him, and carried him off to the hidden boat. They took him, under heavy Patriot guard, to Goshen, New York, about twenty miles west of West Point. There he was chained to a prison cell floor while awaiting trial. Convicted not of murder but of robbery and breaking and entering, he was nevertheless sentenced to death, along with members of his gang.
He and two other Cow-boys were taken in a cart to a gallows surrounded by a large crowd. When the nooses were put around the necks of the three men, according to witnesses, Smith kicked off his shoes, with the observation that his mother, scolding him for his evil behavior, had often told him that he would die with his shoes on: By dying barefoot he would make her a liar.95 The cart was then driven off, and the three men dangled from their nooses.
Soon after the execution Claudius’s son Richard Smith went on a rampage, singling out Patriots for death. The first known victim was found with a note pinned to his body:
A Warning to Rebels
You are hereby forbid at your peril to hang no more friends to government as you did Claudius Smith… . We are determined to hang six for one, for the blood of the innocent cries aloud for vengeance… . There is particular companies of us that belongs to Col. Butler’s army, Indians as well as white men and particularly numbers from New York that is resolved to be revenged on you for your cruelty and murders… . This is the first and we are determined to pursue it on your heads and leaders to the last till the whole of you is massacred.96
Smith’s vengeful warning reminded the Patriots of the two new enemies who were waging the new war in the north: Colonel Butler’s Loyalist Rangers and Britain’s Loyalist Indians.
* John G. Simcoe, a successor to Lt. Col. Robert Rogers, added the Huzzars (Hussars)—a light cavalry troop—to the Rangers, named in honor of Queen Charlotte, the wife of King George III