17
The late conduct of the British demons in New Jersey, in the robberies, burnings, ravishments and murders, with a long catalogue of crimes as black as hell! is a call louder than lightening … against the tyrant and his bloody butchers.
—Newspaper report on terror warfare in New Jersey1
Slowly the Loyalists’ hope of victory ebbed, and vengeance filled the void. William Franklin, who once had been New Jersey’s royal governor, was by 1780 the angry, frustrated personification of all Tories who felt forgotten by Britain. But Franklin still had power, strangely enhanced by the fact that an infamous Rebel, Ben Franklin, was his father. William Franklin, with his uncanny ability to attach himself to the possessors of power, had become the confidant of John André, who, as General Clinton’s secret service chief and adjutant general, controlled the flow of intelligence from and to Clinton. And when André was executed, Franklin coolly moved on to André’s successor, Oliver De Lancey.
In De Lancey, Franklin found an ally for a plan that went beyond the raids that once more were bloodying the Neutral Ground. Mostly at his own expense De Lancey had raised three Loyalist regiments of five hundred men each, creating what became known as De Lancey’s
Brigade. He was made a brigadier general, adding that military clout to the matchless power of his formidable family. As Franklin saw the future, no longer would Loyalists be hit-and-run raiders on the fringes of the war: They would mobilize into strong military units and help to win the war, which was, after all, the Loyalists’ war, not Britain’s.
Franklin balanced his ties to De Lancey by becoming a friend of William Smith, who had married into the Livingston family, longtime rivals of the De Lancey clan. Smith, whose father had been chief justice of New York, had known Clinton for many years. The two lived only two doors apart on Broadway. Smith, although secretly critical of Clinton’s strategic decisions, was an influential adviser to the general.2
Franklin’s hatred of Rebels stemmed from his treatment in their hands. They doubly despised him, as a traitor to his father and a traitor to the colony he had governed. And he was harder to drive from office than any other Tory governor. Unlike others he would not flee or fade away.
William Franklin was born about 1731 to an unidentified “mother not in good Circumstances” and raised by Franklin and his common-law wife, Deborah Read Franklin. “Billy,” as his indulgent father called him, studied in a prestigious classical academy in Philadelphia, enlisted in the colonial army, and grew “fond of a military Life.” But he drifted into law, reading under one of his father’s closest friends in Philadelphia, Joseph Galloway. When he returned to civilian life he worked with his father on electrical experiments, including the one that involved sending aloft a kite with a metal key attached during a lightning storm.3
His father, as a colonial agent in London, arranged for William to continue his law studies there. While William was in London, he basked in his father’s fame and charmed royal officials. That began his political career, which, with his father’s unabashed influence, produced his appointment as governor of New Jersey in 1762.4 Sailing offto his royal post, he left his father behind in London to cope with the growing crisis between the Crown and the colonies.
Beginning with his support of the Stamp Act and continuing through his colony’s growing mood of rebellion, William skillfully warded off critics and held on to his post. He was proudly Loyalist, declaring that “the most heinous Rage of the most intemperate Zealots” could not “induce me to swerve from the Duty I owe His Majesty.”5 Nor, obviously, could his father.
In 1775 Ben Franklin returned from his long stay in London to take up the work of the Revolution. With him was William’s son, William Temple Franklin (always called Temple), born in London around 1759. His mother, like his grandmother, was unacknowledged, except for his middle name, which suggests that he had been conceived while his father was studying at the Middle Temple court of law in London. Temple was put in a foster home, his raising and education paid for by his grandfather. Temple’s father ignored him and married a wealthy, well-connected British woman in 1762, as the governorship was about to come to him.6
Temple accompanied his grandfather when Ben Franklin left London, arriving in Philadelphia on May 5, less than a month after the Battles of Concord and Lexington. Shortly after, Ben, William, and Galloway met at Trevose Manor, Galloway’s palatial seventeenth-century home about twenty miles north of Philadelphia. The meeting banished any hope of reconciliation. Only Galloway and William Franklin had any common ground. Ben had already rejected Galloway’s Plan of Union, and William Franklin had already begun defying his provincial assemblymen as they marched toward revolution.7
On June 15, 1776, the New Jersey Provincial Congress declared Franklin “an enemy to the liberties of this country” and ordered him arrested. Franklin, using arguments both legal and vituperative, protested. But the Continental Congress confirmed the arrest order and put Franklin in the custody of Governor Jonathan Trumbull of Connecticut. By chance he was brought before Trumbull on America’s first Fourth of July.8 Franklin partisans claimed that he was placed in the notorious New-Gate Prison (named after the London original)in East Granby, Connecticut. Prisoners were kept in cells carved into the shafts of what had been a copper mine. Many Tories were jailed there, and Washington was said to have personally sent a few “flagrant and atrocious villains” to New-Gate. Franklin, however, was not one of them.9
He signed a parole drawn up by Trumbull, who put him in the first of a series of residences, giving him freedom to walk around town. He started openly acting as a Tory leader, issuing long-distance pardons to Loyalists in Connecticut and New Jersey to broaden his power base. The politicking violated his parole. So Trumbull put him in the Litchfield town jail. He was there when he learned that his wife, a refugee in New York, had died. He became so melancholy that he was released to a private residence. In October 1778 he was exchanged for John McKinley, the president (governor) of Delaware, who had been captured in Wilmington after a battle in September 1777.10 Franklin headed straight for New York City, offered his services to Clinton, and founded, without Clinton’s blessing, a Loyalist movement innocuously named the Refugee Club. Members of the club showed that they were not conspirators by announcing their meetings at Hicks’s Tavern in newspapers. They appeared to be no more than socializing Loyalists. But Franklin had more than chatting in mind.11
Loyalists, particularly those whose property had been seized by Rebels, had begun calling themselves refugees to advertise their woeful status. New York City officials appointed an “Inspector of the Claims of the Refugees” and later a four-man board “to regulate the bounty of government to the refugees.”12 Both Loyalists and Patriots used “Refugees” for Tories who had fled New Jersey to join the British in New York, often returning to their native state as marauders. Some refugees had come from as far away as Georgia to find sanctuary and work for the Loyalist cause.13
Franklin’s youthful fondness for the military life bloomed anew in New York. He had enough sense and experience to realize there was no possibility of creating an actual Loyalist army. Clinton was absolutely in charge, signing himself “General and Commander in Chief of all his Majesty’s Forces within the Colonies laying on the Atlantic
Ocean, from Nova Scotia to West-Florida, inclusive, &c. &c.”14 Clinton was not against Tory military units, and he did authorize their deployment alongside his British Regulars in battle. But the kind of military organization that Franklin envisioned was a guerrilla force that would terrorize Rebels and rouse Loyalists. Clinton spurned the use of terror.
Another former royal governor, Maj. Gen. William Tryon, gave Clinton a rationalization for terrorizing the Rebels. Tryon pointed out that the Rebels’ own tactics were based on terror—” the general Dread of their Tyranny” and expectation of “our forbearance.” So, Tryon went on, he joined others who “apprehend no Mischief … if a general Terror and Despondency can be awaked among a People already divided.” Tryon wrote about his views on terror after practicing his beliefs in a devastating raid on Connecticut civilians.
On July 2, 1779, Tryon assembled about twenty-six hundred soldiers—Regulars, Hessians, and a major Loyalist military unit, the King’s American Regiment. The regiment, originally known as Fanning’s Corps, was led by Tryon’s secretary, Col. Edmund Fanning.15 Among the black Tory soldiers in the unit was John Thompson, the secret courier who had worked for Tryon when he ran a Loyalist underground from his cabin on board the Duchess of Gordon.
One of Fanning’s officers in the Connecticut raiding party was Capt. John McAlpine, who had been jailed by Rebels for recruiting. His recruits, in an early display of their fidelity, had broken into the jail and freed him.16 His would be a fighting regiment, destined to serve on many battlefields. But on this day, as they boarded ships in New York City, they were part of a terror force.
The first target was New Haven, Connecticut. At dawn, atop the campus chapel, Yale president Ezra Stiles surveyed the raiders’ fleet through his telescope and later saw soldiers landing and advancing from shore. Stiles immediately gathered college records and hid them away. Tryon had planned to burn down Yale and the rest of New Haven. But Fanning, a Yale graduate (class of 1757), persuaded Tryon not to torch the town.17
As the invaders disembarked, Yale students joined a volunteer company of about one hundred men who rushed to West Haven to delay the invaders while women and children fled from New Haven. Fifty-one-year-old Napthali Daggett, a professor of divinity and a former Yale president, got off a few shots from his ancient fowling piece. His moments on the battlefield would go down in Yale history:
A British officer yelled, “What are you doing there, you old fool, firing on His Majesty’s troops?”
“Exercising the rights of war,” Daggett professorially answered.
“If I let you go this time, you old rascal, will you ever fire again on the troops of His Majesty?”
“Nothing more likely,” he replied. British soldiers then bayoneted and clubbed him. They probably would have killed him if one of his former students, William Chandler, a classmate of Nathan Hale, had not intervened. Chandler, a Tory officer, and his brother, Thomas, were guiding Tryon’s men during their all-day looting of the city. William and Thomas were the sons of Joshua Chandler, a Yale alumnus and a wealthy New Haven Tory whom Rebels had briefly jailed for his outspoken support of the Loyalist cause.18
The muskets of the Yale volunteers and militiamen slowed down the raiders for a short time. At least one Tory officer was killed and seven enlisted men wounded; twenty-three Patriots were killed and fifteen wounded.19 Tryon made no effort to stop the looting or harassing of townspeople as his force took possession of the port. The next morning they burned ships, goods, and whatever ordnance they could find and then withdrew to their fleet. The entire Chandler family went with them. A neighbor said he entered the vacant Chandler house, untouched by looters, and saw on a dining table a meal laid out and uneaten. The Connecticut government seized Chandler’s estate.20
Next the troops sailed for Fairfield, a smaller town about twenty-five miles to the south. Alarm cannons fired on the foggy morning of July 7, after lookouts in a small hilltop fort spotted the Tryon fleet nearing Fairfield. The fleet’s pilot was a Fairfield man, George Hoyt, who would accompany them ashore and guide them as they destroyed his town.
Townspeople—mostly women, children, and elderly men—drove livestock into the woods and hid their silver in wells or within the clefts of stone walls. In midafternoon the soldiers began landing on Fairfield’s beach. Two columns separated and marched to the parade ground in the center of town, where Tryon himself posted a proclamation calling on all residents to swear allegiance to the king. No one seems to have paid any attention to the piece of paper. As in New Haven, militiamen fired on the invaders with muskets and cannons. But the overwhelmingly outnumbered defenders fell back before the raiders’ intense musketry and cannon fire from the offshore ships. Tryon easily took control of the town, setting up his headquarters in a large house near the parade ground.21
Again Tryon did not prevent his troops from terrifying the civilians, especially women. Several told later of being menaced, their silver shoe buckles and silver buttons torn away, their homes pillaged, their furniture smashed. One woman said soldiers “attempted, with threats and promises, to prevail upon me to yield to their unchaste and unlawful desires.” After she “obstinately denied them my body, these men then and there dragged me to bed and attempted violence, but thanks to God there appeared that instant two persons who rescued me.” After hearing what happened, Tryon posted two men to guard her from further outrages.22
Tryon sought out the house of Thaddeus Burr, a town judge. Finding the judge absent, Tryon demanded the judge’s official papers from his wife, Eunice Burr. “I told him,” she later recounted, “there were none but of very old dates, which related to the old estates. The general said, those are what we want, for we intend to have the estates. Upon which he ordered an officer to take them… .” After Tryon left, she said, “a pack of the most barbarous ruffians” entered the house. The woman ran into the yard, where the men threw her to the ground and began searching her for a watch they thought she had, “pulling and tearing my clothes from me in a most barbarousmanner.” Capt. Thomas Chapman of the King’s American Regiment, whom she knew socially, appeared and stopped the assault.23
Tryon then ordered the burning of houses, one by one, including the Burr home. As the day was reddening with sunset and flames, a thunderstorm broke and lightning laced the sky. One resident felt it was enough to make a person believe that “the final day had arrived.” The sudden rain did not quench the flames, which were visible for miles around.24
The Reverend John Sayre, who had come to Fairfield as its Anglican minister in 1774, was such an unremitting Loyalist that Rebels had declared him to be “a person inimical and dangerous to the interests of the United States” and exiled him to Farmington, Connecticut, fifty-six miles inland. Rebels later relented and allowed him back. Now, on this day of fiery invasion, Sayre went to Tryon and pleaded with him to stop the torching of the town. Tryon promised to spare certain homes, including Sayre’s.25 Local legend held that Tory homes were marked with black chimney stripes. Other residents and servants fled their houses. At one, raiders began their arson by snatching burning coals from a large fireplace and tossing them onto the wooden floor. As soon as they left, a slave slipped in, scooped up the coals, and threw them out, saving the house. The floor’s burn marks can still be seen.26
The next morning Tryon withdrew, his troops burdened with loot. They left behind the smoldering embers of many houses and the bodies of several slain residents, including three men bayoneted to death and another fatally shot for ignoring a soldier’s order. Sayre, his wife, and eight children all joined Tryon on the path to shore and waiting boats, as did George Hoyt, the Tory guide. Furious militiamen aimed a cannon at the home of Hoyt’s kin, a suspected Tory. A militia officer intervened, and the cannon was not fired.
Tryon assigned Hessians to be his rear guard, shielding his guests and the rest of the force as it withdrew. The departing Hessians put a final touch to the raid, setting fire to Sayre’s church and home, the Congregational Meetinghouse, and the Congregational minister’shome.27 Tryon and his men destroyed ninety-seven houses, seventeen barns, forty-eight stores, two schools, a county building, and three churches.28
The raiders sailed on to Norwalk, a few miles south of Fairfield, and began disembarking troops for an attack on that busy port. Again, after driving off a small militia force, Tryon took possession of the town. His men stole whatever they considered valuable and burned everything else, including whaleboats and small vessels in the harbor. The toll was 135 houses, two churches, eighty-seven barns, twenty-two storehouses, seventeen shops, four mills, and tons of newly harvested hay and wheat.29
Tryon’s fleet sailed next across the Sound to Huntington, Long Island, where he was refitting and resupplying his ships for continued raiding when he received orders to cancel further raids and report back to General Clinton. Tryon’s infuriated superior had two reasons to reprimand Tryon for acting “contrary to his … Orders.” First, the casualties. For no apparent military gain, the terror raids left twenty-six of Tryon’s men killed, ninety wounded, and thirty-two missing. And second, the raids produced a fuming reaction among Patriots, who would turn that anger into revenge.30
Tryon’s raid against Danbury two years before had had a military rationale because the town was the site of a Continental Army supply depot. This time Clinton had approved attacks along the Connecticut coast because he believed they would compel Washington, whose army was in New Jersey, to send troops to the rescue, giving Clinton an opportunity to strike across the Hudson at a diminished foe.31 Washington saw through Clinton’s strategy and outwitted him by ordering Brig. Gen. Anthony Wayne to lead a raid on Stony Point, the British “Little Gibraltar” on the Hudson. Washington knew from his spies that Clinton had withdrawn men from the fort to add to Tryon’s force.
On his march to Stony Point, Wayne arrested civilians to keep any Tories from warning the British. In the swift midnight attack a bullet grazed Wayne’s brow. His men took more than four hundred prisoners, along with several cannon and other military booty in what was the war’s last major battle in the North.32
The attack on Stony Point emphasized Clinton’s blunder in authorizing Tryon’s raids, which Clinton had vaguely viewed as harassment, not terrorism. Although he had neither suggested nor forbidden arson, in the words of his critic and adviser, William Smith, “Sir Henry wished the Conflagrations, and yet not to be answerable for them.”33
Clinton demanded a written report from Tryon, presumably so that he could prepare an explanation for anticipated criticism from London. In his report Tryon insisted that the Rebels had to be punished for their rebellion “if possible without injury to the loyalists.” By terrorizing the Rebels, he said, he had instilled in them fear of reprisals. He expected “no mischief to the public from the irritation of a few in rebellion if a general terror and despondency can be awakened among a people already divided … and easily impressible.”34
If Clinton feared censure from London, he was wrong. Lord Germain approved the raids, signaling what Tryon and William Franklin already knew: The conduct of the war was changing. What Tryon had labeled “desolation warfare” had been renewed, not by Clinton’s soldiers but by William Franklin and his creation, the Board of Associated Loyalists. Tryon backed Franklin’s Associated Loyalists, his instrument for taking the waging of the war away from Clinton and the “Parcel of Blockheads” around him.35
Tryon was a Briton of high military and social class. Franklin was a Loyalist and a son who was not only rebelling against the Patriots but also against his own father. Franklin felt that as a Loyalist he better understood the realities of the war and the Rebels than the British Army or its German hirelings. He had governed one of the mightiest Tory strongholds in America. By one estimate about a third of New Jersey’s population—some five thousand people—were Tories. In Bergen County, just across the river from New York City, Franklin believed he could create an army.36Eventually more than two thousand men would serve in the New Jersey Volunteers.37
While Tryon was preparing for his Connecticut raids, Franklin presented to him—as commander of the provincial forces in America—aplan that would make the Board of Associated Loyalists an independent, quasi-military force whose operations would “distress the Enemy in any Quarter not expressly forbid by the Commander in Chief.”
The distress would include pillage, for Franklin adopted a practice of Tryon’s desolation warfare: The raiders had the right to keep all “the plunder they take, which is to be only from rebels.”38 Tryon endorsed the plan, which called for battalions of about 250 men and a fleet of ships and whaleboats. Nine prominent New York and New Jersey Loyalists began recruiting for Franklin.39
Public notice of Franklin’s organization came on December 30, 1780, in Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer, which published the “Declaration of the Board of Directors of Associated Loyalists.” The group, it noted, had been established “for embodying and employing such of his Majesty’s faithful subjects in North America, as may be willing to associate under their direction, for the purpose of annoying the sea-coasts of the revolted Provinces and distressing their trade, either in co-operation with his Majesty’s land and sea forces, or by making diversions in their favor, when they are carrying on operations in other parts.”40
The announcement made clear to any discerning reader that the Associated Loyalists were to wage an independent war. Franklin’s Associators, as they were called, got British Army benefits but not British Army control. The Associators would be commanded by their own officers, recommended by the board and commissioned by Clinton. He would furnish them with arms, ammunition, and rations, along with vessels that they would crew. If they were sick or wounded, they would be treated in royal army hospitals. Each Associator would “receive a gratuitous grant of Two Hundred Acres of Land in North America.” In a reluctant concession to Franklin, Clinton also gave him the right to handle his own prisoners, rather than place them in the regular British Army prisoner-of-war system.41
The ten-man board of directors, headed by Franklin and approved by Clinton, included Josiah Martin, who had succeeded Tryon as governor of North Carolina. Back in 1775 Martin had deliriously foreseen stamping out rebellion in his colony with a Loyalist forcenumbering in the thousands, especially “throughout all the very populous western counties of this Province.”42 Also on the board was Brigadier Timothy Ruggles, who had pioneered the idea of organizing armed Loyalists. Other members were Daniel Cox, who had been a royal councillor in New Jersey, and George Duncan Ludlow, victim of a Rebel home plundering and superintendent of police on Tory Long Island.43
George Leonard, who had been a volunteer Tory combatant in the Battle of Lexington, was the maritime member of Franklin’s board. Leonard had gone to England and won from the king himself approval of a new Loyalist organization, the Loyal Associated Refugees, which provided the ships, boats, crews, and forces for seagoing raids.44 Franklin’s fleet intensified the whaleboat war being waged in the Sound, where Rebels in Connecticut and Refugees in Long Island raided each other’s shores, plundering and kidnapping.
In a short time more than four hundred Loyalists became Associators. Franklin began feeling like an important placeman again. But he also felt “shackled,” because, despite Germain’s endorsement of the Board of Associated Loyalists, Clinton insisted on approving every mission that Franklin and his board planned. In reality, however, there seems to have been little British control over the amphibious Associators’ raids and privateering along the New Jersey coast.
New Jersey had become an odd kind of battleground, on which vengeful partisans warred while their respective armies remained essentially above the fray. Since the Battle of Monmouth, the war had been deadlocked in the North, each army so entrenched that it dared not attack the other. But once again the armies were foraging in the Neutral Ground.
Occasionally there were large-scale foraging raids. In March 1780, for instance, about three hundred British Regulars and Hessians attacked Hackensack, “a large and beautiful settlement consisting of about two hundred houses,” as Johann Conrad Dohla, a Hessian soldier, wrote in his diary.
All the houses “were immediately broken into and everything ruined… . All the male[s] were taken prisoners, and the town hall andsome other splendid buildings were set on fire. We took considerable booty, money, silver pocket watches, silver plate and spoons, as well as furniture, good clothing, fine English linen, good silk stockings, gloves, and neckcloths, as well as other expensive silks, satins, and other materials.”45 Dohla was disappointed because he and his men had to abandon so much loot after being harassed by Rebel militiamen. Still, they did carry off about fifty or sixty men for future prisoner ransoming and exchanging.46
“There was no trusting of the inhabitants, for many of them were friendly to the British, and we did not know who were or who were not,” wrote Private Joseph Plumb Martin, that intrepid chronicler of the Revolution. Assigned to a Continental Army guard force along the New Jersey shore, Martin told of a night when armed Refugees came ashore, killed a Continental guard, and burst into a house where guardsmen were quartered. “After they had done all the mischief they could in the house,” Martin wrote, “they proceeded to the barn and drove off five or six head of Mr. Halstead’s young cattle, took them down upon the point and killed them, and went off in their boats, that had come across from the island for that purpose, to their den among the British.”47
Vicious warfare was continual between armed Loyalists and the Rebel militias—along with an assortment of freebooters, Cow-boys, Skinners, highwaymen, and robbers who knew no other cause than the filling of their own purses. A peculiar New Jersey breed was the Pine-Banditti, who operated out of the dense forests of the Pine Barrens in the southern coastal plain. Typically justice was dispensed without judges. Three Pine-Banditti, for example, were simply put to death after being caught by Rebel militiamen in Monmouth County.48 Joseph Mulliner, the most notorious of the Pine-Banditti, raided from a base near Little Egg Harbor. Mulliner, a newspaper reported, “made practice of burning houses” and robbing “all who fell in his way, so that when he came to trial it appeared that the whole country, both whigs and tories, were his enemies.” Mullinerwas hanged for high treason against New Jersey on August 8, 1781.49 By one reliable count, from the time of the Battle of Monmouth to the end of the war, there were 266 raids and other clashes in New Jersey and 108 attacks or other incidents between June 1778 and 1783 along the state’s coast or on its rivers. Most actions were Rebel privateer attacks on British shipping.50
The Associators staged many hit-and-run operations, but none of them was militarily significant because Clinton, a professional dealing with an amateur, manipulated the British Army bureaucracy to thwart Franklin. Then, in December 1779, General Clinton sailed south with about seven thousand British, Hessian, and Loyalist troops to launch the southern strategy, once again anticipating a rising of Loyalists. Before leaving, Clinton put a Hessian officer, Lt. Gen. Wilhelm von Knyphausen, in command. If Knyphausen agreed, Franklin, Smith, and Tryon would now have their chance to show that Loyalists could rise in New Jersey, too.
Washington and the Continental Army were in winter quarters in Morristown, New Jersey, about thirty-five miles west of New York. Hunger—and mutiny—stalked the encampment. Starving, freezing men were trying to live through a winter so cold that, for the first time in memory, both the Hudson River and Long Island Sound were frozen solid.51 “At one time it snowed the greater part of four days successively, and there fell nearly as many feet deep of snow,” wrote Private Martin, who had lived through a milder winter at Valley Forge. “… . We were absolutely, literally starved… . I saw several of the men roast their old shoes and eat them.”52
An attack on Washington’s dwindling mutinous army looked easy on the map: Cross from Staten Island to Elizabethtown Point, which was within British lines. Then across about ten miles of fairly friendly territory to Springfield, which was at the threshold of the Hobart Gap, a pass through the Watchung Mountains. Behind those natural ramparts was Washington’s encampment. An enemy force massing at Springfield would surely draw him out to a decisive battle.
William Smith, Franklin’s ally and Clinton’s secret enemy, became the intelligence chief for a possible thrust toward Springfield. Smithinterviewed deserters from the Continental Army and Loyalist spies. Another source was Christopher Sower, a Pennsylvanian who was a member of the Board of Associated Loyalists. He said that he had been told that Loyalists from his state and from Maryland would flock to join a British Army marching to attack Washington.53 All this positive information was presented to Maj. George Beckwith, a British Army intelligence officer. He translated for Knyphausen, who could not speak English.
Some of the intelligence pouring in to Beckwith was false. George Washington, who often acted as spymaster of the Continental Army, ordered the commander at West Point to “magnify the present force on the North [Hudson] river, but keep it within the bounds of what may be thought reasonable or probable.” Whatever other misinformation Washington may have spread is not known. But documents show he was getting good intelligence from his own agents. As early as March 11 he had received an intelligence report that “the enemy have it in contemplation to pay us a visit (and in a very short time).” He was also aware that “the enemy have taken up a large number of vessels (it seems for an expedition against this quarter). All the houses on the western and northern sides of Staten Island are taken for barracking troops.”
In anticipation of an attack he ordered the inspection of “certain Signals established for alarming the Militia in case of a serious movement.” These were tall log towers filled with brush and set afire to bespeak alarm. Seeing the flames—or hearing alarm cannons boom on Mount Hobart and elsewhere—militiamen would muster at prearranged sites.54
Knyphausen kept authorizing sporadic raids while building up forces for a major offensive, a change in tempo that Washington’s agents had noted. Finally, on the night of June 6, 1780, with Clinton still in the South, Knyphausen sent six thousand men, including Loyalist units, into New Jersey. The force outnumbered Washington’s army nearly two to one.55 Washington kept most of his Continental men in Morristown, leaving defense of their homeland to the New Jersey Continental Brigade and local militiamen. Responding to themustering alarms, they tracked the invaders, sniping at them as they slowly headed west, finally stopping at a village called Connecticut Farms (now Union).
The pastor of the Presbyterian church in Connecticut Farms was the Reverend James Caldwell, who had moved there from Elizabeth-town (now Elizabeth) after Tory raiders torched his church and tried to kidnap him. When Knyphausen’s Tories arrived in Connecticut Farms, the minister was in Morristown serving as a chaplain. His wife, Hannah, was home with their nine children. Militiamen and civilians were firing from their houses at the invaders. The invaders began setting fire to the houses and to Caldwell’s church. Someone—perhaps a militiaman, perhaps a Redcoat, perhaps a Tory—fired through the window of Caldwell’s house, killing Hannah Caldwell instantly.
The next morning, Knyphausen, shadowed by militamen, withdrew to Elizabethtown Point. He had just learned that General Clinton, having taken Charleston, South Carolina, was sailing home with most of his men. For the next thirteen days the invaders camped in Elizabethtown, fought off skirmishing militiamen, and awaited Clinton. Newspapers spread the word about the torching of Connecticut Farms and the killing of Hannah Caldwell, denounced as murder by “one of the barbarians.”56 The possibility of an accidental shooting was quickly eclipsed by propaganda and outrage over the Tory murderers.
On June 23 Knyphausen set out for Springfield again, this time under orders from Clinton, who would take his own southern army up the Hudson, hoping to split Washington’s forces and destroy the Continental Army. Rebel fury, rather than Tory fervor, rose along the path that Knyphausen was now taking for the second time. New Jersey Volunteers and the Queen’s American Rangers, marching in the advance guard, got no new Tory recruits. This time, however, British artillery backed up the infantry, and fierce fighting forced Washington to send more Continentals into battle at Springfield, about a dozen miles from Morristown.
Stymied, Knyphausen pulled back, setting fire to houses as he withdrew. Enraged militiamen, some of whom saw their own homesburning, pursued the retreating rear guard, which included Queen’s Rangers and a German unit of Jägers, who suffered heavy casualties. In the two battles, some twenty militiamen and Continentals were killed. About three hundred of Knyphausen’s men were killed, wounded, or missing. The commander of the Jägers, writing home to Germany, summed up the seemingly pointless battles: “I regret from the depths of my heart that the great loss of the Jägers took place to no greater purpose.57
But the battles had achieved unexpected results. The Loyalists lost their hold on much of New Jersey, as Patriots in Springfield immediately demonstrated: They ordered their Tory neighbors to get out of town with only whatever they could carry. The Springfield exiles became refugees and headed for Staten Island, well behind the invaders, who were going to the same place.58 The fiasco should have wiped out William Franklin and his Board of Associated Loyalists, but his influence among Loyalists extended beyond New York and New Jersey.
Sometime in the spring of 1781 the Associated Loyalists sent an agent to Maryland to set in motion a plot aimed at raising a large force of Loyalists who would spearhead a British strike into Chesapeake Bay, peeling off Maryland and Virginia from the North. Local Patriots learned of the plot and obtained documents bearing the names of the Maryland Tories involved. In July 1781 seven of the accused plotters were put on trial before a three-man tribunal, which found them guilty of high treason against Maryland.
After telling the men to make their peace with God, the presiding judge handed down the sentence: “You shall be carried to the gaol of Frederick town and be hanged therein; you shall be cut down to the earth alive and your entrails shall be taken out and burnt while you are yet alive, your heads shall be cut off, your body shall be divided into four parts and your heads and quarters shall be placed where his excellency the Governor shall appoint. So the Lord have mercy upon your poor souls.” Four of the sentences were commuted, but three were hanged. Contemporary accounts do not confirm the drawing and quartering, except to say the three men “suffered the full vigor ofthe law.”59 In Delaware jurors condemned another plotter, “seduced by the instigation of the Devil as a false rebel and traitor,” and ordered him executed in a similarly gruesome manner.60
It would take an international incident to finally bring down Franklin’s Associators. The incident traced to a day in September 1780 when two notorious New Jersey terrorists fought a gun battle. Joshua Huddy, a captain in the Monmouth County militia, was in a house in the village of Colts Neck, about a dozen miles west of Long Branch. Surrounding the house was Colonel Tye, a runaway slave, and his gang of armed Tories. Huddy called himself a refugee hunter, using New Jersey Patriots’ favorite term for targeted Tories. And Tye, a pillaging Tory guerrilla, was the kind of refugee that Huddy hunted.
In November 1775, after Lord Dunmore offered freedom to any slave who joined the British, Tye, twenty-one years old and six feet tall, fled to freedom from his master in Shrewsbury, New Jersey.61 He somehow made his way to Virginia and became a member of Dunmore’s Ethiopian Regiment. When the regiment disbanded, Tye returned to New Jersey, where he fought in the Battle of Monmouth. He then became a renegade refugee, leader of a quasi-military gang of Continental Army deserters and fugitive ex-slaves who looted Rebel homes and farms, kidnapped Rebel and militia leaders, and stole livestock and provisions for the British Army. British officers gave Tye the honorary rank of colonel and dubbed his gang the Black Brigade.62
One of the brigade’s white commanders was Maj. Thomas Ward of the Loyal Refugee Volunteers, whose slaves included at least one of his black soldiers. Their headquarters was a timber-built fortress at Bull’s Ferry, New Jersey, across the Hudson from New York City. On their numerous raids they stole cattle, gathered intelligence, and helped fugitive slaves and refugees reach British lines. On wooded Rebel land they harvested firewood, vitally needed for the cook fires and fireplaces in the vast British establishment in New York. Ward was a law unto himself. Three of his black soldiers were hanged aftera British Army court-martial found them guilty of murdering a man; Ward was accused of ordering the killing but was never charged.63
Washington, irritated by the Bull’s Ferry raids, sent Brigadier General Wayne and about one thousand troops to wipe out the Loyalist base. About seventy Loyalists—a number of them probably Franklin’s Associators—were in the crude fortress, built against a sheer cliff. Wayne cannonaded the redoubt and tried to storm it. Finally, after fifteen of his men were killed and forty-nine wounded, he withdrew. Twenty-one Loyalists were killed or wounded.64 The rest lived on to continue pillaging and terrorizing the area.
Huddy, meanwhile, accused of murdering several refugees, became a target for Tory vengeance. One of his victims was a Tory hanged from a tree limb after being charged with spying for the British. When asked about the hanging, Huddy said that all he had done was “slush” (grease) the rope and pull it.
In the summer of 1780 Huddy took to the sea. The Continental Congress gave him a privateer’s commission to “set forth … in a warlike manner” against the British in “the Armed boat called Black Snake.”65 He had been a privateer for about a month, when, one day, an hour before dawn, Colonel Tye and his men surrounded Huddy’s house. One of them broke a window, hoping to get in, seize Huddy, and get out quickly. The breaking glass awakened Huddy, who grabbed a musket and began firing.
The raiders pulled back. A musket was fired from another window, then another. Tye was convinced that some of Huddy’s men were with him. Inside the house Huddy was acting like several shooters, moving from window to window, firing muskets. They were loaded and handed to him by the only other occupant, a young woman variously described as his housekeeper and mistress.
One shot hit Tye in the wrist. He bandaged the wound and continued the attack, ordering some men to creep up to the house and set it afire. Huddy shouted that he would surrender if they extinguished the fire. They did, and he walked out. Tye led him away to a waiting whaleboat, which would take him through “the lines,” a wavering boundary along the New Jersey coast that marked the border betweenrefugees and Rebels. But militiamen, rushing toward the sound of musketry, saw the motley refugee gang pulling away and fired at the boat. In the confusion Huddy jumped overboard and escaped.66
Gangrene developed in Tye’s wound and he died. Stephen Blucke, a free black from Barbados, succeeded to Tye’s title and command, and the refugee raiding went on. To fight the refugee gangs, a group of citizens formed the Monmouth County Committee of Retaliation, headed by David Forman, a brigadier general in the state militia and a former judge. The committee, unattached to militias or the Continental Army, resembled Franklin’s unrestrained Board of Associated Loyalists.
Acting as a shadow government, the Committee of Retaliation plundered and murdered refugees, often settling private grudges in the name of the Patriots. Forman owned a piece of property in Freehold that was known as the Hanging Place, where at least a dozen Loyalists were hanged before Forman saw reason to leave the state. The state legislature condemned the Retaliators as “utterly subversive of the Law” but could not stop them.67 Refugee and Retaliator raids continued until the end the war.
On March 20, 1782, a mixed force of Franklin’s Associators and Pennsylvania Tories set off in whaleboats from New York City, escorted by the Arrogant, an armed brigantine, and sailed for the village of Toms River, New Jersey, about sixty miles south. They landed at the mouth of the river on Saturday, March 23, and were met by a group of local armed Tories. Just before dawn they all set off for their objective: a blockhouse at the edge of the village.
The blockhouse was a stockade made of logs about seven feet tall, pointed on top, forming a square with no openings. The only way to enter or leave was by a scaling ladder. Every few feet there was an opening in the logs just large enough to sight and fire a musket. The blockhouse included a barracks and a partially underground room that was the powder magazine. On each of the corners was a small, pivoting cannon.
The blockhouse guarded a saltworks, which produced salt from ocean water under a contract with the Continental Army. A vital military commodity, the salt was used in curing meat for shipment to soldiers. The workers, exempted from militia service, were armed and expected to aid in the defense of the works, a prime objective of Associated Loyalist raids. The saltworks also provided nearby residents with a chance to become war profiteers, buying a bushel of salt at fifteen dollars and then selling it to the Continental Army at Morristown for thirty-five dollars.68
The commander of the Toms River blockhouse was Joshua Huddy in a new incarnation as a captain of a state regiment attached to the Continental Army. When the raiders approached and demanded surrender, the defenders responded with muskets and cannons. In a short firefight several raiders were killed or wounded. But Huddy could see that he and his men were outnumbered about four to one. After seven defenders were killed or mortally wounded, Huddy surrendered the blockhouse. He was taken prisoner, along with sixteen others, four of them wounded. The Tories set fire to the blockhouse, killed a local militiaman, and then torched the saltworks and the entire village of Toms River.
The prisoners were put aboard the Arrogant and taken off to the Sugar House Prison in New York City, where British prisoners of war were held. But Clinton had reluctantly given Franklin control over his prisoners. Capt. Richard Lippincott of the New Jersey Volunteers, on assignment from the Board of Associated Loyalists, transferred Huddy to a British warship in New York Harbor. Lippincott was carrying out secret verbal instructions from Franklin.
A few days later Lippincott and a party of other Tories were rowed out to the warship. Lippincott went aboard, took custody of Huddy, put him in the boat, and beached at a desolate stretch of shore near Sandy Hook. Lippincott walked Huddy to a makeshift gallows, put a noose around his neck, pointed to a barrel under the gallows, gave him a piece of foolscap, and told him he could write his will.
Using the barrelhead as a desk, Huddy made his will. A note on the back of the foolscap says, “The will of Captain Joshua Huddy, madeand executed the same day the Refugees murdered him, April 12th, 1782.” He then climbed onto the barrel and a black Tory—probably one of Blucke’s men—kicked it over. When Huddy was dead, someone attached to his body a statement that began, “We, the refugees” and ended, “Up goes Huddy for Philip White.”69
Philip White had been a refugee raider captured by Rebels in a skirmish at Long Branch, New Jersey. According to the Rebel account, White was killed while attempting to escape. One of White’s guards was the son of a man White had killed, and so questions arose about the circumstances of White’s death. But Huddy was not involved. He was in prison in New York when White was killed. Clearly, up went Huddy because Franklin wanted a sacrificial atonement for White’s death.70
Even the Presbyterian minister who preached at Huddy’s funeral joined other Rebels in a demand for retribution. The roar of outrage quickly reached George Washington, who called the hanging an “instance of Barbarity.” Backed by Congress, Washington wrote to Clinton, warning that he would execute a British prisoner if Clinton did not turn over Lippincott. Clinton responded by ordering that Lippincott be court-martialed.
Washington ominously directed that a British officer of similar rank to Huddy be selected by lot from prisoners of war and sent to the Continental Army encampment in Chatham, New Jersey. Thirteen officers confined in Pennsylvania were selected. Each drew from a hat a piece of paper. Twelve papers were blank. The paper with “unfortunate” written on it was drawn by Capt. Charles Asgill of the 1st Regiment of Foot, the twenty-year-old son of Sir Charles Asgill, a former lord mayor of London.
It was also an unfortunate selection for Washington. Not only was Asgill from an illustrious family and famed regiment but his prisoner status was tied to an article of the surrender agreement at Yorktown, which stipulated that surrendered prisoners would be protected.71 Washington had accepted the surrender of General Cornwallis at
Yorktown on October 19, 1781, ending the British southern campaign and effectively ending the war.
By May 1782, when the Huddy crisis was flaring, informal talks between the British and an American Commission led by Ben Franklin were under way in Paris. If Washington ordered Asgill’s execution, William Franklin’s diehard Loyalists could wreck the peace negotiations.
While the Lippincott court-martial was going on, Gen. Sir Guy Carleton replaced Clinton as commander of British forces in America, and Clinton sailed for home. Carleton, condemning “unauthorized acts of violence,” disbanded the Board of Associated Loyalists. But he could do nothing about the court-martial, whose members included such leading Loyalist officers as Brig. Gen. Cortlandt Skinner, founder of the New Jersey Volunteers, and Col. Beverley Robinson, commander of the Loyal American Regiment. Not waiting for the outcome of the court-martial, Franklin left for England, never to return.
Carleton had been in command little more than a month when the verdict came in. The court found that Lippincott was convinced that “it was his Duty to obey the Orders of the Board of Directors of Associated Loyalists.” He said he had not committed murder and thus was not guilty.72The verdict stunned Washington. He knew that he had to make good his threat of retaliation, a decision that “has distressed me exceedingly,” he said in a letter.73 Then, unexpectedly, came a reprieve for both Asgill and Washington.
Asgill’s mother, Lady Asgill, had written a pleading letter to the Comte de Vergennes, the French foreign minister, asking him to intercede. Vergennes sent his own plea to Washington, along with the mother’s letter. Washington, touched by both maternal love and French diplomacy, submitted the appeal to Congress, which told Washington to free Asgill. Because of the long time it took for letters to travel, Asgill was not released until November.74 By then a preliminary peace treaty had been negotiated.
The last major event of the war in the North came in September 1781 when Benedict Arnold burned down New London, about twelvemiles from his Connecticut birthplace. There was an apocalyptic air to this final act in Arnold’s long war—five years in the Continental Army, one year in the British Army—as he led turncoats to their deaths on his native soil. The core of his invasion force was his American Legion, which included more than two hundred deserters from the Continental Army.75 Arnold’s force of about seventeen hundred men also included New Jersey Volunteers and some refugees attached to the Volunteers.
Local Tories—called “friends to Government” in Arnold’s report to Clinton—told him that the two forts guarding New London Harbor were undermanned. But the Patriots fought ferociously, even resorting to spears when Arnold’s force stormed Fort Griswold. Lt. Col. Abraham Van Buskirk, a founder of the Volunteers back in New Jersey, entered the fort. In his report, Arnold said that most of the Patriot officers, among them the fort commander, Lt. Col. William Ledyard, “were found dead in Fort Griswold, and 60 wounded, most of them mortally.” Arnold was glossing over an atrocity.76
A bayoneted survivor, lying in a puddle of blood at Fort Griswold, regained consciousness and later told what had happened: “The first person I saw afterwards was my brave commander, a corpse by my side, having been run through the body with his own sword.” Other witnesses said that Ledyard was bayoneted to death as, surrendering, he handed his sword to Van Buskirk. Other soldiers, identified as Tories, bayoneted the surrendering soldiers and the wounded. “After the massacre,” the bayoneted survivor remembered, “they plundered us of every thing we had, and left us literally naked.” About 115 Patriots were killed. One out of every four men in Arnold’s force was killed or wounded, one of the highest casualty rates of any battle in the war.77 As Arnold was destroying New London, a French fleet, commanded by Admiral François de Grasse, was defeating a British squadron off Yorktown, Virginia. The victory would give the French control of the Chesapeake and trap General Cornwallis’s army on the Yorktown Peninsula. A combined army, led by Washington and French general Jean-Baptiste de Rochambeau, was on the way to besiege and defeat Cornwallis.
Cornwallis’s surrender on October 19 at Yorktown meant the Revolution was almost certainly over. But the civil war went on. In Pennsylvania, where two Quakers had been hanged earlier in the Revolution, 490 people were accused of high treason and put on a “Black List.”78 New York’s Committee (later, Commission) for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies had tried more than one thousand people for Loyalist activities, and trial was tantamount to conviction, a heavy fine, and confiscation of property.79 Delaware, perceiving a rebellion within the state itself, charged forty-eight Tories with treason against the state; the ringleader, convicted of murder, was finally hanged in 1788.80
Along the New York frontier, after General Cornwallis’s surrender, Maj. Walter Butler led a group of Rangers and Indians into the Mohawk Valley on a routine foray for prisoners and plunder. He was killed during a skirmish with Patriot pursuers. A Continental officer later wrote that “the inhabitants expressed more joy at the death of Butler than the capture of Cornwallis.”81