7
This [Rebel] army, of which you will hear so much said, and see so much written, is truly nothing but a drunken, canting, lying, praying, hypocritical rabble, without order, subjection, discipline, or cleanliness; and must fall to pieces of itself in the course of three months.
—A Royal Navy surgeon in Boston1
Loyalists, scanning Dorchester Heights for cannon muzzles, feared that the Patriots would bombard the British troops as they left the city. Patriots, looking at the gun ports on the Royal Navy warships strung around the harbor, expected that the British would give the city a flaming farewell. Boston’s selectmen, all of them Patriots who had remained in the city, decided to make a last-minute effort to save Boston from either fate. Three Loyalists joined them in a rare show of unity.
The Loyalists were Thomas and Jonathan Amory and their friend Peter Johonnot. Months before, Thomas Amory had faced down a crowd that attacked his home because he was friendly with British officers. Soon after the attack he planned that his childless brother Jonathan would sail to England with family members while Thomas stayed behind. But, when Boston was threatened, Thomas Amoryforgot the past and sought out the Patriot selectmen. The third Loyalist, Johonnot, a wealthy distiller, had also planned to leave. Instead he agreed to work with the Amory brothers.2
The save-the-city delegation went first to General Howe, who ordered a general on his staff to respond. Then, on March 8, the Loyalists, under a flag of truce, went to the fortified checkpoint at Boston Neck. Although borne by Loyalists, the petition was bipartisan; it carried the signatures of the selectmen as “a testimony of the truth.” A colonel on Washington’s staff accepted their petition, which said that Howe had given them, through his general, assurance “that he has no intention of destroying the town, unless the troops under his command are molested during their embarkation, or at their departure, by the armed force without”—meaning the guns of Dorchester.
Now both sides wanted a similar assurance from Washington. If those cannons were fired on Howe’s departing troops, the appeal continued, “we have the greatest reason to expect the town will be exposed to entire destruction. Our fears are quieted with regard to General Howe’s intentions. We beg we may have some assurance that so dreadful a calamity may not be brought on …”3
Washington’s colonel duly took the petition to Washington’s headquarters on Tory Row. The next day he returned to the checkpoint with a response: “Gentlemen,—Agreeably to a promise made to you at the lines yesterday, I waited upon his excellency General Washington, and presented to him the paper handed to me by you, from the selectmen of Boston. The answer I received from him was to this effect: ‘That, as it was an unauthenticated paper, without an address, and not obligatory upon General Howe, he would take no notice of it.’ I am, with esteem and respect, gentlemen, your most obedient servant.”4
The curt answer left the Loyalists anxious. “His excellency” General Washington seemed to be ignoring the plight of the city because his rank and command status had not been recognized by Howe. In fact, without setting forth an acknowledgment in words, Howe had agreed not to torch the city, and Washington had agreed not to shell Howe’s men and ships.
Still, during the night of March 9, Washington ordered more cannons entrenched low enough on a Dorchester’s Nook’s Hill to increase the threat to Howe’s troops and ships. The men planting the cannons built a warming fire, which British sentinels spotted, touching off a cannonade that killed five Continentals. Washington answered the British cannons with a bombardment of his own. During a long, terrifying night, artillerymen on both sides fired more than eight hundred shots.
The day after the cannon duel, Howe issued a proclamation and had it distributed in handbills throughout the city. It ordered “all good subjects” to turn in all linen and woolen articles because they were “much wanted by the Rebels, and would aid and assist them in their Rebellion.” There were no exceptions for clothing or blankets. People unable to turn in their goods at army headquarters were told to deliver them to Crean Brush, in care of the Minerva, which was tied up at a wharf. Brush would give receipts for the goods “and will oblige himself to return them to the Owners, all unavoidable Accidents accepted.” Anyone who did not turn in the goods, Howe warned, “will be treated as a Favourer of Rebels.”5
Howe’s proclamation considerably extended Brush’s earlier commission for emptying Boston houses and other buildings. Patriots later told of seeing Brush, escorted by soldiers, using the proclamation as a warrant for breaking into stores and hauling the goods to the Minerva, the well-known ship whose imported sails and fittings had touched off the Falmouth troubles.
Brush, said a witness, was stripping shops “of all their goods, though the owners were in town. There was a licentious plundering of shops, stores and dwelling houses, by soldiers and sailors, carrying destruction wherever they went; and what they could not carry away, they destroyed.”6He accumulated so much loot that he needed another ship, the brig Elizabeth. For seven consecutive days, Brush said afterward, “my own assiduity was so great that I did not in any one night allow myself more than two hours sleep.”7 While approving Brush’s pillage, Howe issued an order saying that “the first soldier who is caught plundering will be hanged on the spot.”8
Washington kept his troops on alert, wary of British deception. On March 10, as dragoons led their horses toward the docks for herding onto transports, there could be little doubt that evacuation had begun. But Washington was still skeptical, and Selectman Timothy Newell was still worried: He noted in his diary on March 12: “The Inhabitants [are] greatly distressed thro’ fear the Town would be set on fire by the Soldiers.”9
The soldiers, however, were focused on leaving, not burning. Work parties loaded ships with the matériel of war, leaving behind at wharves and in warehouses hundreds of pounds of salt, five thousand bushels of wheat, six hundred bushels of corn and oats, one hundred bundles of iron hoops for barrel making, 157 pack saddles, hundreds of blankets, and paraphernalia too heavy to load rapidly: anchors, lumber, nails, four-wheel carriages. The many abandoned cannons were spiked and had their trunnions broken off, but a great deal of ammunition was abandoned, to be retrieved later by the Continental Army. The British would also leave behind a score of ships, including a brig with all its guns and another laden with a full cargo of molasses. Many of the ships were scuttled at the wharf and salvageable, as were their intact or partially destroyed cargoes.10
Logistics officers struggled with the complex task of assigning shipboard space to unaccustomed cargo: the goods of civilian passengers. Down the wharves came carts, wagons, and wheelbarrows overflowing with clocks, tables, chairs, chests of drawers, and other possessions.11 More and more names were added to the list of the Loyalists sailing in the ships of the fleet.
Howe had known for some time that if he had to evacuate his army he would also be obliged to take along all the Loyalists who wanted to leave. “If we are driven to the difficulty of relinquishing Boston,” Lord Dartmouth had written him, “care must be taken that the officers and friends of the government be not left exposed to the rage and insult of rebels, who set no bounds to their barbarity.” Howe had to accept Dartmouth’s order, but he did remind Dartmouth about the problem of simultaneously rescuing soldiers and civilians: “A thousand difficulties arose on account of the disproportion of transportsfor the conveyance of property, and the quantity of military stores to be carried away.”12
Boston Loyalists were overwhelmed by the news of Howe’s decision to abandon the city. Suddenly they lost their hope for an easy triumph over the Rebels. “Not the last trump[et] could have struck them with greater consternation,” Washington noted, using the biblical allusion to the end of the world.13
Many Boston Loyalists were well aware that they would become targets of vengeance when their Redcoat protectors left. They knew they had to flee, and they wanted to take their treasures with them. “The people of the town who were friends of the government,” a witness later wrote, “took care of nothing but their merchandise, and found means to employ the men belonging to the transports in embarking their goods; by which means several of the vessels were entirely filled with private property, instead of the king’s stores.” Another Bostonian complained that Loyalists were outbidding each other to purchase the labor of moving men.14
For Howe’s troops the evacuation was a complex military maneuver. For the Loyalists the exodus from Boston was a panicky flight inspired by fear, despair, and rage. The Loyalists were abandoning home, possessions, and, for many, a cause that was lost. They had expected first Gage, and then Howe, to crush the rebellion. Instead the rebellion had morphed into a civil war. The city that had been the pride of some and the temporary refuge for others had become a place seething with hatred. Neighbors became enemies. Friends turned against friends. As the Loyalists headed for the Halifax-bound ships, they passed silent glares or heard a taunting chant:
The Tories with their brats and wives Have fled to save their wretched lives.15
Many Loyalists, believing that someday they would return, left friends or relatives behind to guard abandoned homes. Others were rich enough to commit to a permanent move; for some Halifax would be a way station en route to England. But in England fewwould find happy or productive lives. Whatever position they had attained in the colonies, in England they were simply Americans, aliens in their ancestral homeland.
Even clergymen, expecting to be welcomed into the fold of the Church of England, found a chill reception. The Reverend Henry Caner, seventy-six-year-old rector of King’s Chapel in Boston, later told of hearing “many compassionable expressions” from the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London—but no offer of an appointment to an English parish. He said he was told, “We can’t think of your residing here. We want such men as you in America.” English clergymen, Caner decided, looked upon their American colleagues “in no better light than as coming to take Bread out of their mouths.”16
Like most Loyalists, Caner had only short notice when he was told he could embark for Halifax. He led a final service at King’s Chapel on Sunday, March 10, and then boarded a ship for Halifax, taking with him the communion service, the church’s register of baptisms, marriages, and burials, and a book of early records.17 About one-third of the King’s Chapel congregation would be gone by the end of 1777, for “Anglican” and “Tory” were almost synonymous.
Caner’s name appears on a list of departing Loyalists compiled for the evacuation.* The list was published in 1881 in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society. A note says that the names were “Taken from a paper in the handwriting of Walter Barrell,” but how Barrell obtained and recorded the names is unknown. He was inspector general in the Boston Customs House, and he would have had the responsibility of monitoring the manifests of the evacuation ships.
The son of a merchant who was already in England, Barrell had been a member of Ruggles’s street-patrolling Loyal American Association.18 Two of his brothers were Patriots. Barrell’s own name is onthe list, which shows that he brought five people, apparently family members, with him to Halifax. The Barrell family was one of about seventy that went from Boston to Halifax and then on to join the growing Loyalist population in England.19
One section of the list, devoted to thirteen mandamus councillors, showed that they did not sail alone. Richard Lechmere took eleven family members to England. Foster Hutchinson, brother of a former royal governor residing in England, took a dozen relatives with him to Halifax. Customs official Henry Hulton took eleven to Halifax and soon sailed on to England.20
All names are followed by a number indicating how many people (unnamed) are leaving with that person. Many names are followed by an occupation, such as “clerk” or “merchant.” And sometimes the same surname is listed several times in a row, each with a number following it, as in the enumeration of the renowned Winslow family, whose total strongly suggests that rank had its privilege in the allotment of ship space:
|
Winslow, Isaac |
11 |
|
Winslow, Pelham |
1 |
|
Winslow, John |
4 |
|
Winslow, Mrs. Hannah |
4 |
|
Winslow, Edward, Collector, Boston |
1 |
Hannah Loring Winslow (subject of one of John Singleton Copley’s portraits) was the thirty-three-year-old widow of Joshua Winslow, a cousin of Copley’s wife. Joshua, as one of the consignees who was to resell imported tea, was a small player in the events leading to the Boston Tea Party. He was the father of six children when he died in March 1775. His widow left for Halifax, listing three children. (The other children may have traveled with other relatives.)21
Edward Winslow took with him the large, carved, wooden royal coat of arms that had hung on a wall of the council chamber in Boston. As he later wrote, the lion and the unicorn in the arms “are of course Refugees and have a claim for residence” in Nova Scotia.22
Other placemen who sailed to Halifax also carried off official documents in the belief that they would bring them back when the unpleasantness was over.
The list accounts for either 926 or 927 passengers, depending upon interpreting what was originally in Barrell’s handwriting. (Included on the list are virtually all the hundred-odd Loyalists mentioned thus far in this book.) Besides those expected refugees there were 105 residents who lived in rural areas or towns and who were not placemen; 213 merchants, and 382 farmers, smaller traders, and “mechanics,” the overall term for artisans and people who worked with their hands.
The largest group of refugees was made up of men who most feared retribution—those who managed or worked for the customs house. They included “tidesmen,” customs officers who boarded ships to get payments of duties, and “tidewaiters,” who examined cargoes in search of contraband.23 Anglican clergymen were members of another class that left virtually as a bloc, headed by Caner.
The grand total of the Halifax-bound “refugees,” as they were called, is estimated at about thirteen hundred men, women, and children. But before and after the evacuation others made their way to Halifax, bringing the probable total to about two thousand. Among these unlisted refugees are a few who get named in other ways. Jolley Allen, a Boston merchant, for example, left posterity an account of his attempt to reach Halifax. And, after the war, many previously anonymous refugees told of their voyages to Halifax in petitions seeking land grants or financial aid from the Crown for their loyalty.
Also not named on the list was John Wentworth, the royal governor of New Hampshire. Wentworth, fearing the rise of Rebels, had mustered a force of Loyalists as a personal guard. He then sought refuge, with his wife and their infant son, on board the HMS Scarborough, which took them to Boston. At the time of the evacuation he sailed to Halifax in a schooner with a number of New Hampshire friends. His wife and child went on to England. Wentworth joined Howe and sailed with him to New York. He recruited a Loyalist military unit known as Governor Wentworth’s Volunteers.24 They were describedas “Persons of Education and reputable Families who have personally suffered variety of Persecutions, and appear now firmly determined to give additional Proofs of their Attachment to the Cause of Government by exerting their utmost Endeavours to suppress the Rebellion in America.”25
Another independent traveler was Isaac Royall, one of America’s wealthiest Loyalists and one of Massachusetts’ few slaveholders. A trader in sugar, rum, and slaves, Royall was a mandamus councillor. He lived in a mansion in Medford, a few miles north of Boston. On his six hundred acres were quarters for twenty-seven slaves. He found himself in Boston on the eve of the Lexington and Concord battles, en route to the family plantation in Antigua. After a while he sailed to Halifax, where he awaited other members of the family, including George Erving, who was married to Royall’s daughter, and Erving’s brother John. The Royalls and the Ervings all went on to England.26
Two Marblehead Tories who immigrated to Nova Scotia and later continued on to self-exile in England were Thomas Robie, an Addresser, and his wife. They were given a raucous farewell by Patriots who went to the dock and shouted taunts. Mrs. Robie, seated in the boat that would take her and her husband to the Halifax-bound ship anchored offshore, shouted back what many departing Loyalists felt in their bitter hearts: “I hope that I shall live to return, find this wicked Rebellion crushed, and see the streets of Marblehead run with Rebel blood.”27
Many Loyalists had left before the evacuation, and many, many more would leave in the years to come. We do not know most of their names. Lorenzo Sabine, a nineteenth-century historian who collected information on thousands of Loyalists, lamented at how little the future was to know about them: “Men who, like the Loyalists, separate themselves from their friends and kindred, who are driven from their homes, who surrender the hopes and expectations of life, and who become outlaws, wanderers, and exiles—such men leave few memorials behind them. Their papers are scattered and lost, and their verynames pass from human recollection.” Some could not write, and those who did, consumed by their shattered lives, lacked the time—and sometimes even the paper—to record their hopes and fears.28
At least three hundred families either went with the British fleet and did not give their names to Barrell or chose to make their own arrangements. Those who did sail independently probably paid passage on ships that for decades had regularly shuttled between New England and Nova Scotia. During the war that connection worked both ways. So many pro-Rebel inhabitants of Nova Scotia wanted to trade illegally with the enemies of the king that the Massachusetts legislature issued passes to them, directing commanders of American warships and privateers to allow safe passage.29
In 1776 Washington had seen Tories merely as disillusioned people, calling them “Unhappy wretches! Deluded mortals!”30 But his attitude toward them gradually hardened. Writing to his brother, John Augustine, Washington was uncharacteristically nasty about the Loyalist departure: “All those who took upon themselves the style and title of government-men in Boston, in short, all those who have acted an unfriendly part in the great contest, have shipped themselves off in the same hurry… . One or two have done, what a great number ought to have done long ago, committed suicide.”31
One of the Loyalists preparing to leave on his own was the merchant Jolley Allen. He had arrived in Boston from England in 1755, set up shop on a fashionable street, and prospered by selling luxury goods. “Just imported from LONDON, by Jolley Allen,” said an ad in the Boston Gazette. “A very large Assortment of English and India GOODS, fit for all Seasons, too many to be enumerated separately in an Advertisement.”32 He also ran a pawnshop and offered lodgings for people and stables for horses.33 Allen suffered financially and personally when the Sons of Liberty began to boycott British imports in the campaign against the Stamp Act.
When the campaign focused on an embargo of tea, Allen surreptitiously bought two chests of tea from the sons of Royal Governor
Thomas Hutchinson. An informer told the Sons of Liberty. Some Sons called on Allen and threatened to tar and feather him, he claimed. By his account, he outwitted them, for they were unable to connect him with English tea. His sales, however, “declined from that time” because he was marked as a Tory. His customers dwindled to “friends of Government and the Army,” including General Gage and other officers.
Early in March 1776, as the city was plunged into the evacuation panic, Allen believed he had to leave, for he feared that if the “Americans”—his word—found him, “knowing the Disposition of the people so well for above Twenty-two Years I had lived amongst them,” they would hang him and everyone in his family. On the waterfront he found Robert Campbell, a captain willing to take aboard his ship, the Sally, Allen, his family, his household goods, and the contents of two warehouses of merchandise. Allen had married a young Irishwoman and “had seventeen children by her plus five miscarriages in thirty-seven years of marriage.” Only six children were alive in 1776.34
Allen planned to follow the ships of the evacuation fleet wherever they sailed. Most of the available ships were under the control of the Royal Navy. But there were others, like the Sally, whose captains were ready to sail under the fleet’s protection and would evacuate anyone who could pay the cost.
Opportunistic captains like Campbell added another complication to British Army and Royal Navy officers who were dealing with a harbor full of evacuation ships. Officers also had to cope with the plundering and heavy drinking of their men. “It was not like the breaking up of a camp, where every man knows his duty; it was like departing your country …,” an officer wrote.35 Officers who had bought furniture and other items could neither take them along nor sell them. Some, in frustration, smashed their American acquisitions.36
Army and navy officers were experienced in transporting soldiers and their supplies. But for this operation there was additional need for space to carry and feed an unknown number of Loyalist families. Their possessions had to be stowed. To make room for the civilians, soldiers had to cut back. Officers ultimately enforced a strict order: “All Household furniture and other useless Luggage to be thrown over Board.”37
“Nothing can be more diverting than to see the town in its present situation,” a Patriot wrote, “all is uproar and confusion; carts, trucks, wheelbarrows, handbarrows, coaches, chaises, are driving as if the very devil was after them.”38 Selectman Newell wrote in his diary for March 13 that Bostonians of all persuasions were “in the utmost distress thro’ fear of the Town being destroyed by the Soldiers, a party of New York Carpenters with axes going thro’ the town breaking open houses, &c. Soldiers and sailors plundering of houses, shops, warehouses—Sugar and salt &c. thrown into the River, which was greatly covered with hogsheads, barrels of flour, house furniture, carts, trucks &c. &c.”39
The tempo of looting increased. Soldiers and civilians broke into shops and carried off their plunder. The soldiers packed away the portable loot. The civilians bore theirs to the wharves, where ships awaited. Crean Brush’s gang loaded the Minerva and Elizabeth. One hundred fifty hogsheads of rum (a hogshead had a capacity of about fifty-five gallons) were loaded onto one of the ships under British Army control.40 The harbor was filled with transports and warships, signal flags whipping up and down the halyards. Scavengers prowled the shore, picking up the flotsam of discarded freight borne on the incoming tide.
Men hired by Jolley Allen shuttled merchandise and household goods from his shop to the wharf where Robert Campbell’s ship was tied up. Allen allowed Campbell to take twenty-one more passengers aboard—” to put more Money in his pocket,” Jolley wrote in his account, which sputters with indignation.41
On Saturday, March 16, Washington sent a small force to Nook’s Hill to fortify the guns. During the night, British guns fired at the hill. Washington’s men did not return the fire. To Howe the silence was ominous. Either through intelligence reports or intuition, he concluded that Washington’s patience was running out. He ordered the evacuation to be concluded the next day.
British Army lieutenant John Barker, in his diary entry for March 17, recorded the soldiers’ last day in Boston: “At 4 oclock in the Morn. the Troops got under Arms, at 5 they began to move, and by about 8 or 9 were all embarked, the rear being cover’d by the Gren[adie]rs. and L[igh]t. Inf[antr]y. The Rebels did not think proper to molest us. We quitted Boston with a fair wind… .”42
Within half an hour Washington sent more than one thousand men into the city—selecting only those who had had smallpox and were thus immune. Washington himself bore the facial scars of a severe case of smallpox, which had struck him at the age of nineteen. He had not only suffered the scourge, but he had also learned about its prevention. He would later insist on inoculations for every soldier in the Continental Army.43
Washington forbade any officer or enlisted man to enter the city without permission because, he said, “the enemy with a malicious assiduity, have spread the infection of the smallpox through all parts of the town.” A “person just out of Boston” told Washington that “our Enemies … had laid several Schemes for communicating the infection of the smallpox, to the Continental Army, when they get into the town.”44 No one yet knew that smallpox had already sailed from Boston, borne by Loyalists and Redcoats. An epidemic had begun in Halifax months before the evacuation.45
Some of the first of Washington’s men to enter Boston headed for the fortifications at Bunker Hill and saw what appeared to be sentinels. Two men were sent forward to see how many British remained. Laughing, they waved their comrades to advance. The sentinels were dummies. The redoubt was empty, a symbol of the military situation in the American colonies: There were hardly any British soldiers left on American soil.46
While liberating the city, Washington kept watch on the fleet lingering off the Nantasket Peninsula, which formed the southeast side of Boston Harbor. “From Penn’s Hill,” Abigail Adams wrote to John, “we have a view of the largest fleet ever seen in America. You maycount upwards of a hundred and seventy sail. They look like a forest.”47 The ships off Nantasket bothered Washington. Even burdened with the civilians, Washington believed, the nine thousand troops might be heading for New York.
There was also a small chance that the evacuation was a feint and Howe might send an invasion force back into the harbor and begin bombarding the city. Washington ordered the city’s redoubts manned and strengthened. And, in case Howe did suddenly veer south, Washington ordered five regiments to march to Norwich, Connecticut, and sail from there to New York. On March 27 most of Howe’s fleet weighed anchor and sailed off to Halifax.48 But the British left a few vessels off Nantasket for more than two months, to the annoyance of American officers in Boston.49
Washington ordered a swarm of American privateers to follow the British fleet, which consisted of about 120 ships. The commander of “Washington’s Fleet,” as the privateer ships were dubbed, was John Manley of Massachusetts. His flagship was the Lee, a schooner transformed into a warship with the addition of six carriage guns and ten gunwale-mounted swivel guns.50 Manley spotted, pursued, and captured a major prize: Crean Brush’s loot-filled Elizabeth, which he took back to Boston. It contained a “great part of the plunder he rob’d the stores of here,” wrote a Bostonian. “… I immagine she must be the richest vessell in the fleet.”51 Brush and several henchmen found on the Elizabeth were jailed in Boston while Patriot officials drew up a case against them.
Jolley Allen aboard the Sally, meanwhile, was making little headway toward Halifax. While the Sally was still in offshore waters, Captain Campbell twice collided with other ships in the British fleet and then ran aground. When Allen asked the captain whether the tide was coming in or going out, the captain said he did not know because he did not have an almanac aboard. Under way again, Campbell turned the wheel over to a lad who was on his first sea voyage. The captain pointed to a ship ahead and told the young helmsman simply to follow it.
Soon a squall came up, partially tearing the mainsail off the mast. The sail fell over the side, starting to fill with water, sink, and take theship with it. Trying to recover the sail, Campbell hauled and tied a line, but—” for want of knowing how to Tye a Sailor’s knot,” according to an exasperated Jolley—the line skittered out of its belay.
Below, the ship started taking on water. Campbell tried one pump, which did not work, and set off, unsuccessfully, to look for the other. Heavy seas carried off a cask containing all the water on board, along with the large container that contained all the food. Allen went below, “took my Wife by the hand as she lay in bed in the Cabin, and “laid myself down by her to think I should die in her Arms along with her.”
His grim reverie was interrupted by frantic sounds and a knocking on the cabin door. The additional passengers, who had been consigned to the hold, pleaded—” for God’s sake”—to be allowed to enter. A plank, they said, “had given way, and the Sea was pouering in and the Vessel was sinking, and they beged that they might be permitted to stay in the Cabin till we all went to the Bottom together.”
Allen, wondering how far the ship was from land, went on deck and asked Captain Campbell their position. He replied, Allen later recorded, that “it was impossible for him to tell, for he had not kept any reckoning, and the reason he gave me for it was that he had forgot to bring pens Ink and paper.” When Allen pointed out that he had those items, the captain told him “he had never learnt Navigation, and that he never was on Salt Water before, but he did know to row a Boat in a River.”
As the sun rose, “with our Sails and Rigging torn in ten hundred thousand Pieces,” the Sally was riding a strong shoreward tide and heading for a landfall that Campbell could not identify. Campbell was for heading out to sea. But Allen, taking command of the foundering ship, ordered everyone on deck and insisted that the ship head toward shore. It scraped across several sandbars and, on the late afternoon of March 28, dropped anchor off Provincetown, Cape Cod, tattered sails signaling its distress.
People ashore, fearing that the strange ship might be carrying smallpox victims, organized a rescue by selecting rowers who had survived the disease. When Allen, his family, and the other passengers were all safely ashore, someone asked where they were from. Allen answered, “From Boston with the Fleet”—marking them all as fleeing Tories.
Allen wrote that he and his family were taken to a “Hog Sty,” a half-wrecked cottage with broken windows and a leaky roof. He did not report what happened to the others, but presumably they were confined elsewhere while the local Committee of Safety decided what to do.
Townsmen scrambled aboard the Sally, running it aground so they could get at the cargo, which consisted almost entirely of Allen’s furniture and merchandise. He was told he would be charged a large sum for the unloading and storage of his property. According to his account, he soon learned—probably from a secret Loyalist—that people were fighting over the cargo, stealing some articles and hurrying away with them, burying others in the sand for retrieval later. Someone, he was told, had torn apart his “crimson Silk Damask Bed which cost One hundred fifty pounds Sterling.”
He and his family were still being held in April when his wife died at the age of fifty-two. Allen, fifty-eight, attributed her death to the stress of their misadventures. In May the town selectmen gave him a pass to Watertown, where the legislature was sitting. His seventeen-year-old son was allowed to go with him on the 120-mile journey. His other children and what was left of his property were held as a guarantee of his return.
On his way to Watertown he stopped at his home and found it occupied by his barber, who charged the pair eight shillings sterling for one bed for two nights. When Allen and his son reached Water-town, the legislature ordered them held for further investigation. He was told that the lawmakers were considering a plan to separate his children, order them kept fifty miles apart, and apprentice them to strangers to earn their room and board. He also was told that some people were looking for a tree big enough for the hanging of him and his children—with “me upon the highest Branch.”
Finally Allen’s brother Lewis Allen learned of Jolley’s ordeal and petitioned the House and the Council, which functioned as a kindof senate, saying that he would assume care of the children, that his brother would stay in Lewis’s home on his farm in Shrewsbury, about thirty-eight miles east of Boston, and that Jolley would not “hold Correspondence with any Person knowing them to be Enemical to the Liberties of America.” The legislators agreed—but not the citizens of Shrewsbury, who said they did not want a Tory living in their town.
A mob broke into Lewis’s home and, on a sixteen-mile march to Northborough, took Jolley before a militia officer and his men. He was told to sign a statement saying that he would be shot through the heart if he left his brother’s farm. Allen argued that he was being asked to sign his own death warrant. After some discussion the militiamen agreed to change the punishment to a lashing of five hundred strokes “on the naked Back.” That done, the mob marched him back to his brother’s farm. Sometime later, probably in 1779, he slipped away to New York and took sail to England. He died there in 1782.52
Crean Brush was still in jail in Boston on November 5, 1777, when his wife spent the day visiting him. When the turnkey told her it was time to go, her clothes left the cell—but she was not in them. As the very unobservant turnkey later told his story, he was greatly surprised the next morning, when, after he passed Brush’s breakfast through an opening in the door, no hand appeared to take the food. He looked through the peephole and saw Mrs. Brush. She did not tell where Brush had gone. But his hunters established that Brush rode off to New York on a horse that had been hidden by Mrs. Brush. In New York he joined countless other Loyalists looking for British assistance in settling grievances. Brush wanted recovery of his disputed property, especially land in the New Hampshire Grants, which would become the state of Vermont. Depressed and penniless, in May 1778 he put a pistol bullet through his head.53
While militiamen and members of Committees of Safety throughout Massachusetts and every other colony were grappling with the question of justice for Loyalists like Jolley Allen and Crean Brush, George Washington himself was forced to handle his own questions of justice. His issue involved a Loyalist spy posing as a staunch Patriot.
The case began in Newport, Rhode Island, where a Patriot was shown an encrypted letter that was to have been delivered to James Wallace aboard the HMS Rose, on patrol offshore. Captain Wallace was well known as an intelligence intermediary who accepted and then passed on messages from Loyalists. Patriots had intercepted at least one, a letter sent to him by Col. Thomas Gilbert, leader of the Tory militia in Freetown.
The encrypted letter had been given to a Newport baker by a former girlfriend who had asked him to get it to Wallace. Patriot leaders had the baker escorted to Cambridge, where Washington was shown the letter. The woman was found and brought to him. Washington began questioning her and “for a long time she was proof against every threat and persuasion to discover the author.” Then, suddenly, she broke and gave up the name of the man who wrote the letter—her secret lover, Dr. Benjamin Church, a longtime Patriot whom Washington had just appointed surgeon general of the army and the director of the army’s first hospital.54
Washington gave the letter to the Reverend Samuel West, a Continental Army chaplain and an amateur cryptanalyst familiar with encryption techniques used by merchants who did not trust the royal mail system. Washington also asked for a separate decryption by Elbridge Gerry, a member of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress and the Committee of Safety. The two codebreakers produced identical translations of the message, which was addressed “To Major Cane in Boston, On His Magisty’s Sarvice.” Cane had been on General Gage’s staff.
“I hope this will reach you; three attempts have I made without success,” the letter began. Church told of his visit to Philadelphia, where “I mingled freely & frequently with the members of the Continental Congress.” He gave standard agent reports on the number and location of cannons and soldiers. And he provided some political observations: The Congressmen “were united, determined in opposition, and appeared assured of success” and “A view to independence gr[ows] more & more general.” Revealing his fear of being caught, Church concluded: “Make use of every precaution or I perish.”55
Church, who for years had been trusted by leading Rebels, probably had spied for the British since the Sons of Liberty first gathered secretly at Boston’s Green Dragon Tavern. Paul Revere later recalled that during the blockade of Boston, Church had once gone into the city, ostensibly to obtain medicine. He claimed to have been captured by British soldiers and released after interrogation by Gage himself—a cover story for a meeting with his spymaster.56
Hanging was the usual fate of spies, but Congress had not passed any laws about treason or espionage. Washington, as commander in chief of the army, decided he had the power to call and head a courtmartial. In a short trial Church insisted he was innocent, but Washington found him guilty of “holding criminal correspondence with the enemy.” Congress ordered Church put in a Connecticut prison. Later, claiming illness, he got himself transferred to Massachusetts. Finally, around 1778, he was allowed to sail to the British West Indies. His ship was lost at sea.57
In the vacuum left by the withdrawal of the British, Congress recommended that the colonies establish new governments. Former royal legislatures became Rebel legislatures with varying views of their duties and their power, including how to deal with Tories. The Continental Congress was concerned with creating and regulating a Continental Army rather than a continental nation. So there was no national government. But, as summer came to Philadelphia, Congress inched closer to taking a first step toward nationhood by beginning to contemplate, in secret sessions, what Church’s spying had revealed to British authorities: “a view to independence.”58
In March, Congress sent Silas Deane, a young, ambitious Connecticut delegate, to France. Deane was under cover as “Timothy Jones,” a purchasing agent of “goods for the Indian trade” (meaning British India). Deane’s covert instructions came from Ben Franklin, a member of the Congressional Committee of Secret Correspondence. Deane was told to negotiate secretly with representatives of the French government and learn what France would do if the colonies were “forced to form themselves into an independent state.”59 Deane was given a special ink to write invisible reports between the lines of what would appear to be an innocuous letter when it was almost inevitably opened by British spies or ship captains in their hire.60
Deane’s French counterpart was Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, a writer,* a friend of King Louis XVI, and a spy for the Comte de Vergennes, the French Foreign Minister. After conferring with Deane, Beaumarchais formed a front company, Roderigue Hortalez et Compagnie, which would buy munitions and other war supplies from the French government and ship them to America, accepting payment in tobacco, rice, cotton, and indigo. The company was financed by France, Spain, and a group of French merchants.61
France, still stinging from its defeat in the French and Indian War, wanted to help an independent America as much as it wanted to hurt England. Supplying arms to America meant that Redcoats would be shot by French bullets from French guns—and French soldiers would not have to endanger themselves by pulling the trigger.
The idea of independence from Britain was now in the revolutionary air. Back in the pre—Stamp Act days, there had been no reason for the word “Loyalist.” Everyone involved was a British subject. They were engaged in a political row that got out of hand: The Boston Massacre. The Boston Tea Party. Lexington. Concord. Bunker Hill. Even after Bunker Hill optimists could see a way back. After all, the Continental Congress had passed the Olive Branch Petition to the “Most Gracious Sovereign.” The king’s ministers and certain members of Parliament were to blame for the lengthy crisis. Peace, if royally proclaimed, could somehow prevail.
A substantial number of subjects fled to Halifax because the oldideas of dissident and disaffected had given way to hatred and violence, to death by musket and bayonet. Some who sailed to safety believed that they would be returning after the Redcoats extinguished the rebellion. Most of those who sailed on to England believed they would never return. That dreadful place had become America; it no longer seemed to be a part of the British Empire.
Then, in July, in the wake of those transports to Halifax, came the Declaration of Independence.
To many Loyalists and Tories, the Declaration was a surprise, seemingly coming out of nowhere. But it had come, most of all, from the pen of Tom Paine, an immigrant from England who attacked not the king’s ministers but the king, writing that “a thirst for absolute power is the natural disease of monarchy… . To the evil of monarchy we have added that of hereditary succession; and as the first is a degradation and lessening of ourselves, so the second, claimed as a matter of right, is an insult and an imposition on posterity.”62
On July 18, 1776, British officers who were prisoners on parole in Boston were invited by their American captors to a ceremony at the Towne House, the handsome brick structure where the royal governor once reigned. “As we passed through the town,” one of the officers later wrote, “we found it thronged; all were in their holiday suits; every eye beamed with delight, and every tongue was in rapid motion. The streets adjoining the Council Chamber were lined with detachments of infantry tolerably equipped, while in front of the jail artillery was drawn up, the gunners with lighted matches. The crowd opened a lane for us, and the troops gave us, as we mounted the steps, the salute due to officers of our rank. “63
As the clock on the Towne House struck one, Sheriff Stephen Greenleaf, standing on the balcony below, began reading the Declaration of Independence in his weak voice: “When, in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another …” Then, sentence by sentence, the words were boomed forth by Col. Thomas Crafts, Jr.—Son of Liberty, leader of the mob that hanged a placeman in effigy from the Liberty Tree, dumper of tea in Boston Harbor, artillery officer at Bunker Hill. A “shout, begun in the hall, passed to the streets, which rang with loud huzzas, the slow and measured boom of cannon, and the rattle of musketry… . large quantities of liquor were distributed among the mob; and when night closed in, darkness was dispelled by a general illumination.”64
The British officers who listened to the Declaration being read were in a new world. When the time came for their exchange, the transaction would take place between representatives of two nations. Once their British Army had been fighting for the king to quench a rebellion, had killed British subjects, and had been killed by British subjects. Royal Navy ships had burned towns occupied by British subjects. Now the troops and the warships would be fighting citizens of a new nation that had vilified the king in its Declaration of Independence.
To Loyalists, the Declaration contained line after line of libel—hundreds of words maligning George III, making him, not his ministers, responsible for rebellion: “He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power. He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation… . He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the Lives of our People.”
And a new accusation: “He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny… .”
The words “at this time” appeared in the Declaration because members of the Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, had just received intelligence from Europe that representatives of King George had gone to Hesse-Kassel and other German states to bargain for the hiring of nearly thirty thousand troops.65 (Because most of the troops were from Hesse-Kassel, they all came to be called Hessians.)
Contracts for the German troops varied, but essentially they called for King George to bear the expense of a hired soldier killed in battle(with three wounded equaling one dead) while German rulers replaced at their own cost any soldier who deserted or died of sickness.66 King Frederick the Great of Prussia so loathed the deal that he said he would impose the customary “cattle tax” on all the hired troops who passed through Prussia “because though human beings they had been sold as beasts.”67
France could not openly give full support to colonies of Britain. But if those colonies broke off from Britain and claimed the status of a nation, then France could become an ally. To prevent that from happening, Britain had a more crucial reason to crush the Rebels. The Declaration of Independence meant that what had been armed response to a rebellion—a civil war between British subjects—had become a war between Britain and a new nation whose existence threatened Britain itself. As for the loyal subjects, their existence was also threatened, and so they must fight. And fitting Loyalist military forces into this new war presented a new challenge to the generals and the statesmen.
* The entire list can be found at ToriesFightingForTheKing.com.
* Among his writings were plays that would later become operas: Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and Rossini’s The Barber of Seville.