Conceived in Liberty (220 page)

New Jersey had nearly as great a proportion of Loyalists as New York, and southern New Jersey was notoriously loyal to Great Britain. Its royal governor, William Franklin, illegitimate son of Benjamin, was particularly active in the British cause. In the spring of 1775, he tried to persuade the New Jersey Assembly to negotiate a separate peace with Britain. Failing this, he continued to organize Tory sentiment. Prodded by a series of petitions organized by him, the assembly vehemently instructed its delegates to the Continental Congress against any attempt at independence. Indeed, Franklin was almost able to induce the assembly to beg the king for peace, and only lengthy harangues by moderate delegates from the Continental Congress were able to dissuade New Jersey from such separate action. It was only in June 1776 that Franklin was finally arrested by the New Jersey Assembly and sent to prison in the recesses of Connecticut.

Apart from Franklin’s political activity, by the spring of 1776 the province was plagued with imminent insurrections in Monmouth, Hunterdon, and Bergen counties. Negroes were reported arming themselves to join the British cause and later to be intriguing with British prisoners of war.

In conservative Pennsylvania, the Tory cause had been crippled by Joseph Galloway’s decision not to run for the Second Continental Congress and his withdrawal from political life. The bulk of the Tories continued to be the Quakers in the Philadelphia area. The Philadelphia Meeting sent dispatches to Quakers throughout the middle colonies urging them to abstain from all forms of rebellion and to remember that it was their religious duty to “honor the King.” From their old anarchic individualism, the Quakers had now evolved into a nonviolent bulwark
of state and crown; it was not their business, the meeting warned, “to plot and contrive the ruin or overturn of any” government. The Toryism of the Quakers remained passive, however, and there was no worry about their taking up arms against the Revolution.

In Maryland, a sharp geographical split prevailed, with the tobacco-growing regions on the western shore of Chesapeake Bay being staunchly revolutionary, while the maritime Eastern Shore was predominantly Tory. In heavily Tory Worcester County on the Atlantic Coast, the Loyalists, led by a Hugh Kelly, obtained arms during the fall of 1775 from a vessel of Lord Dunmore, royal governor of Virginia. Meeting in secret and signing a joint oath, 1,900 Tories formed an association, met for military drill, declared themselves for the king and “against Boston,” and pledged themselves to resist any conscription into the Continental Army. They also managed to seize some local Whigs and hustle them aboard Dunmore’s ship in a futile quest for recruits.

In adjoining Somerset County, one Isaac Atkinson led over half the local militia into a counter-revolutionary force for the king, and he threatened one day to “fight it out.” He also denounced the Revolution as a Presbyterian plot. Several companies of militia in Caroline and Dorchester counties on the Eastern Shore laid down their arms in defiance of the revolutionary cause.

The colony of Delaware, almost wholly on the Chesapeake Peninsula, was riddled with Tory sentiment; by the spring of 1776, 1,000 Tories were under arms in Sussex County in the south; and in northern New Castle County, British ships on the Delaware River were regularly furnished supplies by the inhabitants.

Virginia had only a few thousand Tories at most, but they were concentrated in a few strategic areas. Aided by Lord Dunmore, the highly energetic royal governor, they gave the American rebels a good deal of trouble. Apart from the Tory predominance on the Eastern Shore, the Loyalists were concentrated among the Scottish merchants in Virginia’s commercial city of Norfolk and on the extreme northwestern frontier around Pittsburgh. After the rejection by the Virginia Assembly of Lord North’s conciliation scheme in June 1775, Dunmore fled with over a hundred British regulars to a British ship in the harbor of congenial Norfolk.

Toryism was strong though not predominant on the American frontiers, undoubtedly in part because of a suspicion that the American governments might not be able or eager to supply armed forces to push back the Indians. Toryism on the Virginia frontier was concentrated around Pittsburgh (now in Pennsylvania), near where Fort Pitt had been dismantled three years before. Under Dunmore, Virginia, during 1773 and 1774, had aggressively expanded its territory. Dunmore had seized control of the Pittsburgh region, arresting and expelling Pennsylvania officials and creating a new West Augusta County there for Virginia. Furthermore, in “Dunmore’s War,” the governor had defied the Proclamation Line of 1763 and had driven the Shawnee Indians out of Kentucky.

When the Revolutionary War began, John Connolly, a physician, Tory militia official, and faithful ally of Dunmore and Britain, conceived an audacious plan. Visiting Dunmore on his ship during August 1775, Connolly brought with him a pledge of loyalty to Dunmore and the crown
from several hundred inhabitants of West Augusta County, including the Indian traders Alexander McKee and Simon Girty. More important, Dunmore and Connolly agreed to the latter’s scheme (the “Connolly Plot”), in which Dunmore would raise a troop of Tories in the east, while Connolly, made a lieutenant colonel, would winter at the British fort of Detroit. There Connolly would form a regiment of British regulars and Tory militia into the Royal Foresters, after which he and McKee, with a troop of Indians, would march up the Ohio and seize Pittsburgh. Dunmore would march west, and Connolly east, perhaps enlisting oppressed indentured servants as he went, to meet at Alexandria in northern Virginia, cutting the American colonies in two. In early October a peace conference at Pittsburgh between Indians and representatives of Virginia and Pennsylvania had resulted in an agreement that provided for Indian neutrality in exchange for an American pledge to maintain the Proclamation Line of 1763 as the limit of western settlement. This agreement defied the fact that the line had already been rendered de facto obsolete by the white victory of Dunmore’s War over the Shawnees and by the subsequent beginning of the settlement of Kentucky. McKee and Connolly were agreeable to this arrangement as a short-term tactic until their proposed campaign could begin.

It was an ambitious and undeniably unworkable scheme; but at any rate, it never had a chance, as Connolly and two aides were arrested shortly afterward by alert militia at Frederick, Maryland. Connolly was brought before the Continental Congress for trial and promptly imprisoned. As for McKee, he was soon confined to Pittsburgh by the local Committee of Correspondence, headed by George Croghan, for corresponding with an official of the British army.

The collapse of the Connolly Plot left Lord Dunmore with his forces based upon the sea. For the first time in the war, the British now found themselves a small armed force facing a large, unorganized, hostile population. Except for the initial shock at Concord, the British forces had encountered regular American armies (as at Boston) or fought in friendly or neutral territory (in Canada), but now Lord Dunmore was facing the essence of counter-revolutionary warfare. Since it is waged by relatively small though heavily armed forces of the government or its supporters against the mass of the civilian population, counter-revolutionary warfare must needs be mobile, swift, and devoted to hit-and-run raiding. Even so, it is a grave mistake, made by many analysts and historians, to confuse this kind of raiding with true guerrilla warfare.

Guerrilla warfare must rest on the active support of the bulk of the populace; the guerrilla troop is the armed spearhead of the revolutionary masses. Its fire is directed in pinpoint fashion against government troops and installations, and sometimes against their relatively few allies and
sympathizers. Its aim is to dislodge the rulers from the backs of the people. Its long-run chances of victory are excellent. But counter-revolutionary raiding is necessarily conducted in wild and haphazard fashion, by an armed minority
against
the bulk of the people. Its aim is not simply to dislodge a ruling group, but to spread terror among the people, to injure, harass, and disrupt the economy. Its long-run chances of victory are slight. The strategies proper to the two types of warfare reinforce these differences. The more scrupulously the guerrillas refrain from harming the civilian population, the more solemnly and securely the populace will support them, while the more vigorous the counter-revolutionary terror raids, the more bitterly hostile will the populace become. Short-term successes for guerrillas therefore promote victory in the long run; short-term gains for counter-revolutionary bands anger the people still further and insure long-run defeat.

It was this sort of harassing force that Lord Dunmore established on the Virginia coast. Dunmore began in June 1775 with 100 regulars and a few ships anchored off Norfolk, where he was kept supplied by the preponderantly Tory town, dominated by Scots merchants and their factors and clerks. When in early October Dunmore was angered by rebel newspapers in Norfolk, he sent a detachment of soldiers ashore to seize the press and paper as well as the persons of two of the printers. The local militia was called out to stop the outrage, but the apathetic militiamen failed to lift a finger to protect the printers. The mayor and aldermen of Norfolk sent the governor a feeble
pro forma
protest; so mild, indeed, was Norfolk’s indignation, that shortly afterward a Town Meeting invited Dunmore to occupy the town.

The Virginia rebels decided to take action against renegade Norfolk, and soon 300 local militia of adjoining Norfolk and Princess Anne counties met at Kempsville, in Princess Anne. Dunmore, adding some Negroes and Scottish clerks to his forces, marched against the rebels. The Americans skillfully trapped him in an ambush, but they fled in panic at the sight of the British. Greatly emboldened by his victory, Dunmore proclaimed martial law on November 7 and set up the king’s standard for the colony. In a few days, 300 citizens took an oath of allegiance to the crown at Kempsville, as did 500 more at Norfolk. Soon, 3,000 took the oath in Princess Anne, Norfolk, and Nansemand counties, the inhabitants of Princess Anne pledging themselves to support Dunmore and the crown to the last drop of their blood.

On November 17, with imagination and daring lacking in his fellow British commanders, Lord Dunmore decided to exacerbate the contradictions in American society by offering freedom to any Negro slaves who would join his armed forces, thereby permanently enraging the conservative slave-holding Virginia planters who would probably not have supported
the British in any case. Soon he was able to organize two regiments of Tory militia, the Queen’s Own Loyal Virginia Regiment and the Ethiopian Regiment, composed of runaway slaves. The conservative Committee of Safety leading the rebel cause at Williamsburg was now finally forced to act, sending two regiments of militia against Norfolk with the aid of a regiment of North Carolina militia. The rebels, over 900 men led by Col. William Woodford, faced Dunmore’s 500 at Great Bridge, near Norfolk, on December 11, 1775. Dunmore, in the foolish European manner exemplified by Howe at Bunker Hill, chose to make a direct, massed, frontal assault on the entrenched rebel positions. Rebel musket and rifle fire thoroughly smashed the British as they came forward, and the British suffered sixty casualties, while only one rebel was wounded. Dunmore, decisively defeated, fell back to his ships, and Norfolk was recaptured by the rebel forces.

The Virginia army, on occupying the Norfolk area, recommended that the entire population of the region be forcibly removed to the interior, to prevent any trade or intercourse with Dunmore’s ships. While this recommendation was never really put into effect, a reign of terror was launched against the Tories in the area. Their homes destroyed and plantations seized, the bulk of them fled the colony. Some went to Scotland, others to England and the West Indies. Many joined the British army in Boston.

The Tories were angered at being so callously abandoned by Lord Dunmore, who paid little attention to them and treated even those who fled to his ship with scant consideration. The case of the Sprowle family is a particularly poignant one. One of the wealthiest men in Virginia and for several decades president of the Court of Virginia Merchants, the ardently Tory Andrew Sprowle fled to Dunmore’s ship as the rebels entered Norfolk. The revolutionaries destroyed his urban properties and confiscated his plantation. This was too much for old Sprowle, who died soon after. His wife Katherine, also on Dunmore’s ship, obtained permission from Dunmore to visit her son, imprisoned as a Tory in a North Carolina jail. When she landed, the Williamsburg Committee of Safety refused to allow her the visit and sent her back, but now Dunmore cruelly refused to let her board the vessel. Booted back and forth between the two sides, and not allowed a resting place, she was finally able to obtain passage to Scotland. She was placed on a modest British pension list, but was arbitrarily cut off by Lord Dunmore, while her Virginia plantations were sequestered and sold by the Virginia government.

On New Year’s Day, Dunmore received well over a hundred regulars and much arms from Boston and St. Augustine. Emboldened by the reinforcements, he promptly shelled Norfolk, deliberately firing warehouses on the docks used for cover by the rebel forces. The revolutionaries
used this incident as a convenient cover for brutally putting a large portion of Tory Norfolk to the torch. It is estimated that Dunmore’s naval fire that day destroyed fifty houses valued at over 3,600 pounds sterling, but that the rebels deliberately destroyed nearly nine hundred houses valued at over 110,000 pounds sterling. In February, the ruling Virginia Convention made it official; at its order, the rest of Norfolk—over four hundred houses—was deliberately and savagely burned to prevent Dunmore from ever again using it as a base. Thus did these “moderate” revolutionaries in a “consensus” America pass a harsh collective sentence upon the people of Norfolk. Yet, in the propaganda war, the rebels were able to lay the blame for the burning of the city upon Dunmore, who, the previous October, had desperately but unsuccessfully tried to burn the coastal town of Hampton as punishment for the people’s burning of a grounded British warship.