1775 (43 page)

Some 30 miles from the coast, and near the main road from Boston to New York, Lebanon was well placed for communication. Fleet-footed Narragansett ponies stood hitched at the posts and palings to carry orders to Ticonderoga, the Patriot lines around Boston, or the cannon-producing provincial ironworks in Salisbury (under Trumbull’s direct control by January 1776). Lebanon was relatively safe from British raids. Even so Trumbull was a prime target of the British and Tories, and a price was put on his head. He was guarded around the clock by a half dozen soldiers, and much of the time also by post riders able to summon help.
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Boston, not surprisingly, had such a strong Patriot imprimatur that it resumed its role as the capital of Massachusetts in March 1776 following the British evacuation. No other seaport capital in New England retained that political credibility. Of course, several thousand Boston-area Loyalists went into exile, a huge number relative to those abandoning Newport or Portsmouth.

As for the rebel Hampshire Grants, today’s Vermont, its unofficial 1774–1776 capital was mountain-encircled Bennington. The Green Mountain Boys met in the Catamount Tavern, where they had a ceremony of hoisting offending Tories 35 feet up in a chair and then leaving them to dangle for six to eight hours. However, at a mid-1775 convention, Vermonters replaced Ethan Allen, making the capable but softer-spoken Seth Warner colonel of the Green Mountain Regiment.

New England’s provincial governments, in short, were Patriot led and politically reliable. However, all four included towns or regions where disloyalty was widespread or where the new regime’s authority was rejected. Even New England had some chinks and vulnerabilities.

Vulnerable Frontiers and Dubious Loyalties

Although New England could fairly be called a Patriot “fortress” in 1775, several of its region’s frontiers were exposed. Jonathan Trumbull, sitting in
his War Office halfway between New York and Boston, had to watch and plan for the participation of Connecticut troops on most of those fronts and theaters of operations.

In the late summer of 1775, Connecticut soldiers manned Fort Ticonderoga, still decrepit. Others marched along Quebec’s Richelieu River, started moving up the Kennebec with Benedict Arnold, participated in besieging Boston, manned the somewhat feeble artillery of seacoast batteries or forts from Norwalk to New London, and stood by on the New York border to suppress that province’s Tories and otherwise fill in for its unreliable militia. These multiple roles peaked in late 1775 and 1776. Afterward, despite Trumbull’s ongoing importance as a war leader, Connecticut’s military forces never again played that unique role of representing New England’s—and to an extent George Washington’s—unofficial reserve depot.

Soldiers from the other New England colonies were less broadly dispersed. Massachusetts furnished over half the manpower for the siege of Boston, fortified and guarded a long seacoast, and manned sections of the Canadian frontier. A few companies were posted near Machias, in the Maine district, near that era’s tense boundary between Massachusetts and Nova Scotia. Troops from the Bay Colony played only a small part in the initial invasion of Quebec.

Some of Yankeedom’s best troops came from Rhode Island and New Hampshire. Rhode Island deployed two well-trained regiments in the lines around Boston under Brigadier General Nathanael Greene, who years later would become George Washington’s top general in the Carolinas. A sprinkling of Rhode Islanders went up the Kennebec with Arnold. Two of New Hampshire’s three regiments were fully formed and represented in the siege, and both played a disproportionate and distinguished role at Bunker Hill. New Hampshire also furnished rangers for the Quebec expedition.

As for maritime warfare, the four provinces kept one eye on coastal defenses—
Chapter 14
discusses the British attempts during 1775 to bombard and burn Yankee seaports—while the other watched the Yankee vessels engaging small Royal Navy craft (schooners, cutters, barges, and tenders) and intercepting British supply ships and transports. Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut all launched small provincial navies before the end of 1775. Autumn’s waterborne assault on British supply ships, substantially at George Washington’s own urging, is detailed in
Chapter 12
.

Taken together, these demanding sectors—the Boston theater, the vulnerable
seacoast, the Hudson-Champlain and Kennebec-Chaudière war roads into Canada, and the New York Tory districts that Congress and Washington suppressed with Connecticut militia incursions—made New England the front line of the Revolution in 1775. Virginia and the Carolinas were readying to play a large part, but in 1775 theirs was still a supporting role.

Northern New England’s mountainous “roof,” protected only by militia, was open to invasion anytime the British could muster 6,000 to 10,000 soldiers, as they finally did in 1777. Middling seaports could be devastated by a pair of 20-gun sloops of war. And whenever the Royal Navy wanted to occupy the Narragansett Bay waters surrounding Newport, it could. In general, though, New England displayed lopsided internal support for the Patriot cause, with only a few stipplings of Tory strength.

But these deserve brief note. The two thirds of Massachusetts—its western, central, and northeastern counties—that had made up the arch-Puritan Bay Colony before unification with Plymouth in 1691 was zealous on the Patriot side. These Puritan areas had suppressed, and to a considerable extent forced out, their Loyalist elites in 1774 and 1775. Exile is a fair description, even though many who fled to British-held Boston remained in the province until departing to Halifax with General Howe in March 1776.

Minor insurrections during the early months of 1775 came in the southeastern counties that were originally part of the older, less Puritan Plymouth Colony. Here conservative towns like Assonet, Marshfield, and Scituate were home to
Mayflower
descendants with names like Winslow, Winthrop, and Standish. Parliament recognized Marshfield and Scituate in March by excluding them from its first Restraining Act. Dissidence also centered in residential concentrations of neutrality-seeking Quakers: Barnstable and Sandwich townships on Cape Cod; and whaling-rich Nantucket and Fairhaven, the island’s mainland cousin in the candle, lamp oil, and whalebone corset trade.

By the mid-twentieth century, Old Cape Cod had become a popular song and an even more popular tourist attraction. Histories of its towns, succulent oysters, and Yankee folkways abound. However, there exists no one-volume history of the Cape’s town-by-town politics during the American Revolution. It would mar some images.

Nantucket, in particular, became a 42-square-mile political and commercial hot potato for Massachusetts political leaders. Located some 30 miles southeast of Cape Cod, the island was wide open to the Royal Navy.
Because of this geography—and also because Britain bought virtually all of Nantucket’s lucrative output of whale oil—the island’s Quaker leadership hoped to slip into a semiofficial neutrality. Indeed, several hundred Tories from mainland Massachusetts emigrated there to enjoy a more salubrious political climate. However, because Britain had also exempted collaborative Nantucket from the New England Restraining Act, various opportunity-minded merchants and traders flocked in. Several sought to use Nantucket vessels to smuggle supplies and provisions to His Majesty’s forces in Boston.

By mid-1775, the island had become notorious. Patriot-controlled seaports from Wilmington, North Carolina, to Philadelphia passed ordinances against exporting provisions there. Finally, the Congress prohibited exports to Nantucket except from neighboring Barnstable County, Massachusetts, where judges would decide what was needed for local—and only local—consumption.
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As for New Hampshire, its minor internal disaffection mattered little because that province, alone among the thirteen, was never invaded. Those who declined to sign the Association in 1775—just 6 percent of the eligible population—centered in Anglican locales and places with Wentworth family ties (Portsmouth, Claremont, and several small towns). Some Baptists, especially in newly settled outlying regions, yawned at the Revolution and disliked New Hampshire’s new Congregationalist-run government, prompting what one local historian called a “strong tendency during the war to tar Baptists with a Tory brush.”
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At various times, several dozen remote townships in northern and western New Hampshire wanted to secede and join Vermont.

In Rhode Island, too, religion greatly influenced political loyalties. Anglicans concentrated in Newport, where by one account “the members of Trinity Church (the only Anglican church in Newport) supported the loyalist cause overwhelmingly, and a list of both early royalists and later loyalists reads much like Trinity’s Register.”
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Because Quakers comprised another 15 percent of the city’s population, neutrals and Loyalists constituted a strong force. Baptists had long-standing, influential roles in Rhode Island, so few embraced the antipolitical or neutral sloganry common among their outsider coreligionists farther north.

Like Massachusetts, Connecticut had a troublesome periphery. In contrast to the
über
-patriotism of its evangelical eastern counties, it had a much more conservative western section, abutting New York, where Anglican
strength had almost doubled since 1761. By 1775, churchmen—the label given Church of England members in Connecticut—represented about 25 percent of the population west of the Stratford (Housatonic) River.
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During the course of the war, the western towns, mostly in Fairfield County, provided many hundreds of volunteers for Loyalist regiments, especially the Prince of Wales’ American Volunteers and the King’s American Regiment.
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Politically, western Connecticut Tories arguably caused more trouble in 1775 than those in Massachusetts (where many had already fled to Boston). In March 1774, a conservative convention, drawing from 23 western towns but principally those in Fairfield, had opposed both Connecticut’s western expansion and the reelection of Governor Jonathan Trumbull. In January and February 1775, Tories disrupted patriotic conventions in Fairfield and Litchfield counties, insisting that proper authority in the empire lay with “the King, Lords, and Commons,” not extralegal committees, conventions, and associations.
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In March several Fairfield towns, led by the two Anglican hotbeds, Newtown and Ridgefield, voted against the Continental Association and opposed selecting committees to enforce it.
²⁹

The Connecticut Assembly, besides putting Newtown and Ridgefield under legislative surveillance, took action that spring to disband a militia company in the western town of Waterbury as “inimical.” The legislators cashiered disloyal militia officers in Stamford and refused to commission those chosen in Newtown.
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Bolder than the Assembly, Patriot militia assembled in large numbers between September and December to disarm Tories in North Fairfield, Newtown, Redding, Danbury, Ridgefield, Woodbury, and Derby, the core of western Connecticut Anglicanism. The Anglican rector in Derby, Richard Mansfield, had been foolish enough to write to New York’s royal governor, William Tryon, that if a British army could be sent, it would be joined by 4,000 or 5,000 men from Fairfield, New Haven, and Litchfield counties.
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Mansfield quickly fled to Long Island.

After taking lesser measures, Connecticut legislators struck hard in December 1775 with an act to prohibit enlisting or encouraging enlistment in the British military, serving with Crown forces, providing them with provisions or munitions, helping to pilot a British vessel, or criticizing the laws of Connecticut or Congress. A year later treason was made punishable by death, and a special committee was empowered to visit western towns and interrogate “all inimical persons.”
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In the words even of a sympathetic
Trumbull biographer, “Here then, in Connecticut…was a Detective Code and a Detective Police, for the suppression of internal foes—thorough for the purpose intended as was that of the Duke of Otranto’s in the days of Napoleon the First.”
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This is hardly needless detail. Loyal and reliable Connecticut militiamen were essential to backstop the wide-ranging military commitment Trumbull had undertaken on behalf of Congress and George Washington. Connecticut forces were frequently called upon to help suppress Tory activity in New York, and so comparable behavior in western Connecticut was put down harshly.

Indeed, persisting sub rosa recruitment for Loyalist regiments in Fairfield County displayed what future centuries would call a fifth column. Historians have used the term “military loyalism” to describe both the wayward politics or unreliability of the militia in western towns and the high frequency of militia-age males running off to join the British. Not only was Waterbury, for example, singled out by the dissolution of its militia company, but 66 of the town’s men ran off to join the British. Disaffection was closely related to the strength of local Anglicanism.
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Although it is beyond the time frame of this book, elements of a civil war wracked southwestern Connecticut by late 1776 after British forces had occupied Long Island. Patriots from Yankee eastern Long Island fled redcoat rule by returning to their ancestral Connecticut. Disaffected Connecticut Anglicans, in turn, crossed the sound to relatively welcoming Long Island areas like Brookhaven, Oyster Bay, Huntington Bay, and Hempstead, all now in British hands. For six more years, Patriots and Loyalists raided each other across the sound, establishing and then operating networks for spying, moving refugees, and smuggling alike. Economically and militarily weary as the years passed, Connecticut by 1777 could no longer play its unique early role.
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To the north, politics within the future borders of Vermont, in turn, often reflected the origins of people’s land grants: Did individuals hold property under title from New Hampshire or from New York? Those who looked to New York—true of many in the present-day Brattleboro area—also tended to be Tory or Loyalist in the larger continental struggle. Annals confined to Vermont alone usually include highly relevant cultural, religious, and land-grant anecdotes and evaluations. By contrast, one-volume histories of the American Revolution often sidestep Vermont’s status in 1776 and thereafter. The Continental Congress, responsive to New York, declined
to accept the insurgent-controlled territory as a new state. This not only dashed Green Mountain Boys’ hopes for a New Connecticut but put their 1776–1783 activity outside the thirteen-state mainstream.