1775 (73 page)

Similar mentalities drove the brutality, internecine war, and devastation in New York’s Westchester County “neutral ground,” New Jersey’s Hackensack Valley, and North Carolina’s ravaged Piedmont. By one account, bad blood among the New Jersey Dutch who had sided with the Presbyterian wing of the Dutch Reformed Church and those whose forebears in the Conferentie camp had fought in the green Tory uniforms of Van Buskirk’s Volunteers, lingered into the twentieth century.
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Such bitterness was the darkest face of civil war during the Revolution. On a larger historical dimension, the conflict did indeed reiterate a number of the cleavages, frustrations, and polarities prominent in the 1640s. In a grand sense, stepping around the enmity, gore, and destruction, the English-speaking peoples’ three principal civil wars—the English Revolution (or English Civil War), the American Revolution, and the American Civil War—can be acclaimed and exalted. Their cumulative transformation can be likened to a three-century historical ladder, up which the two leading nations climbed and in doing so sorted out their respective populations, ideologies, and economics in a way that ultimately produced
two
successive global hegemonies.

Not only did family-type resemblances usually recur in these great conflicts, but most of the English-speaking world was affected. The English Civil War, although principally English and fought largely on that soil, quickly drew in Scotland, Ireland, Barbados, and even British North America (at that point Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island). Seventeenth-century North America, still unimportant, was more a locale of tension and bickering than of pitched combat, but there were several battles.
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During the 1770s, that earlier geography reversed. The military confrontation concentrated in North America, not in the British Isles. Ramifications in the latter rarely rose above name-calling or angry demonstrations, accompanied by the British Army’s difficulty in enlisting Englishmen to fight their colonial cousins.

The turnabout in the second cousins’ war also extended to relative wealth and power. Back in the seventeenth century, the king’s opponents in Parliament, commerce, and the cities commanded a larger share of England’s resources. It was the embattled Stuart kings, high church in religion, who had to seek money and assistance from France or Spain. In 1775, the
monarch and Parliament, now politically joined at the hip, were the wealthy side, and it was the colonials who had to pursue aid from Catholic France and Spain. They did so, despite being staunch dissenting Protestants.

Any reader looking for a simple, convenient definition of what differentiates a civil war from a rebellion will not find one in weighing the three cousins’ wars. Indeed, each of the three was also widely referred to as a rebellion or revolution. Terms applied in the 1640s included the Great Rebellion and the English Revolution. In the 1770s, Britons often referred to the Rebellion or the American Rebellion. And during the early 1860s, the description “War of the Rebellion” was commonly used in the North.

For the American Revolution, suffice it to say its grander dimensions coexisted with internecine warfare. By September 1775, substantial districts of several provinces—New York, New Jersey, the Delmarva Peninsula, and both North and South Carolina—were displaying militant Loyalism. Jefferson’s insistence in 1776 that a whole “people” was rising to escape tyranny was greatly overstated. Civil wars are never that simple, and neither were the Great Rebellion and the War of the (Southern) Rebellion.

Where Loyalism was strongest, civil war was either visible or incipient by late 1775. Patriots in New York, for example, could not rely on the militia in most of the same counties that had been unwilling to accept (or even to consider) the Continental Association in late 1774—Queens, Kings, Richmond, Westchester, Dutchess, and Tryon. In New Jersey, Patriot strength lay in New England-settled and Presbyterian areas, and among Dutch Reformed congregations of the Coetus faction. In New Jersey’s Anglican, Quaker, and Dutch Tory locales, Patriots could rely on neither militia nor elections. Along the Delmarva Peninsula, as
Chapter 17
has described, six adjoining counties in Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia leaned to the Loyalist side, and during 1775 Tories disrupted militia musters in most of them. Two other provinces had at least one populous county inclined to Loyalism—Quaker Bucks County in eastern Pennsylvania and Fairfield County (one-third Anglican) along Connecticut’s New York border.

Open war came more quickly in the Carolinas. Within weeks of Lexington and Concord, North Carolina’s governor, Josiah Martin, was advising Lord Dartmouth about potential support in both the former Regulator counties of the Piedmont and the Highland Scottish settlements along the Cape Fear. If Martin exaggerated the prospects, his rough geography was
correct. In South Carolina, the new governor arriving in June, Lord William Campbell, could see the outline of a backcountry insurrection and began plotting with local Tories.

Over the many years of a drawn-out war, New York, New Jersey, the Carolinas, and to a limited extent Delmarva did in fact become the cockpits most notable for intermittent civil or guerrilla warfare. As we will see, Patriot militias and Loyalists fought repeatedly, even when no Continental troops or regular British units were on hand to pursue structured wartime objectives. During the entire war, the American militia participated on its own in 191 engagements in Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey and did likewise on 194 occasions in the Carolinas and Georgia.
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This now gives us two dimensions on which the American Revolution in some colonies may be viewed as a civil war. The most elevated displays the three wars as the grand seventeenth-to-nineteenth-century forge of the English-speaking peoples’ separation and success. The second or workaday face of civil war largely reflected the fundamental Patriot versus Tory polarizations in a half dozen colonies. Suspicion and bad blood were easily aroused, because New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania were all “melting pot” colonies with distinctive ethnic populations—principally English, Scotch-Irish, Irish, Dutch, and German—and a distrustful mix of religions: principally Presbyterian, Lutheran, Anglican, German Reformed, Dutch Reformed, and Quaker.

In those days, the American melting pot had yet to do much melting. As we have seen in
Chapter 3
, politics in the three provinces—and also in the Delmarva Peninsula—was substantially influenced by religion and ethnicity. Pastor Henry M. Muhlenberg made no bones about describing the Pennsylvania election of 1764 as having “the English and German Quakers, the Herrnhuters, the Mennonites, and Schwenkfelders” in one party and “the English of the High Church, the Presbyterian Church, the German Lutheran and German Reformed” on the other side.
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Thus, although demands for political and economic self-determination did much to precipitate the Revolution, in 1775 religion and ethnicity still furnished much of the attitudinal framework through which communities and individuals chose sides. Bloody civil war came as easily to parts of the middle colonies and the Carolinas as it had to England, Ireland, and Scotland in the seventeenth century and to much of Germany during both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In many respects, the backcountries of South and North Carolina resembled each other. As we have seen in
Chapter 6
, large sections of both were extensions of a “Greater Pennsylvania.” The bulk of Carolina Loyalists and Tories were not locally born but migrants from Pennsylvania or from stopping places on the Great Wagon Road southward from the Quaker colony. The principal exception involved heavily Loyalist Scottish merchants, and North Carolina’s Highlanders, most of them recent emigrants from Scotland.

However, before pursuing these two “civil war” complexions of the American Revolution, it is also necessary to cite a third. Petty rather than grand, this typically came from local quarrels and resentments important enough to shoulder their way into people’s early-stage choice of wartime loyalties. If the Hatfields choose one side, the ever-hostile McCoys must take the other. Or in circa 1775 Pennsylvania, if the Susquehannah Company Yankee settlers were staunch Patriots, the local Dutch and German-sprung “Pennamites,” pushed aside by Yankee machinations, joined Tory ranger units. In the South Carolina backcountry, serious rivalries within militia units, contests over rank or commissions, were sometimes enough to make the loser switch loyalty.

Local grudges and issues didn’t usually trump economic, religious, ethnic, and political considerations in choosing sides, but they did play a role.

Local Causations, Minority Consciousness, and Personal Grudges

Jonathan Boucher, the Maryland Anglican clergyman and Loyalist, contended in his later
Reminiscences
that many American Whigs were motivated by personal considerations—“private grudges give raise to public measures.” Such matters, Boucher felt, “lie beneath the reach of ordinary historians.”
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If the Tory clergyman was referring to personal debts, land speculation, or planters’ sour relationships with British tobacco merchants, twentieth- or twenty-first-century thinking would chalk up such widely felt and shared motivations as economic.

British historians have displayed a taste for explanations that dwell on localism. One of them, Sir Lewis Namier, enjoyed a mid-twentieth-century vogue for his thesis that local issues and interests, not ideology, guided Parliament during the 1760s and 1770s, although that argument has since faded. Several British historians have set out a related explanation of the
English Civil War. Counties like Kent supposedly marched to their own parochial drummer, not to the staccato of national themes and causes.
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However, the more recent trend in Britain—where English Civil War minutiae commands attention among war buffs and reenactors comparable to that Americans accord their Civil War—is to assess the loyalties of the 1640s as indeed shaped most by religion and secondarily by politics and economics.
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On the American side of the Atlantic, “localism” clearly mattered in the 1770s. Still, such grudges and issues were only a minor factor in choosing sides—and this was true even though identification with individual colonies shaped American political consciousness circa 1775 more than the individual circumstances of counties or shires, even identity-proud ones, had shaped the loyalties of Englishmen 130 years earlier.

Part of the impact of “localism” in the America of 1775 came from how many individuals, especially in the backcountry, found themselves in a cultural milieu that was new, raw, and lawless. Take Pennsylvania: in its northeastern Susquehanna territory occupied by claimants from Connecticut, and to a lesser extent in the western districts peopled from Virginia, grudges born of local clashes and rival land claims certainly counted. Tories in western Pennsylvania tended to cluster in tracts settled under Dunmore’s grants. To the east, one careful analyst found Susquehanna Loyalism concentrated in two districts where largely Dutch and German drifters and squatters, after being run out by Yankees between 1773 and 1776, took their revenge by joining Butler’s Tory Rangers.
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To another Pennsylvania historian, “Loyalists prove to be largely minority groups; their loyalism was in the main a reflection of looking to Britain to maintain or restore an internal balance of power…In every feud-ridden neighborhood they were one of the two local parties; for irrelevant disputes were not generally abandoned at the onset of war: instead they quickly took on, almost at random, the larger enmities of Whig and Tory.”
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Pennsylvania’s Patriot chief justice, Thomas McKean, described the circumstances of 1776–1779 by saying that “Pennsylvania was not a nation at war with another nation, but a country in a state of civil war.”
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Upper New York was similarly riven. Tenants of some of the feudal landholding patroons on the Patriot side—principally the Livingstons—let dissatisfaction draw them into Tory allegiance. In the vast Mohawk Valley lands held by the family and lieutenants of the late Sir William Johnson, the Palatine German population split, and Johnson’s Scottish Highlanders
began fleeing to Canada in 1775. Old enmities persisted through the war. Nor, as we have seen, could Yorkers maintain their control in the former Hampshire Grants, assigned to New York by the king in 1764. The New England–born Green Mountain Boys took over much of the disputed territory well before the Revolution, and sides chosen often pitted New Englanders against those who held land or office under New York. On March 13, 1775, a sheriff holding royal office by New York appointment ordered his men to fire on a Yankee crowd that had seized a courthouse at Westminster on the Connecticut River. After one Yankee was killed, Yorker appointees were quickly jailed or expelled by the Green Mountain Boys.
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In the Carolinas, two thirds of the white population of 1775 had arrived over the previous two decades, many of them coming directly from Pennsylvania or arriving after brief stays elsewhere. No good statistics exist, but we can surmise that these two provinces, along with Georgia, included especially high percentages of white residents born in another colony. North and South Carolina both had “little Pennsylvanias,” and just as the parent colony was an ethnic and religious kaleidoscope, so were the backcountries of both Carolinas. As in Pennsylvania, church-centered Presbyterians were mostly ardent rebels. But other upcountry settlements reflected more confusing in-migrations—Regular and Separate Baptists; fallen-away Pennsylvania Quakers; and Moravians, Dunkers, and other German pacifists. Still other migrants included Presbyterians from small breakaway sects who were Loyalists or king haters for doctrinal reasons that even Scottish encyclopedias still have difficulty explaining. Malcontents must have abounded. Backcountry men in general suspected or disliked the vestry Anglican plantation elites who ruled both Carolinas from coastal towns like Edenton, New Bern, Wilmington, Georgetown, Charleston, and Beaufort.