Conceived in Liberty (221 page)

Outside of Norfolk, the Virginia rebels tended to be more lenient, and in December 1775 the Virginia assembly offered pardon from arrest and confiscation if the Tories would take an oath of allegiance to the new Virginia government. However, enforcement often differed in accordance with race. Thus, in May 1776, thirteen whites and twelve Negroes were arrested for Tory activity and sent to Williamsburg for trial. The Virginia Convention tried the cases in June; the Negroes were sent to forced labor in Virginia’s lead mines, while the whites were either freed or given parole.

Ousted from his Norfolk base and failing to rouse the west, Dunmore intensified his plunder and terror raids up and down Chesapeake Bay and along the Virginia coast. He ardently intercepted shipping, seized tobacco, and burned plantations, and many Negroes seized the opportunity to supply the British and to join Dunmore’s forces, naturally enraging still further even the most conservative planters. All in all, nearly two thousand Negroes ran away to join his fleet, even though only the Negro soldiers, and not their families, had been offered freedom. The slave exodus from coastal Warwick and Northampton counties was particularly heavy, but a severe smallpox epidemic decimated their ranks and ruined their potential effectiveness.

His troops thus ravaged and his supplies running low, Dunmore decided in the summer of 1776 to give up and join the British fleet in the north. Several hundred of the healthiest remaining Negroes were taken north with the fleet, but Dunmore perfidiously shipped many others into slavery in Florida and the West Indies.

North Carolina confronted concentrations of Tories among Highland Scots in the Wilmington-Fayetteville area, who owed their land to the crown’s largesse and who included a number of retired British army officers. There were also strong but not dominant clusters of Tories in the back country. Perhaps fully half of the North Carolina population was Tory or at least lukewarm to the rebel cause. Furthermore, fear of Negro uprisings aiding the British led the North Carolina Provincial Congress in the spring of 1776 to urge all slave owners on the south side of the Cape Fear River to remove far into the interior all slaves capable of bearing arms for the British. In Wilmington, Negroes began to escape in droves into the woods, and whites enforced a nine o’clock curfew on them.

In January 1776, Josiah Martin, the royal governor of North Carolina, who had fled to a British warship, decided to mobilize the Tories of the province. Overoptimistically expecting 9,000 Tories to rise in arms, Martin urged the Highlanders and all other Tories to rally in arms for the king and march to the sea to join him and expected reinforcements from Great Britain.

Soon, 1,600 Tories gathered under the veteran British general Donald MacDonald at Cross Creek (now Fayetteville). The Tory response was weakened, however, by the failure of Governor Martin to sail his ship past enemy fire to arrive at the Cross Creek rendezvous. Reaching Moore’s Creek Bridge near Wilmington on February 27, the Tories encountered a smaller force of 1,000 militiamen under Cols. Richard Caswell and John Lillington. The Americans held strongly entrenched positions, but in the absence of the ailing MacDonald, the new commander, the young and
reckless Col. Donald McLeod, was able to override the advice of older officers. Once again, as in Virginia, the Tories hurled themselves heedlessly but in orthodox fashion against entrenched rebel positions and were crushed even more effectively than at Great Bridge. The Tories suffered thirty casualties, whereas the revolutionaries enjoyed the incredible casualty rate of none killed and only two slightly wounded.

The surviving Tories fled inland, pursued by relentless bands of American rebels, who captured no fewer than 850 of the enemy. Among the killed were Colonel McLeod, and among the captured, General Mac-Donald and the political leader of the Highland Scots, Maj. Allan Mac-Donald. Armed Toryism in North Carolina had suffered a crippling blow.

After commiserating with their families and pledging them its protection, the North Carolina Provincial Congress decided to disperse the hundreds of captured Tories to all the provinces, so as to guard against their “pernicious influence.” The rank-and-file prisoners were shipped to Maryland and Virginia, the leaders to remote Philadelphia. The people of North Carolina were solemnly warned that the treatment meted out to the prisoners would largely depend on the good behavior of the remaining Tories of the province.

The year before, during the summer and fall of 1775, the English government had worked out a plausible plan: British troops would invade the South from the sea, and the charismatic presence of the redcoats would inspire Tory risings by the Highland Scots and other Loyalists, to follow their royal governors, Dunmore and Martin. British troops were to embark from Ireland to be led by General Clinton, who would join the expedition at Boston. However, bureaucratic bumbling and adverse weather delayed the expedition until April 1776, by which time Dunmore had been routed off the continent and Martin’s premature Tory uprising crushed. When Clinton arrived near the Cape Fear River in mid-April, he was forced to abandon his projected invasion of the South.

Tory disaffection was even stronger in South Carolina than in its northern neighbor, for there both British support and neutralism abounded among low-country merchants and planters as well as the back-country frontiersmen. The revolutionist low-country planters were in constant fear of pro-British insurrections by the numerous Negro slaves, and a Negro named Jerry was executed in the summer of 1775 for saying he would help pilot British warships into Charleston. Furthermore, John Stuart, the British Indian agent in the South, was plotting to raise the powerful Cherokee tribe in attack against the frontier settlements. This buildup was originally part of General Gage’s plan for a concerted Indian attack on the entire American frontier, but the arrest of Connolly in Virginia and McKee in
Pittsburgh in October 1775 and the disarming of Johnson in New York in January 1776 wrecked that plan. Even so, Stuart and the Cherokees were still all too dangerous.

Despite the great potential of Tory strength in South Carolina, lack of intelligent organization crippled its impact. In particular, the royal governor, Lord Campbell, instead of going to the back country to rouse his supporters, chose to conduct operations from British warships in Charleston Harbor. Seizing the opportunity presented by Campbell’s caution, the rebels of Charleston sent their leader, William Henry Drayton, and the Reverend William Tennent, Charleston’s leading Presbyterian minister, to the back country in August 1775 to organize the rebel forces there. By September, two large contending back-country forces had gathered at Ninety-Six, 1,000 rebel militiamen under Drayton confronting a larger Tory force under Col. Thomas Fletchall. Remarkably, Drayton and Tennent managed to sweet-talk Fletchall into signing a “Treaty of Neutrality” and to disband. The treaty pledged the neutrality of Fletchall and his men and even partially acknowledged the authority of the South Carolina Provincial Congress.

Soon, however, the Tories rose again, led this time by Robert Cunningham. Over 1,800 of them gathered at Ninety-Six, where in mid-November they unsuccessfully attacked a fort manned by one-third their number.

In the meanwhile, the South Carolina Council of Safety, the arm of the provincial congress entrusted with executive powers, decided to crush the Tories posthaste, and sent Col. Richard Richardson to do the job. Richardson sped westward, collecting revolutionary militia from both North and South Carolina as he went. By late November, he had amassed over 4,000 men. Richardson’s force crushed all Tory resistance before it, and hundreds of Tories were disarmed and compelled to pledge peaceful behavior in the future. An amnesty the following March completed the rout of the South Carolina Loyalists. South Carolina, any more than its sister province to the north, could not now lend Tory assistance to an invasion by General Clinton.

In Georgia, which had been the colony least enthusiastic for the opposition to Great Britain, armed Tory resistance was at first avoided by the very mildness of the Whig response to the Revolution. Indeed, only the rebel enclave of St. John’s sent a delegate to the Second Continental Congress. The opening of hostilities at Lexington and Concord, however, coupled with the angry boycott of Georgia by the other colonies, could only push Georgian opinion into a more active course. The development also advanced the fortunes of the Liberty Boys, who, on hearing the news, broke into the public powder magazine. Realizing that Gov. James
Wright’s power could only be nullified and eliminated by force, the Liberty Boys organized an effective “Savannah Mob,” headed by young Joseph Habersham, son of the president of the Georgia Council. This spearhead of the liberty militants in the province consisted of a cross section of the town’s activists: aristocrats, laborers, and town rowdies alike. The blows of the mob soon wrecked the authority and morale of the royal government, and Governor Wright soon saw that his cause was lost; this was no longer his snug Tory Georgia. This campaign was capped in early July 1775 by Habersham and others openly and boldly carrying off the government’s store of munitions.

On June 13, several hundred Liberty Boys assembled at Savannah, put up a Liberty Tree, established a Savannah committee to enforce the Continental Association, which Georgia had never joined, and called a provincial congress for the following month. This congress, meeting on July 4, ratified the program and circulated a defense association around Savannah. The congress became the de facto legislature of the colony and a council of safety its chosen executive; the joining of the other American colonies in revolt was particularly symbolized by Georgia’s finally choosing a full slate of delegates to the Continental Congress. Soon the provincial congress took over rule of the militia and the courts in Georgia. Thus the Georgia rebels were fully occupied during 1775 with catching up to the other American colonies.

In mid-January, British warships appeared at the mouth of the Savannah River to aid Governor Wright, who had been shorn of all authority by the rebel provincial congress. The Council of Safety promptly decided to seize Wright and other officials to prevent them from rallying the Georgia Tories. He was arrested by Habersham, but a few weeks later he escaped to flee to a British warship. Georgia Toryism, like its counterparts in the other southern provinces, had been outmaneuvered and effectively suppressed.

Bereft of hope for Loyalist aid in the South, and ordered to return north in a short while, General Clinton still had his powerful expeditionary force, and there was no point in not using it. He decided, not unexpectedly, to attack and seize the key southern port of Charleston, or at least Fort Sullivan in its harbor, which the British could then use as a firm base for invasion of the entire southland. Aided by Gen. Charles Lord Cornwallis, over three thousand regulars, and a strong fleet of over fifty warships under Commodore Sir Peter Parker, Clinton sailed against Charleston to assault it by land and by sea.

The American leadership knew that Gen. Charles Lee was perhaps the only man who could save Charleston. Indeed, Lee was in urgent demand everywhere, as John Adams wrote to him: “We want you at New York —we want you at Cambridge—we want you in Virginia....” George Washington wanted him in New York to counter the expected transfer there of the main British force from Boston. As Washington, later to be Lee’s mortal enemy, wrote to his brother at the time: “He [Lee] is the first officer in military knowledge and experience we have in the whole army.” If he could have been spared, Lee probably would have been chosen to lead the ill-starred campaign against Canada. As it was, both the dashing Gen. Richard Montgomery (an old friend of Lee’s) and, after Montgomery’s death, Benedict Arnold repeatedly urged that Lee be placed in supreme command over them. Now, in mid-February 1776, Congress unanimously decided to send him to Canada to save the campaign—and such leaders as John Adams, and Franklin, and the unpredictable Hancock sent him glowing and optimistic letters of congratulation. But no sooner
had he accepted the post, and asked as his assistants for either Gen. John Sullivan or the able young Gen. Nathanael Greene, an admirer of Lee who had served under him at Boston, than Congress changed its mind. The southern leaders were now beginning to dread a British attack on the South, so at the end of February, the southern members persuaded Congress to name Lee head of a newly established Southern Military Department, covering Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia.

Lee hastily left New York, where he had been cowing the Tories and strengthening defenses, to assume his southern military post, virtually independent of Washington. (Indeed, with the imminent retirement of aging Artemas Ward, Lee was soon to be the second-ranking general in the Continental Army.) Taking up his post at Williamsburg at the end of March, Lee—inveterate scourge of the Tories—was horrified to find Maryland’s royal governor Robert Eden basking unmolested in wide personal popularity. Learning from captured dispatches that Eden intended to help a British invasion of the South, Lee urged Maryland to arrest him. When Maryland’s newly constituted rebel authorities refused, Lee, with the support of the Virginia Council of Safety, boldly went over their heads to appeal for Eden’s arrest to Samuel Purviance, chairman of the Baltimore Committee of Safety. Purviance and the Baltimore committee readily agreed and sent a small troop to the capital at Annapolis to arrest Eden. The angry conservatives of the Maryland Council of Safety at Annapolis prevented Purviance and his men from fulfilling their task, and issued condemnations of the actions of the Baltimore committee. The Council of Safety would do no more than place Eden on parole, and even an order of the Continental Congress could not persuade the council to place him under arrest. Instead, in June, the Maryland convention peacefully suggested that Eden leave for England, allowing him to depart un-searched and unseized.