THE LOYALISTS UNDER ARMS
It has been charged against the Loyalists, and the charge
cannot be denied, that at the beginning of the Revolution
they lacked initiative, and were slow to organize and
defend themselves. It was not, in fact, until 1776 that
Loyalist regiments began to be formed on an extensive
scale. There were several reasons why this was so. In
the first place a great many of the Loyalists, as has
been pointed out, were not at the outset in complete
sympathy with the policy of the British government; and
those who might have been willing to take up arms were
very early disarmed and intimidated by the energy of the
revolutionary authorities. In the second place that very
conservatism which made the Loyalists draw back from
revolution hindered them from taking arms until the king
gave them commissions and provided facilities for military
organization. And there is no fact better attested in
the history of the Revolution than the failure of the
British authorities to understand until it was too late
the great advantages to be derived from the employment
of Loyalist levies. The truth is that the British officers
did not think much more highly of the Loyalists than they
did of the rebels. For both they had the Briton's contempt
for the colonial, and the professional soldier's contempt
for the armed civilian.
Had more use been made of the Tories, the military history
of the Revolution might have been very different. They
understood the conditions of warfare in the New World
much better than the British regulars or the German
mercenaries. Had the advice of prominent Loyalists been
accepted by the British commander at the battle of Bunker's
Hill, it is highly probable that there would have been
none of that carnage in the British ranks which made of
the victory a virtual defeat. It was said that Burgoyne's
early successes were largely due to the skill with which
he used his Loyalist auxiliaries. And in the latter part
of the war, it must be confessed that the successes of
the Loyalist troops far outshone those of the British
regulars. In the Carolinas Tarleton's Loyal Cavalry swept
everything before them, until their defeat at the Cowpens
by Daniel Morgan. In southern New York Governor Tryon's
levies carried fire and sword up the Hudson, into 'Indigo
Connecticut,' and over into New Jersey. Along the northern
frontier, the Loyalist forces commanded by Sir John
Johnson and Colonel Butler made repeated incursions into
the Mohawk, Schoharie, and Wyoming valleys and, in each
case, after leaving a trail of desolation behind them,
they withdrew to the Canadian border in good order. The
trouble was that, owing to the stupidity and incapacity
of Lord George Germain, the British minister who was more
than any other man responsible for the misconduct of the
American War, these expeditions were not made part of a
properly concerted plan; and so they sank into the category
of isolated raids.
From the point of view of Canadian history, the most
interesting of these expeditions were those conducted by
Sir John Johnson and Colonel Butler. They were carried
on with the Canadian border as their base-line. It was
by the men who were engaged in them that Upper Canada
was at first largely settled; and for a century and a
quarter there have been levelled against these men by
American and even by English writers charges of barbarism
and inhumanity about which Canadians in particular are
interested to know the truth.
Most of Johnson's and Butler's men came from central or
northern New York. To explain how this came about it is
necessary to make an excursion into previous history. In
1738 there had come out to America a young Irishman of
good family named William Johnson. The famous naval hero,
Sir Peter Warren, who was an uncle of Johnson, had large
tracts of land in the Mohawk valley, in northern New
York. These estates he employed his nephew in administering;
and, when he died, he bequeathed them to him. In the
meantime William Johnson had begun to improve his
opportunities. He had built up a prosperous trade with
the Indians; he had learned their language and studied
their ways; and he had gained such an ascendancy over
them that he came to be known as 'the Indian-tamer,' and
was appointed the British superintendent-general for
Indian Affairs. In the Seven Years' War he served with
great distinction against the French. He defeated Baron
Dieskau at Lake George in 1755, and he captured Niagara
in 1759; for the first of these services he was created
a baronet, and received a pension of 5,000 pounds a year.
During his later years he lived at his house, Johnson
Hall, on the Mohawk river; and he died in 1774, on the
eve of the American Revolution, leaving his title and
his vast estates to his only son, Sir John.
Just before his death Sir William Johnson had interested
himself in schemes for the colonization of his lands. In
these he was remarkably successful. He secured in the
main two classes of immigrants, Germans and Scottish
Highlanders. Of the Highlanders he must have induced more
than one thousand to emigrate from Scotland, some of them
as late as 1773. Many of them had been Jacobites; some
of them had seen service at Culloden Moor; and one of
them, Alexander Macdonell, whose son subsequently sat in
the first legislature of Upper Canada, had been on Bonnie
Prince Charlie's personal staff. These men had no love
for the Hanoverians; but their loyalty to their new
chieftain, and their lack of sympathy with American
ideals, kept them at the time of the Revolution true
almost without exception to the British cause. King George
had no more faithful allies in the New World than these
rebels of the '45.
They were the first of the Loyalists to arm and organize
themselves. In the summer of 1775 Colonel Allan Maclean,
a Scottish officer in the English army, aided by Colonel
Guy Johnson, a brother-in-law of Sir John Johnson, raised
a regiment in the Mohawk valley known as the Royal Highland
Emigrants, which he took to Canada, and which did good
service against the American invaders under Montgomery
in the autumn of the same year. In the spring of 1776
Sir John Johnson received word that the revolutionary
authorities had determined on his arrest, and he was
compelled to flee from Johnson Hall to Canada. With him
he took three hundred of his Scottish dependants; and he
was followed by the Mohawk Indians under their famous
chief, Joseph Brant. In Canada Johnson received a colonel's
commission to raise two Loyalist battalions of five
hundred men each, to be known as the King's Royal Regiment
of New York. The full complement was soon made up from
the numbers of Loyalists who flocked across the border
from other counties of northern New York; and Sir John
Johnson's 'Royal Greens,' as they were commonly called,
were in the thick of nearly every border foray from that
time until the end of the war. It was by these men that
the north shore of the St Lawrence river, between Montreal
and Kingston, was mainly settled. As the tide of refugees
swelled, other regiments were formed. Colonel John Butler,
one of Sir John Johnson's right-hand men, organized his
Loyal Rangers, a body of irregular troops who adopted,
with modifications, the Indian method of warfare. It was
against this corps that some of the most serious charges
of brutality and bloodthirstiness were made by American
historians; and it was by this corps that the Niagara
district of Upper Canada was settled after the war.
It is not possible here to give more than a brief sketch
of the operations of these troops. In 1777 they formed
an important part of the forces with which General
Burgoyne, by way of Lake Champlain, and Colonel St Leger,
by way of Oswego, attempted, unsuccessfully, to reach
Albany. An offshoot of the first battalion of the 'Royal
Greens,' known as Jessup's Corps, was with Burgoyne at
Saratoga; and the rest of the regiment was with St Leger,
under the command of Sir John Johnson himself. The
ambuscade of Oriskany, where Sir John Johnson's men first
met their Whig neighbours and relatives, who were defending
Fort Stanwix, was one of the bloodiest battles of the
war. Its 'fratricidal butchery' denuded the Mohawk valley
of most of its male population; and it was said that if
Tryon county 'smiled again during the war, it smiled
through tears.' The battle was inconclusive, so bitterly
was it contested; but it was successful in stemming the
advance of St Leger's forces.
The next year (1778) there was an outbreak of sporadic
raiding all along the border. Alexander Macdonell, the
former aide-de-camp of Bonnie Prince Charlie, fell with
three hundred Loyalists on the Dutch settlements of the
Schoharie valley and laid them waste. Macdonell's ideas
of border warfare were derived from his Highland ancestors;
and, as he expected no quarter, he gave none. Colonel
Butler, with his Rangers and a party of Indians, descended
into the valley of Wyoming, which was a sort of debatable
ground between Connecticut and Pennsylvania, and carried
fire and sword through the settlements there. This raid
was commemorated by Thomas Campbell in a most unhistorical
poem entitled _Gertrude of Wyoming_:
On Susquehana's side, fair Wyoming!
Although the wild-flower on thy ruined wall
And roofless homes a sad remembrance bring
Of what thy gentle people did befall.
Later in the year Walter Butler, the son of Colonel John
Butler, and Joseph Brant, with a party of Loyalists and
Mohawks, made a similar inroad on Cherry Valley, south
of Springfield in the state of New York. On this occasion
Brant's Indians got beyond control, and more than fifty
defenceless old men, women, and children were slaughtered
in cold blood.
The Americans took their revenge the following year. A
large force under General Sullivan invaded the settlements
of the Six Nations Indians in the Chemung and Genesee
valleys, and exacted an eye for an eye and a tooth for
a tooth. They burned the villages, destroyed the crops,
and turned the helpless women and children out to face
the coming winter. Most of the Indians during the winter
of 1779-80 were dependent on the mercy of the British
commissaries.
This kind of warfare tends to perpetuate itself
indefinitely. In 1780 the Loyalists and Indians returned
to the attack. In May Sir John Johnson with his 'Royal
Greens' made a descent into the Mohawk valley, fell upon
his 'rebellious birthplace,' and carried off rich booty
and many prisoners. In the early autumn, with a force
composed of his own regiment, two hundred of Butler's
Rangers, and some regulars and Indians, he crossed over
to the Schoharie valley, devastated it, and then returned
to the Mohawk valley, where he completed the work of the
previous spring. All attempts to crush him failed. At
the battle of Fox's Mills he escaped defeat or capture
by the American forces under General Van Rensselaer
largely on account of the dense smoke with which the air
was filled from the burning of barns and villages.
How far the Loyalists under Johnson and Butler were open
to the charges of inhumanity and barbarism so often
levelled against them, is difficult to determine. The
charges are based almost wholly on unsubstantial tradition.
The greater part of the excesses complained of, it is
safe to say, were perpetrated by the Indians; and Sir
John Johnson and Colonel Butler can no more be blamed
for the excesses of the Indians at Cherry Valley than
Montcalm can be blamed for their excesses at Fort William
Henry. It was unfortunate that the military opinion of
that day regarded the use of savages as necessary, and
no one deplored this use more than men like Haldimand
and Carleton; but Washington and the Continental Congress
were as ready to receive the aid of the Indians as were
the British. The difficulty of the Americans was that
most of the Indians were on the other side.
That there were, however, atrocities committed by the
Loyalists cannot be doubted. Sir John Johnson himself
told the revolutionists that 'their Tory neighbours, and
not himself, were blameable for those acts.' There are
well-authenticated cases of atrocities committed by
Alexander Macdonell: in 1781 he ordered his men to shoot
down a prisoner taken near Johnstown, and when the men
bungled their task, Macdonell cut the prisoner down with
his broadsword. When Colonel Butler returned from Cherry
Valley, Sir Frederick Haldimand refused to see him, and
wrote to him that 'such indiscriminate vengeance taken
even upon the treacherous and cruel enemy they are engaged
against is useless and disreputable to themselves, as it
is contrary to the disposition and maxims of their King
whose cause they are fighting.'
But rumour exaggerated whatever atrocities there were.
For many years the Americans believed that the Tories
had lifted scalps like the Indians; and later, when the
Americans captured York in 1813, they found what they
regarded as a signal proof of this barbarous practice
among the Loyalists, in the speaker's wig, which was
hanging beside the chair in the legislative chamber!
There may have been members of Butler's Rangers who
borrowed from the Indians this hideous custom, just as
there were American frontiersmen who were guilty of it;
but it must not be imagined that it was a common practice
on either side. Except at Cherry Valley, there is no
proof that any violence was done by the Loyalists to
women and children. On his return from Wyoming, Colonel
Butler reported: 'I can with truth inform you that in
the destruction of this settlement not a single person
has been hurt of the inhabitants, but such as were armed;
to those indeed the Indians gave no quarter.'
In defence of the Loyalists, two considerations may be
urged. In the first place, it must be remembered that
they were men who had been evicted from their homes, and
whose property had been confiscated. They had been placed
under the ban of the law: the payment of their debts had
been denied them; and they had been forbidden to return
to their native land under penalty of death without
benefit of clergy. They had been imprisoned, fined,
subjected to special taxation; their families had been
maltreated, and were in many cases still in the hands of
their enemies. They would have been hardly human had they
waged a mimic warfare. In the second place, their
depredations were of great value from a military point
of view. Not only did they prevent thousands of militiamen
from joining the Continental army, but they seriously
threatened the sources of Washington's food supply. The
valleys which they ravaged were the granary of the
revolutionary forces. In 1780 Sir John Johnson destroyed
in the Schoharie valley alone no less than eighty thousand
bushels of grain; and this loss, as Washington wrote to
the president of Congress, 'threatened alarming
consequences.' That this work of destruction was agreeable
to the Loyalists cannot be doubted; but this fact does
not diminish its value as a military measure.