Volume 4, Chapter 15, Suppressing Tories in New York
New York, as we have indicated, was a hotbed of Toryism, and even the Whigs were dominated by highly conservative oligarchs.
The colony was therefore held in understandable suspicion by the other colonies,
and Isaac Sears, the leading New York radical who had left in disgust for Connecticut,
was one of the first to realize that any radical action in New York would have to be accomplished from outside its borders.
In late November, Sears, appointed a military commander by the Connecticut Assembly, collected 100 men from Connecticut
and conducted a daring raid into New York City, smashing the Tory print shops.
They seized three leading Westchester Tories, including the Rev. Samuel Seabury, and hauled
them back to New Haven.
Only Suffolk County in eastern Long Island, part of Ulster County and New York City, were
largely revolutionary.
But even in those places the action meted out to the local Tories was negligible.
Indeed, of 104 merchant members of the Chamber of Commerce of New York City, no fewer than
78 were Tories. Westchester County was largely Tory, and Dutchess County predominantly so.
Indeed, in Dutchess, the loyalists armed themselves openly, condemned the Continental Congress,
interfered with the regular militia, and openly enlisted men for the British armed forces.
The Tories were the river men who used their boats to convey enlistees to the British forces
and threatened to carry the leading rebels off as well. During October, 1775, many Tories of the
lower Hudson Valley were planning to join the British forces, some in the Peekskill area,
tried to rise up in arms, but were quickly disarmed by the local militia.
The heavily Tory Staten Island sent no delegates to the Provincial Congress and was embargoed
by the adjoining area of New Jersey for its unfriendly disposition toward the liberties
of America.
But the staunchest Tory region in New York was Queens County, covering most of western
Long Island.
The Queen's towns not only refused to send delegates to the Provincial Congress, but
What Passed Loyalist Resolutions in Defiance of the Revolution?
In the November 1775 elections to the Provincial Congress, the Free Holders of Queens County
voted by three-and-a-half to one against sending a delegate.
The following month, the bulk of the county's voters declared their neutrality in the war
and decided to arm in their own defense.
The British fleet proved more than willing to supply them with arms. Rising Tory activity
in Queens so alarmed even such Conservatives as Jay and MacDougall that the latter held
it imperative to disarm the Tories of the county. Even the Conservative Provincial Congress
recommended embargoing these counties that continued to refuse to send any delegates.
However, the Congress refused to agree to the urgings of its Committee of Safety to
disarm all the provinces' Tories.
The Continental Congress, however, angrily resolved to smash this resistance movement
and declared the virtual outlawry of Queens County, denouncing its citizens as incapable
of resolving to live and die free men.
It declared that the Queen's Tories should be disarmed, the dangerous ones imprisoned,
and the names of all be published throughout the country.
No inhabitant of Queens was to be allowed to leave the county without a passport issued
by the New York Committee of Safety.
It was clear, however, that any chastening of Queen's Tories would have to be accomplished
from outside the province.
With the Continental Congress's direction, Nathaniel Heard of New Jersey was sent into
New York with 1,200 men in late January 1776. Heard succeeded in disarming 600 armed but
disorganized Queen's Tories without a fight. Seventeen Tory ringleaders were marched off
to prison in Philadelphia. Succeeding Heard was that great scourge of Tories in Toryism,
General Charles Lee, increasingly in use as a radical military troubleshooter.
With the Canadian campaign heading toward defeat and the siege of Boston moving towards
victory, it was becoming ever more clear that the next problem was the expected transfer
of the British Army from Boston to some more congenial spot on the Atlantic seaboard.
Probably they would pick New York City.
From there they might, in a combined pincers movement with forces in Canada, try to split
the colonies in two. And riddled with Tories and Neo-Tories as it was, New York might prove
a hospitable haven for the British troops. Lee was among the first to press for more
radical and vigorous measures against the British and the Tories. By the summer of 1775
He was advocating the independence of America and wondered why, in the name of Satan, New
York's Governor Tryon had not been seized. During the autumn, Lee urged McDougall to
seize Tryon and to inform the British naval captain in New York Harbor that, if he had
bombarded the city, the first house he sets on fire shall be the funeral pile of his Excellency
In short, triumph should be held as hostage for British good behavior.
In October 1775, Lee pioneered in proposing two radical steps, that the war be partly
financed by the confiscation of Tory property, and that American ports be thrown open to
all European commerce, defiantly shedding the last American allegiance to the British
laws of trade.
In early January 1776, deeply worried about New York, Lee urged Washington to allow him
to raise a body of Connecticut volunteers in Jersey militia in order to cleanse New York
City of Tories and to fortify it. Washington hesitated for political reasons, but finally
agreed when John Adams approved the plan. Lee promptly went to Connecticut and there
There collected twelve hundred men recruited by Isaac Sears, whom Lee hailed and picked
as his assistant for the expedition, with the rank of lieutenant colonel. Approaching
the border, Lee was met by hysterical pleas not to cross into the city, lest the British
navy bombard it. He characteristically replied that if they did, the first house set in flames
His arrival in New York in early February coincided with the arrival of British General Sir Henry
Clinton. In the harbor with several hundred troops, Lee took command and successfully
threatened the British that opening fire on the town would mean the death of one hundred
Tories. He also cut off the supplies that the New Yorkers had been generously furnishing
The British
The New York Provincial Congress protested with particular bitterness at the hard treatment
Lee was meeting out to the Tories. It is curious that the Congress took time out in the midst
of a dire revolutionary crisis and a fight for survival to complain about the fact that
the Tory, Samuel Gale, had been imprisoned by Lee in Connecticut and his property invaded.
Or perhaps it is not so curious when we reflect that Gale was an English surveyor allied to the landed New York oligarch and highly conservative Whig, James Dwayne.
Lee paid no attention to the carping. Instead, he sent out the eager Isaac Sears to tame the Tories of Queens County.
Sears swept through Queens denouncing the New York Congress and forcing a strong public oath of allegiance upon everyone.
All non-compliers were arrested and sent to Connecticut.
Lee was soon called elsewhere, but his activities did have the effect of shoring up the patriots and chastening the Tories.
An indigenous New York left could not be restored, however,
and the raid provoked such a storm of conservative New York protest that the Continental Congress and Army weakly withdrew from suppressing Tories.
New York was where the British first tried to exploit another contradiction within American society, the disaffected Indians on the frontier.
In any conflict between English and Americans, the tendency of the Indians would be to side
with Britain, for it was the land grabbing American settlers who constituted their supreme
enemy, whereas the British had played a relatively mollifying role with the Indians, for example
in decreeing the proclamation line of 1763.
The most that the Americans could hope for, therefore, was Indian neutrality in the war.
It was that promise that General Schuller had gained from the Iroquois in the summer
of 1775.
Fortunately, for the American cause, Sir William Johnson, Indian trader, superintendent of
Indian Affairs at Albany, and uncrowned king of the Iroquois, had died in 1774.
But Johnson's nephew and son-in-law, Colonel Guy Johnson, succeeded him, and William's
son, Sir John Johnson, ruled an enormous estate in upcountry Tryon County, with the aid of
a fierce private army of his tenant, Highland Scots. Furthermore, Tryon County, covering
most of upcountry New York, was predominantly Tory, and rumors persisted of a plan for the
Johnson Highlanders to join pro-British Iroquois and march down the Hudson Valley, raising
Tories as they came. But the order of the several thousand pro-British Iroquois was
dampened by the British themselves in the spring of 1775, when General Carlton, fearful
of provoking an American invasion of Canada, advised them to lie low for the time being.
In January 1776, General Schuler took several thousand militiamen into Tryon County in a
surprise attack, thoroughly disarming Johnson's Scots and shipping six of their leaders to
prison in Philadelphia. Thus, by early 1776, the rebels, with the use of surprise and skilled
organization, had managed to disarm the Tories in the areas of their greatest support. Many
Many of the Highland Scots, along with most of the other Tories of Upper New York, fled
to Canada, there to work for vengeance in return. Back home, their property was confiscated,
and the Tories who remained behind were imprisoned, flogged and sometimes executed. Sir John Johnson
managed to hold Fort Stanwix at the extreme western point of the Mohawk River until late
Spring of 1776 when he was forced to abandon his properties and flee to Canada.