Volume 4, Chapter 16 Suppressing Tories in the Middle Colonies
New Jersey had nearly as great a proportion of loyalists as New York, and southern New
Jersey was notoriously loyal to Great Britain. Its royal governor, William Franklin, illegitimate
son of Benjamin, was particularly active in the British cause. In the spring of 1775,
He tried to persuade the New Jersey Assembly to negotiate a separate peace with Britain.
Failing this, he continued to organize Tory sentiment.
Prodded by a series of petitions organized by him, the Assembly vehemently instructed
its delegates to the Continental Congress against any attempt at independence.
Indeed, Franklin was almost able to induce the Assembly to beg the King for peace, and
Only lengthy harangues by moderate delegates from the Continental Congress were able to
dissuade New Jersey from such separate action. It was only in June 1776 that Franklin was
finally arrested by the New Jersey Assembly and sent to prison in the recesses of Connecticut.
Apart from Franklin's political activity, by the spring of 1776 the province was plagued
with imminent insurrections in Monmouth, Hunterdon and Bergen counties. Negroes were reported
arming themselves to join the British cause and later to be intriguing with British prisoners
of war. In conservative Pennsylvania, the Tory cause had been crippled by Joseph Galloway's
decision not to run for the Second Continental Congress and his withdrawal from political
The bulk of the Tories continued to be the Quakers in the Philadelphia area.
The Philadelphia meeting sent dispatches to Quakers throughout the Middle Colonies,
urging them to abstain from all forms of rebellion
and to remember that it was their religious duty to honor the King.
From their old anarchic individualism,
The Taurism of the Quakers remained passive, however, and there was no worry about their
taking up arms against the Revolution.
In Maryland, a sharp geographical split prevailed, with the tobacco-growing regions on the western
shore of Chesapeake Bay being staunchly revolutionary, while the maritime eastern shore was predominantly
Tory. In heavily Tory Worcester County on the Atlantic coast, the loyalist led by Hugh
Hugh Kelly obtained arms during the fall of 1775 from a vessel of Lord Dunmore, Royal
Governor of Virginia. Meeting in secret and signing a joint oath, 1900 Tories formed
an association, met for military drill, declared themselves for the king and against Boston,
and pledged themselves to resist any conscription into the Continental Army. They also managed
to seize some local wigs and hustle them aboard Dunmore's ship in a feudal quest for recruits.
In adjoining Somerset County, one Isaac Atkinson led over half the local militia into a counter-revolutionary
force for the king, and he threatened one day to fight it out. He also denounced the
The Revolution is a Presbyterian plot. Several companies of militia in Caroline and Dorchester
counties on the eastern shore laid down their arms in defiance of the Revolutionary cause.
The colony of Delaware, almost wholly on the Chesapeake Peninsula, was riddled with Tories
sentiment. By the spring of 1776, one thousand Tories were under arms in Sussex County in
in the South, and in northern Newcastle County, British ships on the Delaware River were regularly
furnished supplies by the inhabitants.