Note on sources: The original spelling has been retained throughout; [sic] has not been used.

The bibliography of archival and printed primary sources as well as scholarly literature cited in the notes can be accessed at: http://www.holgerhoock.com/​scars-of-independence-bibliography.pdf.

Preface

1. Rachel Hope Cleves, The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobitism to Antislavery (Cambridge, 2009), 13, 15 (quotation); Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York, 2007), 12, with reference to novelist Barry Unsworth; Wayne E. Lee, Barbarians and Brothers: Anglo-American Warfare, 1500–1865 (New York, 2011), 11.

Introduction

1. My depiction of the Boston Massacre and its background, unless otherwise noted, is based on Richard Archer, As If an Enemy’s Country: The British Occupation of Boston and the Origins of Revolution (Oxford, 2010); Dirk Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1765–1780 (New York, 1977), 219–41; Russell Bourne, Cradle of Violence: How Boston’s Waterfront Mobs Ignited the American Revolution (Hoboken, NJ, 2006), 145–68; Neil Longley York, The Boston Massacre: A History with Documents (New York, 2010); John W. Shy, Toward Lexington: The Role of the British Army in the Coming of the American Revolution (Princeton, 1965), 306–19; John Ferling, John Adams: A Life (New York, 2010), 65–6; idem, Independence: The Struggle to Set America Free (New York, 2011), 26–34; Hiller B. Zobel, The Boston Massacre (New York, 1970), with the quotation from Davis at 191. Zobel is best read alongside Pauline Maier, “Revolutionary Violence and the Relevance of History,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2:1 (1971), and Jesse Lemisch, “Radical Plot in Boston (1770): A Study in the Use of Evidence,” Harvard Law Review 84:2 (1970).

2. For a brief overview of longer- and short-term contexts and causes of the Revolution, see Stephen Conway, A Short History of the American Revolutionary War (London, 2013), ch. 1. For concise introductions to the colonial protests of 1764–70, see also Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Political Protest and the World of Goods,” and Craig B. Yiruch, “The Imperial Crisis,” in Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, ed. Edward G. Gray and Jane Kamensky (Oxford, 2013); Archer, As If an Enemy’s Country, chs. 1–5. For the nature and chronology of pre-Revolutionary violence, see Bourne, Cradle of Violence, 148–52; Hoerder, Crowd Action, 219–23; Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1987); David C. Rapoport, “Before the Bombs There Were the Mobs: American Experience with Terror,” Terrorism and Political Violence 20:2 (2008); Joseph S. Tiedemann, “A Tumultuous People: The Rage for Liberty and the Ambivalence of Violence in the Middle Colonies in the Years Preceding the American Revolution,” Pennsylvania History 77:4 (2010).

3. O. M. Dickerson, comp., Boston under Military Rule (1768–1769) As Revealed in a Journal of the Times (New York, 1970); Archer, As If an Enemy’s Country, 126–35, and the points on Irish and Afro-Caribbean soldiers at 106, 117. For a standing army as a provocation in light of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British and North American history, see Patrick Griffin, America’s Revolution (New York, 2012), 88. For the British government underestimating the impact of revenue reforms and a standing army, see Nancy L. Rhoden, “The American Revolution I: The Paradox of Atlantic Integration,” in British North America in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Companion Series to the Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Stephen Foster (Oxford, 2013), 275.

4. York, Boston Massacre, 21–5 (Franklin quotation 21).

5. Adams is quoted in Zobel, Boston Massacre, 290. “Come on you Rascals”: New-York Gazette, Apr. 2, 1770, “Extract of a Letter from Boston, Mar. 19, 1770.” For this and the following paragraph, see esp. Archer, As If an Enemy’s Country, 190–93.

6. All quotations from the Boston Gazette, Mar. 12, 1770, except the bystander, John Hickling, quoted in Zobel, Boston Massacre, 199.

7. Prentiss is quoted in Benjamin L. Carp, Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party & the Making of America (New Haven, 2010), 42.

8. Ulrich, “Political Protest”; Yiruch, “Imperial Crisis” (quotation 91).

9. Archer, As If an Enemy’s Country, 202; Zobel, Boston Massacre, 205; Bourne, Cradle of Violence, 163; A fair account of the late unhappy disturbance at Boston in New England (London, 1770), 9, 19; Jill Lepore, Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (New York, 2013), 155.

10. For the published depositions collected to support the Boston and British versions of events, respectively, see A short narrative of the horrid massacre in Boston (Boston, 1770), sent to London by Samuel Adams, with Revere’s image as frontispiece, and A fair account. For the depositions of twenty-two British soldiers and civilians secretly recorded by a friendly magistrate working for Hutchinson, see CO5/88, XC1580. See also York, Boston Massacre, 129–57. Andrew Oliver to Benjamin Lynde, Mar. 6–7, 1770, MHS Collections Online, at http://www.masshist.org/​database/​2714?ft=Boston%20Massacre&from=/​features/​massacre/​initial&noalt=1&pid=34.

11. All dates in 1770: Boston Gazette, Mar. 12. Also in Connecticut Journal (supplement), Mar. 16; New Hampshire Gazette, Mar. 16; Providence Gazette, Mar. 10–17; Pennsylvania Gazette, Mar. 22; Georgia Gazette, Apr. 11. British: Lloyd’s Evening Post, Apr. 20–23; St James’s Chronicle, Apr. 21–24; Dublin Mercury, Apr. 28–May 1. For neutral and pro-British accounts, see Boston Chronicle, Mar. 8; New-York Journal, Mar. 15; New-York Gazette, Apr. 2.

12. For Revere, see York, Boston Massacre, 32; Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History (Princeton, 2010), 63. For the Revolutionary role of the motley crew, see Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston, 2000), ch. 7. It was not until William C. Nell published The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Boston, 1855) that Crispus Attucks was depicted as black.

13. For the trials, see The trial of William Wemms…held at Boston (Boston, 1770); [William Wemms], The trial of the British soldiers (Boston, 1807); “Adams’ Argument for the Defense, December 3–4, 1770,” Founders Online, at http://founders.archives.gov/​documents/​Adams/​05-03-02-0001-0004-0016. On anti-riot duty carried out by soldiers lacking nonlethal weaponry, see Bruce Lenman, Britain’s Colonial Wars, 1688–1783 (New York, 2001), 199–200.

14. JA, Diary, Mar. 5, 1773, at http://www.masshist.org/​digitaladams/​archive/​browse/​diaries_by_date.php.

15. JA to Matthew Robinson, Mar. 2, 1786, WJA, viii: 383–5.

16. The quotation from Edward Larkin, “American Revolutionary War Writing,” in The Cambridge Companion to War Writing, ed. Kate McLoughlin (Cambridge, 2009), 126. For the distortion of the collective American memory of the Revolution and war, see Michael A. McDonnell, ed., Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation Making from Independence to the Civil War (Amherst, MA, 2013), 5, 20–21, 35 n. 7, and passim. See also Griffin, America’s Revolution, 155. For the American right’s antihistorical appropriation of the founding, see Lepore, Whites of Their Eyes. Although scholars have more recently studied aspects of Revolutionary violence—Amerindian warfare; partisan and guerrilla fighting in the Southern backcountry and on the New York frontier; the fate of prisoners in New York City—such specialist literature remains too fragmented to convey fully the nature and significance of violence and of its politicization, and it has yet to transform the Revolution’s popular narrative. See annotations to subsequent chapters for detailed references to the important work of Wayne E. Lee, Edwin Burrows, Sarah Purcell, John P. Resch, et al.

17. Notions of violence are products of their time. By ascertaining how protagonists on all sides defined the limits of legitimate violence, and by probing how they invoked and contested these limits, we can attempt to evaluate allegations of excessive violence and war crimes. At the same time, rumors, exaggerations, and unproven claims of violence in the historical sources can provide useful insights into the mindset of historical actors, their fears, moral dilemmas, and polemical strategies. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “violence” as the “deliberate exercise of physical force against a person, property, etc.” In a legal context, violence refers also to “the unlawful exercise of physical force, intimidation by the exhibition of such force.” See “violence, n.,” and “terror, n.,” OED, at http://www.oed.com. “Terror” was a word regularly used by all sides to refer to extreme fear in the face of physical and psychological violence, or the threat thereof, and the use of fear to intimidate people. See, e.g., Robert Beverley Letterbook, LOC; Dartmouth to WH, Sept. 5, 1775, BHQP 31; GW to Continental Congress Camp Committee [Jan. 29, 1778]. Unless noted otherwise, Washington’s correspondence and military orders are cited from PGW. On American ambivalence regarding the laws of war, see John Fabian Witt, Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History (New York, 2012), 15, 48.

18. Holger Hoock, Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War and the Arts in the British World, 1750–1850 (London, 2010), 75–81 (quotation 75).

19. Historians have been more comfortable recognizing a string of local civil wars in New Jersey, New York, or the Southern backcountry. As David Armitage has pointed out, we tend to consider civil war and revolution as antithetical: “Civil wars are destructive; revolutions are progressive…Civil wars mark the collapse of the human spirit; revolutions, its unfolding and self-realisation.” David Armitage, “Civil War and Revolution,” Agora 44:2 (2009): 20. For a working definition of civil war, with reference to Stathis Kalyvas, see ibid., 19: “organized collective violence within a single polity which leads to a division of sovereignty and consequently a struggle for authority.” On the dynamics of revolution and counterrevolution, see Jerry Bannister and Liam Riordan, “Loyalism and the British Atlantic, 1660–1840,” in The Loyal Atlantic: Remaking the British Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era, ed. Jerry Bannister and Liam Riordan (Toronto, 2012), 5. For the marginalization of the Loyalists, see Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York, 2011).

20. R. R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, vol. I, The Challenge (Princeton, 1959), 190. For British mobilization, see Stephen Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence (New York, 2000), ch. 1. Seeley is quoted in Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), xvi.

21. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1967); Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992); see also, more recently, T. H. Breen, American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (New York, 2010). For the history of Founders Chic, see Francis D. Cogliano, “Founders Chic,” History 90:299 (2005).

22. “we must seek”: Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010), 1–2. On violence in American history and culture, see, highly selectively, Richard Maxwell Brown, Strain of Violence: Historical Studies of American Violence and Vigilantism (New York, 1975), with references to America’s violent birth at 5, 7; Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace, eds., American Violence: A Documentary History (New York, 1970); Michael A. Bellesiles, ed., Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History (New York, 1999); Christopher Waldrep and Michael A. Bellesiles, eds., Documenting American Violence: A Sourcebook (Oxford, 2006); Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, CT, 1973); Peter Rhoads Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York, 2008); Mark A. Neely, “Was the Civil War a Total War?,” Civil War History 50:4 (2004); idem, Civil War and the Limits of Destruction (Cambridge, MA, 2007); John Tirman, The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars (Oxford, 2011).

23. Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York, 2008), has movingly deromanticized notions of the Civil War. For the Civil War and cultures of death, see also Mark S. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death (Ithaca, NY, 2008). Carol Berkin, Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence (New York, 2005), ix.

24. 1.25 percent of Americans died on the Patriot side, compared to 0.12 percent and 0.28 percent of Americans in World War I and World War II, respectively, and 1.6 percent in the Civil War. If we assume that some 200,000 Patriots bore arms during the conflict, more than 17 percent of those soldiers were killed, compared to 13 percent of Union troop losses in the Civil War. My estimates follow Howard Henry Peckham, The Toll of Independence: Engagements & Battle Casualties of the American Revolution (Chicago, 1974); Edwin G. Burrows, Forgotten Patriots: The Untold Story of American Prisoners during the Revolutionary War (New York, 2008), 204; John Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (New York, 1976), 249–50; Allan Kulikoff, “The War in the Countryside,” in Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, ed. Gray and Kamensky, 218; Michael A. McDonnell, “War and Nationhood: Founding Myth and Historical Realities,” in Remembering the Revolution, ed. McDonnell et al., 21, 29. For British casualties, see Nick Bunker, An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America (New York, 2014), 382–3 n. 7.

25. On comparative and transnational approaches, see Maya Jasanoff, “The Other Side of Revolution: Loyalists in the British Empire,” WMQ 65:2 (2008). Matthew H. Spring, With Zeal and with Bayonets Only: The British Army on Campaign in North America, 1775–1783 (Norman, OK, 2008), xiii, highlights that campaign narratives for popular audiences privilege Patriot over Loyalist, British, and German sources.

26. Even at the most conservative estimate of 20 percent—those who signed a document, did business with the army, took up arms, or went behind British lines or into exile—some 400,000 people opposed the Revolution. John Adams referred to an estimated one-third of the people in the colonies actively opposed to the Revolution; on another occasion, he referenced “one third…averse to the revolution,” an “opposite third” for it, and a “middle third” who were waverers. JA to Thomas McKean, Aug. 31, 1813, WJA, x: 62–3; JA to James Lloyd, Jan. 1815, ibid., 108–14. The classic estimate of 20 percent Loyalists is Paul H. Smith’s in “The American Loyalists: Notes on Their Organization and Numerical Strength,” WMQ 25:2 (1968). On the difficulties of determining numbers, see Jasanoff, “Revolutionary Exiles: The American Loyalist and French Émigré Diasporas,” in The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840, ed. David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (Basingstoke, 2010), and Liberty’s Exiles. See also Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole, eds., A Companion to the American Revolution (Malden, MA, 2000), 234; Shy, People Numerous and Armed, 236. For degrees of loyalism, see Robert M. Calhoon et al., “Author’s Note,” in Tory Insurgents: The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays, ed. idem (Columbia, SC, 2008), 11. Many British-Americans tried to sit on the fence as long as possible: Leonard W. Labaree, Conservatism in Early American History (New York, 1948), 158; Henry J. Young, “Treatment of the Loyalists in Pennsylvania” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1955), 76; Sung Bok Kim, “The Limits of Politicization in the American Revolution: The Experience of Westchester County, New York,” JAH 80:3 (1993). On the disaffected, see Michael A. McDonnell, “Resistance to the American Revolution,” in Companion to the American Revolution, ed. Greene and Pole. “I have no relish”: J. Seagrove to Jn. Blackburn Esq., New York, July 2, 1775, Dartmouth MSS, II/1348 [copy].

27. On the violence, and the rhetorical and emotional power of descriptions of violence, see, e.g., Cleves, Reign of Terror, 12–15. Older histories of the Revolution—such as Philip Davidson, Propaganda and the American Revolution 1763–1783 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1941), Allen Bowman, The Morale of the American Revolutionary Army (Washington, D.C., 1943), and Carl Berger, Broadsides & Bayonets: The Propaganda War of the American Revolution, rev. ed. (San Rafael, CA, 1976)—speak of “propaganda,” the systematic, misleading dissemination of information. I prefer to consider instead the polemical war, whereby “polemical” means “relating to dispute or controversy; contentious, disputatious, combative,” or, borrowing the terminology of Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York, 1998), the war of words. See “polemical, adj.,” OED, at http://www.oed.com.

28. Cf. Brown, Strain of Violence, 42; Peter Thompson, “Social Death and Slavery: The Logic of Political Association and the Logic of Chattel Slavery in Revolutionary America,” in Between Sovereignty and Anarchy: The Politics of Violence in the American Revolutionary Era, ed. Patrick Griffin et al. (Charlottesville, VA, 2015). Adams: JA to Abigail Adams, Feb. 17, 1777, at http://www.masshist.org/​digitaladams/​archive/​doc?id=L17770217ja. “common ethnicity”: Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (New York, 2006), 4. As the idea for this book was first taking shape, Presidents Clinton and Obama were reminding Americans of the importance of conducting foreign policy by the power of example. See William J. Clinton, Speech at Democratic National Convention, Aug. 27, 2008, at http://www.nytimes.com/​2008/​08/​27/​us/​politics/​27text-clinton.html?pagewanted=all. Barack H. Obama, Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 2009, at https://www.whitehouse.gov/​blog/​2009/​01/​21/​president-barack-obamas-inaugural-address.

29. On exceptionalist ideology, see William Huntting Howell, ‘ “Starving Memory’: Antinarrating the American Revolution,” in Remembering the Revolution, ed. McDonnell et al., 94; Godfrey Hodgson, The Myth of American Exceptionalism (New Haven, 2009); Donald E. Pease, The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis, 2009).

Chapter One

1. My rendering of Malcom’s story is based on Benjamin H. Irvin, “Tar, Feathers, and the Enemies of American Liberties, 1768–1776,” NEQ 76:2 (2003), and Frank W. C. Hersey, “Tar and Feathers: The Adventures of Captain John Malcolm,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts Publications 34 (1941) with the quotations in this section, unless otherwise referenced, at 446, 444, 447, 452, 445. See ibid., 435, for Malcom and the Regulator uprising, for which see also Steven Wilf, “Placing Blame: Criminal Law and Constitutional Narratives in Revolutionary Boston,” Crime, History & Societies 4:1 (2000). See also AO12/105/41; 13/75/41–5; Nathaniel Philbrick, Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution (New York, 2013), 14–22; James Barton Hunt, “The Crowd and the American Revolution: A Study of Urban Political Violence in Boston and Philadelphia, 1763–1776” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 1973), 381–3. Merchant’s diary: Anne Rowe Cunningham, ed., Letters and Diary of John Rowe (New York, 1969), Jan. 25, 1774. For Hewes, and a reading in terms of class differences, see Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (Boston, 1999), ch. 7. For newspapers, all in 1774, see Boston Gazette, Jan. 31, Feb. 4 and 20; Massachusetts Gazette, Jan. 27, Feb. 3; Boston Evening Post, Jan. 31, Feb. 14, Apr. 4; Massachusetts Spy, Jan. 27, Feb. 17; New-York Journal, February 17. Hulton is quoted from Ann Hulton, Letters of a Loyalist Lady, Being the Letters of Anne Hulton (Cambridge, MA, 1927), 71. For the recipe, see Douglass Adair and John A. Schutz, eds., Peter Oliver’s Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion. A Tory View (Stanford, 1961), 94. For tarring and feathering as a “ritual articulation of waterfront justice” against British officials and customs informers, see Benjamin L. Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (Oxford, 2007), 53–5 (quotation 54).

2. For this and the next paragraph, see Yirush, “Imperial Crisis,” 94–6; Carp, Defiance of the Patriots, 1–3, 191–4 (North is quoted at 191: “ringleader”).

3. Carp, Defiance of the Patriots, 199; Michael A. McDonnell, “The Struggle Within: Colonial Politics on the Eve of Independence,” Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, ed. Gray and Kamensky, 106, but see also 108 on how “radical action masked deep divisions” in many places. For the First Continental Congress and the profile of the delegates, see Jack N. Rakove, Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (Boston, 2010), 31, 53–63; Richard R. Beeman, Our Lives, Our Fortunes, and Our Sacred Honor: The Forging of American Independence, 1774–1776 (New York, 2013), 57–61, 173. My reading of the Continental Association and the committee system relies on published committee records cited in this chapter and on T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford, 2004), 325–9, and American Insurgents, chs. 6, 7. See also Benjamin H. Irvin, Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty: The Continental Congress and the People Out of Doors (Oxford, 2011), 28–51; Jack N. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (New York, 1979), 50; Catherine S. Crary, The Price of Loyalty: Tory Writings from the Revolutionary Era (New York, 1973), 28; Robert Stansbury Lambert, South Carolina Loyalists in the American Revolution (Columbia, SC, 1987), 23; Jerrilyn Greene Marston, King and Congress: The Transfer of Political Legitimacy, 1774–1776 (Princeton, 1987), 103, 111; Beeman, Our Lives, 120–21. Quotations from the Association in this section are from JCC, i: 79.

4. Virginia had 1,100 committeemen across 33 counties and 3 towns by the end of 1774; 900 committeemen served in the much less populous Maryland, where 11 of 16 counties featured committees by 1775. Sizes varied from an average of some 20 men per committee in Virginia to 50 or 60 in New York City and 100 in Maryland. See Green and Pole, eds., Companion to the American Revolution, 219; Kevin Phillips, 1775: A Good Year for Revolution (New York, 2012), 261–2; Hermann Wellenreuther, Von Chaos und Krieg zu Ordnung und Frieden: Der Amerikanischen Revolution erster Teil, 1775–1783 (Berlin, 2006), 27, 43, and 32–3 for quotations from local and provincial resolutions; Breen, American Insurgents, 200–201, 170, 185. James Moody, Lieut. James Moody’s narrative of his exertions and sufferings, 2nd ed. (London, 1783), 5.

5. For the demographics of Loyalism I have drawn on Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 8. See also Crary, Price of Loyalty, 3–4; Kevin Phillips, The Cousins’ War: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America (New York, 1999), 168–232; William H. Nelson, The American Tory (Oxford, 1961), 61, 86, and passim; N. E. H. Hall, Peter C. Hoffer, and Stephen L. Allen, “Choosing Sides: A Quantitative Study of the Personality Determinants of Loyalist and Revolutionary Political Affiliation in New York,” JAH 65:2 (1978); Kenneth Schuyler Lynn, A Divided People (Westport, CT, 1977). Deerfield: Bruce G. Merritt, “Loyalism and Social Conflict in Revolutionary Deerfield, Massachusetts,” JAH 57:2 (1970), 282; Larry R. Gerlach, ed., New Jersey in the American Revolution, 1763–1783: A Documentary History (Trenton, NJ, 1975), 242. For the social diversity of New York Loyalism, see Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 33; Crary, Price of Loyalty, 138–40; Ruma Chopra, Unnatural Rebellion: Loyalists in New York City during the Revolution (Charlottesville, VA, 2011), 65–7.

6. Materialistic reading: Pennsylvania Evening Post, June 1, 1776. See Nancy L. Rhoden, “Patriots, Villains, and the Quest for Liberty: How American Film Has Depicted the American Revolution,” Canadian Review of American Studies 37:2 (2007), for the persistence of this interpretation. On loyalist ideology, see Robert M. Calhoon, The Loyalist Perception and Other Essays (Columbia, SC, 1989); Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, MA, 1974); John E. Ferling, The Loyalist Mind: Joseph Galloway and the American Revoution (University Park, PA, 1977); Janice Potter-MacKinnon, The Liberty We Seek: Loyalist Ideology in Colonial New York and Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA, 1983); Chopra, Unnatural Rebellion; Anne Y. Zimmer, Jonathan Boucher; Loyalist in Exile (Detroit, 1978); Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles (quotation 24). See also Edward Larkin, “Loyalism,” in Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, ed. Gray and Kamensky, 294–5. Loyalist historiography lacks a modern synthesis. For orientation in the literature, see the classic Bailyn, Ordeal (and the critique in Bannister and Riordan, “Loyalism and the British Atlantic”); Calhoon, Loyalist Perception, with bibliographical essay at 216–27, to be read alongside Calhoon et al., Tory Insurgents, with bibliographical essay at 375–85; Joseph S. Tiedemann, Eugene R. Fingerhut, and Robert W. Venables, eds., The Other Loyalists: Ordinary People, Royalism, and the Revolution in the Middle Colonies, 1763–1787 (Albany, NY, 2009); Wallace Brown, The King’s Friends: The Composition and Motives of the American Loyalist Claimants (Providence, RI, 1965). Philip Gould, Writing the Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in British America (Oxford, 2013), stresses the ambivalence of Loyalist identities, and Loyalists’ sense of loss and displacement. For the Loyalist experience in North American, Atlantic, and global contexts, see Judith L. Van Buskirk, Generous Enemies: Patriots and Loyalists in Revolutionary New York (Philadelphia, 2002); Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 2000); Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles; Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York, 2006); idem, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies (New York, 2010); Bannister and Riordan, eds., Loyal Atlantic.

7. Joseph S. Tiedemann and Eugene R. Fingerhut, “Introduction,” in Other Loyalists, ed. Tiedemann, Fingerhut, and Venables, 10, and in the same collection, David J. Fowler, “ ‘Loyalty Is Now Bleeding in New Jersey’: Motivations and Mentalities of the Disaffected,” 65. Studies of Revolutionary allegiance in many areas suggest that preexisting political, social, and economic divisions helped shape choices. For studies of Loyalism in local context, see, e.g., Chopra, Unnatural Rebellion; Adele Hast, Loyalism in Revolutionary Virginia: The Norfolk Area and the Eastern Shore (Ann Arbor, MI, 1982); Philip Papas, That Ever Loyal Island: Staten Island and the American Revolution (New York, 2007); Christopher J. M. Sparshott, “The Popular Politics of Loyalism during the American Revolution, 1774–1790” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 2007); Philip Ranlet, The New York Loyalists (Knoxville, TN, 1986). For analyses in terms of individual and collective psychology, see Lynn, Divided People; George Athan Billias, “The First Un-Americans: The Loyalists in American Historiography,” in Perspectives in Early American History, ed. George Athan Billias and Alden T. Vaughan (New York, 1973), 303–4; Hull, Hoffer, and Allen, “Choosing Sides”; Ronald Hoffman, A Spirit of Dissention: Economics, Politics, and the Revolution in Maryland (Baltimore, 1973). For black loyalists, see James W. St. G. Walker, Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783–1870 (London, 1976); Mary Beth Norton, “The Fate of Some Black Loyalists of the American Revolution,” Journal of Negro History 58:4 (1973); Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada; a History (New Haven, CT, 1971); Cassandra Pybus, Epic Journeys of Freedom: Runaway Slaves of the American Revolution and Their Global Quest for Liberty (Boston, 2006); Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution (New York, 2006).

8. For an analysis of mixed, unstable, and malleable loyalties in one rural New York community, see Jonathan Clark, “The Problem of Allegiance in Revolutionary Poughkeepsie,” in Saints and Revolutionaries: Essays on Early American History, ed. David D. Hall, John M. Murrin, and Thad W. Tate (New York, 1984). For the Franklins, see Sheila L. Skemp, William Franklin: A Son of a Patriot, Servant of a King (New York, 1990); eadem, Benjamin and William Franklin: Father and Son, Patriot and Loyalist (Boston, 1994); Sarah C. Chambers and Lisa Norling, “Choosing to Be a Subject: Loyalist Women in the Revolutionary Atlantic World,” Journal of Women’s History 20:1 (2008): 44–5. Whitecuffs: AO12/19/148–51; 13/56/628; Pybus, Epic Journeys, 27–8, 79; Graham Russell Hodges, Root & Branch: African Americans in New York and New Jersey, 1613–1863 (Chapel Hill and London, 1999), 148.

9. Rick Ashton, “The Loyalist Experience: New York, 1763–1789” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1973), 121–37, quoting Morris to AH, May 1777, at 127. Adams: JA to Cushing, Dec. 15, 1780, in RDC, iv: 195. For Morris, see James J. Kirschke, Gouverneur Morris: Author, Statesman, and Man of the World (New York, 2005), 30–31; William Howard Adams, Gouverneur Morris: An Independent Life (New Haven, CT, 2003), 42–6, 67–8; Richard Brookhiser, Gentleman Revolutionary: Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution (New York, 2003), 23.

10. For the limited survival of records, see Breen, American Insurgents, 186; see also 215–16 for the powerful impact of naming and shaming. Committee proceedings: Wellenreuther, Von Chaos und Krieg, 35 n. 85. “a species of infamy”: quoted in Schlesinger, Prelude, 210, from an article appearing in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts in Nov. and Dec. 1774.

11. Leora H. McEachern and Isabel M. Williams, eds., Wilmington–New Hanover Safety Committee Minutes, 1774–1776 (Wilmington, DE, 1974), 14–15, 19, 23–4; Breen, American Insurgents, 190–93. For other localities, see also Wellenreuther, Von Chaos und Krieg, 29; Am. Arch., 4th ser., II: 690, 897, 1551–2. For a probing reexamination of Associational logic, see now Thompson, “Social Death and Slavery,” who sees “grounds for questioning whether the disciplinary logic of the Association was understood to be premised on the reintegration of white dissidents sidelined and subordinated within their communities” (156).

12. Hast, Loyalism, 21; Phillips, 1775, 260, 270; Larry Bowman, “The Virginia County Committees of Safety, 1774–1776,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 79:3 (1971), 330–32; Am. Arch., 4th ser., I: 1047. Peggy Stewart: Robert M. Calhoon, Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760–1781 (New York, 1973), 145; New Hampshire Gazette, Jan. 20, 1775. For similar cases of tarring and feathering, see Proceedings of the Committees of Safety of Caroline and Southampton Counties (Richmond, VA, 1929), 129.

13. Tea: Claude Halstead Van Tyne, The Loyalists in the American Revolution (New York, 1970), 16–17 (“pestilential herb,” also “white coffee”). See also William Duane, ed., Passages from the Diary of Christopher Marshall, vol. I, 1774–1777 (Philadelphia, 1839), entry for Mar. 1, 1775 (“baneful and detested weed”); Am. Arch., 4th ser., I: 839 (“baneful vehicle”). For the political symbolism of tea, see Breen, Marketplace, 305, 327. For pastimes compromising republican values, see Ann Fairfax Withington, Toward a More Perfect Union: Virtue and the Formation of American Republics (New York, 1991), xv, 13–16, 245; Breen, American Insurgents, 202–3; Irvin, Clothed in Robes, 23–4, 30, 34, 48–50, 118–19, 121–3; Virginia Gazette, July 12, 1775; Bowman, “Virginia County Committees of Safety,” 332; Proceedings of the Committees of Safety of Caroline and Southampton Counties, 151, 156; McEachern and Williams, eds., Wilmington–New Hanover Safety Committee Minutes, 3–4, 13–14, 20; “Minutes of Shrewsbury Township Committee, Monmouth County,” in New Jersey in the American Revolution, ed. Gerlach, 149–50; Am. Arch., 4th ser., I: 1178. The poem is quoted in Gould, Writing the Rebellion, 71. For the language of oppression, terror, and inquisition, see Henry Hulton to [Robert Nicholson], Boston, Feb. 21, 1775, quoted in Crary, Price of Loyalty, 29–31, at 30; Potter-MacKinnon, Liberty We Seek, 29; Samuel Seabury, “The Congress canvassed, or, an examination into the conduct of delegates at their grand convention,” in Letters of a Westchester Farmer, 1774–1775, ed. Clarence H. Vance (White Plains, NY, 1930), 84–5; Suffolk, “Address to the Americans, Feb. 4, 1775,” Am. Arch., 4th ser., IV: 1211–13; see also Am. Arch., 4th ser., I: 1094–6, 1230; II: 238, 252. Rivington’s Gazetteer, Mar. 30, 1775; Gage to Barrington, June 26, 1774, in John W. Shy, “Confronting Rebellion: Private Correspondence of Lord Barrington with General Gage, 1765–1775,” in Sources of American Independence: Selected Manuscripts from the Collections of the William L. Clements Library, ed. Howard Henry Peckham (Chicago, 1978), i: 115.

14. “Not thinking”: DLAR 24/36/157 n.d. Tice: Intercepted letters of the Tice family, C. to Gilbert Tice, Johnstown, Oct. 28, 1775, Schuyler Papers, Box 50, NYPL. For word crimes, see Minutes of the Committee of Safety of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, 1774–1776 (Harrisburg, 1890), 352–3, 361, 364–5, 369; DLAR 24, reel 36/168–71; Agnes Hunt, The Provincial Committees of Safety of the American Revolution (New York, 1968), 106–7; G. A. Gilbert, “The Connecticut Loyalists,” AHR 4:2 (1899), 288–9 n. 1; Ferling, Independence, 256. Loyalist pamphletists such as Thomas Bradbury Chandler denounced the rebels’ “tyranny, not only over the actions, but over the words, thoughts, and wills” of Americans. See Chandler, What think ye of the Congress now? or, An enquiry how far the Americans are bound to abide by and execute the decisions of the late Congress? (New York, 1775), 81. See also Bruce E. Steiner, Samuel Seabury, 1729–1796: A Study in the High Church Tradition (Athens, OH, 1972); Everett Emerson, ed., American Literature, 1764–1789: The Revolutionary Years (Madison, 1977), 63; Vance, ed., Letters of a Westchester Farmer, 8, 19, 60–61, 85–7; Alexander Clarence Flick, Loyalism in New York during the American Revolution (New York, 1970), 27–8. For an example of private correspondence that ended up in the public domain and cost the author his place in the local community, along with his livelihood, see Richard Barksdale Harwell, ed., Proceedings of the County Committees, 1774–1776, the Committees of Safety of Westmoreland and Fincastle (Richmond, VA, 1956), 32–6; Bowman, “Virginia County Committees of Safety,” 328–9; Breen, American Insurgents, 229–31; Thompson, “Social Death and Slavery,” 155–6.

15. For pre-Revolutionary violence and mobs, see Wayne E. Lee, Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina: The Culture of Violence in Riot and War (Gainesville, FL, 2001), esp. part I; David Henry Villers, “Loyalism in Connecticut, 1763–1783” (PhD diss., University of Connecticut, 1976), 160–61; Ferling, Independence, 16, 20, 26–7; Pauline Maier, “Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth-Century America,” WMQ 27:1 (1970); Arthur Meier Schlesinger, “Political Mobs and the American Revolution, 1765–1776,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 99:4 (1955): 246. My reading of colonial mobs also draws on Gordon S. Wood, “A Note on Mobs in the American Revolution,” WMQ 23:4 (1966); Marion Breunig, Die Amerikanische Revolution als Bürgerkrieg (Münster, 1998), 51–61; Gilje, Road to Mobocracy. Connecticut Journal, Aug. 30, 1775; Norwich Packet, Apr. 27, 1775. “people’s sentinels”: Connecticut Journal, Aug. 30, 1775.

16. “repugnant”: Robert M. Calhoon, “The Reintegration of the Loyalists and the Disaffected,” in The American Revolution: Its Character and Limits, ed. Jack P. Greene (New York, 1987), 350, with reference to a circular, Feb. 9, 1775. Cambridge: Ranlet, New York Loyalists, 157–8 (quotation 157).

17. In early modern England, a V as a brand mark stood for vagabond, an S for someone involved in sedition, and so forth. Burning the royal cypher on an outcast’s head reversed the symbolism of the old political order. Villers, “Loyalism in Connecticut,” 168; Hunt, Provincial Committees; Crary, Price of Loyalty, 57, with further references. “all these cattle”: Colonel Woodford to VA Convention, Am. Arch., 4th ser., IV: 244–5 (quotation 244), 346. Van Tyne, Loyalists, 61, 79; Chopra, Unnatural Rebellion, 32.

18. Wellenreuther, Von Chaos und Krieg, 35 n. 84; Connecticut Courant, Sept. 12, 1774. “thirst for”: Daniel Oliver to Colonel Ruggles, Hardwick, Aug. 19, 1774, Bancroft 92/17. For the violent experiences of mandamus councillors and their evasive measures, see also Lorenzo Sabine, Biographical sketches of loyalists of the American revolution, with an historical essay (Boston, 1864), ii: 708; Calhoon, Loyalists, 277–8; Am. Arch., 4th ser., I: 762, 1260–63; Anon. to [Thomas and John Fleet], Dec. 19, 1774, Schoff Collection, WLCL; Extract of Gage to Dartmouth, Boston, Sept. 2, 1774, Shelburne Papers 66/369–72, WLCL. John Trumbull, McFingal: a modern epic poem (1776), Canto III, 493–4. Dunbar: Justin Winsor, History of the town of Duxbury, Massachusetts, with genealogical registers (Boston, 1849), 140; Gazetteer [London], June 8, 1775; Thomas B. Allen, Tories: Fighting for the King in America’s First Civil War (New York, 2010), 25–6.

19. For Bebee [or Beiby], see Adair and Schutz, eds., Peter Oliver’s Origin, 157. See also Am. Arch., 4th ser., I: 787; Neil Longley York, Henry Hulton and the American Revolution: An Outsider’s Inside View (Boston, 2010), 179. For a Virginia case, see Irvin, “Tar, Feathers,” 234. For attacking houses as “an expressive form of planned symbolic violence,” see Robert Blair St. George, Conversing by Signs: Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998), ch. 3 (quotation 293). Withington, Toward a More Perfect Union, 229–34 (quotation 229).

20. My dissenting reading of the role of coercion and violence notwithstanding, it will be apparent that I have relied heavily on Breen’s important American Insurgents (quotation here 186); see also 164, 185–6, 207, 212–14. At 208, Breen refers to “unpleasant exceptions” that should not “obscure the major accomplishments of these revolutionary bodies.” See also Withington, Toward a More Perfect Union, 222–5, 244, for the “limited extent of the civilian violence” (244). To Don Higginbotham, The War of American Independence: Military Attitudes, Politics, and Practice, 1763–1789 (New York, 1971), 278, the “remarkable fact about the treatment of the loyalists was its relative mildness, not its severity.” Bowman, “Virginia County Committees of Safety, 1774–1776,” 337, stresses the committees’ “effective prevention of violence.” Beeman, Our Lives, which almost completely ignores the Loyalists, opines: “There would be occasions on which local committees would show excessive zeal in carrying out their enforcement obligations” (174); see also 190. For my reading, see now also the excellent Thompson, “Social Death and Slavery,” with a nuanced critique of Breen et al. at 149–50; Rhys Isaac, “Dramatizing the Ideology of Revolution: Popular Mobilization in Virginia, 1774 to 1776,” WMQ 33:3 (1976): 372.

21. “orangotangs”: Pennsylvania Evening Post, Sept. 7, 1776. “reptiles”: TNA, CO5/122/118–19.

22. A committee in New Milford, CT, described two Loyalists as “despicable animals”; see Villers, “Loyalism in Connecticut,” 207. “thing whose head”: New-York Journal, Feb. 9, 1775. “vultures”: Newport Mercury, May 27, 1776. Washington referred to Loyalists as “those execrable Parricides, whose Counsels and Aid have deluged this Country with Blood.” He went further: “One or two have done, what a great number ought to have done long ago—committed Suicide.” GW to John Augustine Washington, Mar. 31, 1776. Washington wanted “to root out or secure such abominable pests of Society,” as quoted in Mark V. Kwasny, Washington’s Partisan War, 1775–1783 (Kent, OH, 1996), 47. Governor William Livingston defined a Tory as an “incorrigible Animal” that needed to be killed. Quoted in Kwasny, Washington’s Partisan War, 183. Less highly placed Patriots used similar language: Am. Arch., 4th ser., III: 823–4; Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan, iv: 874; Committee, Monmouth Co., NJ, to Boston Committee of Correspondence, [c. May] 1774, Boston Committee of Correspondence, Box 3, NYPL. Definition of Patriots quoted in Robert Munro Brown, “Revolutionary New Hampshire and the Loyalist Experience: ‘surely We Have Deserved a Better Fate’ ” (PhD diss., University of New Hampshire, 1983), 107.

23. Samuel Curwen, Journal and letters of the late Samuel Curwen, judge of Admiralty (New York, 1842), 25–6, 29–30, 58–9. For the global experiences of Loyalist exiles, see Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles.

24. New York: Wetherhead’s 1783 memorial is quoted in Crary, Price of Loyalty, 44–7, at 45–6. See also Edward F. De Lancey, ed., History of New York during the Revolutionary War…by Thomas Jones (Cranbury, NJ, 2006), i: 40; Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan, iv: 882. Lieutenant Governor Cadwallader Colden to Dartmouth, May 3, 1775, in NYCD, viii: 571; Richard Yates to John Sargent, New York, May 1, 1775 [extract], Dartmouth MSS, II/1240. For Patriot concerns over the Loyalists’ “hellish schemes” and “horrid Plot,” see Villers, “Loyalism in Connecticut,” 141, 147, 373; Ellen D. Larned, Historic gleanings in Windham County, Connecticut (Providence, RI, 1899), 116–18. Virginia: Am. Arch., 4th ser., III: 823.

25. David A. Copeland, Debating the Issues in Colonial Newspapers: Primary Documents on Events of the Period (Westport, CT, 2000), 227, 233–4. “knocking out”: Rivington’s New-York Gazetteer, Dec. 22, 1774. Am. Arch., 4th ser., II: 132, 12. “Englishman”: Sabine, Biographical sketches, ii: 217. Boycott orders: Am. Arch., 4th ser., I: 1051, 1240; II: 1106; Schlesinger, Prelude, 225; see more generally, ibid., 222–6; “a most wretched” and further verbal abuse quoted at 225. Threats and beatings: Eric Burns, Infamous Scribblers: The Founding Fathers and the Rowdy Beginnings of American Journalism (New York, 2006), 180. For this account, see also Breen, American Insurgents, 233–4.

26. Schlesinger, Prelude, 219–20; Potter-MacKinnon, Liberty We Seek, 30; Gerlach, ed., New Jersey in the American Revolution, 98; Irvin, Clothed in Robes, 69; Ferling, Independence, 256.

27. Rivington’s petition to Congress, May 20, 1775, in Am. Arch., 4th ser., II: 836–7. Rivington would later return with new presses as the King’s Printer to publish Rivington’s New York Loyal Gazette (subsequently relabeled The Royal Gazette) in British-occupied New York. For the destruction of William Goddard’s press in 1777, see W. Goddard, Memorial to the Committee of Grievances, Maryland House of Delegates, Mar. 28, 1777, Misc. Collections, U.S. States and Territories, Box 7, Maryland, NYPL. See Harry M. Ward, The War for Independence and the Transformation of American Society (London, 1999), 59–65, for restrictions of the freedom of press, and violence against the press.

28. For clerical networks, see, e.g., Rev. Henry Caner, Letterbook, to Bishop of London, Aug. 16, 1775, quoted in Crary, Price of Loyalty, 93. For association and nonsigners, see Am. Arch., 4th ser., III: 141–2. Dibblee: Crary, Price of Loyalty, 107–8. Mansfield: Mansfield to Rev. Samuel Peters, Jan. 12, 1776, quoted in Crary, Price of Loyalty, 103; Gilbert, “Connecticut Loyalists,” 277. Beach: Gilbert, “Connecticut Loyalists,” 279 (quotation); Crary, Price of Loyalty, 106–7. For cases beyond Connecticut, see “Introduction,” in Loyalists and Community in North America, ed. Robert M. Calhoon, Timothy M. Barnes, and George A. Rawlyk (Westport, CT, 1994), 3; Villers, “Loyalism in Connecticut,” 165–6; William Stoodley Bartlet, ed., The Frontier Missionary: A Memoir of the Life of the Rev. Jacob Bailey, A.M. (Boston, 1853), 105; Julia Martha Ross, “Jacob Bailey, Loyalist, Anglican Clergyman in New England and Nova Scotia” (PhD diss., University of New Brunswick, 1975); Jacob Bailey to “Dear Sir,” Mar. 1, 1775, Jacob Bailey Papers, LOC; Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 6–7; AO12/6/47–53, 42/1–6; 13/71A/248–55.

29. “mop filled”: Samuel Peters, General History of Connecticut (London, 1781), quoted in Crary, Price of Loyalty, 91. Roberts: Irvin, “Tar, Feathers,” 237. Several other priests subsequently died as a result of abuse or the harsh conditions of their imprisonment: Luke Babcock of Philipse Manor; Ebenezer Kneeland of Stratford, CT (both 1777); Thomas Barton, York County, PA (1780). See also Ranlet, New York Loyalists, 159; Crary, Price of Loyalty, 88, 187; Gazetteer and Daily Advertiser, Dec. 30, 1776; E. LeRoy Pond, The Tories of Chippeney Hill, Connecticut (New York, 1909), 19.

30. Oaths: John McKesson, Secretary to New York Provincial Congress, corr. 1775–9, DLAR, Force Papers 7E, [reel 17] item 74; Minutes of the Committee of Safety of Bucks County, 361; Calhoon, “Reintegration,” 58–9; Breen, American Insurgents, 237–9; Van Tyne, Loyalists, 219; Edward Alfred Jones, The Loyalists of New Jersey: Their Memorials, Petitions, Claims, etc., from English Records (Newark, NJ, 1927), 54–5; Christopher Moore, The Loyalists: Revolution, Exile, Settlement (Toronto, 1994), 77; AO12/10/131. Capt. Bowater to Earl of Denbigh, June 5 and 11, 1777, in Marion Balderston and David Syrett, eds., The Lost War: Letters from British Officers during the American Revolution (New York, 1975), 131. Militias: McEachern and Williams, eds., Wilmington–New Hanover Safety Committee Minutes, 40, 31–2; Charles Neimeyer, “ ‘Town Born, Turn Out’: Town Militias, Tories, and the Struggle for Control of the Massachusetts Backcountry,” in War and Society in the American Revolution: Mobilization and Home Fronts, ed. John Resch and Walter Sargent (DeKalb, IL, 2007); Breen, American Insurgents, 239; Breunig, Amerikanische Revolution, 71–6.

31. Kim, “Limits of Politicization,” 873–5. “the Neighbourhood”: quoted in Hoerder, Crowd Action, 303.

32. For Brown, see Jim Piecuch, Three Peoples, One King: Loyalists, Indians, and Slaves in the Revolutionary South, 1775–1782 (Columbia, SC, 2008), 46, 57–9; Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 23–5; Edward J. Cashin, The King’s Ranger: Thomas Brown and the American Revolution on the Southern Frontier (New York, 1999), 27–9. “like a calf”: Robert S. Davis Jr., “A Georgia Loyalist’s Perspective on the American Revolution: The Letters of Dr. Thomas Taylor,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 81:1 (1997), 126. For Loyalist associations in Connecticut in 1775, see, e.g., AO12/1/172–3, 214–15; Am. Arch., 4th ser., I: 1202, 1210, 1258–60. Villers, “Loyalism in Connecticut,” 207; David Henry Villers, “ ‘King Mob’ and the Rule of Law: Revolutionary Justice and the Suppression of Loyalism in Connecticut, 1774–1783,” in Loyalists and Community, ed. Calhoon, Barnes, and Rawlyk, 19; Yale University MS, MS 674, American Revolutionary Collection. For similar pledges in other colonies, see Loyalist Association, Maryland, Dec. 8, 1775, BHQP 88; Jonathan Grout, Proceedings of the town of Petersham, in town-meeting, January 2, 1775 (Evans 49293); Carol Berkin, Jonathan Sewall; Odyssey of an American Loyalist (New York, 1974), 107; Am. Arch., 4th ser., I: 1164; “A Jersey Farmer Proposes a Loyalist Association, January 26, 1775,” in New Jersey in the American Revolution, ed. Gerlach, 114–15.

33. For the regional, ethnic, and socioeconomic demographics of Loyalism, see Ward, War for Independence, 36–7; William H. Nelson, “The Loyalist View of the American Revolution” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1958), 131; Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution 1763–1789, rev. and expanded ed. (Oxford, 2007), 564–5.

34. Schaw is quoted in Crary, Price of Loyalty, 61; see also Breen, American Insurgents, 187–8, 193–7.

35. For women’s roles and political status, see Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1980); eadem, “ ‘May all our Citizens Be Soldiers and all our Soldiers Citizens’: The Ambiguities of Female Citizenship in the New Nation,” in Women, Militarism, and War, ed. Jean Bethke Elshtain and Sheila Tobias (Savage, MD, 1990); Berkin, Revolutionary Mothers; Joan R. Gundersen, To Be Useful to the World: Women in Revolutionary America, 1740–1790 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006); Douglas Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the American Union, 1774–1804 (Charlottesville, VA, 2009), 58; Jones, Loyalists of New Jersey, 238–9; Crary, Price of Loyalty, 78–80. For examples of women expelled from their homes, see AO12/38/403–5, 40/222, referenced in Gregory T. Knouff, “Masculinity and the Memory of the American Revolution,” in Gender, War and Politics: Transatlantic Perspectives, 1775–1830, ed. Karen Hagemann, Gisela Mettele, and Jane Rendall (Basingstoke, 2010), 335. See also AO12/24/118, 76/145, 89/16, 90/3, 101/114, 109/268; 13/9/183–end, 70B/363–6, 83/427–30, 94/338–45.

36. “to Make us”: MS Journal of an unidentified North Carolina Highlander Loyalist officer who participated in battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge, prisoner of war [Feb. 1776], Clinton Papers 14/32. Crary, Price of Loyalty, 208; Janice Potter-Mackinnon, While the Women Only Wept: Loyalist Refugee Women (Montreal, 1993), 38; Brown, “Revolutionary New Hampshire,” 107–8; William Thomas Johnson, “Alan Cameron, a Scotch Loyalist in the American Revolution,” Pennsylvania History 8:1 (1941). For the section title, see Thomas Anburey, Travels through the Interior Parts of America (New York, 1969), repr. of 1789 ed., ii: 303.

37. Quoted in Crary, Price of Loyalty, 202–3. For John Champneys’s imprisonment in Charleston and subsequent banishment, see Piecuch, Three Peoples, 57.

38. Willard: Connecticut Journal, Sept. 9, 1774; York, Henry Hulton, 178. A critical bystander was tarred and feathered on that occasion. For other instances of the threat of imprisonment in the mines, see Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, June 8, 1775; Am. Arch., 4th ser., I: 1262. British press (“the loyalists are”): English Chronicle, July 27–30, 1782; London Chronicle, July 27–30, 1782. English visitor: Edward Augustus Kendall, Travels through the northern parts of the United States, in the years 1807 and 1808 (New York, 1809), i: 210.

39. New-York Mirror, i: 33 (Mar. 13, 1824): 257–8. Just before the war, the Connecticut assembly had purchased the mine for use as a makeshift colonial prison; it was soon dubbed the Newgate of Connecticut, evoking the infamous prison in the British capital. New-York Journal, Jan. 1, 1773; Providence Gazette, Jan. 15, 1774.

40. Physical description largely from “Account of the escape of Ebenezer Hathaway and Thomas Smith,” Rivington Royal Gazette, June 9, 1781; Crary, Price of Loyalty, 218. See also Denis R. Caron, A Century in Captivity: The Life and Travels of Prince Mortimer, a Connecticut Slave (Durham, NH, 2006), 72–3. For British references, see London Chronicle, July 17–19, 1781; Morning Chronicle, July 20, 1781.

41. Boston Post-Boy, Nov. 21, 1774; Connecticut Journal, Aug. 30, 1775.

42. Criminal sentences: Connecticut Journal, Nov. 3, 1774; Norwich Packet, Mar. 31 to Apr. 7, 1774; Massachusetts Gazette, Apr. 15, 1774; Essex Gazette, Apr. 19, 1774, Boston Post-Boy, Nov. 21, 1774; Am. Arch., 5th ser., I: 43. See also Connecticut Courant, Sept. 6, 1790; Rhode-Island American, Apr. 10, 1822. For Washington, see GW to Committee of Symsbury, Dec. 11, 1775; Am. Arch., 4th ser., IV: 235–6, 376. Sheldon S. Cohen, ed., “The Connecticut Captivity of Major Christopher French,” Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin 55:3–4 (1990): 150.

43. Crary, Price of Loyalty, 216; N. H. Egleston, “The Newgate of Connecticut: The Old Simsbury Copper Mines,” Magazine of American History 15:4 (1886), 325; Kansas City Star, June 17, 1906 (quotation).

44. “vapour”: Kendall, Travels, i: 212. Cf. Connecticut Mirror, Aug. 6, 1831; Egleston, “Newgate of Connecticut,” 322.

45. “imparting”: Caron, Century in Captivity, 73. Peters, General History of Connecticut, 175–6.

46. Caron, Century in Captivity, 73; Peters, General History of Connecticut, 175–6. “utter isolation”: Egleston, “Newgate of Connecticut,” 325.

47. Escape attempts: Connecticut Courant, Apr. 12–19 and Apr. 26–May 3, 1774, Dec. 18, 1775; Connecticut Journal, Feb. 12, 1774; Egleston, “Newgate of Connecticut,” 330; Richard Harvey Phelps, The Newgate of Connecticut (Hartford, CT, 1876), 33–9. Newspapers alerted the public to prison escapes and bounties for recapture: Connecticut Gazette, Jan. 21, 1774; Essex Gazette, Jan. 25–Feb. 1, 1774; Connecticut Courant, May 3–10, 1774, Sept. 4, 1775, Dec. 2 and 9, 1776, Feb. 24, 1777.

48. “Prisoners in this gaol” and “ferocious disposition”: Kendall, Travels, i: 215. Deaths: Kansas City Star, June 17, 1906; Caron, Century in Captivity, 75.

49. Lord Campbell to Dartmouth, Charleston, July 19, 1775 [extracts], BHQP 19; Larkin, “Loyalism,” 291; Keith Mason, “The American Loyalist Problem of Identity in the Revolutionary Atlantic World,” in Loyal Atlantic, ed. Bannister and Riordan, 45–8.

Chapter Two

1. London Evening Post, Dec. 1–3, 1774; Public Advertiser, Dec. 5, 1774. For Malcom’s petition to the king and George III’s response, see Hersey, “Tar and Feathers,” 461–4 (quotations 463).

2. General Evening Post, Mar. 10–12, 1774. See also Morning Chronicle, Mar. 9, 1774; London Evening Post, Mar. 24–26, 1774. Cf. Mary A. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, 2010), on the mediation of distant violence.

3. Transatlantic symbols of liberty connect the American Patriot movement with domestic British radicalism: the figure 45 references issue no. 45 of the British radical John Wilkes’s anti-government The North Briton.

4. Report of the Lords committees, appointed by the House of Lords to enquire into the several proceedings in the colony of Massachusetts’s Bay (London, 1774), 33–4, and passim. North is cited in Bunker, Empire on the Edge, 261; see ibid., 327, 350, for intelligence on Americans arming.

5. By the King, A Proclamation, For suppressing Rebellion and Sedition (Aug. 23, 1775). “Torrent of Violence”: His Majesty’s most gracious speech to both Houses of Parliament, on Friday, October 27, 1775. British officials in America, too, asserted the government’s duty to protect the Loyalists: Gage, Proclamation, Boston, June 1775, Mackenzie Papers, Box 3.

6. Government overestimating Loyalists: Spring, With Zeal, 17–18; Julie M. Flavell, “Government Interception of Letters from America and the Quest for Colonial Opinion in 1775,” WMQ 58:2 (2001): 404. Reports of violence: Gov. Franklin to Lord Dartmouth, Perth Amboy, Dec. 6, 1774, Bancroft 92/26; Alex Innes to Lord Dartmouth, Charleston, May 1, 1775, Bancroft 94/17; Governor Josiah Martin of North Carolina, quoted in Bessie Lewis Whitaker, The Provincial Council and Committees of Safety in North Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC, 1908), 10; Ferling, Independence, 95.

7. “many worthy”: William Strahan to Benjamin Franklin, London, Oct. 4, 1775 [copy], Dartmouth MSS, II/1552. For Mary Murray [MM], see MM to [Edward Hutchinson Robbins], Jan. 8 (quotation); MM to “Betsy,” July 20, 1775; memorial by Dorothy Forbes, Dec. 12, 1775; MM to aunt, Feb. 4 and 25, 1776, James Murray Robins, Box 1, MHS.

8. For Loyalist literature, see Gould, “American Independence and Britain’s Counter-Revolution,” Past & Present 154 (1997): 114–15. “unheard-of-cruelties”: quoted in Alfred Grant, Our American Brethren: A History of Letters in the British Press during the American Revolution, 1775–1781 (Jefferson, NC, 1995), 171. See also London Chronicle, Sept. 11, 1775. “extorting”: Gazetteer, Feb. 11, 1775. Some pieces exaggerated the regularity of killings: Gazetteer, Feb. 21, 1775. For references to various modes of torture, see Middlesex Journal, Dec. 3, 1774; Morning Chronicle, Dec. 7, 1774, Oct. 12, 1775; Public Advertiser, Jan. 8, 1776; Daily Advertiser, Feb. 26, 1776. Live burial: York, Henry Hulton, 178.

9. For the role of pressure and threats, see AO12/13/80–119, 36/59–60; Georgia Gazette, Oct. 4, 1775; Charles A. Risher, “Propaganda, Dissension, and Defeat: Loyalist Sentiment in Georgia, 1763–1783” (PhD diss., Mississippi State University, 1976), 107–8; Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 24; Ruma Chopra, Choosing Sides: Loyalists in Revolutionary America (Lanham, MD, 2013), 3, 13; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain, 1764–1776 (New York, 1958), 213.

10. Gazetteer, Feb. 11, 1775. See also Morning Chronicle, Aug. 15, 1776.

11. Deposition sworn before Gov. W. Tryon by Christopher Benson, June 16, 1776, Mackenzie Papers, Box 1, folder 2; Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan, iv, 923, 1001; [Great Britain, Loyalist Commission], American Loyalists. Transcript of the Manuscript Books and Papers of the Commission of Enquiry into the Losses and Services of the American Loyalists held under Acts of Parliament of 23, 25, 26, 28 and 29 of GEORGE III Preserved Amongst the Audit Office Records in the Public Record Office of England, 1783–1790 (London, 1960), xii: 193; Connecticut Courant, Feb. 20, 1775. Villers, “Loyalism in Connecticut,” 207; AO12/1/288–9, 291, 293; 57/43; 109/110; 13/70B/212; 76/191–200; 83/78–80.

12. The interception scheme was probably initiated by Lord Dartmouth. The letters used here—the less-well-known earlier portion—were selected mostly from the New York packet, which carried letters from New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Quebec. Once the colonies were proclaimed to be in open rebellion against the Crown in August 1775, London had outgoing correspondence opened, too. For the papers, the context of their interception, and the better-known stash held in TNA, see Flavell, “Government Interception.” Precautionary measures: [?] London, to Thomas Quin, New York, Oct. 4, 1775, Dartmouth MSS, II/1556. “P.S.”: J. G. to Thomas Charles Williams c/o Messrs Williams, Teb & Williams, Aug. 6, 1775 [extract], II/1431. See also J. Ingersoll to Jared Ingersoll, Aug. 5, 1775 [copy], II/1423; II/1483, 1490. “the Caution”: Flavell, “Government Interception,” 421, with reference to Anthony Todd in n. 58. John Penn to William Baker, Esq., June 5, 1775 [copy], II/1292; James Tilghman to William Baker, July 30, 1775 [copy], II/1399; Cadwallader Colden Jr. to Revd. Dr. Myles Cooper, Coldingham, July 15, 1775 [extract], 1372. “The poor proscribed Tories”: to Revd. Doctor Myles Cooper or to Isaac Wilkins, Sept. 4, 1775, II/1483. See also John Cruger to Edmund Burke, May 4, 1775 [extract], II/1257. A London correspondent told Peyton Randolph, president of the Continental Congress, that, in his perspective, the Americans showed a “savage ferocity” in “the cruel Persecution of even Neutrals.” Edward Montagu to Randolph, Oct. 2, 1775, II/1543. For self-censorship, see also Samuel Quincy Diary, Feb. 26, 1775, MHS. London Chronicle, Sept. 11, 1775; Chester Chronicle, Feb. 29, 1776.

13. Michael Eliot Howard, “Temperamenta Belli: Can War Be Controlled?,” in Restraints on War: Studies in the Limitation of Armed Conflict, ed. idem (Oxford, 1979), 1 (quotations), 4; see also Geoffrey Best, Humanity in Warfare (New York, 1980); Stephen C. Neff, War and the Law of Nations: A General History (New York, 2005), 15–25. In the early modern period, theorists and practitioners of war shifted their attention to the just conduct of war, or ius in bello. For my understanding of the codes of war, I am indebted to the important work of B. Donagan on the seventeenth century, esp. “Atrocity, War Crime, and Treason in the English Civil War,” AHR 99:4 (1994), and Wayne E. Lee on the eighteenth century, as referenced throughout this book. Lee, Barbarians and Brothers, fruitfully considers the relationship between restraint and excessive violence or frightfulness in terms of capacity, control, calculation, and culture. Cf. David Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston, 2007), 49, on codes of war against “civilized” and “noncivilized” opponents. The term “civilian” was not yet used in the modern sense, but there was a clear understanding of the distinctions between soldiers and non-soldiers created by occupation, location, social status, and gender: Erica Charters, Eve Rosenhaft, and Hannah Smith, “Introduction,” in Civilians and War in Europe, 1618–1815, ed. eaedem (Liverpool, 2012), 11, 17.

14. For the identity of the British-Americans, and the nature of their relations with metropolitan Britons, see Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (London, 2002), 207; Stephen Conway, “From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners: British Perceptions of the Americans, circa 1739–1783,” WMQ 59:1 (2002); Dror Wahrman, “The English Problem of Identity in the American Revolution,” AHR 106:4 (2001), with the quotation “of the same language” at n. 13; Gould, Persistence of Empire; idem, Writing the Rebellion; Griffin, America’s Revolution, 44; Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire, 4–5; Breen, Marketplace. For Atlantic world and imperial integration and evidence of the simultaneous Americanization of the colonies, see Rhoden, “The American Revolution.”

15. “though H.M.’s subjects”: quoted in Wood, Revolutionary Characters, 22. Conway, “From Fellow-Nationals to Foreigners,” 69–71, 82 (quotation); Irvin, Clothed in Robes, 65; Colley, Captives, 207; T. H. Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising,” JAH 84:1 (1997). See Armitage, “Civil War and Revolution,” 21, for the Revolution as an imperial civil war.

16. This paragraph is based on James E. Bradley, “The British Public and the American Revolution: Ideology, Interest and Opinion,” in Britain and the American Revolution, ed. H. T. Dickinson (London, 1998), and Conway, British Isles, 131–46. See also Jerome R. Reich, British Friends of the American Revolution (London, 1998). Samuel Quincy’s London Diary for 1774/75 (MHS) shows him moving in pro-American circles, gaining the impression that “multitudes of fervent friends to America reside in this Island” (204).

17. Based on Ira D. Gruber, “For King and Country: The Limits of Loyalty of British Officers in the War for American Independence,” in Limits of Loyalty, ed. Edgar Denton III (Waterloo, Ont., 1980). See also Richard Fitzpatrick Papers, LOC.

18. Effingham’s resignation letter, with this paragraph’s first two quotations, was printed widely: London Magazine (Sept. 1775), 456; St James’s Chronicle, Sept. 2–5, 1775; Morning Chronicle, Sept. 5, 1775; Public Advertiser, Oct. 19, 1775. For the corporations of London, Dublin, Newcastle, and others expressing their thanks to Effingham see, e.g., Am. Arch., 4th ser., II: 1070–71, 1672. See also Craftsman, Oct. 21, 1775; General Evening Post, Oct. 17–19, 1775; Morning Chronicle, Oct. 20 and Nov. 25, 1775. “imbrue his hands”: Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, Sept. 2, 1775; Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, Sept. 26, 1775; Public Advertiser; Sept. 14, 1775; St. James’s Chronicle, Sept. 28–30, Oct. 17–19, Oct. 31–Nov. 2, 1775; Chester Chronicle, Nov. 13, 1775. Am. Arch., 4th ser., II: 1635; III: 505. Effingham to Barrington, Apr. 12, 1775, extract from Cape Fear Mercury, Aug. 7, 1775.

19. The key article on hard-liners versus conciliators in the British Army remains Stephen Conway, “To Subdue America: British Army Officers and the Conduct of the Revolutionary War,” WMQ 43:3 (1986). See also idem, “ ‘The Great Mischief Complain’d of’: Reflections on the Misconduct of British Soldiers in the Revolutionary War,” WMQ 47:3 (1990); Balderston and Syrett, eds., Lost War, 27, 78. For this chapter, and especially the sections on individual leaders, I am indebted well beyond specific annotations to Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy’s authoritative Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of Empire (New Haven, CT, 2013), which fills a long-standing lacuna regarding British perspectives on the war. See also Troyer Steele Anderson, The Command of the Howe Brothers during the American Revolution (Cranbury, NJ, 2005), 10–13.

20. O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 28–9; Dartmouth to [unknown], Whitehall, July 12, 1775, Add MS 21697/99–101; By The King, A Proclamation, for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition. For the argument regarding moderation, see the work of Eliga H. Gould, “Zones of Law, Zones of Violence: The Legal Geography of the British Atlantic, circa 1772,” WMQ 60:3 (2003); idem, “American Independence.”

21. On the king’s character, see Jeremy Black, George III: America’s Last King (New Haven, CT, 2006), ch. 7; Stella Tillyard, A Royal Affair: George III and His Scandalous Siblings (London, 2006); John Brooke, King George III (London, 1972); Stanley Ayling, George the Third (London, 1972). For the king’s toughening stance, see O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 22 with n. 13; George III to North, Feb. 4, May 6, Sept. 11, 1774, in J. W. Fortescue, ed., The Correspondence of King George III from 1760 to December 1783 (London, 1927–8), iii: 59, 104, 131; Black, George III, 84, 221; Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, “ ‘If Others Will Not Be Active, I Must Drive’: George III and the American Revolution,” Early American Studies 2:1 (2004): 5; Richard L. Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, NC, 1985), 219.

22. The notion of a quarrel or family dispute was considered by early Anglophile historians of the Loyalists, such as Moses Coit Tyler, Glimpses of England: Social, Political, Literary (New York, 1898), 279; see also Winston Churchill, A History of English Speaking Peoples (London, 1956), iii, book 8, ch. 12. William D. Liddle, “ ‘A Patriot King, or None’: Lord Bolingbroke and the American Renunciation of George III,” JAH 65:4 (1979), argues that most Americans delayed renouncing George III until 1775. For the anti-patriarchal critique of the king and competing 18th-century notions of parent-child relations, see Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (Cambridge, 1982), esp. 89–119; Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC, 2009), 62–3; Black, George III, 220–21. For the cult of the monarchy in late colonial America, see Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006). For a more skeptical view of the emotional ties between colonials and the king by the early 1770s, see James Corbett David, Dunmore’s New World: The Extraordinary Life of a Royal Governor in Revolutionary America (Charlottesville, VA, 2013), 54.

23. Tillyard, Royal Affair, 314–17 (quotations 315). George III to North, Feb. 15, 1775, in W. Bodham Donne, ed., The Correspondence of King George the Third with Lord North from 1768 to 1783 (London, 1867), i: 229.

24. For North, see Alan Valentine, Lord North (Norman, OK, 1967); O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, ch. 2; Ferling, Independence, 43–6, 103. Bunker, Empire on the Edge, 88, has the speech count.

25. On North’s conciliatory efforts, see O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 56; “The dye is now cast”: George III to North, Sept. 11, 1774, in Donne, ed., Correspondence, i: 202. See also George III to North, Nov. 18, 1774, in Fortescue, ed., Correspondence, iii: 153; George III to North, Feb. 15, 1775, in Donne, ed., Correspondence, i: 229. For the chronology of intelligence reaching London, new orders for Gage, and the legal verdict of treason, see Bunker, Empire on the Edge, 350–65. For Gage, see John Shy, “Gage, Thomas (1719/20–1787),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, online edition, Jan. 2008, at http://www.oxforddnb.com.pitt.idm.oclc.org/​view/​article/​10275 (accessed Aug., 21, 2016); Bunker, Empire on the Edge, 289–90, and passim.

26. My portrait of the Howes is based on O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 83–96; Ira D. Gruber, The Howe Brothers and the American Revolution (New York, 1972); idem, “Lord Howe and Lord George Germain, British Politics and the Winning of American Independence,” WMQ 22:2 (1965); idem, “George III Chooses a Commander in Chief,” in Arms and Independence: The Military Character of the American Revolution, ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville, VA, 1984); Phillips, Cousins’ War, 298–9; David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing (New York, 2004), 67–78 (quotation 68).

27. For George Augustus Howe, see Hoock, Empires of the Imagination, 44; Michael Kammen, Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials (Chicago, 2010), 71–3. Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 70. Entry for “Howe, Hon. William,” in Lewis B. Namier and John Brooke, The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1754–90 (London, 1964), ii: 649–50.

28. “a child”: O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 132. Cf. Piers Mackesy, The War for America: 1775–1783 (London, 1964), 46; George Athan Billias, “John Burgoyne: Ambitious General,” in George Washington’s Generals and Opponents: Their Exploits and Leadership, ed. idem, vol. 2 (New York, 1994).

29. John Burgoyne, “Speech of a General Officer (Feb. 27, 1775),” in Proceedings and Debates of the British Parliaments Respecting North America 1754–1783, ed. R. C. Simmons and P. D. G. Thomas (Millwood, NY, 1982), v: 475–6. “a genius”: quoted in O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 86 with n. 9.

30. Margaret Stead, “Contemporary Responses in Print to the American Campaigns of the Howe Brothers,” in Britain and America Go to War: The Impact of War and Warfare, 1754–1815, ed. Julie Flavell and Stephen Conway (Gainesville, FL, 2004), 119–20, with the quotation “The most plausible” at 119. Anon. author “Nottingham”: London Evening Post, Feb. 27, 1776. Cf. Mercy Otis Warren to Catherine Macaulay, Feb. 1, 1777, Mercy Otis Warren Papers, MHS.

31. “first time”: Troy Bickham, Making Headlines: The American Revolution as Seen through the British Press (DeKalb, IL, 2009), 7, with reference to Conway, British Isles, 315. For the language of “unnatural” civil war, see Chopra, Unnatural Rebellion.

32. The classic account of the aftermath of Lexington is Arthur Bernon Tourtellot, Lexington and Concord: The Beginning of the War of the American Revolution (New York, 1963). For specific references, see subsequent notes.

33. Address from the Massachusetts Congress to the inhabitants of Great Britain, April 26: London Evening Post, May 30–June 1, 1775; General Evening Post, May 30–June 1, 1775; Public Advertiser, May 30, 1775; Gazetteer, May 31, 1775; Craftsman, June 3, 1775; Chester Chronicle, June 5, 1775. Official rebel account from Essex Gazette, Salem, Apr. 25, 1775: London Evening Post Extraordinary, May 29, 1775; Public Advertiser, May 30, 1775. Survivors’ depositions: General Evening Post, May 30–June 1, 1775; Middlesex Journal, May 30–June 1, 1775; Daily Advertiser, May 31, 1775. See also Massachusetts Provincial Congress, A narrative of the excursions and ravages (1775); DLAR 382/12/80/39 (Amherst Papers); Daniel Fuller Appleton, ed., The Diary of the Rev.:d Daniel Fuller (New York, 1894). Defensive response by British officials in private: Dartmouth to Gage, June 1, 1775, Gage Papers, English Series 29, WLCL. See also [?]Pownall to W. Knox, June 2, 1775, William Knox Papers, Box 2, WLCL. The General Evening Post (June 9, 1775) cautioned that accounts by the “rebel Vermin” were “stuffed with many Falsities.” British allegations of “massacre”: Stamford Mercury, June 1, 1775. Charity: Public Advertiser, June 9, 1775; Gazetteer, June 9, 1775; General Evening Post, June 8, 1775; St James’s Chronicle, June 8–10, 1775. Libel case: “Proceedings against John Horne,” in T. B. Howell, ed., A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors, xx (London, 1816); An Interesting Address to the independent part of the People of England (1777); Grant, Our American Brethren, 34–7. For a rival charity, with Loyalists in London exile raising several thousand pounds for “such occasional Acts of Benevolence as may be useful to Soldiers” serving in America, and for their widows and orphans, see Stanley Weintraub, Iron Tears: America’s Battle for Freedom, Britain’s Quagmire: 1775–1783 (New York, 2005), 16. For British allegations of rebel atrocities, including a scalping, see James Abercrombie to Cadwallader Colden, May 2, 1775, in Cadwallader Colden Papers, LOC.

34. Gruber, “Lord Howe and Lord George Germain,” 231–2. Admiralty to Graves, July 6, 1775, NDAR, ii: 1316. See also Graves to Mowat, Oct. 6, ibid., 324–6; Dartmouth to Dunmore, July 5, 1775, Bancroft 94/235.

35. Valentine, Lord North, i: 372–3; Jon E. Lewis, ed., The Mammoth Book of War Diaries and Letters: Life on the Battlefield in the Words of the Ordinary Soldier, 1775–1991 (New York, 1999), 2; O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 86; Sylvia R. Frey, The British Soldier in America: A Social History of Military Life in the Revolutionary Period (Austin, 1981), 46–7. Clinton is quoted in Michael Glover, General Burgoyne in Canada and America: Scapegoat for a System (London, 1976), 86. “The Rubicon”: quoted in Balderston and Syrett, eds., Lost War, 31.

36. Quotations from Morning Chronicle, Sept. 21, 1775; see also London Evening Post, Sept. 23–6, 1775; Middlesex Journal, Sept. 21–3, 1775; Craftsman, Sept. 23, 1775; Chester Chronicle, Sept. 25, 1775. See further, Daily Advertiser, Oct. 11, 1775; Morning Chronicle, Oct. 19, 1775.

37. “unmanly and infamous kind of War”: Edward Howland Tatum, ed., The American Journal of Ambrose Serle (San Marino, CA, 1940), 36. See also C. Stedman, The history of the origin, progress, and termination of the American war (London, 1794), i: 118; Roger Lamb, An Original and Authentic Journal of Occurrences during the Late American War (New York, 1968), 27; “Diary of Lt. John Barker,” JSAHR 7 (1928), entry for Apr. 19, 1775. “Military Europe”: terminology and analysis after Stephen Conway, “The British Army, ‘Military Europe,’ and the American War of Independence,” WMQ 67:1 (2010). For tensions rooted in the previous war, see Fred Anderson, A People’s Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years’ War (Chapel Hill, NC, 1984); Douglas Edward Leach, Roots of Conflict: British Armed Forces and Colonial Americans, 1677–1763 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1986), chs. 5–6; Alan Rogers, Empire and Liberty: American Resistance to British Authority, 1755–1763 (Berkeley, CA, 1974). “King George’s”: Constitutional Gazette, Mar. 23, 1776; cf. Pennsylvania Journal, Aug. 28, 1776.

38. “Sea of Blood”: Peter Benaudet to Ingham Foster, June 8, 1775 [extract], Dartmouth MSS, II/1303. See also II/1359. “to breathe Vengeance”: [brother] to Ingham Foster, July 29, 1775 [copy], II/1395. On unanimity, see II/1240, 1252, 1253, 1257, 1266, 1273, 1292, 1294, 1348 (“Voice from one Extreme”), 1395. See also Anth. Van. Dam. to William [N/H]eate, May 3, 1775 [copy], II/1255; II/1292. Will Strahan to Dr. Franklin, Oct. 4, 1775 [copy], II/1552.

39. Lord Dartmouth to General Gage, Aug. 2, 1775, Guy Johnson Papers MSS 494, Ser. 1, Folder 19, Beinecke Library, Yale University.

40. “Hang, draw”: Middlesex Journal, Jan. 27, 1774. By The King, A Proclamation, for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition.

41. Both Olive Branch Petition and address to inhabitants at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/​18th_century/​contcong_07-08-75.asp. See also Pennsylvania Journal, July 12, 1775.

42. “destined to”: quoted in Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 37. According to some legal authorities, a very substantial body of rebels had to be treated as if they were legitimate combatants. See, e.g., Emer de Vattel, Bela Kapossy, and Richard Whatmore, The law of nations, or, Principles of the law of nature, applied to the conduct and affairs of nations and sovereigns, with three early essays on the origin and nature of natural law and on luxury (Indianapolis, 2008), book iii, ch. xviii, pp. 644–6, paras. 292–4. For the applicability of the codes of war, see Neff, War and the Law of Nations, part ii; Ian K. Steele, “Surrendering Rites: Prisoners on Colonial North American Frontiers,” in Hanoverian Britain and Empire: Essays in Memory of Philip Lawson, ed. Stephen Taylor, Richard Connors, and Clyve Jones (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 1998), 148–9, 156–7.

43. On the relationship between the conflated classification of Jacobites as both rebels and savages and violent responses, see Geoffrey Gilbert Plank, Rebellion and Savagery: The Jacobite Rising of 1745 and the British Empire (Philadelphia, 2006). See also Colin G. Calloway, White People, Indians, and Highlanders: Tribal Peoples and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America (New York, 2008), 30, 99; Jonathan Hawkins, “Imperial ’45: The Jacobite Rebellion in Transatlantic Context,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 24:1 (1996): 114–17; Witt, Lincoln’s Code, 42; Bruce Lenman, The Jacobite Risings in Britain, 1689–1746 (London, 1980), 231–59.

44. “false humanity”: G. D. Scull, ed., Memoir and Letters of Captain W. Glanville Evelyn (New York, 1971), 65. North: Simmons and Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates, vi: 411 [Feb. 29, 1776]. On Scotland (and Ireland) in officers’ background, see Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 34–5.

45. Through subsidies treaties, the British Crown hired entire regiments of trained and uniformed German (and sometimes other Continental European) troops for a certain period of time. Under international law, such auxiliary forces were acceptable in support of a just war; auxiliaries were not mercenaries, who were instead individual soldiers hiring out their services. Rodney Atwood, The Hessians: Mercenaries from Hessen-Kassel in the American Revolution (Cambridge, 1980), 22–3, 29, and passim. His Majesty’s most gracious speech to both Houses of Parliament, on Friday, October 27, 1775 (1776). Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 51, was probably the first historian of America to reference the early secret Anglo-German negotiations; Charles W. Ingrao, The Hessian Mercenary State: Ideas, Institutions, and Reform under Frederick II, 1760–1785 (Cambridge, 1987), 136, had already done so based on European sources. For British troop numbers, see Conway, British Isles, 15, 27.

46. “tenderness”: His Majesty’s most gracious speech to both Houses of Parliament, on Friday, October 27, 1775 (1776). See also O’Shaughnessy, “ ‘If Others Will Not Be Active,” 14. Cobbett and Hansard, eds., Parliamentary History, xviii: 726 (“as Englishmen”), 733, 761; Simmons and Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates, vi: 95–6, 105.

47. Gruber, Howe Brothers, 37; O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 210; George III to North, Nov. 7, 1775, in Donne, ed., Correspondence, i: 286. “Roman severity”: a January 1775 statement quoted in Weintraub, Iron Tears, 35.

48. My assessment of Germain is based on O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 167–87 (with a good evaluation of the court-martial); Alan Valentine, Lord George Germain (Oxford, 1962); George H. Guttridge, “Lord George Germain in Office, 1775–1782,” AHR 33:1 (1927); Gruber, “Lord Howe and Lord George Germain”; Mackesy, War for America, 51 (admirer); entry in History of Parliament, at http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/​volume/​1754-1790/​member/​sackville-lord-george-1716-85. When Lady Elizabeth Germain died in 1769 without natural heirs and left her estates to him, Sackville adopted her name and was now styled Lord George Germain. For ease of reading, I am referring throughout to Germain.

49. Mackesy, War for America, 49; Valentine, Lord George Germain, 71. “sentimental manner”: GG to William Knox, Dec. 31, 1776, quoted in O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 176. For the extensive degree to which Germain directed the war, see Valentine, Lord George Germain, 107, 127–8, and passim; Guttridge, “Lord George Germain in Office,” 33.

Chapter Three

1. For the orders, see Lords Commissioners to Graves, July 6, 1775, NDAR, i: 1316–17; Dartmouth to [unknown], July 12, 1775, Add MS 21697/99–100; Gov. Wentworth to Adm. Graves, Nov. 24, 1775, ADM1/484/385–6. See also Graves to Lords of the Admiralty, Apr. 11, 1775, CO5/121/123–4.

2. “the King’s people”: Graves to Gage, Boston, Sept. 1, 1775, DAR, xi: 98. Cf. Add MS 14039/102.

3. For the Falmouth scene I have drawn on James L. Nelson, “Burning Falmouth,” MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History 22:1 (2009); Donald A. Yerxa, The Burning of Falmouth, 1775: A Case Study in British Imperial Pacification (Portland, ME, 1975), 126, for Falmouth’s political history. Mowat to People of Falmouth, Canceaux, Falmouth, Oct. 16, 1775, Maine Historical Society, Coll. 1157, pp. 6–7. Papers printed Mowat’s ultimatum [all dates in 1775]: New England Chronicle, Oct. 26; Providence Gazette, Nov. 4; Connecticut Courant, Nov. 6; Rivington’s New York Gazette, Nov. 9; Virginia Gazette (Dixon and Hunters), Nov. 18; Massachusetts Spy, Nov. 10; Morning Chronicle, Dec. 19, 1775. “execute” and “frightful consternation” (Rev. Jacob Bailey) quoted in Nathan Miller, Sea of Glory: A Naval History of the American Revolution (Annapolis, MD, 1992), 47.

4. “Never was”: quoted in William Pendleton Chipman, ed., A Tory’s Revenge: Being Ben. Mathew’s Account of the Burning of Falmouth in 1775 (New York, 1905), 244. “terrified”: Jacob Bailey, Falmouth, Oct. 18, 1775, NDAR, ii: 500. Landing parties: NDAR, ii: 513–16. Barton: William Goold, The burning of Falmouth (now Portland, Maine), by Capt. Mowatt in 1775 (Boston, 1873), 15.

5. Graves to Philip Stephens, Secretary to the Admiralty, Oct. 9, 1775, Maine Historical Society, Coll. 1157, pp. 6–7; see also ibid., Coll. 422, i: 54.

6. Projectiles: Chipman, ed., Tory’s Revenge, 242–4. Destruction: Yerxa, Falmouth, 137–42; NDAR, ii: 513–16, for Mowat’s account to Graves, Oct. 19, 1775. Canceaux log: NDAR, ii: 516.

7. Franklin: Ferling, Independence, 191. New England Chronicle, Oct. 19, 1775. NDAR, ii: 536, 549, 569, 601, 603. “British barbarians”: Joseph Greenleaf to JA, Apr. 30, 1776, at http://founders.archives.gov/​documents/​Adams/​06-04-02-0062.

8. Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton, The Dominion of War: Empire and Conflict in America, 1500–2000 (London, 2005), 104–59; John E. Ferling, The First of Men: A Life of George Washington (New York, 2010), with the quotation from Adams at 265; Rush to Thomas Ruston, Oct. 29, 1775, in Lyman Henry Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, 1761–1792 (Princeton, 1951), i: 92; Joseph J. Ellis, His Excellency: George Washington (New York, 2004); Paul K. Longmore, The Invention of George Washington (Berkeley, 1988). On Charles Willson Peale’s Revolutionary career as artist, soldier, and political activist, see Hoock, Empires of the Imagination, 104–9.

9. “regulate”: JCC, ii: 96. Washington: GW to Hancock, Oct. 24, 1775 (“Outrage exceeding”) and GW to William Ramsay, Nov. 12, 1775. See also NDAR, ii: 590; GW to Falmouth Committee of Safety, Oct. 24, 1775; GW to Philip Schuyler, Oct. 26, 1775. “the unheard of”: quoted in Nelson, “Burning Falmouth,” 69. See also NDAR, ii: 607; Robert Morris to Robert Herries, Feb. 15, 1776, LDC, iii: 258–9; BF to Anthony Todd, Mar. 29, 1776, PBF, xxii: 392–4.

10. Paul Langford and William B. Todd, eds., Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (Oxford, 1981), iii: 102–69, “Speech on Conciliation with America” (Mar. 22, 1775). For Burke’s prescient political sociology, see Rakove, Revolutionaries, 67–9. “the predatory, or war by distress”: Langford and Todd, eds., Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, iii: 183–220, “Second Speech on Conciliation,” Nov. 16, 1775, published speech as per The Parliamentary Register, 185–201, at 185–6. See also Sheffield MSS 212–14, quoted in Langford and Todd, eds., Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, iii: 212–13.

11. British press, including letters between Continental officers, as well as reports about further threats and assaults on cities from New York to Newport and Plymouth: London Evening Post, Dec. 16–19, 1775; Lloyd’s Evening Post, Dec. 18–20, 1775; London Chronicle, Dec. 19–21, 1775; Middlesex Journal, Dec. 19–21, 1775; Morning Chronicle, Dec. 20, 1775; Morning Post, Dec. 20, 1775; Craftsman, Dec. 23, 1775; Chester Chronicle, Dec. 25, 1775. Quotations from St James’s Chronicle, Dec. 21, 1775 (“coercive and sanguinary Measures”) and “Nauticus”: Public Advertiser, Feb. 8, 1776. By spring 1776, some newspapers vented frank criticism of Britain’s brutality towards American fellow subjects: Grant, Our American Brethren, 174; London Chronicle, Feb. 20, 1776. “absurd”: quoted in Nelson, “Burning Falmouth,” 69.

12. “farther Violences”: Graves to Capt. Wallace, Nov. 4, 1775, Add MS 14039/102. Bannister and Riordan, “Loyalism and the British Atlantic, 1660–1840,” 17, 19; Gruber, Howe Bothers, 30.

13. Unless otherwise referenced, the Norfolk scene is largely based on Hast, Loyalism, esp. 9–31, 45–59; John E. Selby, The Revolution in Virginia, 1775–1783 (Williamsburg, VA, 1988), 83–4; Michael A. McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007), 166–73; H. S. Parsons, “Contemporary English Accounts of the Destruction of Norfolk in 1776,” WMQ 13:4 (1933); Benjamin Quarles, “Lord Dunmore as Liberator,” WMQ 15:4 (1958).

14. Other former Jacobites, too, would later fight for the Hanoverian king in America, although some fought for the rebels. Hugh Mercer, for example, who had witnessed Culloden as a teenager, died as a Continental brigadier general from wounds received at the Battle of Princeton (see also ch. 5 below). See Calloway, White People, 38–9. For Dunmore’s portrait, see David Mannings and Martin Postle, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings (New Haven, 2000), i: 347.

15. [?Thomas Wharton] to Sam:l Wharton Esq., Dartmouth MSS, II/ 1321 [copy], June 15, 1775. On the suspicious timing of the removal of the gunpowder, see Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC, 1999), 144–9. See also David, Dunmore’s New World, esp. chs. 1, 4.

16. TJ to John Page, Oct. 31, 1775, at http://founders.archives.gov/​documents/​Jefferson/​01-01-02-0130.

17. Lord Suffolk to GG, June 15, 1775, Germain Papers, vol. 4. “the bravest”: Sir John Dalrymple, Project for strengthening General Howe’s Operations, Germain Papers, vol. 4. “Young King”: quoted in William J. Harris, The Hanging of Thomas Jeremiah: A Free Black Man’s Encounter with Liberty (New Haven, 2009), 117. “a set of barbarians”: quoted in Alan Gilbert, Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence (Chicago, 2012), 43, with a fuller account of the case at 39–44. See also Piecuch, Three Peoples, 40.

18. Brooke, George III, 178; Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York, 2009), 61, 70; Pybus, Epic Journeys, 21, 8 (“followed by”); Piecuch, Three Peoples, 39–43; Sylvia R. Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age (Princeton, 1991), 67–8, 77 (“horrid and wicked”: 67). For fears and allegations of British-instigated or -led slave insurrections in early Revolutionary America, see Gov. J. Wright to Dartmouth, May 26, 1775, Bancroft 94/61; Robert Parkinson, “Enemies of the People: The Revolutionary War and Race in the New American Nation” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2005), ch. 2.

19. On rumors of, and blacks believing in, an emancipatory purpose to a future British invasion, see Holton, Forced Founders, 153–4. Gage to Barrington, Boston, June 12, 1775, in Clarence E. Carter, ed., The Correspondence of General Thomas Gage with the Secretaries of State, 1763–1775, repr. (Hamden, CT, 1969), ii: 684; Gage to Dartmouth, June 12, 1775, ibid., i: 403–4. For cabinet hawks in London sharing Gage’s sense of urgency about raising troops from multiple sources, see Earl of Suffolk to GG, June 15, 1775, Germain Papers, vol. 3.

20. Dunmore’s Proclamation, Nov. 7, 1775.

21. The most recent interpretation is David, Dunmore’s New World, 6, 103–7, with the emphasis on intimidation at 106. Holton, Forced Founders, 158–9, has ample documentation on the proclamation’s unifying effect, for which see also Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York, 2013), 23–4. “Hell itself”: quoted in Patrick Rael, Eighty-Eight Years: The Long Death of Slavery in the United States, 1777–1865 (Athens, GA, 2015), 53. “Dunmore’s proclamation”: Hodges, Root & Branch, 140.

22. “flock to” and “boatloads”: quoted in Gilbert, Black Patriots, 23, with individual stories of blacks running away to Dunmore at 23–4; William Campbell’s proposal for blacks and indentured servants manning guerrilla units, and the mustering of a “Company of Negroes” by the Crown’s officers in New England and Philadelphia, at 28–30. Greene and Pole, eds., Companion to the American Revolution, 241, estimate that “probably ten times” as many slaves were ready to respond to Dunmore’s call, but were “prevented or dissuaded by patriot surveillance from responding to it.” See also Schama, Rough Crossings, 77–83; Pybus, Epic Journeys, 14. Taylor, Internal Enemy, 26, suggests (with reference to Pybus, Epic Journeys, 30–31) that in the face of threats to their families few of Virginia’s young male slaves ran away solo. For the quotations on Dunmore, see Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82 (New York, 2001), 56. On the Ethiopian Regiment, see Joyce Lee Malcolm, Peter’s War: A New England Slave Boy and the American Revolution (New Haven, 2009), 112–21.

23. London Chronicle, Mar. 8, 1776. The injury report in Woodford to Pendleton, Dec. 10, 1775, “Woodford, Howe, and Lee Letters,” Richmond College Historical Papers 1 (1915–17): 118. For the sale of captured slaves, see Malcolm, Peter’s War, 112.

24. For the demographics and conditions aboard the floating town, see David, Dunmore’s New World, 114–21.

25. Hast, Loyalism, 30. Am. Arch., 4th ser., IV: 103. “A Gentleman, Ship William, off Norfolk, Dec. 25, 1776,” quoted in NDAR, iii: 243–4.

26. Virginia Gazette, Jan. 18, 1776; NDAR, iii: 119, 140. The officer is quoted in Malcolm, Peter’s War, 113.

27. Howe’s report in NDAR, iii: 579–80. See also Colonel W. Woodford to Colonel T. Elliott, Norfolk, Jan. 4, 1776, ibid. 617. Analysis of destruction: Selby, Revolution in Virginia, 83. “The wind”: quoted in McDonnell, Politics of War, 170.

28. Dunmore’s report in Virginia Gazette, Jan. 18, 1776, under the date Jan. 15 and also in Am. Arch., 4th ser., IV: 540–41 (quotation 541); the account was reprinted in London’s Daily Advertiser, Apr. 16, 1776. Virginia Gazette, Jan. 26 and Feb. 9, 1776. See also Dunmore to Dartmouth, Jan. 4, 1776, DAR, xii: 62.

29. Quoted in McDonnell, Politics of War, 172.

30. “full of Dead Bodies”: quoted in Gilbert, Black Patriots, 25. Fenn, Pox Americana, 55–62, for the smallpox epidemic among Dunmore’s black shipboard population in 1775/76; ibid., 46–70, for smallpox early in the war generally, including at the sieges of Boston and Quebec, and 91 for rumors of germ warfare in Virginia. For the smallpox epidemic among Dunmore’s men, see also David, Dunmore’s New World, 121–4.

31. Quotation and computations from “Report of the Committee to investigate the burning of Norfolk, 1776,” in [Virginia,] Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia…1835–36 (Richmond, VA, 1835), Document 43.

32. Adams: Samuel Adams to James Warren, Jan. 7, 1776, cited in Michael Kranish, Flight from Monticello: Thomas Jefferson at War (New York, 2010), 85. See also Samuel Adams to Samuel Cooper, Apr. 30, 1776, LDC, iii: 600–602; Robert Morris to Robert Herries, Feb. 15, 1776, LDC, iii: 258–9. Hancock: John Hancock to GW, Jan. 6[–21], 1776. “unite the whole”: GW to Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Reed, Jan. 31, 1776.

33. “strike such a terror”: London, Mar. 8, 1776, NDAR, iii: 954. Duke of Richmond, “attended” and “in a manner”: Simmons and Thomas, eds., Proceedings and Debates, vi: 432 (House of Lords, Mar. 5, 1776). By March, reports circulating in London papers echoed Dunmore’s version but seemed to gain limited traction. See Morning Post, Mar. 4, 1776; Daily Advertiser, Mar. 8, 1776; Morning Chronicle, Mar. 15, 1776.

34. On rebel propaganda around the actual and planned destruction of American cities, see also Carp, Rebels Rising, 215.

35. For Hessians in British service, see H. M. Scott, British Foreign Policy in the Age of the American Revolution (New York, 1990), 216–20, 228–30; Ingrao, Hessian Mercenary State, 136–44; Horst Dippel, Germany and the American Revolution, 1770–1800: A Sociohistorical Investigation of Late Eighteenth-Century Political Thinking, trans. Bernhard A. Uhlendorf (Chapel Hill, NC, 1977), 118–27; Atwood, Hessians, 14–19; Dietmar Kügler, Die deutschen Truppen im amerikanischen Unabhängigkeitskrieg, 1775–1783 (Stuttgart, 1980); Inge Auerbach, Die Hessen in Amerika, 1776–1783 (Darmstadt, 1996). For perceptions, see Melodie Andrews, “Myrmidons from Abroad: The Role of the German Mercenary in the Coming of American Independence” (PhD diss., University of Houston, 1986), ch. 1, and pp. 200–202; Christof Mauch, “Images of America—Political Myths—Historiography: ‘Hessians’ in the War of Independence,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 48:3 (2003); H. D. Schmidt, “The Hessian Mercenaries: The Career of a Political Cliche,” History 43:149 (1958). “Foreigners were”: St James’s Chronicle, Mar. 28, 1776. See also Alderman Bull in Hansard, Parliamentary History of England, xviii: 1185; 1224 for Lord Camden; and Parliamentary Register, iii: 263 (Apr. 25, 1776) for T. Townshend, MP. Some British officers considered the Hessians unreliable since they were “uninterested in the Event of the War.” Haldimand to GG, Sept. 4, 1778, Add MS 21714/54–7.

36. Congress obtained copies of the treaties and ordered them to be published. The use of the “Hessians” featured among the grievances in almost all local declarations of independence, and instructions for the delegates to the Second Continental Congress. See Am. Arch., 4th ser., VI: 650, 699–700; Boston Gazette, May 20, June 24, 1776; Auerbach, Hessen in Amerika, 115; Andrews, “Myrmidons from Abroad,” 168–9, 211–19; Lyman H. Butterfield, “Psychological Warfare in 1776: The Jefferson-Franklin Plan to Cause Hessian Desertions,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 94:3 (1950): 233–4. For newspaper reports, see, e.g., Pennsylvania Packet, May 6, 1776; Boston Gazette, May 20, 1776. Hancock is quoted in Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York, 1997), 39. Bartlett: Am. Arch., 4th ser., VI: 1022. Cf. Livingston’s satire on 500 Indian elephants, 4,000 Laplanders, 3,500 Korozan archers, and 12,000 Japanese troops offered to George III: PWL, i: 226–9.

37. Committee of Inspection and Observation, Lancaster County, Nov. 1775, DLAR 25/6; McEachern and Williams, eds., Wilmington–New Hanover Safety Committee Minutes, 9–12, 30, 64–5; Proceedings of the Committees of Safety of Caroline and Southampton Counties, 130–31, 143; Minutes of the Committee of Safety of Bucks County, 354–5, 357–9; Henry Read McIlwaine, ed., Proceedings of the Committees of Safety of Cumberland and Isle of Wight Counties (Richmond, VA, 1919), 14, 16, 17, 21; Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 154–60; Neimeyer, “Town Born, Turn Out,” 25; Higginbotham, War of American Independence, 277.

38. For the section on the Declaration of Independence I have drawn especially on Maier, American Scripture; Charles D. Deshler, “How the Declaration Was Received in the Old Thirteen,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 85 (July 1892), with the quotations at 168; David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge, MA, 2007); Carl L. Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York, 1942); Garry Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (Garden City, NJ, 1978); Robert Ginsberg, ed., A Casebook on the Declaration of Independence (New York, 1967), esp. essays by Tyler, Fisher, Becker, Ginsberg.

39. Maier, American Scripture, 156–7.

40. For a reading of this section, including the connotations of “facts,” see Stephen E. Lucas, “The Stylistic Artistry of the Declaration of Independence,” Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives 22 (1990). Numerous local documents had previously justified independence with reference to the king’s political crimes, a critical rhetorical maneuver, since the dominant colonial theory of empire acknowledged the king as the only legitimate authority over the colonies. For the earlier documents, see Maier, American Scripture, 47–96. See also William L. Hedges, “Telling Off the King: Jefferson’s ‘Summary View’ as American Fantasy,” Early American Literature 22:2 (1987); Stella F. Duff, “The Case against the King: The Virginia Gazettes Indict George III,” WMQ 6:3 (1949). For earlier writings of Jefferson’s, see Maier, American Scripture, 108–21. See Eric Nelson, The Royalist Revolution: Monarchy and the American Founding (Cambridge, MA, 2014) for the royalist theory of representation and colonial disappointment with George III’s failure to reassert the royal prerogative of his Stuart predecessors. For the need to break with the monarch to complete the transfer of political legitimacy, see Marston, King and Congress.

41. For this reading of the grievances, see Maier, American Scripture, 147, including “domestic insurrections.” Armitage, Declaration, 54–6 (“effectively placed” at 56); Ginsberg, “The Declaration as Rhetoric,” in Casebook, ed. Ginsberg, 236. For the association between the British monarch and Native American warriors and warfare in the run-up to independence, see Robert Parkinson, “Enemies of the People: The Revolutionary War and Race in the New American Nation” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2005), ch. 1.

42. Copies reached London by mid-August, Scotland and Ireland between Aug. 20 and 24, and Madrid, Leiden, Vienna, and Gothenburg by the end of that month. By early September, the document had spread as far as Copenhagen and Warsaw; soon there were French and German translations. For the international audience and the law of nations as a context of the Declaration, see Armitage, Declaration, 17–18, 21, 70, 72; idem, “The Declaration of Independence and International Law,” WMQ, 59:1 (2002); Eliga H. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2012); Dippel, Germany and the American Revolution, 100–101. For the sentimental reading of the Declaration of Independence, see Knott, Sensibility, 66.

43. For American print dissemination, see Maier, American Scripture, 131, 159. Cf. Caesar Rodney to Capt. Thomas Rodney at Dover, Philadelphia, July 4, 1776, Caesar Rodney Correspondence, NYPL. For British commanders in America receiving copies, see Philip Schuyler Papers, Box 18, fols. 260, 262, NYPL; Bancroft 97/65–7.

44. Dover: Deshler, “How the Declaration Was Received,” 170. Huntington: David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997), 31; and for Baltimore, 31 n. 21. See also for Savannah: Connecticut Gazette, Oct. 8, 1776; Pennsylvania Evening Post, Oct. 8, 1776. Boston: Winthrop D. Jordan, “Familial Politics: Thomas Paine and the Killing of the King, 1776,” JAH 60:2 (1973): 306–8; New York Gazette, Aug. 12, 1776; Connecticut Gazette, Oct. 25, 1776. New York City: New York Gazette, June 4, 1770; “drove”: Capt. John Montressor, quoted in Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498–1909 (New York, 1967), v: 992; Arthur S. Marks, “The Statue of King George III in New York and the Iconology of Regicide,” American Art Journal 13:3 (1981). For a more detailed account of the struggle over the statue between Patriots and Loyalists, see my Empires of the Imagination, 49–57. For other examples of removal and destruction, see Deshler, “How the Declaration Was Received,” 166–7, 172; Bushman, King and People, 225; Pennsylvania Journal, Aug. 28, 1776, quoted in Gerlach, ed., New Jersey in the American Revolution, 225; Massachusetts Spy, July 24; Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet, Aug. 5, 1776. For surviving royal symbols, see Edmund Farwell Slafter, “Royal Arms and Other Regal Emblems and Memorials in Use in the Colonies before the American Revolution,” Massachusetts Historical Society 4 (1887–9): 254–60.

45. Strategic value: Barnet Schecter, The Battle for New York: The City at the Heart of the American Revolution (New York, 2002), 2. Population figures: Conway, British Isles, 67.

46. “wood of pine trees”: quoted in Papas, That Ever Loyal Island, 64.

47. For this section I have drawn heavily on O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, esp. 192–220; Joseph J. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence (New York, 2013), 118–20; Gruber, “Lord Howe and Lord George Germain”; Frederick Wyatt and William B. Willcox, “Sir Henry Clinton: A Psychological Exploration in History,” WMQ 16:1 (1959); William B. Willcox, ed., The American Rebellion: Sir Henry Clinton’s Narrative of His Campaigns, 1775–1782 (New Haven, CT, 1954), xiii–xxiii. For Fischer, see Washington’s Crossing, 77–8. For the Rhode Island expedition, see Paul David Nelson, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, Marquess of Hastings: Soldier, Peer of the Realm, Governor-General of India (Madison, NJ, 2005), ch. 3. For one royal official’s optimistic assessment of Britain’s ability soon to end the rebellion across various Northern colonies, see Gov. Hutcheson to [General Haldiman], July 10, 1776, Add MS 21680/121–6.

48. Gruber, “Lord Howe and Lord George Germain,” 230–31.

49. Lloyd’s Evening Post, Aug. 14, 1776.

50. “beautiful forests”: William L. Stone, ed., Letters of Brunswick and Hessian Officers during the American Revolution (New York, 1970), 194.

51. Quoted in David McCullough, 1776 (New York, 2005), 145.

52. My portrait of Clinton is largely based on William Bradford Willcox, Portrait of a General: Sir Henry Clinton in the War of Independence (New York, 1964); Wyatt and Willcox, “Sir Henry Clinton”; O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 207–19 (quotation 214). For Clinton’s broad military reading, see Ira D. Gruber, Books and the British Army in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010), 44–5.

53. Memo of conversation, Feb. 7, 1776, Clinton Papers, vol. 13. O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 218.

54. Insignia: Stone, ed., Letters of Brunswick and Hessian Officers, 50. For later references, see Spring, With Zeal, 172. Storm: McCullough, 1776, 155–6, and 119 for Long Island. For men killed by lightning, see Capt. Isaac Wood Diary, 1775–77, entry for Aug. 21, 1776, Stillman Harkness MS Collection, NYPL. John J. Gallagher, The Battle of Brooklyn 1776 (Edison, NJ, 2002), 81.

55. S. Sydney Bradford, ed., “A British Officer’s Revolutionary War Journal, 1776–1778,” Maryland Historical Magazine 56 (1961): 157; Edwin G. Burrows, “Kings County,” in The Other New York: The American Revolution beyond New York City, 1763–1787, ed. Joseph S. Tiedemann and Eugene R. Fingerhut (Albany, NY, 2005), 28. Graham is quoted in John C. Dann, ed., The Revolution Remembered: Eyewitness Accounts of the War for Independence (Chicago, 1983), 50. See also Bruce E. Burgoyne, ed., Enemy Views: The American Revolutionary War as Recorded by the Hessian Participants (Bowie, MD, 1996), 71.

56. For this section, see especially Andrews, “Myrmidons from Abroad,” 208–9, 254, 258–63; Butterfield, “Psychological Warfare,” 240; McCullough, 1776, 181; Charles Patrick Neimeyer, America Goes to War: A Social History of the Continental Army (New York, 1996), 90 (on the proposal for Patriots painted as Indians). “behaved with great”: quoted in Andrews, “Myrmidons from Abroad,” 262. For the allegation of spitting men to trees, see Burrows, Forgotten Patriots, 5.

57. For sham surrenders, see Gallagher, Battle, 121. “Many high ranking”: quoted in Burgoyne, ed., Enemy Views, 71. See Mark Urban, Fusiliers: Eight Years with the Redcoats in America (London, 2007), 85, for a Hessian admitting to beating enemy soldiers.

58. Quotations in Gallagher, Battle, 119, 121. For British encouragement of Hessians not to grant quarter, see also “Schreiben eines hessischen Officiers,” Long Island, Sept. 1, 1776, Bancroft 40, Hessian 4/6/13, NYPL. For an example of how the narrative of Hessian cruelty was already firmly locked in place, see Samuel Miles Diary (Nov. 1776), LOC.

59. Percy: Charles Knowles Bolton, ed., Letters of Hugh, Earl Percy, from Boston and New York, 1774–1776 (Boston, 1902), 69. Hodges, Root & Branch, 144.

60. The British officer is quoted in Mackesy, War for America, 88. The Loyalist is cited in Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York, 1999), 254. Charles Stuart to Lord Bute, Feb. 4, 1777, quoted from Violet Hunter Guthrie Montagu, ed., A Prime Minister and His Son, from the Correspondence of the 3rd Earl of Bute and of Lt.-General the Hon. Sir Charles Stuart, K.B. (London, 1925), 99. Conway, “The Great Mischief,” 385. For Howe’s political reasoning, see entries for June 29, Nov. 21, 1776, Sept. 15, 1777, in Great Britain Orderly Book, WLCL; Gruber, Howe Brothers, 145–6; Stephen Kemble et al., The Kemble Papers (New York, 1884), i: 473.

61. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer, 119; O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 218; Wyatt and Willcox, “Sir Henry Clinton,” 78; Schecter, Battle for New York, 166–7; Willcox, ed., Clinton’s Narrative, 44.

62. Gallagher, Battle, 148–54; Burrows, “Kings County,” 29. Quotations in Ellis, Revolutionary Summer, 119.

63. Ellis, Revolutionary Summer, 119–20 (quotation 119) with n. 24: WH to GG, Sept. 3, 1776, DAR, xii: 218; Conway, Short History, 76; O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 96–8. See also Johann Ewald, Diary of the American War: A Hessian Journal (New Haven, CT, 1979), 18, 19, 25.

64. Valentine, Lord George Germain, 145; Mackesy, War for America, 88; O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 100; Stephen Brumwell, George Washington, Gentleman Warrior (New York, 2012), 236.

65. Jay, as a member of the Committee Detecting Conspiracies, Feb. 22, 1777, at http://www.columbia.edu/​cu/​libraries/​inside/​working/​jay/​archive/​columbia.jay.04038.html. On Robinson’s committee interrogation, see also Crary, Price of Loyalty, 148–9. Together with his four sons, Robinson organized the Loyal American Regiment and later played a key role in negotiations with Benedict Arnold over the treasonous hand-over of West Point. Sabine, Biographical sketches, ii: 221–4; Breunig, Amerikanische Revolution, 146–8; Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles, 34–6, and passim. On volitional allegiance, see James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1978).

66. “an ignorant”: JA to Abigail Adams, July 11, 1776, quoted in Papas, That Ever Loyal Island, 69. “make whigs”: JA to J. D. Sergant, July 21, 1776, WJA, ix: 425. Executions: Villers, “King Mob,” 22; Amandus Johnson, The Journal and Biography of Nicholas Collins, 1746–1831 (Philadelphia, 1936), 250–51.

67. In Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina, the test laws demanded an oath of allegiance from all free male adults 16, 18, or 21 years and older. In New Jersey, all civil servants and those individuals who had sworn an oath during the British occupation were required to swear allegiance. After the British defeat at Saratoga (1777), half a dozen states strengthened their test laws further. An overview of the test laws in Van Tyne, Loyalists, Appendix B. New York: [New York,] Journals of the Provincial Congress, Provincial Convention, Committee of Safety and Council of Safety of the State of New-York, 1775–1777 (Albany, NY, 1842), i: 669, 684, 827, 855–6 [henceforth: JPC]. Am. Arch., 5th ser., III: 238, 251, 257; Flick, Loyalism in New York, 116–34.

68. New Jersey issued fines and threatened non-jurors with confiscation. New York confiscated the property of non-signers and exiled them to the British lines. Pennsylvania non-signers were threatened with the loss of civil rights as well as with fines, punitive taxes, and professional bans in the case of lawyers, apothecaries, doctors, and merchants, as was also the case in Maryland. Rhode Island and Connecticut deprived non-jurors of their rights to vote and to sue in a court of law. Delaware and Virginia banned them from public office and the latter also from voting, purchasing land, and claiming debts, as well as levying a double and treble tax. North Carolina confiscated non-jurors’ property and stripped them of their civil rights; they were to leave the state within thirty days. South Carolina gave Loyalists a chance to sell property before banning them, a threat that Georgia later also dangled over non-jurors. See Calhoon, Loyalists, 309–10; Breunig, Amerikanische Revolution, 67. On confiscation versus death for traitors, see Aaron N. Coleman, “Loyalists in War, Americans in Peace: The Reintegration of Loyalists, 1775–1800” (PhD diss., University of Kentucky, 2008), 201, 203, 230–232.

69. For the Bates episode, see W. O. Raymond, ed., Kingston and the Loyalists of the “Spring Fleet” of A.D. 1783 (Kingston, New Brunswick, 1889), with quotations at 8. Other committees gave men they felt to be “Inimical to our Common Cause” the chance to prove their loyalty to America by serving in the militia, “to wipe off the present Evil Suspicions” or, otherwise, be imprisoned: Northumberland Committee of Safety, HSP Am. 277, entries for Dec. 14 and 17, 1776.

70. Elisabeth O’Kane-Lipartito, “ ‘The Misfortunes and Calamities of War’: Civilians and Society in the American Revolution and After 1775–1830” (PhD, University of Houston, 1993), 128–37 (quotation 136). See also Linda K. Kerber, “ ‘May all our Citizens be Soldiers, and all our Soldiers Citizens’: The Ambiguities of Female Citizenship in the New Nation,” in Women, Militarism, and War, ed. Jean Bethke Elshtain and Sheila Tobias (Totowa, NJ, 1990), 14; Crary, Price of Loyalty, 82–3; Kerber, Women of the Republic, 123–36. For the hardship consequent to dispossession on all sides, see also Ward, War for Independence, 39–40; Potter-Mackinnon, While the Women Only Wept, 57. Trial of girls suspected of Loyalism: William James to Elisha James, Aug. 19, 1777, Elisha James MS N–1486, MHS.

71. Holmes is quoted in Mary Beth Norton, “Eighteenth-Century American Women in Peace and War: The Case of the Loyalists,” WMQ 33:3 (1976): 398, and Linda Grant DePauw, Founding Mothers: Women of America in the Revolutionary Era (New York, 1994), 137–8, with reference to AO13/65/529–30. Similar tales in AO12/49/56–8, 102/80; 13/45/530, 67/192, 68/125, 96/263, 102/1107. For continued popular violence against “tender women,” see Council of Safety to Committee of Inspection and Observation, Berks Co., Oct. 5, 1776, Society Miscellaneous Collection (Collection 425), Box 15 B, HSP.

72. Ward, American Revolution, 263–4 (quotations 263). Michael Fellman, In the Name of God and Country: Reconsidering Terrorism in American History (New Haven, 2010), 10, draws a comparison with the water cure in the American-Philippine war and U.S. waterboarding in twenty-first-century Iraq.

73. For New York’s demographics, see Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 245–6; Conway, British Isles, 67. The Newport Gazette, May 17, 1777, a Loyalist paper during the British occupation of that town, recounted the execution of John Hart of New York after a “sham Trial.” For executions and reprieves, see Ward, American Revolution, 265; Brown, King’s Friends, 79, 65, 47, 34, 115, 134, 158, 169, 183, 198, 215; Moody, Narrative; Crary, Price of Loyalty, 224–39; Bradburn, Citizenship Revolution, 57–8. Fear of retaliation: Ward, War for Independence, 39. See also Stokes, Iconography of Manhattan, iv: 910 [1776]. “We are cast”: [?]Williams to John Hancock, Jan. 2, 1777, DLAR 53.

74. John E. Ferling, Almost a Miracle: The American Victory in the War of Independence (Oxford, 2007), 165, for New Jersey statistics. GG to Knox, Dec. 3, 1776, quoted in Valentine, Lord George Germain, 309–10; see also DAR, xii: 274.

Chapter Four

1. General Orders, Sept. 6, 1776.

2. In thinking about this chapter, I have benefited from John W. Shy’s writings as well as Fischer, Washington’s Crossing; Lepore, Name of War; Stuart D. Brandes, Warhogs: A History of War Profits in America (Lexington, KY, 1997); and Conway’s analysis of the moral economy of plundering in “The Great Mischief” and “Moral Economy, Contract, and Negotiated Authority in American, British, and German Militaries, 1740–1783,” Journal of Modern History 88 (2016).

3. Washington’s confirmation of the verdict in General Orders, Sept. 11, 1776. See Witt, Lincoln’s Code, 20, with reference to General Orders, Aug. 9, 1775, and GW to John Hancock, Sept. 21, 1775, for soldiers signing the Articles of War. For the military flogging scene in the following pages, see Neimeyer, America Goes to War, 139–40; Harry M. Ward, George Washington’s Enforcers: Policing the Continental Army (Carbondale, IL, 2006), 162–5, 177; Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1979), 78. For whipping in early modern culture and in military culture more generally, see Sarah Covington, “Cutting, Branding, Whipping, Burning: The Performance of Judicial Wounding in Early Modern England,” in Staging Pain, 1580–1800: Violence and Trauma in British Theater, ed. James Robert Allard and Mathew R. Martin (Burlington, VT, 2009); Matthew Pate and Laurie A. Gould, Corporal Punishment around the World (Santa Barbara, CA, 2012), 31. For military and naval cats, see George Ryley Scott, History of Torture (London, 1971), 199; Rediker, Slave Ship, 205. The former British drummer quoted is John Shipp, Flogging and its substitute: A voice from the ranks (London, 1831), 20 (“practice of stripping”), 21 (“as though the talons”). The soldier describing his own flogging was Alexander Somerville, The Autobiography of a working man (London, 1848), 277–91 (quotation 288). A similar description is quoted in Myra C. Glenn, Campaigns against Corporal Punishment: Prisoners, Sailors, Women, and Children in Antebellum America (Albany, NY, 1984), 91–2, from Jacob Hazen, Five years before the mast. “resembles roasted meat”: Samuel Leech, Thirty years from home; or A voice from the main deck (Boston, 1844), 50. I used the Library of America edition (1983) of Herman Melville, White-Jacket, or the World in a Man-of-War, the quotations at 489 (“either from constitutional”), 492 (“stripped like a slave”), 496 (“while his back bleeds”). See Caroline Cox, A Proper Sense of Honor: Serivce and Sacrifice in George Washington’s Army (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), ch. 3, on punishment in the Continental Army. On witnessing violence and the politics of empathy and complicity, see Elizabeth Barnes, Love’s Whipping Boy: Violence & Sentimentality in the American Imagination (Chapel Hill, NC, 2011), 17, 71, and passim. For the public spectacle and shame of excessive violence, see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1979), 34.

4. A British officer denounced the Hessians as an army of locusts; an American officer used the same simile for the black women following Cornwallis’s army: Tatum, ed., American Journal, 120; Frey, Water, 169. “chief of plunderers”: Thomas Paine, American Crisis, IV, in Virginia Gazette, Sept. 26, 1777. American historians tend to endorse contemporary views of the Hessians as the worst of plunderers, e.g., Frey, British Soldier, 75; Steven R. Taaffe, The Philadelphia Campaign, 1777–1778 (Lawrence, KS, 2003), 195. Atwood, Hessians, 173–6, has attempted to explain Hessian practices with reference to specific military rationales.

5. Natural disasters: “Plundering by the British Army during the American Revolution,” 114 (tornado); Virginia Gazette, Jan. 31, 1777 (plague, earthquake). Shreve: Jason R. Wickersty, “A Shocking Havoc: The Plundering of Westfield, New Jersey, June 26, 1777,” Journal of the American Revolution (July 21, 2015), at http://allthingsliberty.com/​2015/​07/​a-shocking-havoc-the-plundering-of-westfield-new-jersey-june-26-1777/, quoting Shreve to Dr. Bodo Otto, June 29, 1777.

6. New-York Gazette, Feb. 3 and Apr. 14, 1777, quoted in Leonard Lundin, Cockpit of the Revolution: The War for Independence in New Jersey (New York, 1972), 247. Carl Leopold Baurmeister, Revolution in America: Confidential Letters and Journals, 1776–1784, of Adjutant General Major Baurmeister of the Hessian Forces, trans. Bernhard A. Uhlendorf (New Brunswick, NJ, 1957), 338–9.

7. This paragraph is indebted to Jürgen Luh, Kriegskunst in Europa, 1650–1800 (Cologne, 2004), ch. 1, on transport, magazines, distribution; the reference to Frederick II, from Friedrich der Große: Betrachtungen über die Feldzugspläne (1775), is quoted at 18. See also John A. Lynn, Women, Armies, and Warfare in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2008), 32, 294; Fritz Redlich, De praeda militari: Looting and Booty, 1500–1815 (Wiesbaden, 1956), 72, and passim; John W. Wright, “Military Contributions during the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the American Military Institute 3:1 (1939). On the “thin line,” see also E. Wayne Carp, To Starve the Army at Pleasure: Continental Army Administration and American Political Culture, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1984), 83; Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 174; Wayne E. Lee, “The American Revolution,” in Daily Lives of Civilians in Wartime Early America: From the Colonial Era to the Civil War, ed. David S. Heidler and Jeanne T. Heidler (Westport, CT, 2007), 45 (“fine line”); see 43–9 for foraging and plundering by regular and irregular forces and banditti.

8. For this and the previous paragraphs, see Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 175. DLAR 437, New Jersey, Revolutionary War: Damages by the British and Americans in New Jersey, reel 2, vol. 1. See also Society Miscellaneous Collection (Collection 425), Box 15 B, HSP.

9. On the ordinariness of wartime plundering, see Barbara Donagan, “War, Property, and the Bonds of Society: England’s ‘Unnatural’ Civil Wars,” in Civilians and War in Europe, ed. Charters, Rosenhaft, and Smith, 61. Frazer scene after Lee, “American Revolution,” 32, with reference to Persifor Frazer, General Persifor Frazer: A Memoir Compiled Principally from His Own Papers by His Great-Grandson (Philadelphia, 1907), 157–60 (quotation 159).

10. For Miller, see Lee, “American Revolution,” 45–6, with reference to Harry M. Ward, Between the Lines: Banditti of the American Revolution (Westport, CT, 2002), 39. Cf. the violence against male and female civilians documented in Pennsylvania, Division of Archives and Manuscripts. Records of Pennsylvania’s Revolutionary Governments, 1775–1790, Executive Correspondence of the Council of Safety, Pennsylvania, July 1776–March 1777, depositions against Capt. Jerrad Irwin (Jan. 25, 1777), DLAR 24. The examples throughout this chapter also draw on my reading of well over one hundred orderly books in manuscript (esp. LOC, LCP, MHS, HSP) and print, as well as other accounts. For specific references, see, e.g., George F. Scheer, ed., Private Yankee-Doodle; being a narrative of some of the adventures, dangers, and sufferings of a Revolutionary soldier (Boston, 1962), 52, 96–7, 100, 104–5, 139–40, 203; Lundin, Cockpit, 246; entry for Aug. 2, 1781 in Major John Singer Dexter Orderly Books, vol. i, LOC; PNG, i: 215, 268; HEH, HM Orderly Book of General Lacey, Jan. 1778 to Sept. 1780, Aug. 1780; Bonnie Sue Shelton Stadelman, “The Amusements of the American Soldiers during the Revolution” (PhD diss., Tulane University, 1969), 52, 96–7, 100, 104–5, 139–40, 203. On war, property, and Englishness, see Lepore, Name of War. For the impact of plundering on civilians, see also Lee, “American Revolution,” 43–7.

11. Neimeyer, America Goes to War, 139–45, esp. 140. On forms of corporal punishment, see Anne-Marie Cusac, Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America (New Haven, CT, 2009), 81; Maurer Maurer, “Military Justice under General Washington,” in Military Analysis of the Revolutionary War: An Anthology by the Editors of Military Affairs (Millwood, NY, 1977); Cox, Proper Sense of Honor, 87–8. On the rationale and defense of flogging, see Richard Holmes, Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket (London, 2001), 320; Cusac, Cruel and Unusual, 42; Arthur N. Gilbert “Military and Civilian Justice in Eighteenth-Century England: An Assessment,” Journal of British Studies 17:2 (1978): 64; Steven Pierce, “Punishment and the Political Body: Flogging and Colonialism in Northern Nigeria,” in Discipline and the Other Body: Correction, Corporeality, Colonialism, ed. Steven Pierce and Anupama Rao (Durham, NC, 2006), 197.

12. In Britain, corporal punishment was the milder alternative to the death penalty in a criminal justice system that by 1776 knew some 160 capital offenses, mostly concerning property crimes. See Douglas Hay et al., Albion’s Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 1975); Douglas Hay, “Crime and Justice in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England,” in Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of Research, ed. Norval Morris and Michael Tonry (Chicago, 1980). Early British critics of military flogging are quoted in J. R. Dinwiddy, “The Early Nineteenth-Century Campaign against Flogging in the Army,” EHR 97:383 (1982); Peter Burroughs, “Crime and Punishment in the British Army, 1815–1870,” EHR 100:396 (1985); Cox, Proper Sense of Honor, 88–9, which references criticism of brutal military punishment in late-eighteenth-century officer manuals. On flogging and the slave regime, see Cusac, Cruel and Unusual, 75; Rediker, Slave Ship; Barnes, Love’s Whipping Boy, 17, 71, 73; http://www.mountvernon.org/​digital-encyclopedia/​article/​slave-control; Fritz Hirschfeld, George Washington and Slavery: A Documentary Portrayal (Columbia, MO, 1997), 37, 50; Cleves, Reign of Terror, 30; Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1780–1865 (Manchester, 2000), 260–61. For the slave’s lacerated body and abolitionism, see, e.g., Henrice Altink, “ ‘An Outrage on All Decency’: Abolitionist Reactions to Flogging Jamaica Slave Women, 1780–1834,” Slavery & Abolition 23:2 (2002).

13. Anderson and Cayton, Dominion of War, 129–31. Early anti-plundering orders, among many: GW to Robert Spotswood, Oct. 31, 1755. Humphrey Bland is quoted from his Treatise of Military Discipline (London, 1743), 237; various London editions were published in 1727–62. On Washington’s relations with British officers, and their sharing martial knowledge, see also Ferling, First of Men, 33.

14. “seems never”: Ward, George Washington’s Enforcers, 165. “without Order”: General Orders, HQ, Cambridge, Jan. 1, 1776. See also GW to Israel Putnam, Aug. 25, 1776. “stamping order”: Richard Norton Smith, Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation (Boston, 1993), 4. “I have a Gallows”: quoted in Ellis, His Excellency, 27.

15. For Washington assessing the provincials at Cambridge, see Ferling, First of Men, 126–7; James Thomas Flexner, George Washington in the American Revolution, 1775–1783 (Boston, 1968), 30. “an exceeding dirty”: quoted in Glenn A. Phelps, “The Republican General,” in George Washington Reconsidered, ed. Don Higginbotham (Charlottesville, VA, 2001), 169. Recommendation of Bland: GW to Colonel William Woodford, Nov. 10, 1775. For military reading more widely, see Sandra L. Powers, “Studying the Art of War: Military Books Known to American Officers and Their French Counterparts during the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Military History 70:3 (2006); JA to William Tudor, Oct. 12, 1775, at http://founders.archives.gov/​documents/​Adams/​06-03-02-0099; Conway, “British Army.” Cox, Proper Sense of Honor, 44, doubts “military texts were reaching more than a small minority of officers.” For examples of GW overruling courts-martial by replacing corporal punishment with confinement on bread and water in spring 1776, see Alexander McDougall’s First New York Regiment orderly books, 1776, entries for Feb. 21 and Mar. 4, 1776, NYHS.

16. I draw here on Anderson and Cayton, Dominion of War, 166–7: The army “embodied the Revolution itself” and “represented an American union” when no other institution yet did. Tudor is quoted in Ward, George Washington’s Enforcers, 34. The American Articles of War were based on the Massachusetts Articles of War, which were in turn largely derived from British regulations, although containing fewer capital offenses and lower lash limits. Articles in JCC, ii: 111–22, the revisions in iii: 331–4. Robert Harry Berlin, “The Administration of Military Justice in the Continental Army during the American Revolution, 1775–1783” (PhD diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1976). For soldiers’ temporary loss of liberty, see also Cox, Proper Sense of Honor, 76.

17. On McCowan, see Benjamin Franklin Stevens, ed., General Sir William Howe’s Orderly Book at Charlestown, Boston and Halifax, June 17, 1775 to 1776, 26 May (Port Washington, NY, 1970), 96–7 (quotation 97). For similar cases, see ibid., 187; WO55/677, Capt. Farrington, Orderly Book, HQ Boston, Jan. 3, 1776; Frederick Bernays Wiener, Civilians under Military Justice: The British Practice since 1680, Especially in North America (Chicago, 1967), 150; A. R. Newsome, “A British Orderly Book, 1780–1781,” North Carolina Historical Review 9:1–4 (1932), esp. entries for Mar. 1 and 2, 1781. For the uncovering of female victims of flogging, see Pierce, “Punishment and the Political Body,” 199–200. For British sentences of 400 to 1,000 lashes, see, e.g., “Diary of Lt. John Barker,” JSAHR 7 (1928), entry for Aug. 14, 1775; Stevens, ed., Howe’s Orderly Book, 101–2, 105–6, 109; Kemble et al., Kemble Papers, i: 437, 499, 510–11; WO71/92/336–9; WO55/677, Capt. Farrington, Orderly Book, entry for Jan. 3, 1776. For death sentences for British plunderers, see Kemble et al., Kemble Papers, i: 399, 428, 480, 491; Orderly Book, unid. unit, 1778–79, Sept. 23, 1778, HSP 633; Orderly book kept during the occupation of Philadelphia, Apr. 24–June 27, 1778, fol. 81, HSP, Am. 625; British orderly book, Oct.–Dec. 1777, DLAR 9, roll 1 (cow theft). For British military justice and the gentlemanly priorities it enshrined, see G. A. Steppler, “British Military Law, Discipline, and the Conduct of Regimental Courts Martial in the Later Eighteenth Century,” EHR 102:405 (1987); Arthur N. Gilbert, “The Regimental Courts Martial in the Eighteenth-Century British Army,” Albion 8:1 (1976); idem, “Changing Face of British Military Justice, 1757–1783,” Military Affairs 49:2(1985); idem, “Military and Civilian Justice.”

18. Barber is quoted in Neimeyer, America Goes to War, 135. Waldo: Albigence Waldo, “Valley Forge 1777–8, Diary of Surgeon Albigence Waldo, of the Connecticut Line,” PMHB 21:3 (1897): 310. For the moral economy of plundering in the rival armies, see Neimeyer, America Goes to War, 136; Conway, “The Great Mischief”; idem, “Moral Economy.”

19. Higginbotham, War of American Independence, 304; Dorothy Denneen Volo and James M. Volo, Daily Life during the American Revolution (Westport, CT, 2003), 178; Lee, “American Revolution,” 43–6. “With respect”: GW to Continental Congress Committee to Inquire into the State of the Army, July 19, 1777. For troops complaining about shortages of provisions, see Scheer, ed., Private Yankee-Doodle, 50–52. See more generally, James A. Huston, Logistics of Liberty: American Services of Supply in the Revolutionary War and After (Newark, DE, 1991), 128–9; Carp, Starve the Army, 172–3, 181, 186, 201–11; Wellenreuther, Von Chaos und Krieg, 183–6; Dann, ed., Revolution Remembered, 23, 63, 126. Prices: Conway, Short History, 129.

20. After Lee, “American Revolution,” 44–5.

21. Wellenreuther, Von Chaos und Krieg, 166. See Brandes, Warhogs, 38, on fraud, and Carp, Starve the Army, 19, 67–8, on shortage cycles when blankets and tents were made into clothing and flour bags, and tents into blankets. John W. Shy, “Logistical Crisis and the American Revolution: A Hypothesis,” in Feeding Mars: Logistics in Western Warfare from the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. John A. Lynn (Boulder, CO, 1993), 161–79; Phelps, “Republican General,” 184–5; Higginbotham, War of American Independence, 304–5; [?Alexander McDougall] to GW, Pecks Kill [NY], May 21, 1777; Conway, Short History, 129. Washington and many of his officers tended to prefer voluntary sales and civil impressment to military coercion: Royster, Revolutionary People, 73–4; Neimeyer, America Goes to War, 135; James C. Neagles, Summer Soldiers: A Survey & Index of Revolutionary War Courts-Martial (Salt Lake City, 1986), 24; GW, Instructions to Colonel Benedict Arnold, for Canada campaign, Sept. 14, 1775; Lee, “American Revolution,” 44–5; Carp, Starve the Army, esp. 77–98.

22. This section after Arthur R. Bowler, Logistics and the Failure of the British Army in America, 1775–1783 (Princeton, 1975), 8–9, 94–5, 109, 158, and passim; Edward E. Curtis, The Organization of the British Army in the American Revolution (New Haven, CT, 1926), 100–104; Taaffe, Philadelphia Campaign, 54; “The Siege of Charleston; Journal of Captain Peter Russell, December 25, 1779, to May 2, 1780,” AHR 4:3 (1899), 481. For Britain’s fundamental supply problem, see TNA, T64/118, Daniel Chamier to Robinson, Mar. 31, 1777, quoted in Curtis, Organization, 82. For connections between strategic decisions and logistical thinking, see Bowler, Logistics, 241, 62–3, 67. The underlying supply problem of the British Army in America was that it hardly ever controlled sufficient territory to meet its food requirements. The division of responsibility among poorly coordinated government departments and inadequate information flow exacerbated Britain’s logistical challenges. The ration of a soldier was calculated at one pound of beef or nine ounces of pork per day, plus weekly issues of oatmeal, butter, cheese, and peas, and the occasional issue of rice at the rate of one ounce per day; six men were daily given a quart of rum. Norman Baker, Government and Contractors: The British Treasury and War Supplies, 1775–1783 (London, 1971), 4; PRO30/55/3/238 (1); Curtis, Organization, 89, 172; Mackesy, War for America, 65–8, 222–4.

23. Bowler, Logistics, 53–4, 98–108; Baker, Government and Contractors, 3; Curtis, Organization, 94–7, quotation 94 (“mouldy bread”). “our army”: quoted in Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 172. The horses consumed 14,000 tons of hay and 6,000 tons of oats annually.

24. For this paragraph, see Bowler, Logistics, 41–91, esp. 44–5, 48. For Murray, see Eric Robson, ed., Letters from America, 1773 to 1780; Being the Letters of a Scots Officer, Sir James Murray (Manchester, 1951), 29, letter to Betsy, June 17, 1776; minimal provisions: 40–41.

25. “fighting for”: Robson, ed., Letters from America, 40, letter dated Feb. 25, 1777, quoted in Martin Joseph Clancy, “Rules of Land Warfare Observed by the American Army during the American Revolution,” World Polity 2 (1960), 231. See also “Bamford’s Diary: The Revolutionary Diary of a British Officer,” Maryland Historical Magazine 27 (1932): 245; O’Shaughnessy, Men Who Lost America, 103. For the British Army seeking to disrupt Continental foraging expeditions, see, e.g., GW to NG, Feb. 12, 1778; see also six letters, Feb. 15–20, 1778, for which see also PNG, ii: 285–7; GW to NG, Feb. 16 and 18, 1778; correspondence between GW and Lee, Feb. 16–25, 1778; Frank H. Stewart, Foraging for Valley Forge by General Anthony Wayne in Salem and Gloucester Counties (Woodbury, NJ, 1929); Captain Henry Lee Jr. to GW, Feb. 19, 1778.

26. Robert Kirkwood, The Journal and Order Book of Captain Robert Kirkwood of the Delaware Regiment of the Continental Line (Wilmington, DE, 1910), “Book of Gen. Orders, 1777,” 98, 104; Colonel James Chambers, 1st Pennsylvania Regiment, 1778–1780, Sept. 22, 1778, HSP 973; Abraham Scranton Orderly Book, 1778, HQ Providence, Sept. 14, 1778, MCC 1262, LOC. Houses and barns: Head-Quarters, White-Plains, Nov. 2, 1776. Gardens, orchards, and mowing grounds: Colonel Ward’s Order Book, Mar. 11, 1776, Force 7E, reel 55, item 155, LOC. “Orderly Books and Journals kept by Connecticut Men while taking part in the American Revolution, 1775–1778,” Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, vii (1899). Firewood: Ebenezer Adams Orderly Book, July to Oct. 1776, entry for Oct. 7, 1776, LOC; Kirkwood, Journal, 104, 125–6; Colonel James Chambers, 1st Pennsylvania Regiment, 1778–1780, entry for Sept. 25, 1778, HSP 973; Christian Myers Orderly Book, July to Sept. 1779, entry for Aug. 5, 1779, MCC 1259, LOC; “Orderly Book of the Fourth New York Regiment, 1778–80,” in Orderly Books of the Fourth New York Regiment, 1778–1780. The Second New York Regiment, 1780–1783, ed. Almon W. Lauber (Albany, NY, 1932), 94; Charles Webb, Orderly Book, Nov. 11, 1775–July 26, 1776, entry for May 5, 1776, Connecticut Historical Society, American Revolution Collection, 1765–1844, reel 3; Collection of American Orderly Books: General William Smallwood, Smallwood’s Brigade, 1778–1779, entry for Dec. 20, 1778, HSP 973; Ebenezer Huntington Orderly Book, entries for June 5 and 13, 1779, Force 7E, reel 16, item 63, LOC. Published notices: New-York Journal, Apr. 11, 1776, and May 2, 1776. For the section title: “Punishments being intended to deter by the terror of example,” in John Williamson, The elements of military arrangement: and of the discipline of war; adapted to the practice of the British infantry (London, 1791), ii: 153.

27. General Orders, Sept. 19, 1776.

28. GW, camp near Kingsbridge, Sept. 22, 1776. See also the lobbying of William Tudor, the Judge Advocate General, for an increased lash maximum of one or two hundred. Tudor to JA, July 7 and Sept. 23, 1776, PJA, iv: 367; v: 36–7. Cf. Cox, Proper Sense of Honor, 95, with reference to Colonel Joseph Reed, a lawyer on GW’s staff, to Hancock. GW to Hancock, Sept. 25, 1776. For a later example, see NG to GW, Aug. 26, 1780, PNG, vi: 233–4.

29. For this and the previous paragraph, see GW to Hancock, Sept. 25, 1776. Cf. Am. Arch., 5th ser., II: 498–500.

30. Adams, Diary, iii: 409–10, at http://64.61.44.187/​publications/​apde/​portia.php?mode=p&id=DJA03p409. See also Brumwell, George Washington, 247–8. Committee on Spies commissioned June 14; Congress discussed report Aug. 7, 19, Sept. 19, 20. Articles in JCC, v: 788–807, see esp. sec. XIII, art. 13, 21; sec. XVIII, art. 3. For the British Army, see Sylvia R. Frey, “Courts and Cats: British Military Justice in the Eighteenth Century,” Military Affairs 43:1 (1979): 8; idem, British Soldier, 90; Steppler, “British Military Law,” 884, with reference to the 44th Foot punishment records revealing a scale from an average of 267 (actually inflicted: 200) lashes in 7 cases of abusing civilians, and 390 lashes (320) in 28 cases of theft from civilians, to 533 (494) in 7 cases of insolence to commissioned officers.

31. GW to President of Congress, Feb. 3, 1781, PGW/EA. For examples of much higher American lash counts than the congressional limit, see Cox, Proper Sense of Honor, 106–7; Ward, George Washington’s Enforcers, 162; Royster, Revolutionary People, 77–80; Neimeyer, America Goes to War, 143–5, 210; James Thacher, A military journal during the American revolutionary war (Boston, 1827), entry for Jan. 1, 1780; Stuart L. Bernath, “George Washington and the Genesis of American Military Discipline,” Mid-America 49:2 (1967): 97. One hundred lashes or more: GW to Committee of Congress, Jan. 28, 1778; General William Smallwood, Smallwood’s Brigade, Orderly Book 1778–1779, entry for Apr. 27, 1778, HSP 973; Caleb Boynton, Orderly Book, White Plains, July to Aug. 1778, entry for July 16, 1778, LOC; Court Martial at Fishkill, July 1778, John Fisher Papers, Box 1, NYHS; Samuel McNeil Orderly Book, entry for Aug. 27, 1779 (threat of five hundred lashes for plunders), NYHS. Increasingly desperate orders threatened summary punishment on the spot. Kirkwood, Journal, 89, 98, 104, 123–6, 150, 181; see also Neimeyer, America Goes to War, 145. Estimates of military executions range from between 40 and 75 for all offenses and for those parts of the army for which the records are reasonably reliable, suggesting, conservatively, no more than perhaps 100 executions overall. This compares to some 142 capital convictions in the British Army, including 40 to 50 for nonmilitary crimes such as murder, rape, robbery, plunder: Gilbert, “Military and Civilian Justice,” 58–9.

32. After Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 117–21, 137; Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 164.

33. Stedman, History, i: 242–3. “we went on”: Charles Stuart to Lord Bute, Feb. 4, 1777, quoted in Stuart-Wortley, Prime Minister and His Son, 99. See also Richard Fitzpatrick to brother, July 5, 1777, Richard Fitzpatrick Papers, LOC. For Patriots singing similar tunes, see Document signed W. Whipple, Baltimore, Jan. 15, 1777, John Langdon Papers, i, HSP 353; Alexander M’Whorter, Letter to unidentified correspondent, Newark, Mar. 12, 1777, printed, e.g., in Pennsylvania Evening Post, Apr. 26, 1777. For Loyalist claims testifying to British plundering regardless of victims’ allegiance, see AO13/1/106–11; 1/442–56; 9/256–83; 1 part i, 111a; 11/C1, 14/47; 8/170–242; AO12/22/137. But other British commanders exempted the foraging of “Rebel Cattle” from general bans on plundering: see Archibald Campbell, Journal of an expedition against the rebels of Georgia in North America under the orders of Archibald Campbell (Darien, GA, 1981), 14–16 (quotation 15), 20; Curtis, Organization, 114–15. For officers taking decisive disciplinary action against plunderers, see also Milton M. Klein and Ronald W. Howard, eds., The Twilight of British Rule in Revolutionary America: The New York Letter Book of General James Robertson, 1780–1783 (Cooperstown, NY, 1983), 32, 37, 120–21, and passim.

34. “unfortunately”: “Proposed Reformation for the American Army,” n.d., Germain Papers, vol. 17/41. See Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 172–8, for an excellent discussion of how British compulsory foraging and plundering undermined the policy of pacification. For further materials on the politics of plunder, see also Letter to unid. correspondent, Newark, Mar. 12, 1777, printed, e.g., in Pennsylvania Evening Post, Apr. 26, 1777; HSP 353, John Langdon Papers, i, Jan. 15, 1777.

35. Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 129–32 (quotation 129), 155–6. “the ground”: quoted in Schecter, Battle for New York, 268.

36. GW, Instructions to Colonel Benedict Arnold, for Canada campaign, Sept. 14, 1775. See also Marquis de Malmedy to NG, Mar. 10, 1781, PNG, vii: 424–5; Stedman, History, i: 242–3. “into a mere plundering scheme”: GW, Circular to Pulaski and Colonels of Horse, Oct. 25, 1777. For American orders to treat particular local populations with indulgence because most were Patriots, see NG to Wayne, Dec. 19, 1778, PNG, iii: 120. Not just Continentals but Patriot militias, too, were regularly plundering Loyalist properties. When, conversely, Loyalist corps plundered Patriots, their victims demanded a compensatory tax be levied on them. See GW to WL, Jan. 24, 1777; Michael S. Adelberg, The American Revolution in Monmouth County: The Theatre of Spoil and Desctruction (Charleston, SC, 2010); Adrian C. Leiby, The Revolutionary War in the Hackensack Valley: The Jersey Dutch and the Neutral Ground, 1775–1783, rev. ed. (New Brunswick, NJ, 1992), 84–90; Oliver DeLancey, Orderly Book of the Three Battalions of Loyalists Commanded by Brigadier General Oliver DeLancey, 1776–1778 (New York, 1917), 9, 21, 28, 23, 58, 66, 95; Burgoyne, Hessian Diary, 45–6.

37. For Washington and other commanders exhorting troops to honor the ideals of their cause throughout the war, see, e.g., General Orders, Sept. 4, 1777; Ward, George Washington’s Enforcers, 65–6; Elijah Fisher, Elijah Fisher’s journal while in the war for independence and continued two years after he came to Maine (August, ME, 1880), entries for Oct. 6–28, 1778; Neagles, Summer Soldiers, 90; DLAR 458, Gen. Wm. Heath Order Book, Aug. 14, 1777; HSP Am. 626, vol. 1, Jan. 13, 1778; Orderly Book of the New Jersey Brigade, July–Oct. 1780, entries for Aug. 9, 16, 23, Sept. 12, 1780, NYPL. Lee, Barbarians and Brothers, 193, 199, is optimistic about the comparative restraint of Continental foraging, concluding: “The Continentals were never perfect, but one cannot doubt that Washington’s disciplinary efforts greatly reduced the damage they inflicted on the countryside” (199).

38. Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 133–5. “full power”: quoted in Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 168.

Chapter Five

1. Count Carl von Donop, Journal of the Hessian Corps in America under General von Heister, 1776–June 1777, 90–91, Morristown National Historical Park, NJ. For the Martin episode, see also Thomas J. McGuire, The Philadelphia Campaign (Philadelphia, 2006), i: 29–31.

2. AH to John Jay, Middle Brook Camp [NJ], June 2, 1777, PAH, i: 261–3 (quotation 263). Newspapers: Pennsylvania Gazette, June 6, 1777; Pennsylvania Journal, June 11, 1777; Pennsylvania Evening Post, June 12, 1777. Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, The Journals of Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, trans. Theodore G. Tappert and John W. Doberstein (Philadelphia, 1982), iii: 51. See also Israel Putnam to Godfrey Marlbon, June 24, 1777, DLAR 444/72445, for twenty-two bayonet stabbings of a British officer, most likely Martin.

3. GW to Cornwallis, June 2, 1777. “that he was no coroner”: Alexander Graydon, Memoirs of his own time: with reminiscences of the men and events of the revolution, ed. John Stockton Littell (Philadelphia, 1846), 266. Cornwallis to GW, June 2, 1777. Earlier that year, General Howe had described the ambush and murder of a British captain in New Jersey “with a degree of Barbarity that Savages could not exceed.” CO236/37 (Jan. 5, 1777).

4. This synthesis is based on Theodore P. Savas and J. David Dameron, A Guide to the Battles of the American Revolution (New York, 2006), 87–94; Fischer, Washington’s Crossing; William S. Stryker, The Battles of Trenton and Princeton (Boston, 1898), 361–4, with the quotations from a Continental officer, on the weather and shoeless soldiers, at 362; Richard M. Ketchum, The Winter Soldiers: The Battles for Trenton and Princeton (New York, 1999), 224–319, with the quote from Hessian diarist at 236. “Soldiers keep”: William S. Powell, “A Connecticut Soldier under Washington: Elisha Bostwick’s Memoirs of the First Tears of the Revolution,” WMQ 6:1 (1949), 102. See also Capt. Isaac Wood Diary, entry for Dec. 26, 1776, Stillman Harkness MS Collection, NYPL.

5. “all the blood”: “The Battle of Princeton. By Sergeant R——,” PMHB 20:4 (1896), 518. Losses: Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 185–6.

6. Ferling, Almost a Miracle, 188–91 (quotation 188).

7. “fought on”: Mark Edward Lender, “The ‘Cockpit’ Reconsidered: Revolutionary New Jersey as a Military Theater,” in New Jersey in the American Revolution, ed. Barbara J. Mitnick (New Brunswick, NJ, 2005), 50–51 (quotation 51). Creswell is quoted in Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 259–60; see ibid. 293 on Donop. On Patriot recruiting after Trenton, see also Hutcheson to Haldimand, Feb. 10, 1777, Add MS 21680/173–4.

8. See Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 293 on Donop. Definitions of atrocity: Sascha Möbius, “Kriegsgreuel in den Schlachten des Siebenjährigen Krieges in Europe,” in Kriegsgreuel: Die Entgrenzung der Gewalt in kriegerischen Konflikten vom Mittelalter bis ins 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Sönke Neitzel and Daniel Hohrath (Paderborn, 2008); idem, “ ‘Von Jast und Hitze’: Überlegungen zur Wahrnehmung von Gewalt durch preussische Soldaten im Siebenjährigen Krieg,” Forschungen zur Brandenburgischen und Preußischen Geschichte 12 (2002): 18. Committee appointed: JCC, vii: 42–3 (Jan. 16, 1777).

9. Varnum Lansing Collins, President Witherspoon: A Biography (Princeton, 1925), i: 21.

10. “a deserted village”: Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, i: 125–6. “a shambles”: Ketchum, Winter Soldiers, 230. Young: Sergeant Young, 1776–77, entry for Jan. 17, 1777, HSP, Am. 619.

11. Quotations from The correspondence, journals, committee reports, and records of the Continental Congress (1774–1789), 53: “Papers and Affidavits Relating to the Plunderings, Burnings, and Ravages Committed by the British, 1775–84,” fol. 51 [henceforth: “Papers and Affidavits”], NARA M247. All dates 1777: Pennsylvania Evening Post, Apr. 24; Connecticut Journal, May 14; Independent Chronicle, May 22; Connecticut Gazette, May 23; Norwich Packet, May 19–26; Boston Gazette, May 26; Freeman’s Journal, June 21.

12. Order book cited in Appendix to “Papers and Affidavits,” fol. 45; Pennsylvania Evening Post, May 10, 1777; also referred to as “two Cruel Bloody Orders of Howe,” in Varnum Lansing Collins, A Brief Narrative of the Ravages of the British and Hessians at Princeton in 1776–77: A Contemporary Account of the Battles of Trenton and Princeton (Princeton, 1906), 21, see also 21–22 with note at 22. Paine, Crisis, II (Jan. 13, 1777), in Thomas Paine, Collected Writings (New York, 1995), 108.

13. Samuel Chase to GW, Jan. 23, 1777; GW to Chase, Feb. 5, 1777.

14. Affidavit Rev. George Duffield, Apr. 25, 1777, “Papers and Affidavits,” Appendix, reprinted in, e.g., Pennsylvania Evening Post, Apr. 29, 1777. William D. Dwyer, The Day Is Ours! An Inside View of the Battles of Trenton and Princeton, November 1776–January 1777 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1998), 208–10, and quotation at 322 (“this may”).

15. Affidavit Rev. George Duffield, Apr. 25, 1777, “Papers and Affidavits,” Appendix. Cf. John Witherspoon to David Witherspoon, Baltimore, Feb. 12, 1777, LDC, vi: 269–70; Stryker, Battles, 266–7; Dwyer, The Day Is Ours!, 208–10, 322–3, 379–80; Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 300.

16. Yates: GW to WH, HQ at Morristown, Jan. 13, 1777. Affidavit: PRO30/55. See also WL to GW, Feb. 15, 1777, PWL, i: 224–6; GW to Samuel Chase, Feb. 5, 1777; “Papers and Affidavits,” fol. 47. A slightly edited version was included in the congressional report’s appendix, and printed as such in the press: Pennsylvania Evening Post, May 10, 1777. A similar version in Purdie’s and Dixon and Hunter’s Virginia Gazette, Jan. 31, 1777, reprinted in Connecticut Courant, Mar. 3, 1777. Medical experts: Deposition taken by New Jersey JP, Henry Freeman, Feb. 17, 1777, “Papers and Affidavits”; GW to Samuel Chase, Feb. 5, 1777; GW to John Hancock, Feb. 5, 1777; unidentified American officer at Chatham, NJ, Feb. 3, 1777, quoted in GW to WL, Feb. 3, 1777, n. 2; New Jersey Historical Society, New Jersey Archives: Documents Relating to the Revolutionary History of the State of New Jersey, orig. publ. 1901–17 (New York, 1977), i: 366; Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 377–8. For the empirical turn in common law and science, and the medicolegal trend to provide empirical evidence in criminal trials, see Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca, NY, 2000); Julia Rudolph, Common Law and Enlightenment in England, 1689–1750 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, 2013), ch. 3; Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, 1998); Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, 2011); Stephan Landsman, “One Hundred Years of Rectitude: Medical Witnesses at the Old Bailey, 1717–1817,” Law and History Review 16:3 (1998): 449, 482; Tal Golan, Laws of Men and Laws of Nature: The History of Scientific Expert Testimony in England and America (Cambridge, MA, 2004); “butchered”: GW to WL, Feb. 14, 1777. See WH to GW, Jan. 23, 1777, for Howe’s answer when confronted with the case. American interpretations: Collins, Brief Narrative, 41–4; Butterfield, ed., Letters of Benjamin Rush, i: 127–8.

17. The quotation from Spring, With Zeal, 233.

18. “It was the Nation”: William B. Reed, Oration delivered on the occasion of the reinternment of the remains of General Hugh Mercer before the St. Andrew’s and Thistle societies (Philadelphia, 1840), 38. For the Mercer story, see also Pennsylvania Evening Post, Jan. 18, 1777; Pennsylvania Journal, Feb. 5, 1777; Collins, Brief Narrative, 42–4; Samuel Chase to GW, Jan. 23, 1777; “Papers and Affidavits,” fols. 49–52; Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 332–3 with further references.

19. The report also covered rape (see the second part of this chapter), prisoner abuse, and plundering. For American circulation, see, e.g., Pennsylvania Evening Post, Apr. 24, 26, 29, May 10, 1777; New England Chronicle, May 29, June 5, 12, 1777; Connecticut Courant, June 2–9, 1777; Norwich Packet, June 9, 1777; Providence Gazette, July 12, 1777. Congress: JCC, vii: 42–3, 277–9; 8: 565. “furnish”: Council of Safety, NY, committee of John Jay, Livingston, G. Morris, Letter to New York delegates in Congress, May 28, 1777: [New York]. Journals of the Provincial Congress, i: 947. “the barbarities” and “odious and revolting”: Duke of Richmond, Parliamentary History of England…1778 (Dec. 7, 1778). Leyden Gazette: Oct. 7, 1777, “Supplement,” Oct. 5–6, 14, 1777, “Supplement,” 5–6. For the Gazette, see Simon Burrows, “The Cosmopolitan Press, 1760–1815,” in Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America, 1760–1820, ed. Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows (Cambridge, 2002), 26–7; Jack Censer, “France, 1750–89,” ibid., 170; Jeremy D. Popkin, News and Politics in the Age of Revolution: Jean Luzac’s Gazette de Leyde (Ithaca, NY, 1989).

20. For this and the following paragraph, see Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History, 1690–1960 (New York, 1962), 99–100; Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York, 2007), 3–9; Burns, Infamous Scribblers, 192–4, 219–20; Michael Humphrey, The Politics of Atrocity and Reconciliation: From Terror to Trauma (New York, 2002), 132. On Paine, see John Keane, Tom Paine: A Political Life (Boston, 1995), 138–41. For an analogous argument concerning the press as instrumental in constituting the new nation, its citizens a community of readers, see Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire, 23–9, and passim. My argument is not necessarily incompatible with Loughran’s in Republic in Print that the absence of a highly developed national infrastructure enabled a nation to be imagined across diverse American regional cultures and interests.

21. “united the colonies”: Burns, Infamous Scribblers, 219.

22. Even though the Board of War recommended to Congress that Washington be provided with a portable printing press, a printer, and journeymen, the proposal was apparently never approved. See GW to Committee of Congress, July 19, 1777; Rollo G. Silver, “Aprons Instead of Uniforms: The Practice of Printing, 1776–1787,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 87 (1977): 117. For the closest early modern parallel, see the depositions taken in the wake of Irish Catholic atrocities against Protestants in 1641 at http://1641.tcd.ie/. See Holger Hoock, “Mangled Bodies: Atrocity in the American Revolutionary War,” Past & Present 230 (Feb. 2016), for a systematic investigation of witnessing and atrocity narrative.

23. “The progress”: Broadside, dated Bucks. Co., Dec. 14, 1776, for which see also Virginia Gazette, Dec. 27, 1776; Connecticut Journal, Jan. 1, 1777; Independent Chronicle, Jan. 2, 1777; Essex Journal, Jan. 9, 1777; Freeman’s Journal, Jan. 7, 1777; Massachusetts’s Spy, Jan. 2, 1777; Connecticut Courant, Apr. 21, 1777. A widely excerpted “letter from an officer of distinction in the American army,” which was also published in British and European papers, referenced the rape of girls, teenagers, and women by British troops under Cornwallis near Pennytown, New Jersey. Published by order of the Pennsylvania Council of Safety, in Pennsylvania Packet, Dec. 27, 1776; Pennsylvania Evening Post, Dec. 28, 1776; also in London Evening Post, Mar. 25–27, 1777. NG to Gov. Nicholas Cooke, PNG, ii: 4–5.

24. “to secure”: Council of Safety of Pennsylvania, Dec. 23, 1776, in Pennsylvania Packet, Dec. 27, 1776; Pennsylvania Evening Post, Dec. 28, 1776. British reference: Gazetteer, Mar. 31, 1777.

25. Girls and teenagers: Sharon Block, “Rape in the American Revolution: Process, Reaction, and Public Re-Creation,” in Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones: From the Ancient World to the Era of Human Rights, ed. Elizabeth D. Heineman (Philadelphia, 2011), 36, 38. For an emphasis on the notion of the theft of female sexual property, see Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M. Rose, “Introduction: Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature,” in Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. eadem (New York, 2001), 7; Deborah G. Burks, “ ‘I’ll Want My Will Else’: ‘The Changeling’ and Women’s Complicity with Their Rapists,” English Literary History 62:4 (1995); Barbara J. Baines, “Effacing Rape in Early Modern Representation,” English Literary History 65:1 (1998); Georges Vigarello, A History of Rape: Sexual Violence in France from the 16th to the 20th Century (Malden, MA, 2001), 2, 24, 30–31; Amy Greenstadt, Rape and the Rise of the Author: Gendering Intention in Early Modern England (Farnham, 2009), 12–13, 22; Laura Gowing, “Women, Status and the Popular Culture of Dishonour,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6 (1996). For references to rape in front of relatives and friends, see Colonel Measam to Colonel Wayne, Jan. 11, 1777, Bancroft 378/185–9; Pennsylvania Evening Post, Dec. 28, 1778; Independent Chronicle, July 15, 1779; Virginia Gazette, 7 Aug. 1779; HL to William McCulloch, Mar. 9, 1782, PHL, xv: 470–73. As Sharon Block has shown, rape as a political metaphor “combined the image of unrestrained, illegitimate power with images of innocent, helpless, female victims who needed to be saved by righteous American men.” For Block’s work on how sexual violence was implicated in the establishment of systems of power dependent upon racial, gender, and social categories, see her Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006), esp. 212–18, 230–34 (quotation 234); “Rape without Women: Print Culture and the Politicization of Rape, 1765–1815,” JAH 89:3 (2002); “Rape in the American Revolution.”

26. Reports and rumors: Alexander MacWhorter, the pastor of the Newark Presbyterian Church, who accompanied Washington’s army across New Jersey in 1776/77, Letter to unid. Correspondent, Newark Mar. 12, 1777, printed in Independent Chronicle, Apr. 10, 1777; Pennsylvania Evening Post, Apr. 26, 1777; Boston Gazette, June 2, 1777; Norwich Packet, May 26, 1777. Adam Stephen to TJ, c. Dec. 20, 1776, PTJ, i: 659. Virginia Gazette, Jan. 31, 1777. In late colonial America, castration was reserved as a punishment by Southern courts for African-American men convicted of rape: Block, Rape, 190–96, 203. For rape and racial discourse in late colonial and early national America, see also Sharon Block, “Violence or Sex? Constructions of Rape and Race in Early America,” in New World Orders: Violence, Sanction, and Authority in the Colonial Americas, ed. John Smolenski and Thomas J. Humphrey (Philadelphia, 2005); Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca, NY, 2002), 185–7; Catherine Adams and Elizabeth H. Pleck, Love of Freedom: Black Women in Colonial and Revolutionary New England (New York, 2010), 44–5; Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Women before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639–1789 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1995), 184–231, 248, 270–73, 283.

27. Reissued later, e.g., as the title page of a New England Almanac in 1776. For rape as a political issue during the occupation of Boston in 1768–69, see O. M. Dickerson, comp., Boston under Military Rule, [Essex Gazette,] June 27 and July 11, 1769; Alfred F. Young, Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier (New York, 2004), 49; Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York, 1975), 115.

28. Bell, First Total War; Anna Clark, Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770–1845 (London, 1987), 5–6, 34; Vigarello, History of Rape, 25, 43. “an acceptable”: Stevi Jackson, “The Social Context of Rape: Sexual Scripts and Motivation,” in Rape and Society: Readings on the Problems of Sexual Assault, ed. Patricia Searles and Ronald J. Berger (Boulder, CO, 1995), 19. Joshua S. Goldstein, War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa (Cambridge, 2001), 333. Randolph Trumbach, Sex and the Gender Revolution: Volume One (Chicago, 1998), 277, 301–5; James Kelly, “ ‘A Most Inhuman and Barbarous Piece of Villainy’: An Exploration of the Crime of Rape in Eighteenth-Century Ireland,” Eighteenth-Century Ireland—Iris an dá chultúr 10 (1995): 95, 107; Nazife Bashar, “Rape in England between 1550 and 1700,” in The Sexual Dynamics of History, ed. London Feminist History Group (London, 1982), 36; Thomas Lacqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA, 1990), 161; Gregory Durston, Victims and Viragos: Metropolitan Women, Crime and the Eighteenth-Century Justice System (Bury St. Edmunds, 2007), 165, 167; Else L. Hambleton, “The Regulation of Sex in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts,” in Sex and Sexuality in Early America, ed. Merril D. Smith (New York, 1998), 96.

29. The historiography of rape in early modern European warfare remains slim: Holger Hoock, “Rape, ius in bello, and the British Army in the American Revolutionary War,” Journal of Military Ethics 14:1 (2015), 75 with detailed references. Sexual coercion of Native American women, and the relative scarcity of rape by Native American men, has attracted somewhat greater attention: Alice Nash, “ ‘None of the Women Were Abused’: Indigenous Contexts for the Treatment of Women Captives in the Northeast,” in Sex without Consent: Rape and Sexual Coercion in America, ed. Merril D. Smith (New York, 2001); Thomas S. Abler, “Scalping, Torture, Cannibalism and Rape: An Ethnohistorical Analysis of Conflicting Cultural Values in War,” Anthropologica 34:1 (1992); James Axtell, The European and the Indian: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York, 1981), 181–2; Lee, Barbarians and Brothers, 148, 160, 162; Richard Godbeer, “Eroticizing the Middle Ground: Anglo-Indian Sexual Relations along the Eighteenth-Century Frontier,” in Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History, ed. Martha Elizabeth Hodes (New York, 1999); Sally Smith Booth, The Women of ’76 (New York, 1973), 196. Most histories of the American Revolutionary War have given little if any consideration to the subject of sexual violence, even though it is generally recognized that women in war zones were vulnerable. See Gundersen, To Be Useful, 179; Lee, “American Revolution”; Caroline Gilman, ed., Letters of Eliza Wilkinson (New York, 1969), 28–31, 46; Sidney Barclay, ed., Personal Recollections of the American Revolution; A Private Journal (Port Washington, NY, [1970]), 34, 76, 153–9, 165; “Historical Notes: A Woman’s Letters in 1779 and 1782,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 10:2 (1909); Stevens, ed., Howe’s Orderly Book, 186–8; Berkin, Revolutionary Mothers, 38; Dann, ed., Revolution Remembered, 130–31, 141, 187; Elizabeth Evans, Weathering the Storm: Women of the American Revolution (New York, 1989), 29. The few scholars who consider the topic of rape in war emphasize the dearth of rape proceedings, or observe that only where British troops were stationed over a period of time did they have an opportunity to exploit civilian women in a systematic way: Lee, “Civilian Experience,” 55; Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston, 1980), 202–5. Contemporary concerns about these very instances, however, are dismissed by other scholars, who consider the raping of civilians an “extreme rarity” and largely a product of the “American propaganda mill.” Ward, War for Independence, 84; see also Frey, British Soldier, 78–9. Rape is not discussed in such classics as Higginbotham, War of American Independence; Mackesy, War for America; Royster, Revolutionary People; Middlekauff, Glorious Cause; Neimeyer, America Goes to War. There is a perfunctory reference in Jerome J. Nadelhaft, The Disorders of War: The Revolution in South Carolina (Orono, ME, 1981), 68: “There was so much horror, so much death and brutality, there might well have been a corresponding amount of rape.” Fischer, Washington’s Crossing, 178–9, reliably covers the New Jersey rape cases discussed below.

30. Legal definition of rape in Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England: In Four Books (Oxford, 1770), iv: 210. For the history of rape law, see Antony Simpson, “Vulnerability and the Age of Female Consent: Legal Innovation and Its Effect on Prosecutions for Rape in Eighteenth-Century London,” in Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Manchester, 1987), 182–5. Vattel, Kapossy, and Whatmore, Law of nations, book iii, ch. viii, pp. 543–9, paras. 140–45. For early modern codes of war and rape, see also Diane Wolfthal, Images of Rape: The “Heroic” Tradition and Its Alternatives (Cambridge, 1999), 65, 97; Karin Jansson, “Soldaten und Vergewaltigung im Schweden des 17. Jahrhunderts,” in Zwischen Alltag und Katastrophe: Der Dreissigjährige Krieg aus der Nähe, ed. Beninga von Krusenstjern and Hans Medick (Goettingen, 1999), 197; Vigarello, History of Rape, 15, 39. Peter Way, “Venus and Mars: Women and the British Army in America during the Seven Years’ War,” in Britain and America Go to War, ed. Flavell and Conway; Gundersen, To Be Useful, 143–4.

31. “more difficult”: WL to Caesar Rodney, Feb. 24, 1777, PWL, i: 251; see also GW to WL, Feb. 14, Mar. 3, 1777; Collins, Brief Narrative, 14–15. “A man”: Ira D. Gruber, ed., John Peebles’ American War: The Diary of a Scottish Grenadier, 1776–1782 (Mechanicsburg, PA, 1998), 74 (Dec. 24, 1776). See also WO71/86/201–2 (1778). Frey, British Soldier, 78. Vigarello, History of Rape, 40, for a sensitive discussion of silencing circumstances. See also Garthine Walker, “Rereading Rape and Sexual Violence in Early Modern England,” Gender & History 10:1 (1998) with reference to Miranda Chaytor, “Husband(ry): Narratives of Rape in the Seventeenth Century,” Gender & History 7:3 (1995): 382–3, 394–5, 399–400; Lynn A. Higgins and Brenda R. Silver, “Editors’ Introduction,” in Rape and Representation, ed. eadem (New York, 1991), esp. 4–6.

32. General Orders, Jan. 1, 1777. GW to WL, Mar. 3, 1777. See also GW to WL, Feb. 14, 1777.

33. “Papers and Affidavits,” fols. 29, 31, 33, 35.

34. On rape as sexualized violence, see Jackson, “Social Context of Rape,” 16; Merril D. Smith, “Introduction: Studying Rape in American History,” in Sex without Consent, ed. eadem, 7. Catherine A. MacKinnon, “Sex and Violence: A Persepctive (1981),” in Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law, ed. eadem (Cambridge, MA, 1987), insists on the convergence of male sexuality and violence. Block, “Rape in the American Revolution,” 29, agrees that there were “more violent versions of sexual attacks” in wartime than “were normally seen in peacetime.” A substantial minority of rapes in colonial America, and a majority of cases in eighteenth-century England where the relationship between attacker and attacked is known, were committed by the masters of servants or the master’s relatives, by women’s fellow workers or lodgers, and by relatives and intimates. Rape by (armed) enemy soldiers represents an extreme case of stranger rape by disruptive outsiders to a local community. See Clark, Women’s Silence, 38, 40; Block, Rape, 55–80; Jansson, “Soldaten und Vergewaltigung,” 207, 223; Thomas A. Foster, Sex and the Eighteenth-Century Man: Massachusetts and the History of Sexuality in America (Boston, 2006), 59–61; Durston, Victims, 147; Kelly, “ ‘A Most Inhuman and Barbarous Piece of Villainy,’ ” 81–93.

35. Only in a few British courts-martial concerning child rape did physicians testify to a girl’s infection with venereal disease or to particularly brutal genital injuries. Block, Rape, 110–11; WO71/149/bundle 8/7–19; 71/94/253–60.

36. Maggie Craig, Damn’d Rebel Bitches: The Women of the ’45 (Edinburgh, 1997), 107; John Prebble, Culloden (London, 1961), 209–10; Robert Forbes and Henry Paton, The Lyon in mourning: or, A collection of speeches, letters, journals, etc. relative to the affairs of Prince Charles Edward Stuart (Edinburgh, 1895), iii: 107; TNA, SP 54/35/50. Elements of the army that had defeated the Jacobites later fought in the Seven Years’ War in North America. General James Wolfe, who had condoned that earlier rape of Scottish Highland women, threatened that female Quebec French prisoners might be “given up to the delicate embraces of the English tars.” Plank, Rebellion and Savagery, 54, 172 (quotation).

37. Trumbach, Sex, 328–30; Stephen Conway, “Locality, Metropolis and Nation: The Impact of the Military Camps in England during the American War,” History 82:268 (1997): 550–51. Most reported cases of rape by British soldiers during the American Revolutionary War were of female army followers, especially of girls under the age of ten. Frey, British Soldier, 59–63; Berkin, Revolutionary Mothers, 52, and ch. 4; Holly A. Mayer, Belonging to the Army: Camp Followers and Community during the American Revolution (Columbia, SC, 1996); eadem, “Wives, Concubines, and Community: Following the Army,” in War and Society, ed. Resch and Sargent; Gerard J. De Groot and C. M. Peniston-Bird, eds., A Soldier and a Woman: Sexual Integration in the Military (New York, 2000), esp. essays by Hendrix, Crim. For army wives, see Paul Kopperman, “British High Command and Soldiers’ Wives in America, 1755–1783,” JSAHR 60 (1982), with references to venereal disease and sexual harassment at 17–18 with n. 12. For camp women motivating “British boys” against the “d——d rebels,” see John Greenwood Manuscript, 1775–83, fol. 22, WLCL. Rape of girls as young as four, in the Seven Years’ and the Revolutionary Wars: HEH, Loudon Memorandum Book, V, Jan. 26, 1758; Orderly Book of John Thomas’s Regiment of Mass. Provincials, Feb. 12, 1760, John Thomas Papers, MHS. General Orders by Major General Howe in Kemble et al., Kemble Papers, i: 556, 560; WO71/80/421–2, 441–51; 71/85/290–301; 71/90/85–8; 71/149/bundle 8/7–19; CO5/236/214.

38. Quoted in Booth, Women of ’76, 105–6. No positive evidence documenting rape in the early Southern campaign has been found thus far, but see Virginia Gazette, July 27, 1776, for a report on British soldiers treating Charleston women with “great barbarity,” including shooting and stabbing them.

39. Morning Chronicle, Apr. 2, 1777, in response to rape allegations in the Patriot press.

40. Block, “Rape in the American Revolution,” 31–3, 37–8. Hoock, “Rape, ius in bello, and the British Army.”

41. WO71/82/412–25 (Sept. 3–7, 1776).

42. Christopher: “Papers and Affidavits,” fol. 39. For other references to rapes in New Jersey, 1776–77, see Joseph Galloway, Letters to a nobleman, on the conduct of the war in the middle colonies (London, 1779), 25–7; Edward Field, ed., Diary of Col. Israel Angell, commanding the Second Rhode Island continental regiment during the American revolution (Providence, RI, 1899), 26–7. For this argument, see also Block, “Rape without Women,” 859.

43. There is some evidence that Continental soldiers and Patriot militia treated women rudely and indecently. Two women later testified that they had suffered miscarriages after scuffles with American troops; one woman asserted she had been raped by a rebel soldier. See Loyalists Transcripts, iii: 352, xiv: 209; E. Alfred Jones, The Loyalists of Massachusetts, Their Memorials, Petitions and Claims (London, 1930), 124, 139; Hulton, Letters of a Loyalist Lady, 85–6; Robert M. Dunkerly, Women of the Revolution: Bravery and Sacrifice on the Southern Fields (Charleston, SC, 2007), 40–42; Christopher Moore, The Loyalists: Revolution, Exile, Settlement (Toronto, 1994), 80; Ruairidh H. MacLeod, Flora MacDonald: The Jacobite Heroine in Scotland and North America (London, 1995), 193; Capt. Pendleton’s Orderly Book, 1781, entry for July 25, 1781, LOC; “Journal book of Bayze Wells of Farmington, in Canada expedition,” in Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, vii: 293–4; Norton, “Eighteenth–Century American Women,” 399; AO12/49/56–8, 102/80; 13/45/530, 64/76–7, 65/529–30, 67/192, 68/125, 81/59, 96/263, 102/1107; Thomas Goldswaith to daughter Catherine, Aug. 20, 1779, J. M. Robbins Papers, MHS. No systematic courts-martial records survive for the Continental Army. Orderly books recording courts-martial show very limited evidence of sexual abuse proceedings. See Neagles, Summer Soldiers; Gundersen, To be Useful, 144; Kerber, Women of the Republic, 46; Linda Grant De Pauw and New Jersey Historical Commission, Fortunes of War: New Jersey Women and the American Revolution (Trenton, NJ, 1975), 18–19. Robert Howe Orderly Book, entry for Mar. 10, 1778, WLCL. For modern data, see Robert M. Hayden, “Rape and Rape Avoidance in Ethno-National Conflicts: Sexual Violence in Liminalized States,” American Anthropologist 102:1 (2000).

44. For soldiers in Loyalist regiments sentenced to death for rape, see William Kelby, ed., Orderly book of the three battalions of loyalists commanded by Brigadier-General Oliver De Lancey 1776–1778 (Baltimore, 1972), 86, 93–4; WO71/86/200–206; Orderly Book of General Sir A. Campbell, HQ Staten Island, Apr.–Sept. 1778, June 1, 1778, HM 617, HEH. John Graves Simcoe, Simcoe’s Military Journal (New York, 1844), 212; Simcoe to Cornwallis, June 2, 1781, Cornwallis Papers. Greene: NG to Catherine Greene, Dec. 16, 1776, PNG, i: 368–9. On rape, imperial conflict, and conquest generally, see Goldstein, War and Gender, 365, 369; Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis, MN, 1993); Wolfgang Reinhard, Lebensformen Europas: Eine Historische Kulturanthropologie (Munich, 2004), 368–9; Jansson, “Soldaten und Vergewaltigung,” 201–5; Foster, Sex, 55; the quotation from the Independent Chronicle in the following paragraph is at 64.

45. Galloway, Letters to a Nobleman, 42–3. On Galloway, see also Wiener, Civilians, 145–6; Ferling, The Loyalist Mind.