DURING THE YULETIDE SEASON in New York, William Franklin was embraced by the influential and wealthier American Tories, who admired his courage, integrity, and willingness to suffer any indignity rather than give up his allegiance to the Crown. They still called him Governor and looked to him for leadership. It was generally assumed that Franklin was staying there simply to learn everything he could about the living conditions on the island and the army’s plans; then he would depart for England.
He certainly feared for his safety, to have been so secretive about his street address. Letters are discreetly headed “New York.” He probably stayed in rooms let by William Hick, in the dwelling formerly occupied by his late wife, on Dock Street. Used to confinement, the governor now moved within a triangle of streets in lower Manhattan whose vertex was St. Paul’s Church at the upper end of Broadway, where Elizabeth was buried, down to British headquarters, the Kennedy mansion, at the foot of Broadway near the western battery, over to Dock Street on the southeastern quay.
One could walk the whole perimeter in an hour looking up at the spires of half a dozen churches saved from burning. Fires here started just after the British occupation had destroyed the northwest quadrant of the city. Five hundred houses burned north of Broadway, as well as the nave and bell tower of Trinity Church south near Wall Street. Loyalists believed the fires were set by rebel incendiaries under orders from General Washington. The most recent blaze, in September, had leveled the warehouse where Governor Franklin’s furniture, books, and papers had been stored.
At the head of Broad Street stood City Hall, a three-story building with wings that now quartered the Main Guard; the Royal Exchange crouched upon immense stone arches at the foot of the same street, at the city’s center. There were four enormous sugar houses: one now used to dry tobacco, another as a prison. Broadway was the raised backbone of New York and there were markets and theaters all up and down it, taverns and coffeehouses, and the famous Fly Market stood at the foot of Maiden Street. This market, whose name comes from the Dutch word vly, “meadow,” sold meat and fish, and so was aptly named.
Manhattan was crowded with loyalist refugees, tens of thousands who lived wherever they could find a bed. The poor pitched tents upon the foundations of burned and gutted buildings, so the ruined quarter northwest of Broadway became known as canvas town. High-ranking soldiers had commandeered the best houses, and the wealthier American Tories were able to afford rooms in homes where the rent quadrupled in two years. Inflation was rampant, and food, clothing, and fuel were often difficult to find at any price. Rebels surrounded the city, controlling supply lines, holding New York hostage.
So Franklin was fortunate to find himself in a place where he was revered, and grateful for any hospitality. He had lost nearly everything. Gaunt yet handsome, he was the image of the counterrevolutionary, a man capable of anything because he has nothing to lose. In this character he walked the streets: across the island from Dock to Broadway, past the portico of St. Paul’s, down Broadway to General Clinton’s headquarters and the fort with its turreted barbicans, its battlements, overlooking Bowling Green. Safe here, a British citizen under protection of the king’s army, he could not venture outside the stronghold of New York without risking his life.
Of course he was free to board a ship and sail for England, following in his friend Galloway’s footsteps. But his reluctance to leave the scene of action compelled him to remain tethered to this stubborn, dwindling British colony. Arriving with well-tempered hopes and a prospect that the empire he had long served would prevail against the rebels, he envisioned a plan of collaboration between the American loyalists and the British army.
The war itself had moved eight hundred miles south, to Georgia and South Carolina. In the New York winter of 1778–79 it would be, for all purposes, invisible. This was as frustrating to Henry Clinton as it was to William Franklin and the rest of the loyalists who longed to fight the rebels in New Jersey and Connecticut. They milled about the streets and taverns grumbling, bored, and frustrated they were not allowed to fight for their own country.
What Benjamin Franklin had accomplished at Versailles in February 1778, the treaty of alliance with France, England’s greatest enemy, had swift and far-reaching results. On March 13, England declared war on France, the alliance automatically took effect, and Lord Germain ordered Major General Clinton to transform his military strategy in America. Clinton quit Philadelphia in May, leading a caravan of fifteen hundred wagons bearing military supplies and booty from patriot homes. The army marched to New York past vicious defiance at Monmouth and began preparing the campaign in the south, certain of strong loyalist support there.
General Clinton understood the danger of a French, American, and Spanish coalition in the south, but he hated shipping such huge battalions to the region as Germain had ordered. This would weaken his main army in the mid-Atlantic, troops that had been battered at Monmouth, where only the bungling of Washington’s generals had saved Clinton from a crushing defeat. He offered up his resignation—it was refused. The arrival of the French admiral Charles Henri Hector, comte d’Estaing, that summer, in command of sixteen ships off Sandy Hook, blockading Lord Howe’s little fleet in the Bay, deepened Clinton’s despondency. He knew this was only the first of a parade of French and Spanish armadas that would bear down upon his dispirited soldiers.
Foreign wars are terribly costly when the invaders are not quick to prevail. At the close of 1778, no one knew who would win this sprawling war for independence, but certainly the Americans had time, and now international support, on their side. What remained uncertain was the slant of public opinion. Clinton’s advantage in the south was groups of colonists and some Indian tribes that remained loyal to the Crown. But communication was slow and dispatches from the front were maddeningly vague, so New Yorkers did not know what to make of a battle fought at Port Royal Island, South Carolina, or Kettle Creek, Georgia, in February. The news took weeks to arrive, by which time it might be irrelevant. It was possible to live in New York City as in a bubble, surrounded by Tories who seized upon every rumor of victory as fuel for their faith that the rebellion would fizzle out.
Tories might also grow discouraged by the leadership of the military government in the British-occupied city, as William soon learned. The generals’ condescension toward the American loyalists—the very patriots they were charged to defend—was astonishing.
Power and authority resided at No. 1 Broadway, the two-story English mansion of whitewashed brick overlooking the Hudson. There Major General Clinton had his headquarters. Governor Franklin paid his respects early in November 1778, at the first opportunity. Walking down Broadway he could glimpse the square cupola and widow’s walk surmounting the steep roof of tiles. One admired the symmetry of the Kennedy mansion: beneath the gable of the central section a Palladian triple window duplicated the entrance beneath.
Guards saluted. The governor was expected. The carved doorway led to wide halls. The drawing room, where the general held his war councils, was fifty feet by thirty, hung with crystal chandeliers that cast rainbows on the wainscoting. A recently knighted Member of Parliament, Sir Henry Clinton was Franklin’s age, forty-eight, a fair-haired, blue-eyed officer with large features and a pouting lower lip. His long, delicate hands looked more artistic than military. He was shy but also very brave, having sustained saber wounds in Germany during the Seven Years’ War that would have crippled a lesser man. His conversation swung from sullen taciturnity to overwhelming bluster. Suspicious, reserved, given to spells of melancholia, the general nevertheless had a first-rate military mind that was too often ignored by the ministry.
Clinton was one of three so-called peace commissioners at the long table who welcomed Franklin in November, the others being William Eden and Sir Frederick Howard, Earl of Carlisle. Their admiration for the governor upon his arrival that day was fulsome and explicit.
Franklin’s first appeal had to do with money. He had nothing, and his debt to Thomas Wharton had mounted into the thousands during his captivity. Knowing the governor’s sacrifice and his influence, the officials were eager to oblige, promptly granting him £1,200 in New Jersey currency (about $100,000). Soon to sail for England after a fruitless peace mission, Eden and Carlisle promised to acquaint Lord Germain with Governor Franklin’s situation, with a view to getting him a pension. That was the easy part. He would have enough to get by, and to rent a small house in a city where inflation had made a coat more costly than a horse had been.
Everything else Franklin wanted to discuss met with resistance. While the commissioners welcomed his aid as a propagandist, willing to pay him to keep the newspapers full of essays inviting Americans to forsake the cause of independence, Clinton was reluctant to discuss the military potential of the loyalists. A few Tories had been organized into Royal Provincial Regiments and had seen action; some served in the New York militia, guarding Manhattan. But the British regarded the Americans with so much distrust that they mostly declined to deploy them. To Franklin’s wonderment, the British army held the American Tories in low esteem for some of the same reasons their countrymen did. They saw the refugees as renegades who had fled for safety, forsaking their neighbors—they could not be trusted. Even if they could, these were not soldiers fit for the British mold, lacking the requisite training and character. It was this monstrous prejudice the governor discovered between the lines of his conversation with Henry Clinton.
Yet Franklin was not discouraged. When he returned to his lodgings he drew up a plan to create a Board of Loyal Refugees, men from six colonies who would work together to procure intelligence of the plans and movements of the enemy. The board would interview every refugee and prisoner who came through British lines and inspect captured letters. These members would be issued passes to move through the British lines and infiltrate the Continental Congress and the rebel army; then of course they would report to General Clinton.
Franklin sent this proposal with Eden and Carlisle when they sailed for England on November 27. He also gave them a letter to the colonial secretary, Lord Germain, a narrative of his own trials, hardships, and losses during the years since he was abducted from his home in Perth Amboy.
FRANKLIN’S LIFE DURING THE next two years was dedicated to getting American loyalists into the field. The British had come to put down a rebellion, but if they failed it would be the American Tories who would suffer, deprived of their homes, their property, their influence—and driven into exile. To William, the condescension of the British establishment, the very thing that had driven his father away from the motherland, seemed insane. At first he would not accept that it was systemic, instead attributing the attitude to Henry Clinton.
By this time General Clinton did not have much faith that his army and navy could put down the rebellion. And beyond a twinge of vanity, he did not care. Soon after his meeting with Governor Franklin at No. 1 Broadway, Clinton sent his aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Duncan Drummond, to England in order to present the general’s petition to be recalled. The king refused, declaring that no man but Clinton could save America. These flattering words brought him small comfort when they came in the spring of 1779. His command was listless. Governor Franklin had arrived with momentum at a time when the stagnant military government had left the refugees feeling helpless and hopeless.
So Franklin planned his board, essentially an intelligence agency, and next, with the aid of the grant he had received, he began reaching out to assist all “suffering friends of government,” families in the city, in Staten and Long Islands, and Tories in Connecticut prisons. He quickly got everyone’s attention by negotiating the release of some harmless Tory lumbermen who had been captured on Long Island and then faced trial for treason in Connecticut. Franklin had succeeded in spite of the doubts, fears, and meddling of the commander in chief. William had demanded that an equal number of rebel prisoners in Connecticut should be selected and retained as hostages for these unfortunate woodcutters, and Clinton was worried that British prisoners elsewhere would be endangered in response.
William got his way by pressuring General Clinton with lawyer’s logic and a startling, irrepressible authority. He demanded that those eight rebel prisoners be released into his custody, then he told the Connecticut court that if they did not free his eight woodmen, he would force the rebel hostages to dig a dungeon beneath the New York prison and live underground there on half rations. Within days the prisoners were exchanged.
Clinton’s pleasure that the loyalists had come home did not equal his vexation that Governor Franklin had upstaged him. He had succeeded in saving the prisoners’ lives, and in showing a determination that had long been missing—that the government would no longer stand by idly while some of the king’s best subjects were slaughtered with impunity. Many thought that Franklin deserved an appointment as superintendent of refugees. The man was perfect for the role, but Clinton wanted no such office and was naturally opposed to a newcomer who threatened the established order.
One of Franklin’s first political acts upon his arrival in New York had been to sign a petition to restore civil government. New York City under martial law was viciously corrupt. Civilians had no protection against British soldiers and bureaucrats, and violent crimes were everyday occurrences. A German officer wrote of “theft, fraud, robbery, and murder by the English soldiers,” excited by their love of drink, and as they received little money, they resorted to robbery and rape to get what they wanted.
A wartime army’s chief concern is for its survival; the rights of civilians come second. In a colonial city like Philadelphia, martial law was beside the point because the army was mostly kin to the civilians. But British and Hessians together might prey upon the Americans of Manhattan—and martial law enabled them, being a system not of justice but of maintaining the army. The punishments handed down by courts-martial for capital offenses—flogging, fines, jail time—were designed to restore the offender to active duty. It was terrifying to see a man who had been convicted of rape or theft back at his post, armed with a rifle, thirty days later.
The rebels’ blockade of the city created perfect conditions for bribery and a black market: a scarcity of wheat, beef, firewood, and other necessities. The city that had thrived upon the produce of the surrounding farms now depended solely upon imports for its staples. New York had rum and molasses aplenty, and these things were scarce beyond the blockades, so smugglers were eager to trade them in New Jersey for beef and meal. The illegal trading, essential to the military and civilians alike, was acknowledged by authorities with a nod and a wink; and of course a great deal of money greased the wheels at every turn of the merchandise.
Governing the city was the military commandant, a coveted position shared in turn by several British generals. Continuity was provided by the superintendent general, Andrew Elliot, a civilian Clinton appointed to oversee day-to-day trade and police operations. Elliot regulated prices, rents, and wages, and supervised the night watch. Every tavern keeper, peddler, auctioneer, distiller, and stable keeper—anyone who wished to do business—required a license from the police. Trollops and smugglers paid their dues under the table. In 1779, a commandant tried to limit the number of taverns to two hundred, not for any moral purpose but to increase kickbacks from unlicensed tapsters.
This was the garrisoned city that Franklin discovered in 1778, a power pyramid that rested upon illegal trade, blackmail, bribery, and authorized vice. In the middle of the structure stood quartermasters, barrackmasters, naval commissaries, clerks, hay inspectors, wood inspectors, rum inspectors, ration deliverers, and police of the night watch. Everybody wanted a piece.
And at the very top, with authority over all, was the commander in chief, Major General Henry Clinton.
Clinton had little interest in Governor Franklin’s crusade on behalf of the refugees, so William began to work around him. With his charm and organizational skills he started a club of refugees from many provinces that met at the City Arms, Hicks’s tavern on the west side of Broadway, next to the ruins of Trinity Church. Two blocks from Clinton’s headquarters, the place was popular with the soldiers, as this stretch of Broadway now made a promenade for the women of the city to display their finery in all kinds of weather. At the corners of the balcony and the piazza below were special tables for gentlemen of rank and reputation. At the head of his table, Governor Franklin hosted the Refugee Club. They drank rum, claret, and Madeira, smoked superb tobacco and Turkish opium, shared their stories of loss and defiance, and schemed for the future. They had nothing to hide from the British soldiers, as all had a common goal to put down the rebellion.
The idea of loyalists from many provinces banding together was novel and empowering. The refugees were impatient for a more aggressive strategy in the central colonies—a blockade of American harbors, bold guerrilla tactics, “one capital stroke,” as Franklin advised Lord Germain. Such talk irritated Clinton, who despised the overly optimistic refugees whose zeal had often outrun their prudence. He had no idea how frustrated they had become, stranded in New York, unable to march against the rebels.
That year the club plotted to create a force that would succeed where the British army was failing. The idea was to empower William’s planned Board of Loyal Refugees not only to gather intelligence but also to muster guerrilla units, terrorize rebel ports, free loyalist prisoners, and block rebel raids upon the Long Island Tory settlements. William’s petition to General Clinton went unanswered. Knowing Franklin’s intention, Clinton would not formally approve it; on the other hand, he made no effort to discourage any action that might trouble the enemy as long as it did not disrupt his command. Opposed to terrorism as a matter of policy, he was aware of the effects of it in the hands of an enemy. As Clinton’s adviser, Justice William Smith, once said, “Sir Henry wished the conflagrations, and yet not to be answerable for them.”
The loyalists did not wait for authorization. They began ordering retaliatory strikes in New Jersey and Connecticut. On March 27, one of the board, John Mason, sent out a letter headed “Warning to Rebels” promising that if they continued their murders and cruelties, six of their men would be hanged for every loyalist killed. Lord Germain approved, acknowledging a change in the conduct of the war. It had become what General William Tryon called “desolation warfare,” that final lawless paroxysm when arson, rape, and murder prosper under the lex talionis, an eye for an eye, the Golden Rule gone to the devil.
Tryon, former governor of New York, was now Major General Tryon, Commander of Provincial Forces in America under Clinton’s direction. Tryon was one of two men in Clinton’s inner circle who liked Franklin and served as a broker between them. The other was the head of British secret intelligence, the stage actor, painter, and poet, twenty-nine-year-old Major John André. One of the most fascinating men of his time, the major burned brightly and would not live long in its welter. Franklin knew him in 1779, near the end of his tragic life. They had a curious connection: During the occupation of Philadelphia, John André had the honor of taking over the Franklin-Bache house in Market Street. Galloway figured the young poet, a man of refinement, would appreciate and take care of his friends’ valuables. The fact that André made off with Ben Franklin’s portrait, his harpsichord, and his spyglass does not seem to have stood in the way of his friendship with William, who was as charmed by the major as everyone else was.
First John André and then William Tryon represented Governor Franklin in the war room at No. 1 Broadway. With so many old contacts in New Jersey, Franklin quickly established a network of spies behind rebel lines, and he reported directly to Major André. His secret intelligence encompassed troop movements as well as loyalist sentiment regarding a counterinsurgence. George Washington, writing from headquarters in Middle Brook, New Jersey, on April 28, said he had heard that Governor Franklin had been appointed major general and commandant of new loyalist militia, and that already he was nominating civilians to replace the American government once Perth Amboy surrendered. The rumor was overblown, but founded upon the fear of what Franklin actually wanted to do.
André liked Franklin’s plan for a Board of Refugees, and he hoped the general would fund it. On May 29, Franklin wrote up the details in a letter to André meant for Clinton’s consideration. But the next day the army began a major offensive upon the rebel garrison at Strong Point, a strategic bridge over the Hudson. Clinton was so busy with this, and his campaign on Long Island, that he had no time, he explained, to answer Franklin’s petition. Years later he would admit that it was not the press of other business that diverted him but his belief that further plans to employ the loyalists would be a waste of resources. Far from useless, Franklin’s unchartered Refugee Club and its spy network were reporting the movements of rebel generals Anthony Wayne and Nathanael Greene in New York and New Jersey. And they mustered a militia at Lloyd’s Neck, Long Island.
On June 11, Franklin informed Clinton that the club’s militia at Lloyd’s Neck was embedded there, provisioned and fully armed, awaiting his orders. Clinton should have enlisted them, but pride and a perverse sense of failure deterred him. Angry and frustrated, Franklin then turned to his colleague Governor William Tryon, inviting him to intercede. A career soldier with a proven appetite for cold-blooded warfare and terrorism, General Tryon appreciated his friend’s rage and realized how much energy was stored up in the idle loyalists of New York. Wanting to fight, they refused to join the British for fear of being shipped to South Carolina. These men wanted action here and now, rescuing their own people. So Franklin drew up a proposal under the heading “Regulation of Refugees” and gave it to Tryon at the end of June.
Tryon was intrigued. Under the command of “some capable gentleman,” as William phrased it, the Tories were to be armed, provisioned, and equipped. They needed gunboats and guns, and authority to undertake expeditions wherever General Clinton did not expressly forbid them; everything was subject to his approval. If he preferred, he might order this regiment to support his own troops, but in that case the Americans would receive equal pay and privileges. They would own any plunder they seized during forays; and what prisoners they took would be kept separate from the army’s, to use in exchange for any of their own men captured.
William’s proposal included a peculiar clause forbidding any “excesses, cruelties or irregularities contrary to the general rules of war among civilized nations, unless by way of retaliation.” Qualified as it was, this provision was self-canceling. Already there had been so many atrocities on both sides that any cruelty might be justified as retaliation.
Tryon recommended the plan to Clinton the next day, specifying that the “capable gentleman” modestly mentioned must be William Franklin, of course. The force ought to be organized under the command of Governor Franklin with the title of Director General and Commandant of the Associated Loyalists, and he should have authority to appoint officers and give orders agreeable to General Clinton. General Tryon then rode off to command a campaign of terror in Connecticut, looting towns before setting fire to them. Franklin corresponded with John André, waiting for a response from General Clinton that never came, not that summer, fall, or winter.
At least William had money while he waited. He had received a cordial letter from Lord Germain saying the king was fully persuaded of William’s commitment and would reward his merit. The Lords of the Treasury were granting Franklin £500 ($76,000) for his present use and £500 per year as of January 1780. He was to appoint an agent in London to receive the money for him—that would be Mr. Strahan, of course.
The official adoption of Franklin’s plan for the Associated Loyalists was drawn-out and complex. André tried in vain to sway Clinton. The general’s blundering warfare in New Jersey and New York, and his constant wrangling with his admiral, convinced him that British morale would be best served by mounting an expedition in South Carolina. Deciding to take personal charge of this distant campaign, he embarked with a legion of fourteen thousand soldiers on Christmas Day.
Left to themselves, William’s club, or the Associators, as they came to be known, commenced conducting espionage and guerrilla warfare along the coast. Their ten vessels attacked ports in Connecticut and Rhode Island. After the British commander in chief sailed away without a word, a loyalist named George Leonard, who had been bankrolling the club’s expeditions out of his own dwindling fund, got on the next ship bound for England. In his pocket was Franklin’s plan that General Tryon had submitted to Clinton long ago. He would give it to Lord Germain when he got to London.
Lord Germain liked it, and he wrote to Clinton on April 21 ordering that Franklin’s plan be put into effect. Leonard sent the good news to him on May 3, and their letters reached New York simultaneously, in June 1780, just before Clinton returned, in triumph, from South Carolina. He dodged Franklin for two weeks before ordering his secretary to show him Germain’s letter, without commenting or hinting how he would respond.
Months passed. One day in September, William was at headquarters on an errand and Clinton approached him. Out of a clear blue sky he asked what had been done to establish his proposed board. William blinked. He replied that the group did not have a copy of Germain’s letter, and they had received no official order to proceed. Calling for the letter, Clinton declared he was in favor of it, and turned the paper over to him.
And so began another game of cat and mouse, Franklin rewriting the damned plan to please the commander in chief, and Clinton nitpicking and stalling and caviling until there were so many restrictions upon Franklin’s authority it all seemed useless. Finally there was a document that satisfied no one but would have to suffice. The final draft was completed on Christmas Day 1780 and submitted to Clinton. At last he signed the documents, on the twenty-seventh, forced by the order from Germain.
William Franklin was to be president of the Board of the Associated Loyalists, with powers limited by the commander in chief and unlimited liabilities.
IN CLINTON’S WAR ROOM that autumn, the Intercolonial Council that met at the long table discussed the terrible predicament of William’s friend John André. Major André had gotten tangled up in Benedict Arnold’s plot to surrender West Point to the British for £20,000. Returning from a meeting with Arnold on September 23 in civilian clothes, with incriminating letters from Arnold in his stocking, he was arrested by militiamen near Tarrytown and taken to Continental Army headquarters at Tappan. There he was held while George Washington went to West Point to question Arnold, who had just time enough to sneak away to the garrison in Manhattan before Washington confirmed his treason.
Major John André was left holding the bag. Washington convoked a board of American generals presided over by Nathanael Greene that included such luminaries as Lafayette, Von Steuben, Lord Stirling, and Henry Knox. As a court-martial, the generals saw no choice but to condemn André to death as a spy. Receiving this news the following day, September 30, General Clinton convened his council to consider what might be done to save his favorite aide from the gallows. Governor Franklin, outraged, distraught, advised challenging the evidence that André was a spy, but he was voted down. Instead, the council sent a letter to Washington condemning his ignorance of military procedures and threatening a stern reprisal if the major was executed. They announced that a commission was on its way there to discuss the matter.
The delegation, headed by General Robertson, sailed up the Hudson on Sunday, the first of October, to a meeting place near Tappan, bringing Major André his uniform and razor. George Washington had sent General Greene there to talk with the British. Robertson argued, as well as he could, the protocols concerning prisoners, the right to escape in civilian clothes, André’s right to suborn an enemy officer, and other considerations. Besides, the major was young, and brave, a stalwart who refused to place the blame upon Benedict Arnold. Greene and the other generals were really sorry for the gallant, poised, and eloquent officer who reminded many of Lafayette—no one in his right mind wanted to see such a person die. But Washington could think of no way of sparing André without violating military justice and demoralizing his soldiers.
Benedict Arnold wrote to Washington that if André were executed, he swore to heaven that His Excellency would be made to answer for the torrents of blood that would be spilled in consequence. Arnold promised that he himself would retaliate against any one of Washington’s soldiers unlucky enough to fall into his power, and that forty patriots in South Carolina would be hanged.
It is said that Washington’s hand trembled as he signed John André’s death sentence. On October 2, surrounded by a crowd of civilians and soldiers, the young man stepped up into a wagon. He drew two handkerchiefs from his pocket, knotted together. Removing his hat and scarf, he tied his own blindfold with steady hands, slipped the noose over his head, and tightened it around his throat, sparing his executioner. “I pray you bear me witness that I meet my fate like a brave man,” he declared. The wagon lurched and pulled away and he hung in the air in his red regimental coat and black boots. Few witnesses could forbear weeping at the sight of the hanging man.
This was a crucial provocation in what Tryon had called the warfare of desolation. Washington was deeply disturbed by Arnold’s betrayal and the chance of more defections. He wrote in distress about the fitful fluctuations of his army, and the importance of West Point, complaining on October 18 that his army was dwindling to nothing. It appeared to him then that the enemy was free to ravage the country whenever and wherever they liked. William Franklin hoped so. The execution of his friend André was appalling, and might have been his own fate but for the grace of God. He wrote to Strahan on November 12 calling the execution “a shocking, bungling piece of business.” Franklin grew bitter.
But in 1781, Governor Franklin was authorized to retaliate; Clinton had signed the articles of organization at the end of the previous year. A circular had been issued announcing the charter of the Board of Loyalists, to be headed by President Franklin whose men enlisted not as British soldiers but as Americans answering to the board. The charter stated that their aim was to take arms and help suppress the rebellion by harrowing the seacoasts of the revolted colonies and upsetting their commerce. No innocent people were to be hurt. Loyalists who served would share in the captured spoils, and anyone who served for the rest of the war would receive two hundred acres as well.
By March the Board of Loyalists was in full swing. William played several roles for which his life experience had prepared him: military strategist, commander, and mediator between the American Tories and the British high command. All of his sacrifices on behalf of the Crown, his zeal and integrity over so many years, were an inspiration to many thousands of loyalists who stepped up to serve him. He had become the most influential, the most revered, and probably the most powerful American loyalist.
With his commission came a secretary, Sampson S. Blower, and a house at No. 4 Nassau Street, where the board made their headquarters. It stood in the center of the city on Broadway between City Hall and the towering New Dutch Church. In the little house on Nassau Street, in the shadow of the great church tower, Franklin presided over the paramilitary organization, planning hundreds of missions. Most involved a ship or two and a dozen to three dozen men sent to capture stores, livestock, or prisoners. The time and labor involved in planning and documenting these missions—not to mention listing and managing the companies—was staggering. Plus, every detail had to be relayed to Clinton. Men drawn to guerrilla warfare are not always orderly, and President Franklin had his hands full in keeping these companies on task and under control.
What did they accomplish? There are glimpses in newspapers. On March 1, Captain Cornelius Hetfield and four other refugees under cover of night crossed the Raritan River from Staten Island to the village of Spanktown, five miles west of Rahway. There they dragged out of bed John Clauson, commissioner for selling confiscated property, and took him prisoner, along with an ensign who tried to rescue him. The two patriots were taken to Staten Island and never heard from again. Later that month a handful of Associators hatched a plot to kidnap one Josiah Hornblower, Speaker of the Provincial Assembly, who lived in Newark. A renowned mechanic, he had built the first steam engine in America, and worked such wonders of military engineering for the patriots that it would be useful for the Tories to capture him. They tried on March 29, but Hornblower outwitted and escaped them.
More typical was the raid upon the town of Closter, high up on the Hudson. During a two-day expedition in March the marauders robbed the village of everything of value that was movable. Almost weekly there were raids somewhere in New Jersey. Elizabethtown, across the river from Staten Island, was a favored target. On May 4, a party of refugees carried off forty head of cattle, and on June 2, a sniper there killed Private Richard Woodruff.
There is no evidence that Franklin ever left New York for active duty upon any of these errands. He surely would not have risked it. On the garrisoned island he was fortunate, at night, if some assassin did not dispatch him with a dagger; lucky, eating his breakfast, if he was not poisoned. He relied upon young soldiers like Thomas Ward.
Captain Thomas Ward commanded a corps of loyalists who foraged with axes in Bergen County to provide firewood for New York. Valiant and resourceful, the captain realized his feeble blockhouse at Bergen Point on the Hudson was not only vulnerable, it was too far south to serve the guerrillas as a base for raids upon the farms and forests of the Hackensack Valley. Fort Lee, across from Harlem, would be better. One of the memorable actions of the Associated Loyalists occurred on May 14, 1781, when a fleet of gunboats bearing two hundred troops landed near Fort Lee under Captain Ward’s command. They quickly scared away the militia pickets and began building a new blockhouse upon the remains of this fort that George Washington had abandoned in 1776.
The rebel commanding officer there put out a call to the Bergen County militia, and three hundred patriots showed up to drive off the invaders. For five days the fighting was fierce. At his headquarters in New Windsor, George Washington got word of it and ordered Colonel Alexander Scammell and his corps to mobilize. General Clinton heard of it and got a thousand troops ready to sail away—Hessian riflemen, as well as loyalists from Bergen County. But a British colonel, arriving first to assess the action, ordered Captain Ward and his marines to return to their ships and give up the fort as they could not secure it.
While Fort Lee was not a major battle, it had been a costly diversion, worrying General Washington and wasting the energy of an entire corps of crack soldiers who came from Westchester County and crossed the river at Nyack. The patriots marched around from Closter to Tappan in the rain and mud before learning that the Tories had gone back to New York. Captain Ward was promoted to the rank of major.
THE EXPEDITIONS FRANKLIN PLANNED in his office on Nassau Street that summer and autumn were not glamorous. But an important post was established at Lloyd’s Neck on the north shore of Long Island, with a well-armed garrison under the command of Colonel Joshua Upham and a warship named the Henry Clinton. From this point his loyalists in brigs conducted raids along the Connecticut coast, skirmishing with rebel guards and capturing horses, cattle, and sheep.
More damage was done in New Jersey. Up and down the coast from New Jersey to Rhode Island, foraging and looting—it was impossible to know exactly what went on. Given such license, the terrorists were not likely to inform upon one another. The tactics of terror were viewed as retaliation, and the reports of patriot atrocities were bloodcurdling. In early summer the Board of Associated Loyalists had sent unlucky agents down to Maryland to liberate prisoners in Frederick Town and Sharpsburg and raise a force that would aid Cornwallis as he moved up from the Chesapeake, dividing the rebel army, south from the north. In Frederick, one of William’s men, mistaking an American officer for a disguised Tory, passed him letters detailing the plot. Seven Tory conspirators were brought up before a rump tribunal and summarily convicted of treason.
The sentence the judge handed down—for the crime of enlisting men to the service of the king—echoed the Dark Ages: “You shall be carried to the gaol of Frederick town, and be hanged therein; you shall be cut down to the earth alive, and your entrails shall be taken out and burnt while you are yet alive, your heads shall be cut off, your body shall be divided into four parts and your heads and quarters shall be placed where his Excellency the Governor shall appoint. So the Lord have mercy upon your poor souls.”
Usually the cruelty was more random and spontaneous. General Nathanael Greene, observing the war in the south, wrote that the rebels seemed determined to exterminate the Tories, and the Tories the rebels, and if a stop was not soon put to the massacres, “the country will be depopulated in a few months more.” Naturally William Franklin was most sensitive to rebel acts of terrorism in New Jersey. He was particularly alarmed by developments in Monmouth County, where an Association for Retaliation had been murdering Associated Loyalists in Freehold and Shrewsbury for three years. He kept count—it was more than a dozen killings. In the case of the loyalist Jacob Fagan, the man died of his wounds and was buried by his friends; then the rebels dug him up and carried his corpse to Colt’s Neck, where they hung it in chains from a chestnut tree a mile from the courthouse.
The patriot “Retaliators” worked under the leadership of General David Forman and Joshua Huddy, a vicious, disowned Quaker, troublemaker, and felon. After the Battle of Monmouth, General Forman’s duty was to report to General Washington on British warships from New York to Little Egg Harbor, fifty miles to the south. In his spare time he was to suppress the Tory guerrillas, who called him Devil David. As for Huddy, the times and the task suited his temperament. As a captain of the New Jersey militia he had led raids upon merchants smuggling for the British, capturing and sometimes murdering loyalists as the spirit moved him. He liked to boast of his cruel deeds, and it is said that Huddy looked like a pirate with a black beard, a headscarf, and an earring.
Now both armies had a new adjective for what the war had become: “intestine.” As Abner Nash, governor of South Carolina, put it, this was “a country exposed to the misfortune of having a war within its bowels.” Back in September 1778, a newlywed New Jersey loyalist, Stephen Edwards of Shrewsbury, was in bed with his wife when Captain Jonathan Forman (no relation to Devil David) knocked at his door in Eatontown. The captain, leading a party of cavalry from the New Jersey militia at midnight, knew where to find the Tory because their families had known each other for years. His wife tried to hide Stephen under the blankets. That he was disguised in a maid’s outfit and cap did not fool Captain Forman. Searching the house, he found papers that led him to believe the bridegroom in a gown was a spy.
The rebels took Stephen Edwards to the jail in Freehold on a Saturday. On Monday at ten in the morning he was hanged from an oak tree shading the portico of the Monmouth Courthouse. Joshua Huddy was proud to say he was one of the party that captured and hanged the first loyalist spy in Monmouth County. He told the world he was the man who had greased the rope and pulled it tight around Edwards’s neck.
More than a year passed before William Franklin was able to orchestrate a reprisal in Huddy’s hometown of Shrewsbury, on the river below Sandy Hook. On April 30, 1780, Captain William Gillian led a party of seven loyalist marauders on a mission there to capture the privateer brig Elizabeth and some prisoners—including Huddy, if he could be found. The loyalists, most of whom were from the area, included Richard Lippincott and Philip White, both of whom were relatives of young Stephen Edwards and wanted revenge.
The Tories made short work of the Elizabeth, capturing the vessel and its captain. But they ran into trouble soon after their door-to-door pillaging began. Entering the home of one John Russell, guns blazing in the night, the raiders met with rebel gunfire from sixty-year-old Russell and his son, and a surprisingly complex bloodbath followed. Captain Gillian, born and raised in Shrewsbury, grabbed the old man by the collar and was about to bayonet him in the face—though he was mortally wounded—when the fire suddenly blazed up, illuminating the scene. The younger Russell, who lay bleeding on the floor, took a bead on Captain Gillian and shot and killed him outright. John Farnham, a loyalist from nearby Middletown, then leveled his musket at Russell Jr. and meant to shoot him when Lippincott, suddenly recognizing a kinsman, knocked away the weapon, crying there was no need to shoot a dying man. He then got on with ransacking the house. Russell’s widow, screaming, and John Jr.’s wife and five-year-old son were cowering in a back bedroom. Somehow in the confusion the child was struck by a bullet and wounded, but he managed, like his father, to survive.
Try as they would, the Associated Loyalists could not catch Joshua Huddy. In August, the Continental Congress issued him a commission to man a gunboat called the Black Snake to attack British shipping and loyalist strongholds. He was so destructive that in September, William Franklin ordered a surprise attack upon his sturdy house in Colt’s Neck. An hour before dawn, sixty loyalists, led by the notorious commander Titus Cornelius, a runaway slave the British had given the honorific “Colonel Tye,” surrounded Huddy’s well-built wood frame home. A gunfight ensued. Huddy and his twenty-year-old mistress, Lucretia Emmons, somehow held the refugees at bay for two hours, firing from different windows as if they were five persons. Tye, badly wounded in his wrist, at last set fire to the house. Only then did Huddy agree to surrender on the condition they leave the girl alone.
When Colonel Tye and his men were returning to their ship with the prisoner and some livestock, the rebel militia arrived, muskets booming, to rescue Huddy. They killed six Tories before the rest made it aboard the vessel with their prisoner. As they weighed anchor, the militiamen kept shooting from the shore, wounding Huddy in the thigh. Then this cat with nine lives leapt overboard, shouting to his comrades, “I am Huddy! I am Huddy!” and swam ashore to live, and terrorize loyalists, another day.
While Captain Huddy’s leg healed, gangrene set in to Tye’s wound and he died of it. And the Committee of Retaliation, a shadow government in the lawless barrens and coves of Monmouth, arranged to plunder and butcher the refugees whenever they could, settling old scores with the Tories in the name of liberty. Franklin lobbied for gunboats and guns, with small success. In Freehold there was a vacant lot owned by General Forman that became known as the Hanging Place for the dozen Tories who had been lynched there without ceremony.
It was Devil David, and Captain Huddy, and the bloodshed in Monmouth County that troubled William Franklin’s sleep during that terrible night, October 23, 1781, when all were awakened by the sound of cannon fire upon the Jersey Shore.
A celebration was under way. News of Cornwallis’s surrender had come to New Jersey.