Chapter 12. The Committees of Safety and the Militias

The American Revolution was to innovate very remarkable revolutionary institutions, many of which were to resurface in popular uprisings throughout the world. Perhaps one of the most remarkable of these innovations was the network of revolutionary committees that emerged at every level of society, which were to constitute the authentic engine of the Revolution—later to be emulated in the French Revolution and in other comparable upheavals well into the twentieth century. When the First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in September 1774 to create a Continental Association designed to end all intercourse with Britain, it also set up a specific mechanism to implement its goals. Article 11 of the resolution passed by the Congress on October 20 recommended “that a committee be chosen in every county, city, and town, by those who are qualified to vote for representatives in the legislature, whose business shall be to observe the conduct of all persons touching this association”—that is, to enforce the boycott of British goods.[159] These committees were to examine every shipment of imports that arrived from Britain after December 1,1774, and to supervise the disposition of confiscated goods.

In accordance with this resolution—and very much on their own initiative as well—ordinary citizens began to constitute grassroots, county, and provincial committees throughout the colonies. Although the Continental Congress expected that the various colonies would instruct the Committees of Correspondence to enforce the Continental Association, these committees were already so overburdened with responsibilities that smaller auxiliary bodies were formed to perform special duties, which generally went under the name of Committees of Safety. By July 1775 the Continental Congress called upon every colony to establish a Committee of Safety, presumably to take on the overflow of work that nonimportation committees were unable to handle, thereby legitimating their existence as special revolutionary bodies.

Committees of Safety were not entirely unprecedented historically, but nowhere else did they emerge on a scale even remotely comparable to that created in America in the late 1770s. During the English Revolution of the 1640s and 1650s, the House of Commons had established bodies with that name to deal with crucial situations that required swift action by a small number of elected parliamentary representatives. But the British committees of safety were primarily parliamentary bodies; they rarely had local roots.

By contrast, the Committees of Safety in the American colonies were generally far-flung popular bodies whose insurrectionary pedigree reached back to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when William and Mary replaced lames II, a revolution that aroused widespread hopes for greater liberties not only in England but the colonies as well. In both Boston and New York City the citizenry had risen in insurrections to unseat Court-approved executives of James by men of their own choosing. In New York, many citizens harbored long-term resentments against their heavy tax burdens, the highhanded behavior of Lieutenant Governor Francis Nicholson, and the arrogance of a small, privileged oligarchy composed of established families such as the Van Cortlandts and Philipses that exercised firm control over the colony. In the spring of 1689, Nicholson, who was slow to inform the people of the change of royal power that had occurred in England, aroused widespread popular suspicion, which, together with fears of a possible French invasion of the city, led to a broad uprising. Nicholson was obliged to flee from his own province, and in June the city’s affairs had been placed in the hands of an elected Committee of Safety composed of sixteen members, led by the commander of the rebel militia, Jacob Leisler, a German merchant immigrant. Driving the ruling merchant- landowner elite from office, Leisler had replaced them with a wider social spectrum of officeholders and remained at the Committee’s head for some eight months until he assumed the title of lieutenant governor of the entire province, replacing the Committee with a conventional executive council. In March of the next year, Leisler was arrested, tried, and hanged, and the entrenched oligarchy whose rule he had temporarily disrupted was restored to power in the province.

But Leisler’s Committee of Safety had established a precedent that was not easily forgotten. Even before the recommendation of the Continental Congress in October 1774, Committees of Safety had spontaneously sprung up in almost every patriot province, county, city, and town, each elected by the people of the area to enforce the Continental Association. In some areas, the Committees appeared under a variety of names, such as Committees of Supply and Committees of Observation and Inspection, which zealously saw to it that the Continental Association boycott was honored. As Governor Dunmore of Virginia complained:

A Committee has been chosen in every County whose business it is to carry the Association of the Congress into execution, which Committee assumes an authority to inspect the books, invoices, and all other secrets of the trade and correspondence of Merchants; to watch the conduct of every inhabitant without distinction, and to send for all such as come under their suspicion into their presence; to interrogate them respecting all matters which, to their pleasure, they think fit objects of their inquiry; and to stigmatize, as they term it, such as they find transgressing what they are now hardy enough to call the Laws of Congress, which stigmatizing is no other than inviting the vengeance of an outrageous and lawless mob to be exercised upon the unhappy victims.[160]

Although Dunmore’s description specifically cites committees that were established to implement nonimportation of British goods, the distinctions between mere boycott and open revolution became increasingly murky.

The Continental Congress provided little guidance on how the committees were to gain the personal adherence of their fellow citizens to boycott British goods or gain pledges to consume only what America could produce itself. “The Continental Congress laid down the program on general lines,” observes A.C. Flick, “but let each colony devise its own ways and means.”[161] The first method of the committees was relatively genteel; they simply published the name of any individual who violated the Continental Association in the local press. To ferret out more surreptitious violators of the boycott, in some places copies of the Continental Association document were circulated for signature by the people, and those who refused found their names listed in the press as well.

In time, during recess periods between meetings of a legislative body—be it a town meeting, a county convention, or a provincial congress—the local Committee of Safety often became a temporary executive authority to meet the growing and varied needs of the revolutionary cause. As Margaret Burnham Macmillan observes, the loyalist royal governors in 1774 and 1775 were “compelled to admit that entire new revolutionary governments, parallel and coexistent with the old authority, had been established in their respective provinces.”[162] In December 1774, Virginia governor Dunmore warned in alarm: “Every County ... is now arming a Company ... for the Avowed purpose of protecting their committees, and to be employed against government, if occasion require.”[163] Between June and October 1775, most of the royal governors took refuge on offshore British warships or in British military fortifications. There were, to be sure, exceptions. The governor of New Jersey, for example, remained in office, although the revolutionaries placed his house under guard, intercepted his mail, and finally arrested him in June 1776. The governor of Connecticut, on the other hand, remained in office throughout the war, prudently working together with the committees, and even became governor of the new state of Connecticut after the Revolution. On the other hand, the governor of Maryland, who was very popular with the elite strata of the colony, was forced out of office when more vigilant revolutionaries discovered that he had been in correspondence with Britain and with the loyalist governor of Virginia.

In time, the Committees began to meet continually, even during the sessions of the various bodies whose duties they had only temporarily taken over, often assuming executive powers when they were not granted them outright. As such, they became a revolutionary executive during the period from the end of the rule of royal governors to the adoption of new state constitutions for patriot governments. Indeed, once actual military operations began, their tasks expanded enormously, well beyond the enforcement of the Continental Association. They became the active forces par excellence in overseeing the authority of the Revolution, coordinating military efforts where necessary, issuing enlistment orders, setting quotas for the number of militia each town was expected to provide, and mobilizing troops for existing militias and the new Continental Army. It was the committees that often procured arms for the militias, equipped them with supplies, and cared for the dependents of absent troops. In many cases, the committees functioned as the collective commanderin-chief of the militias, and commonly maintained close surveillance of known or suspected loyalists, even rounding them up for questioning and imprisonment. They fixed prices, confiscated loyalist property, and when necessary conducted military operations, appointing officers when they were not elected by their men. Where no institutionalized patriot judiciary existed, the committees generally functioned as revolutionary courts.

It was these bodies, as Richard Alan Ryerson points out, that gave grassroots institutional embodiment to the democratic ideals espoused by revolutionary intellectuals. If “the American Revolution was a seminal event in world history,” Ryerson writes, it was “not because it proclaimed the right of revolution, but because it developed the ideological, governmental, and popular means to bring about a revolution.” Indeed, it took that democratic ideology “out of the realm of theory and rhetoric and into the domain of reality and action.”[164]

With the exception of Rhode Island, every colony had a Provincial Committee (or Provincial Council) of Safety at one time or another during the course of the Revolution, working with coexisting county and local Committees of Safety that often outlasted a provincial committee’s dissolution by new state institutions. The Committee of Safety in New Hampshire, among the longest-lived in the colonies, was not disbanded until June 1784, three years after British troops began to debark from the former colonies, while the Connecticut committee lasted until 1783. Some committees had very limited authority, as in Massachusetts, while others had virtually dictatorial powers.

The structure established in North Carolina almost ideally exemplifies the structure that existed to one degree or another in nearly all of the colonies.

Established in September 1775, the province’s carefully graded structure of committees consisted of a reliable and patriotic Provincial Council of Safety, whose thirteen members were elected by the Provincial Congress together with two members from each of the province’s electoral districts. County committees formed the next tier of the structure, followed by Committees of Safety that met quarterly in major towns of each elected district. Not only did the committees direct the local militia, but they functioned as appeals courts for Tory defendants whom the all-important local committees had convicted of offenses against the patriot cause. The town Committees of Safety were elected annually by the local freeholders. Ranging in number from seven to fifteen members, they established their own operating regulations and were free to arrest and confine all suspected Tories. The local militias, which they organized and commanded, often served as the real force in the communities and counties. The militias, it should be added, elected most or all of their officers, and they played a decisive role in winning a given town or region to the revolutionary cause.

By no means were all the Provincial-level Congresses and Committees of Safety eager to carry out the responsibilities that had been thrust upon them. A number of them conspicuously lagged behind the local, district, and county committees, which were usually notable for their revolutionary zeal and initiative. Although the local committees were given a broad latitude in carrying out their responsibilities, they eagerly took many matters into their own hands. Thus in New Hampshire it was the local committees that typically undertook the job of rooting out Tories, confiscating their land, mobilizing and equipping militia forces, and caring for the dependents of militiamen on active duty. In New Jersey, the main function of the Committee of Safety and Inspection seemed to consist almost entirely of dealing with Tories. The province had become a battleground for bitter conflicts between Tories and patriots, exploding in widespread bitter guerrilla warfare, especially in areas where the fronts between British and Continental armies were still ill-defined.

At the provincial level of some provinces, however, uncertainty about the outcome of the conflict and fear of reprisals after a possible British victory undoubtedly caused many moderate patriots to be wary of undertaking overt anti-British activity. Not only were they glad to leave the responsibilities of supporting the Revolution to the local Committees of Safety, but in Maryland, to cite an extreme example, the provincial committee was composed almost completely of the more “respectable,” prudent and hesitant supporters of the Revolution. So conservative was this committee, in fact, that it tended to deal with patently Tory officials with remarkable deference. There, Continental Army officers such as the militant General Charles Lee had to turn to the radical Baltimore committee, composed largely of workmen, to challenge the provincial committee and circumvent the governor’s barely disguised support for the British.

On the other hand, patriots in the New York City area were often in the minority and were obliged to depend mainly on committees at the provincial level to countervail the strong loyalist sentiment in Westchester, Queens, and Kings Counties and on Staten Island. In these counties, patriots actually lost control of the local Committees of Safety to virtual loyalists, who carried out none of their obligatory functions. So moderate was the provincial revolutionary government of New York that General Washington, John Hancock, and General Lee had to urge it to take stronger measures against Tories to keep the city from falling to the British. When the city finally did fall in the autumn of 1776, the local committees were disbanded and the city became the major gathering place for Tories from throughout the provinces.

Thus, throughout the provinces the local committees often acted on their own, beyond the strict control of the provincial committees. In general, “the central government [of a province] had no means of enforcing authority over [the county committees],” observes Agnes Hunt, a historian of moderate political views. “These county committees ... were tenacious of their local supremacy and stood as a complete barrier against any attempt at centralization which must precede any practical exercise of independence in a central executive.”[165] The Committees of Safety, in effect, emerged as a dual power on every level of sovereignty, county and local as well as provincial, even paralleling various provincial congresses as well as the Continental Congress itself.

Like the French revolutionaries a decade later, the patriots’ civilian authorities in the American Revolution were continually suspicious of possible coups by the military—and, as it turned out, their suspicions were often quite warranted. Thus, some Committees of Safety openly resisted any attempt by the Continental Army to dictate orders to them. “Committee of safety members usually were civilians well imbued with the prevalent distrust of unchecked military authority,” Macmillan notes.[166] In Massachusetts the Provincial Committee was accountable only to the Provincial Congress and assiduously upheld the supremacy of the civil authority over that of the military. When General Ward of the Continental Army ordered a Massachusetts committee to place its military stores at the discretion of the army’s officers, the committeemen complied but solemnly took the pains to assert the authority of civilian institutions over that of the military, warning, “It is of vast importance that no orders are issued by the military or obeyed by the civil powers, but only such as are directed by the honorable representative body of the people, from whom all military and civil power originates.”[167]

Essentially, all the institutions for a revolutionary democracy were very much in place in areas controlled by the revolutionaries. The New England town meeting was extended to many communities along the Atlantic seaboard and even to inland frontier settlements. Outside New England, as one patriot later recounted, resistance leaders envied the New England town meetings and their ability to unite “the whole body of the people in the measures taken to oppose the Stamp Act induced other Provinces to imitate their example.” Even sizable cities developed popular assemblies of one kind or another that were markedly democratic. Thus, Charleston’s patriotic local artisans consciously imported the New England town meeting to their city, an act that was all the easier because the city was unincorporated on the eve of the Revolution and lacked municipal bodies that patriots might use to press their resistance to British rule. In time, the town meeting gradually became the municipal government of the southern city. Initially, in 1768, “mechanics and many other inhabitants of this town” gathered to urge that South Carolina join the other provinces in the nonimportation agreement; by September 1769, merchants and planters began to attend the boycott committee, so that the meeting soon became a “general meeting of inhabitants ... to consider of other matters for the general good” besides nonimportation. The same “general meeting of the inhabitants of and near Charlestown” then convened in late 1773 in order that the “sense of the community might be collected” on its response to the passage of the Tea Act, followed again in March 1774 by another meeting on the closing of the port of Boston. Finally, this “general meeting” called upon the various parishes of South Carolina to choose delegates to a General Convention, which thereupon formed a committee in which as many as half of its members were mechanics. Typically, Christopher Gadsden, the leading South Carolina Whig, distrusted the Charleston town meeting as a disorderly mob and even defamed it in 1778, when he speculated that the people’s “running upon every fancy to the meetings of liberty tree” was a “disease among us far more dangerous than ... the whole present herd of contemptible tories.” The Charleston town meeting continued to be the municipal government of the city for a total of fifteen years, until the city was incorporated by the state legislature in August 1783.[168]

Nor were the newly formed revolutionary militias immune to the democratic fervor that swept over the colonies. In Baltimore, to cite a remarkable example, democratic practices had so completely imbued the local revolutionary militia that its troops actually assumed the lead in democratizing the city’s lagging institutions. “At a time when Baltimore had no elective offices,” observes Charles G. Steffen, “privates were suddenly choosing their own officers.” With the strong democratic spirit that existed among the citizen-soldiers, Maryland’s provincial convention of 1775 abrogated its previous policy of appointing local militia officers and “permitted companies to elect officers below the battalion level,” Steffen notes. The temper of the militias suggests that the assembly gave this “permission” only reluctantly; in any case, popular impulses to democratize the militia swept over the entire province. “Across Maryland the new militia law sparked a revolution within the units, as soldiers debated openly the merits of their prospective commanders.” The “mechanics” or artisans and other urban workers who made up much of the militia chose officers to lead them who were “fellow mechanics, not... merchants, lawyers, or physicians; only a decade of experience in the Mechanical Company, Sons of Liberty, and Mechanical Fire Company could have prompted such independent action.”[169] As a result of the popular initiative unleashed by the Revolution and the revolutionary storm that erupted following the beginning of hostilities, many local militias soon came to be as democratic as that of Baltimore. Similarly, captured American seamen who were taken prisoner formed their own prisoners’organizations: “Separated from their captains and governing themselves for the first time, on their own they organized into disciplined groups with bylaws: in microcosm the prisoners went through the whole process of setting up a constitution.”[170]

MILITIAS AND LOYALISTS

Every stratum in the American provinces was affected by this storm: the merchants and artisans who could or would not sell their goods to the British; the farming families bereft of manpower or subject to requisitions by both sides of the conflict; the black slaves who overheard talk of equality and inalienable human rights; and the wealthy landowners, merchants, speculators, financiers, as well as privileged artisans—not to speak of the thousands of bureaucrats and officials in the king’s service who lived in deadly fear of the “leveling” language of the revolutionaries. Indeed, as Richard Alan Ryerson points out, the colonies were politically divided, industrially feeble, and militarily unprepared. The only strong element of their capacity to resist Great Britain was their will. Extraordinary self-sacrifice would make them powerful, visible sacrifice would unify them. When thousands of patriots publicly cast their timid self-interest aside, they reinforced the courage of all.[171] Indeed, it was mainly through the zeal of the ordinary citizenry that the war could possibly be won.

And it was a war that was fought within every city and in many towns and villages. If we accept John Adams’s estimate, one-third of all Americans were patriots, and another third were loyalists, while the remaining third were “neutral.” In fact, it would have been very difficult to be neutral during these demanding times: the revolutionary committee system that reached into the very marrow of colonial society—the sheer depth of the revolution, penetrating into every aspect of everyday life from New England to the Carolinas—left little room for indifference. Almost everywhere, patriots viewed loyalist sympathizers with intense suspicion, even if they did not commit overt acts in support of the British. C.H. Van Tyne, a historian sympathetic to opponents of the Revolution, recounts in considerable detail the patriots’ growing, active suspicion toward loyalists. “Exclusion from public favor was the first step in the political purification,” he notes. “This social ostracism was at first informal. After the first violent agitation and discussion there was a breaking of old bonds. Loyalists were sent to Coventry by their townsmen. Old friends did not speak as they met; neighbors ignored neighbors; Whig and Tory drifted further apart, because neither modified the views of the other by friendly argument”[172] Lists of loyalist sympathizers were published, their businesses boycotted, and their homes often burned to the ground. Their presses were smashed by irate patriot crowds, while other loyalists were refused any services by tradesmen and mechanics. In Massachusetts in 1775 alone, two hundred conservatives, including the Hutchinsons, left America altogether.

Nor was it easy to hide one’s views—neutral or otherwise—from public surveillance. Loyalists had initially been identified by their refusal to sign on to the Continental Association, but patriot committeemen soon found that it was far too easy for someone to conceal his or her loyalty to the Crown by simply signing their name. To make identification more certain, loyalists or neutrals were identified by their failure to volunteer for militia associations or muster with the patriot militia. Other activities that soon came to constitute punishable acts in support of the Crown included writing or speaking against the American cause; harboring or associating with known Tories; being “in arms against the liberties of America”—meaning, arming oneself or others in support of the British; recruiting soldiers to fight for the British; drinking to the health of the king; even rejecting Continental currency.

Betraying the American cause soon became a punishable crime. According to resolves that the Continental Congress passed in August 1775, suspects arrested for antipatriotic crimes could be tried by a local Committee of Safety, and their property temporarily placed in the custody of “some discreet person” whom the Committee could appoint. By January 1776, even so moderate a patriot as General Washington described the loyalists as “abominable pests of society,” demanding that “vigorous measures, and such as at other times would appear extraordinary, are now become absolutely necessary.”[173] In March the Congress recommended that all arms found in the possession of nonassociators, persons “disaffected to the cause of America,” and those who refused to take an oath of loyalty to the patriot cause be confiscated and placed in the temporary custody of a county committee. When General Washington complained to the Congress in June 1776 about the activities of loyalists in New York, the province was ordered to create better means “for detecting, restraining, and punishing disaffected and dangerous persons in that colony.”[174]

As the conflict intensified in scope and bitterness, punishment of loyalists increased in severity, ranging from denunciation to fines, and worse. A loyalist in Baltimore was required to pay five hundred pounds to the revolutionary government, as well as nine shillings daily to each of the soldiers assigned to “guard” him under house arrest. In time, Tories were tarred and feathered, or tried and imprisoned. Weapons that had been confiscated only temporarily were kept for permanent use on behalf of the patriot cause. Indeed, revolutionary committees became increasingly ruthless in their treatment of their loyalist opponents, turning themselves into revolutionary tribunals, sentencing loyalist spies to death and filling prisons with supporters of the Crown. Some loyalists were exiled to other states; North Carolina’s Committee of Secrecy, War and Intelligence recommended that loyalists captured in the Battle of Moore’s Creek be sent to Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, since “their pernicious influence... might and probably would prove fatal.”[175] Some revolutionaries held convicted Tories as prisoners of war in what Van Tyne calls “reconcentration camps.”[176] Finally, temporary confiscations of real and personal property became permanent possessions of the patriot cause and were sold off to support the revolutionary army. Indeed, sweeping confiscations of personal wealth, livestock, crops, and land that followed gave the American Revolution that “leveling” quality that conventional historians tend to ignore.

After the mid-1770s, patriots seethed with so much hatred toward the loyalists that even seemingly authentic neutrals, whom both sides, in fact, tended to view as closet opponents, began to suffer retribution. Very likely, many “neutrals” drifted from one side to the other, changing their allegiances with the fortunes of the contending forces. Beyond New York City and Long Island, the virtual capital of the British Army in America, the areas controlled by the patriot and British forces shifted back and forth incessantly and were marked by eversharpening conflicts and destruction.

But even if British regulars had taken and held all the urban centers and larger towns of the colonies, it is highly unlikely that they could have been able to conquer the rural areas in which the majority of Americans lived and worked. For the redcoats to go too far inland was to risk decimation and defeat at the hands of armed yeomen, who easily changed from farmers into guerrillas. In January 1777, Washington’s rout of a substantial British force at Princeton demonstrated that the British were incapable of holding the northern rural areas for any extended period of time, and were limited primarily to capturing and occupying colonial cities. It is not accidental that after General Howe captured Philadelphia on September 26, 1777, he made no attempt to pursue Washington into the countryside, where the battered Continental Army took refuge at Valley Forge, some twenty miles to the northwest. Although Howe might have all but wiped out the patriot forces in a conventional battle, he prudently chose to settle back with his army in the safety of urban surroundings. “The British could not win,” observes Jesse Lemisch, “precisely because the Americans were fighting a popular war”—and one that the redcoats could not hope to win in the countryside, as the Battle of Saratoga was to prove.[177]

The victory of the Americans over Major General John Burgoyne at Saratoga in October 1777 was not only the turning point of the war, but graphically testifies to the populist nature of the conflict. Burgoyne’s ill-starred Saratoga campaign in the summer of 1777 was undertaken to cut New York off from New England, an enterprise that would have divided the northern colonies along the Hudson River. But “Gentleman Johnny” was hardly the man to lead an army of 4,000 British regulars, 3,000 Hessians, 1,000 Canadian militia, and highly unreliable Indian allies through the dense wilderness that separated Fort Ticonderoga at the southern tip of Lake Champlain from Fort Edward on the Hudson. Overloaded with baggage, with the families of his officers, and with supplies that were more suitable for conventional warfare in open country than a conflict in a heavily forested region, the army was slowed to a snail’s pace, eventually to no more than one mile a day. This highly encumbered force contrasted markedly with the lightly equipped yeoman militia it opposed, which enjoyed enormous maneuverability and close proximity to a home base, and was thoroughly familiar with the terrain.

Part officer, part light-minded courtier, “Gentleman Johnny” took nearly a month to reach Fort Edward, which the Americans by then had already abandoned. Lacking sufficient food for his men, Burgoyne made two expeditions into the countryside, which aroused all the patriot forces in the area. The first expedition went up the St. Lawrence River to Oswego and then into Mohawk country, where it encountered such strong patriot resistance that it retreated back into Canada, completely abandoning the main force under Burgoyne’s command. The second expedition moved into the Hampshire Grants (later Vermont) and was wiped out by the Green Mountain Boys under the command of General John Stark. So completely had Burgoyne’s march stirred up the countryside that zealous farmers and militia—almost twice as numerous as Burgoyne’s own forces, which were now reduced to a mere thousand as a result of the two failed expeditions—surrounded him at Saratoga and forced him to surrender on October 17. Most of the men who brought this well-armed, largely European military force to a standstill and then to defeat were not professional soldiers but armed farmers organized into militia units under elected officers, who fought more as an armed people than a professional army. The defeat served to reinforce British fears that rural America was not secure battleground on which to deploy a largely uninspired conventional military force, however easily it could capture cities and towns along the Atlantic coast.

With this victory the Revolution sharpened in intensity, and patriot and loyalist fought each other with increasingly vicious measures. The conflict was fought by fair means or foul, in nearly all the colonies and at all levels of social life. Aside from more traditional forms of military engagement, guerrilla warfare sprang up everywhere, a “partisan warfare,” as Charles Royster calls it,[178] with all its attendant bitterness and cruelties. Once the British troops entered the countryside, they came under attack from revolutionary farmers, using tactics of “mobility, withdrawal, and unexpected counterattack; they fled only when they could not win and turned and fought only when they had a good chance of victory.”[179] Snipers often decimated small detachments of British regulars and wiped out their patrols. Patriot guerrillas used roadblocks to impede the movement of British supplies, destroyed bridges that the redcoats needed in order to move in the wild countryside, conducted sudden raids from behind stone fences, and waged demoralizing small-scale engagements, until it was difficult, often impossible, for the British regulars and Hessian mercenaries to operate in the rural areas.

Loyalists, too, took up arms in support of their own cause. Southern backwoodsmen who smoldered with resentment toward the patriot tobacco planters, together with adventurers of all sorts who found the conflict an invitation to pillage and profiteer, incongruously joined royalist elites to form a “loyalist party” and, once the conflict had crossed a river of blood, established a military and guerrilla force in their own right. It is estimated that in New York, the loyalist base for most of the war, some 42,000 American loyalists created a Tory militia that often fought with British regulars. Together with small or large forces elsewhere in the colonies, they carried on a furious, continual assault against the patriot forces. The region between Newburgh, New York, and Manhattan became a blood-soaked guerrilla battleground in which the Tories massacred whole families and burned their homes to the ground. In New York generally, yeoman farmers played less of a role in the Revolution than elsewhere because much of the province’s agriculture was dominated by landed families, unlike in New England, with its fiercely independent towns and villages. Inasmuch as the British never altered the old Dutch patroon system after their capture of New Amsterdam, many of the big landholders became Tories.

By contrast, a furious struggle ravaged the Mohawk River valley of the province, where newly settled yeomen farmers—many of whom, in fact, were uncommitted to either side—were harassed by Tory guerrillas, such as Sir John Johnson’s Loyal Greens and John Butler’s Tory Rangers, who behaved with exceptional brutality toward all settlers in the area.[180] In early 1776, General Schuyler, leading a force of Tryon County militia, captured the arms of the thousand-man loyalist force in the region, naively releasing Johnson on parole—who then continued with his guerrilla activities, fleeing to Canada only after he learned that Schuyler was again in pursuit of his forces.

Even more brutal than the Tory raids in the North were those which were led by Benedict Arnold in the South. Arnold had defected to the British and came to be hated as much by his countrymen for his cruelty as for his betrayal of the patriot cause. During the southern campaign commanded by General Charles Cornwallis, loyalists took full vengeance not only on the patriot forces but on civilians whom they suspected of being patriot sympathizers. These raids were often carried to the point of near extermination of patriot frontier settlements.

So much had the Revolution cut across ethnic as well as social lines that Loyalists readily allied themselves with aggrieved Indians and white ruffians, who spared neither women nor children in their attacks on outlying settlements.

The American Revolution, in effect, was a harsh civil and social war. Landlord, merchant, yeoman, tenant, artisan, ropemaker, or freight carrier—all who signed its documents and fought as guerrillas or spies—were fair game for one side or the other. For every Burgoyne or Cornwallis who led well-organized British troops with flags flying and drums beating, there were others who served the king as guerrillas with extreme brutality. By the same token, the patriots often terrorized the loyalists in their midst into silence, forced them to flee abroad, divested them of their wealth, and occasionally executed them as spies. But if the revolution was a bitter fight for “home rule,” as Carl Becker put it in 1909, it was also a fight for “who shall rule at home.”[181]