As She Began - Bruce Wilson

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and one of the sons were sentries on the same point. An American rifleman dropped a man to his left, but in so doing exposed himself, and almost as a matter of course, was instantly dropped in his turn by the unerring aim of the father. The enemy were at that moment being driven in, so the old man of course (for it was a ceremony seldom neglected) went up to rifle his victim. On examining his features he discovered that it was his own brother. Under any circumstances this would have horrified most men, but a Yankee has much of the stoic in him, and is seldom deprived of his equanimity. He took possession of his valuables, consisting of an old silver watch and a clasp knife, his rifle and appointments, coolly remarking, that it “served him right for fighting for the rebels, when all the rest of his family fought for King George.” It appeared that during the Revolutionary War his father and all his sons had taken arms in the King’s cause, save this one, who had joined the Americans. They had never met him from that period till the present moment; but such is the virulence of political rancour, that it can overcome all the ties of nature.7

      The American Revolution was truly the first American civil war.

       2

      The Loyalist War out of Canada

       Adam Crysler flattened himself in the brush near the road, positioned his rifle, and listened intently. His scouts had informed him that a large rebel party from Schoharie was in hot pursuit of his small band. They had attacked the night before and had been driven off. Now they were renewing their offensive. At moments like these, Crysler’s mind turned back over the last few turbulent years. It would be ironic if it all ended for him here. Crysler had been a solid citizen of Schoharie with a fine farm, a grist mill and a sawmill. When the troubles began, he had had no hesitation in publicly declaring his loyalty to the king. For his courage, he had been taken prisoner by the agitators and permitted to go at liberty only under sentence of immediate death for the least assistance to the king’s cause. A man not easily frightened, Crysler had proceeded to organize seventy whites and twenty-five Indians at Schoharie and had engineered a devastating ambush against the rebels before fading into the wilderness. In November 1777 he had arrived at Fort Niagara with one hundred Indians. Colonel John Butler made him a lieutenant in his Rangers and Crysler’s life from that point had been a blur of marching and hiding, interspersed with brief, violent bursts of action. He had hammered Canatasago in three separate raids, put the torch to the Wyoming and Cherry valleys under Butler, attacked the German Flats with Captain Caldwell, raided the Susequehanna and himself led several successful raids on Schoharie. It was brutal and bloody work; he was constantly numbed and exhausted. Yet Crysler and his compatriots were winning. The rebels now hardly dared to stick their noses beyond their own thresholds. One day soon, Crysler knew, these rebel lands would again be ruled by their rightful sovereign. He pressed himself even flatter on the grass and waited.1

      The Americans do not see the Revolution as a fratricidal conflict. The preferred popular image is one of an entire people rising up united against the British oppressors. The course of the actual warfare is seen as a confrontation between vigorous frontier pragmatism and stilted European tactics – canny American marksmen with their squirrel guns, hiding among the trees and picking off British regulars as the redcoats marched stiffly past in their serried ranks, their drums beating and their flags flying. Native participation in the war is portrayed in the American myth as the actions of blood-thirsty savages who, egged on by brutal British Indian agents, carried out an uncontrolled campaign of plunder and indiscriminate slaughter.

      Aside from the inaccuracies in the depiction of the British regulars, it is far from true that the redcoats fought alone. Over 19,000 Loyalists served in provincial corps during the Revolution, and they were accompanied by several thousand Indians. Some of the largest and most consistently active Loyalist regiments, the Royal Highland Emigrants, the King’s Royal Regiment of New York and Butler’s Rangers, as well as the rangers of the Northern Indian Department and several smaller corps, all operated from British bases in Canada or near to the present border. Substantial segments of these corps settled in Ontario after the war. These units had an impressive battle record; they served, for the most part, not as auxiliaries of the regular army but as guerillas, loosely organized in small bands, highly mobile and adept at living off the land. Moving swiftly through hostile territory, they swept down in devastating raids upon the northern and western colonial frontiers. They, not the rebels who lived in terror of them, were the most successful frontiersmen of the Revolutionary War.

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      The Warriors: Uniform Buttons

      The buttons illustrated here are, with one exception, reproductions. The exception is the button at the far right in the top row. Silver plated, it is an officer’s button with a crown and stand of arms, reading simply “Rangers.” It was found near Fort Anne, Vermont, and may well be a King’s Ranger button from the revolutionary period. The buttons from top to bottom and left to right are: a Royal Provincial button, generally worn by the provincial corps, especially the smaller ones; a Butler’s Rangers button; a King’s Rangers button; a button of the 8th (or King’s) Regiment of Foot, a regiment of the regular army which served extensively at the upper posts; a button of the 84th Regiment of Foot (or Royal Highland Emigrants), a unit raised in North America, but placed on the regular establishment; and lastly, a variant of the 84th button.

      The Loyalist guerilla parties were fluid groupings usually composed of elements from several provincial corps, together with substantial numbers of their native allies. The Indians were a key element in the military successes of the Loyalists, providing much of the driving fury that fuelled the frontier campaign. The loyal Indians were not, however, the sadistic animals lusting after slaughter their American opponents accused them of being. Indeed, the various tribes were initially reluctant to involve themselves in the conflict and were inclined to remain neutral. The actions of the Indian Department in defusing what had threatened to be a major Indian war in 1774 had appeared to the Indians to be treachery and had cooled their ardour for the British cause. The tribes, moreover, were perplexed by the Revolution. The quarrel seemed to them to be an unnatural one, a controversy between brothers. As the Oneidas, one of the Iroquois tribes, informed Governor Trumbull of Connecticut, “We are unwilling to join on either side of such a contest, for we love you both – old England and new. Should the great King of England apply to us for aid – we shall deny him – and should the colonies apply – we shall refuse.”2

      Like it or not, it was a certainty that the Indians would become involved in the controversy between the colonies and England. They were simply too valuable as allies to be ignored. Despite early attempts to encourage Indian neutrality, both sides quickly turned to seeking Indian aid. In this contest, the royalists were almost entirely successful. With the exception of some Oneidas and Tuscaroras of the Six Nations, a handful of Indians from Canada and Nova Scotia, and a few Delawares on the Pennsylvania frontier, all the Indians who took up arms during the Revolution remained loyal. However, not all Indians nominally on the royalist side committed themselves enthusiastically to the contest. Those of Nova Scotia, the Canadian Indians of Quebec and the Indians of the Illinois Country took no more than a sporadic interest in the war. Those who offered consistent support were the Six Nation Iroquois of Upper New York State and the Ohio Indians – that is, the Delaware, Shawnee and Mingo. What divided the participants from the non-participants was self-interest. The New York Iroquois and the Ohio Indians by the time of the Revolution found their tribal lands threatened by the pressure of white settlement. The other Indian groupings were not as immediately menaced. The Ohio Indians and the Iroquois felt they had little choice but to fight for their homelands and they believed the British were more likely allies of their cause than the Americans. The Indians who allied themselves with the British were waging their own war within the larger Revolutionary conflict. Like the loyal whites, they fought for definite purposes of their own, not for any blood lust.

      Even before the Indian braves had been drawn into the war, the white Loyalists were beginning to organize. In April 1775, Lieutenant-Colonel Allen Maclean of Torloisk, the Isle of Mull, who had extensive previous military service in North America, was authorized by George III to raise a regiment among “our subjects who have, at different times, emigrated

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