from Butler [John Butler, leader of the Loyalist Butler’s Rangers] desiring all the friends of government to join him, and bring their cattle together with their wives and families and they would be kindly received by the said Butler.” For those for whom the carrot was not sufficient, there was a stick. Shortly after the reading of the proclamation, the loyal Indian leader Joseph Brant appeared on the scene with a party of warriors. He ordered a number of the settlers to go with him, or if they did not, “to take their own risks.” His meaning could not be mistaken and the settlers went.6 Episodes such as this make it clear that desperate conditions in the war led to drastic measures and some consequent blurring of the lines between Tory and Whig. Indeed, especially in the frontier regions, the issues which initially divided Patriot and Loyalist were often lost in the confusion of raids, massacres and lawlessness, blood spilt and vengeance extracted, as the revolutionary conflict became increasingly savage.
Given the swirl of disparate motives that could decide loyalty or rebellion, it is not surprising that for many colonists the final decision was a highly individual one. If many small farmers in New York and Pennsylvania fought for the crown, the vast majority of farmers across the colonies did not. If many German-Americans remained loyal, German-Americans were also at the core of the successionist movement in New York. Large numbers of North American Indians actively supported the British but many more remained apathetic. The Revolution split families and divided business partnerships. Old friends became bitter enemies.
A contemporary account of the War of 1812 contains this revealing account of an incident in that war involving the Glengarry Fencibles:
In this regiment there were a father and three sons, American U.E. Loyalists, all of them crack shots. In a covering party one day the farmer 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.
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
