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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 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 from the North West parts of North Britain and have transported themselves to New York.”³ Maclean concentrated on recruiting former Highland soldiers who had fought during the Seven Years’ War and had afterwards settled in Quebec, Nova Scotia and the Mohawk Valley. Maclean and his Royal Highland Emigrants, along with small numbers of Indians, played an important role during the rebel invasion of Canada in 1775-76. Small groups of Canadian Indians and Indian Department personnel were involved in the attempt to stop the advance of Richard Montgomery’s rebel army up the Lake Champlain-Richileu River route in the fall of 1776. Two hundred and fifty Royal Highland Emigrants were at Montreal when it was captured by Montgomery in November. The Emigrants fell back to Quebec City where they, along with the 7th Regiment and the French Canadian militia, threw back the onslaught of the combined forces of Montgomery and Benedict Arnold in their New Year’s Eve assault on the fortress. After the relief of Quebec in the following spring and the mopping-up operations which cleared the Americans from the province, a portion of the Royal Highland Emigrants assumed garrison duty at posts in Quebec and along the Great Lakes. In 1778 the corps appeared as the 84th Regiment of Foot on the regular army establishment. After the war, a sizable contingent from it settled in Ontario.

The Warriors: “A Captain of the Royal Highland Emigrants,” artist unknown

The Royal Highland Emigrants were raised to a large extent from disbanded soldiers who had served in North America in the Seven Years’ War, particularly with the Black Watch and Fraser’s Highlanders. Their magnificent uniform was patterned on that of the Black Watch, except for the sporran which would normally have been of badger pelt but in this case was racoon, probably because of the greater availability of that pelt in the new world. The uniform was meant to be a lure to Highlanders to enlist, as the public wearing of the kilt had been generally proscribed since the defeat of the Highlanders at Culloden Moor in 1746.

By mid-1775 events were leading towards the formation of a more prominent Loyalist regiment. The Johnsons were gathering their forces in the Mohawk Valley. In June, under increasing pressure from rebel sympathizers, Guy Johnson, the superintendent of the Northern Indian Department, along with his chief aides, removed to Montreal. Sir John Johnson, Sir William’s son, stayed behind; by late 1775 he and his neighbours had secretly agreed to form a battalion in the king’s favour and had actually “named all the Officers.” They were held back, however, by the American General Philip Schuyler who maintained firm control of the Mohawk Valley with a large force of outside militia. Sir John Johnson was a comparative stranger to many of those from the New York frontier who would serve with him. Then thirty-four years of age, he had been educated at a distance and afterwards had made a prolonged visit to England, where he had been knighted by the king in recognition of his father’s services. He had then resided for several years in Albany and New York, both before and after his marriage to an heiress and lady of fashion. Reserved and distant in manner, Johnson never gained the popularity and local influence of his father. Nonetheless, because of his position and parentage, he was the acknowledged leader of western New York Loyalists.

By early 1776, the Patriots were tightening their grip on the New York frontier. In May an American regiment was ordered to march upon Johnson Hall and take Sir John and his principal adherents dead or alive. Johnson, having had prior warning of the attack, escaped to Canada. With him went a large number of Tories and a few Mohawk Indians as scouts. This group, numbering 170, arrived safely in Montreal after a long and arduous journey through the woods, “being nine days without anything to subsist upon but wild onion roots and the leaves of Beech Trees.” When Johnson returned again to New York, it would be at the head of a provincial regiment which he called the King’s Royal Regiment of New York (Royal Yorkers for short) and which the Americans nicknamed Johnson’s Greens. Johnson was given a commission to form such a regiment in June. It grew slowly at first, amounting to only 300 men by the end of its first year. Ultimately it would total more than 1,290 men, making it the largest single Loyalist corps to operate in the northern theatre of the war.

The Warriors: “Sir John Johnson” (1742-1830), artist unknown

The son of Sir William Johnson, Sir John was superintendent of the Northern Indian Department from 1783. He had served in both the Seven Years’ War and against Pontiac’s Rebellion. Sir John commanded the King’s Royal Regiment of New York, known as the Royal Yorkers, the largest Loyalist unit to be raised in Canada during the course of the Revolution. In 1784 he was entrusted by the government with the general supervision of Loyalist settlement in central Canada areas. Because of his family connections, Johnson was one of the most prominent Loyalists to settle in that region.

The Warriors: “Joseph Brant” (ca. 1743-1807), by William Berczy

Joseph Brant was the Indian leader who most fully accepted the war aims of the crown as defined by British military leaders. He was in turn the chief spokesman of the Indian interest to their white allies. Indian-raised and white-educated, he was a man of many parts. From the age of twelve, he had participated in the Seven Years’ War and later in an expedition against the Western Indians. He acted as a translator and interpreter for the Indian Department and in course of his varied career translated the Gospel of St. Mark, a primer, the liturgy of the Church of England and other religions works into Mohawk. He served fully throughout the course of the Revolutionary War. At its end, he settled at Burlington Bay near the Grand River, where he continued as the Iroquois’ chief spokesman in the adjustment to the new conditions, and their major leader in wider Indian affairs. His sister, Molly Brant, was the Indian wife of Sir William Johnson and in her own right exercised a formidable influence in the council of the Iroquois.

A Loyalist war leader whose status would become every bit as great as that of Sir John Johnson was Thayendanegea, or Joseph Brant. A Mohawk Iroquois who had been educated by whites, Brant was a devout Anglican and a Freemason. He spoke at least three and possibly all of the Six Nation languages, and had frequently been useful as an interpreter in the Indian Department. His attachment to the Johnsons and his devotion to what he felt was the best interest of the Indian peoples made him a valuable ally for the British. Joseph in his turn was dependent upon his relations with the British. He was not a traditional chief or sachem of the Iroquois. He exercised his influence as a war chief, an office open to any brave who by the force of reputation and personality could draw together a war party and lead it. Even though he showed great capacities in that role, Brant was not ranked by the Iroquois as their most distinguished war chief. His prominence came as spokesman of the Indian interest to their British allies. Joseph’s education and his reliability endeared him to the whites, and they respected and admired him for his degree of acculteration. His complete dependability attracted British officials to him and raised him high in their esteem. Brant would be the linchpin in British-Indian relations both during the war years and for three decades afterwards.

In November 1775 Brant, together with Guy Johnson and other members of the Indian Department, had travelled to England. He returned in July 1776 fully convinced that the only salvation for his people lay in complete and active support of the royalist cause. During the winter and spring of 1775-76, while the Iroquois clung to their wavering neutrality, Brant made a wide-ranging tour through their territory, encouraging active involvement, gathering about him a party of about one hundred warriors and raising enthusiasm for the British cause.

At the same time John Butler, the Indian agent at Fort Niagara, was also working to break the Indians’ neutrality. Butler, who, like Johnson and Brant, would be a major figure in the early settlement of Ontario, was the son of a British soldier. As chief translator of the Indian Department, he had risen to be right-hand man of Sir William Johnson. Butler has been described as “a fat man, below middle stature, yet active. . . . Care sat upon his brow. Speaking quickly, he repeated his words when excited. Decision, firmness, courage were undoubted characteristics of the man.”⁴ Butler was a highly ambitious and driving individual who by early 1776 was turning all his considerable energies to encouraging Iroquois resistance of the Revolution. By a combination of feasting, drinking, gifts, reminders of ancient alliances and eloquent speeches, Butler single-handedly convinced three hundred Senecas to participate in the major campaign of 1777, thus decisively breaking the Indian neutrality by engaging an important segment of the Six Nations in the war.

The Warriors: “John Butler” (1728?-1796), by Henry Oakley

Butler was the most successful and the most feared of the Loyalist military leaders. The son of an officer in the British army, Butler was closely associated with the British Indian Department from early manhood. He served extensively in the Seven Years’ War, being second-in-command of the Indians when Sir William Johnson took Fort Niagara in 1759 and holding the same post in Amherst’s force advancing on Montreal. He was instrumental in winning the Iroquois to active participation in the Revolution on the British side; from 1777 he directed his own corps, Butler’s Rangers, in a devastating series of raids against the American frontier settlements. It has often been contended that Butler and his men were motivated by hatred and a desire for revenge. Their operations, however, had the important objectives of denying supplies to the Continental army and drawing off as many rebel troops as possible from operations further east. In these objectives Butler was enormously successful.

The entry of the Iroquois into the conflict seemed to come at a propitious moment. In the early years of the Revolutionary War, from 1775 to 1777, the British had attempted to strike first at rebellion in the north of the American colonies where resistance had been strongest. The rebels had had some early successes in forcing the British out of Boston and taking Fort Ticonderoga, the key to the passage of Lakes George and Champlain to Canada. When the Americans attacked Quebec City in December 1776, however, as we have seen, they were utterly defeated. The British pressed forward in the following year to take New York City and then pushed down towards Philadelphia, which they occupied in 1777.

The other major campaign the British undertook in 1777 was what they hoped would be a decisive blow against the rebel strongholds in the northern colonies. General John Burgoyne with a sizable army was to drive from Canada down Lake Champlain and the Hudson River to Albany, thus forcing a wedge between the solidly disaffected New England colonies and their more moderate sisters. An auxiliary force under Colonel Barry St. Leger and Sir John Johnson was to subdue the Mohawk Valley and then join Burgoyne on the Hudson for the main thrust. This second army, totalling 1,400 men, consisted mainly of Loyalists. It brought together for the first time the partisans who had been gathered by Johnson, Butler and Brant.

On August 3, St. Leger’s forces laid seige to Fort Stanwix, a rebel-held post near the head of the Mohawk Valley. When the American General Nicholas Herkimer attempted to relieve the garrison, he marched straight into an ambush carefully laid at Oriskany Creek by Butler and Brant. In savage hand-to-hand fighting during a torrential rainfall, both sides lost heavily. The rebels, although in possession of the field, were too weak to pursue the invaders. Despite their costly success at Oriskany, the Loyalist forces, equipped with insufficient artillery, were unable to crack the well-fortified Fort Stanwix. Disheartened by their own heavy losses, the besiegers had little stomach for holding on. False rumours of the approach of a massive American army led to the precipitous retreat of St. Leger’s little force. In revenge for Oriskany, Mohawk villages at Fort Stanwix and Fort Hunter were sacked by the Americans. Numbers of Mohawks fled behind the British lines.

Meanwhile, Burgoyne had advanced from Canada with an army of 7,000 regulars and German mercenaries accompanied by 680 Canadians and Loyalists and 500 Canadian Indians. Burgoyne’s Loyalist contingent consisted of a number of fledgling corps formed in 1777 – the Queen’s Loyal Rangers under John Peters, the Loyal Volunteers commanded by Francis Pfister and the King’s Loyal Americans under Ebenezer Jessup. In addition there were small groups under Captain Daniel McAlpin, Dr. Samuel Adams and Lieutenant Samuel McKay as well as a corps of bateaux men raised for the duration of the campaign. None of these units would survive in the form in which they existed in 1777 or grow to significant proportions.

Many of the Loyalists with the Burgoyne expedition were used in the hazardous tasks of maintaining supply lines, foraging, road and bridge repairs, and scouting. Some, notably the Queen’s Loyal Rangers, saw heavy fighting. The losses of the Loyalists were heavy and the rank and file of several units dwindled drastically. Burgoyne used the Indian warriors with his army to good effect, threatening to turn his braves loose on the frontier settlements. Panic-stricken, many colonists hastened to the British camp. Then a seemingly isolated incident nullified Burgoyne’s tactics. A small party of Indians escorting Jane McCrae, fiancée of a Tory officer, senselessly killed the girl. Horrified, Burgoyne demanded of his braves in the strongest terms that they abstain from indiscriminate warfare. This largely unjustified censure lost him the support of the bulk of the warriors, who deserted early in August. Most of Butler’s Senecas had returned home after the retreat from Fort Stanwix, but Brant’s party and others briefly joined Burgoyne. Finding he could do little to assist and being disgusted with what he considered the mismanagement of affairs, Brant returned to the Six Nations country. Others followed his lead.

The Warriors: “Colonel Guy Johnson” (ca. 1740-1788) by Benjamin West

Guy Johnson remained a rather peripheral figure in the Revolutionary War. A distant relation of Sir William Johnson, he married Sir William’s youngest daughter and was active in the Indian Department from 1759. He assumed the duties of superintendent in 1774 and the following year was one of the leaders of several hundred loyal residents who left the Mohawk Valley. Guy spent most of the war in London and New York, returning only in late 1779 to direct Indian affairs from Fort Niagara. He was replaced by his brother-in-law, Sir John Johnson, in 1783, because of his suspected involvement in a major provisioning scandal. In this magnificent portrait, Johnson is depicted in a combination of Indian and white garb which, although on a more modest scale, was typical of officers of the Indian Department. It has been stated that the Indian behind him is Joseph Brant.

For Burgoyne, things went from bad to worse. He did not receive the local support in New York that he had counted on. Dangerously handicapped by a slowness of movement and over-extended lines of supply and communications, Burgoyne’s army was finally surrounded and forced to surrender near Saratoga on October 17.

When the defeat of Burgoyne’s army was certain, some Loyalists began to fear for their safety, for they did not think they would be protected under the articles of capitulation in the same manner as the British regulars. With Burgoyne’s permission, large numbers of them slipped away and escaped to Canada. Along with those later paroled, they may have numbered as many as 560.

The surrender at Saratoga was a debacle of the first order for the royal cause. An entire army, which the British could ill afford, had been completely lost. No major offensive using regular troops would again be mounted from Canada in the course of the war. Without such heavy involvement from the regular army, the whole nature of the conflict on the Great Lakes frontier was dramatically altered. Despite their losses, the British still had the upper hand in the lakes region. Their hold on the forts along the northern edge of the colonies was never significantly challenged after 1776. These posts – Montreal, Oswegatchie (now Ogdensburg), Carleton Island (off Kingston), Oswego, Niagara, Detroit and Michilimackinac – provided excellent bases for the staging of raids into New York and Pennsylvania as well as into the Illinois and Ohio Country. Control of the Great Lakes allowed the royalist forces to provision their interior garrisons and the cause of the crown continued to attract an increasing number of frontier settlers and Indians who could be effectively used in an all-out guerilla war. South of the lakes, the rebel settlements were poorly protected. Few Continental troops were stationed there, while the local militias were incapable of undertaking decisive offensive operations and were hardly able to provide an adequate defence. Penetrating at will, small Loyalist bands by-passed the garrisoned forts and aimed crippling blows against the isolated settlements. Before the American militia could respond, they were gone. For five years the Loyalist corps pressed this grim frontier war. They could not hope to conquer and hold the rebel territories, but they could devastate them settlement by settlement. So the Tory raiders swept down from Canada, gathering supporters and protecting the women and children they had left behind, destroying foodstuffs – Tryon County was the bread basket of Washington’s army – and forcing American commanders to weaken their position by drawing off troops for the defence of the back country.

Foreshadowing this change in strategy, in September 1777 John Butler was commissioned to raise a corps of rangers. Butler’s Rangers, the last of the major Loyalist regiments operating out of Canada to be formed, was to consist of eight companies, two to be of “people speaking the Indian language and acquainted with their customs and manner of making war” and the six remaining “to be composed of people speaking the Indian language and well acquainted with the woods, in consideration of the fatigue they were liable to undergo.” At its height the corps contained about six hundred men. Butler’s Rangers were similar in organization and function to the rangers attached directly to the Indian Department; both were composed of colonials and in the field the two were often indistinguishable.