16. Suppressing Tories in the Middle Colonies

0:00Volume 4, Chapter 16 Suppressing Tories in the Middle Colonies New Jersey had nearly as great a proportion of loyalists as New York, and southern New Jersey was notoriously loyal to Great Britain. Its royal governor, William Franklin, illegitimate son of Benjamin, was particularly active in the British cause. In the spring of 1775, He tried to persuade the New Jersey Assembly to negotiate a separate peace with Britain. Failing this, he continued to organize Tory sentiment. Prodded by a series of petitions organized by him, the Assembly vehemently instructed its delegates to the Continental Congress against any attempt at independence.

0:50Indeed, Franklin was almost able to induce the Assembly to beg the King for peace, and Only lengthy harangues by moderate delegates from the Continental Congress were able to dissuade New Jersey from such separate action. It was only in June 1776 that Franklin was finally arrested by the New Jersey Assembly and sent to prison in the recesses of Connecticut. Apart from Franklin's political activity, by the spring of 1776 the province was plagued with imminent insurrections in Monmouth, Hunterdon and Bergen counties. Negroes were reported arming themselves to join the British cause and later to be intriguing with British prisoners of war. In conservative Pennsylvania, the Tory cause had been crippled by Joseph Galloway's decision not to run for the Second Continental Congress and his withdrawal from political The bulk of the Tories continued to be the Quakers in the Philadelphia area.

1:56The Philadelphia meeting sent dispatches to Quakers throughout the Middle Colonies, urging them to abstain from all forms of rebellion and to remember that it was their religious duty to honor the King. From their old anarchic individualism, The Taurism of the Quakers remained passive, however, and there was no worry about their taking up arms against the Revolution. In Maryland, a sharp geographical split prevailed, with the tobacco-growing regions on the western shore of Chesapeake Bay being staunchly revolutionary, while the maritime eastern shore was predominantly Tory. In heavily Tory Worcester County on the Atlantic coast, the loyalist led by Hugh Hugh Kelly obtained arms during the fall of 1775 from a vessel of Lord Dunmore, Royal Governor of Virginia. Meeting in secret and signing a joint oath, 1900 Tories formed an association, met for military drill, declared themselves for the king and against Boston, and pledged themselves to resist any conscription into the Continental Army. They also managed to seize some local wigs and hustle them aboard Dunmore's ship in a feudal quest for recruits.

3:40In adjoining Somerset County, one Isaac Atkinson led over half the local militia into a counter-revolutionary force for the king, and he threatened one day to fight it out. He also denounced the The Revolution is a Presbyterian plot. Several companies of militia in Caroline and Dorchester counties on the eastern shore laid down their arms in defiance of the Revolutionary cause. The colony of Delaware, almost wholly on the Chesapeake Peninsula, was riddled with Tories sentiment. By the spring of 1776, one thousand Tories were under arms in Sussex County in in the South, and in northern Newcastle County, British ships on the Delaware River were regularly furnished supplies by the inhabitants.