USA > Connecticut > Litchfield County > Plymouth > The Tories of Chippeny hill, Connecticut; a brief account of the Loyalists of Bristol, Plymouth and Harwinton, who founded St. Matthew's church in East Plymouth in 1791 > Part 2
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"Sir, Wishing you and your family well, "I remane, Yrs. "James Nichols."
It is difficult to say whether the Pond correspond- ence is of any material importance in judging Nichol's character, but it has been given for what it may be worth. The controversy was evidently over the title to the Pond homestead which Jonathan Pond purchased 'of James Nichols. Where Nichols obtained his title was a mystery that baffled Jonathan Pond and he was compelled eventually to purchase the farm a second time from Charles Ward Apthorpe, a Tory of New York. According to a little old scrap of paper among the Pond documents, apparently an unsigned abstract of title, Nichols obtained the farm from certain-named
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THE REV. JAMES NICHOLS
individuals, who, it was surmised, were heirs of the parties to whom it had been mortgaged. The mort- gagees, according to the paper, had previously given a warrantee deed of it "to Charles Ward Apthorp of the City of New York who (sd Apthorp) has joined the Enemy and forfeited his estate." The fact that Apthorpe had forfeited his estate is emphasized by an exclamation point. It is true that Charles Ward Apthorpe joined the enemy. He had been a patron of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel since 1758, his name appearing in the reports in company with that of Rev. East Apthorp, D.D., the rector of the parish church of the Society, St. Mary Le Bow, and he was the second assistant manager of the Court of Police in New York established by General Howe's proclamation of May 1, 1777, drawing a salary of two hundred pounds therefor. Of him Judge Jones in his scathing criticisms of his fellow Tories says: "This gen- tleman never attended; the appointment was designed as a sinecure." He was a wealthy purchaser of mort- gages in Waterbury and about Connecticut, a member of His Majesty's Council governing New York, and was indicted because of the latter fact for high treason by a rebel grand jury of New York. His estate, according to Jones, was confiscated together with those of the other members of the royal council-but, alas for the title of Jonathan Pond, his estate in Connecticut was not forfeited. He laid claim to it through his attor- ney, the honorable James Hillhouse, in 1792, and, in response to repeated demands from Hillhouse, who was attending Congress at Philadelphia, Jonathan Pond, honest old blacksmith with a family of eight children
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THE TORIES OF CHIPPENY HILL
on his hands, raised the cash and paid for the farm a second time.
Having considered Nichols' life in Connecticut, let us see how he fared in Vermont.
The little community of Arlington, in Vermont, was a Church of England town chartered in 1761 by people mostly from Litchfield, Connecticut, and later settled by emigrants from Newtown and New Milford, Con- necticut. In 1784 the inhabitants resolved to install a minister and build a church. "The Rev. James Nichols, a clergyman from Connecticut, of more than ordinary parts, was employed, and the services of the church which for some time had been very irregular were resumed at private houses." It was about 1786 that Nichols was called and the church edifice was com- menced. Owing to the poverty of the inhabitants the building was not completed until 1803, but it had been furnished with temporary seats and was used for public worhsip about 1787, and was, in fact, the first church in the State. The name of the parish was St. James, and the salary of Mr. Nichols-its first rector-was twenty pounds a year, raised by assessment upon "the grand list." On June 4, 1788, "the Rev. James Nichols, having by his intemperate habits lost the respect of his people, was dismissed."
Sandgate, a place not far from Arlington, proved to be a more permanent field of labor for this gentleman from Connecticut. It was while he was here that he and the Rev. Daniel Barber of Manchester organized the first annual convention of the Episcopal Church in Vermont, which was held at Arlington in September, 1790. One of its purposes was to take action to
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THE REV. JAMES NICHOLS
preserve to the church the lands which had belonged to it before the war. Nichols and Barber were the only clergymen who attended. Barber read the prayers and Nichols preached the sermon. Nichols also preached the sermon at the next recorded conven- tion in 1792.
In 1793, the Rev. Bethuel Chittenden and the Rev. J. C. Ogden, men of a more spiritual type, increased the number of clerical members of the convention to four, and the Rev. Dr. Edward Bass of Newburyport, Massachusetts, was at that time elected bishop.
A special convention two months later at Manchester elected the Rev. Samuel Peters, D.D., bishop, and dispatched a messenger post haste to the Archbishop of Canterbury to have him consecrated. Peters was a notorious refugee from Connecticut and was an enemy of Dr. Bass. Nichols and Barber were evidently in favor of Peters, for they signed a letter of recommenda- tion to the archbishop, and there was considerable cor- respondence between Nichols and Peters. Chittenden and Ogden protested vainly for Dr. Bass.
This convention was a packed one and but nine out of twenty-four parishes were represented. Colonel Jarvis of Toronto, Canada, a son-in-law of Dr. Peters, was very active in securing a majority of votes for Dr. Peters and Colonel John A. Graham of Rutland, a rela- tive, placed his name in nomination.
Dr. Peters was at this time in England, living upon a pension from the government, and was a Tory of the objectionable kind. He had been driven from his home in Hebron, Conn., because of rabid loyalty and in retaliation wrote his "General History of Connecticut,"
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THE TORIES OF CHIPPENY HILL
which contains the famous Blue Laws spun from his brain that have since been associated with the name of that State. He hated Dr. Bass as the devil hates holy water, for that able and good clergyman of Newbury- port had reluctantly yielded to the stress of the Revolu- tion and peaceably held services without mention of the king and royal family. This cost him the withdrawal of financial support by the home society, due partly . to the enmity of Dr. Peters, but he was reinstated and finally became Bishop of Massachusetts. Dr. Samuel Peters was a brilliant but eccentric man. His ruling passion was ambition. He loved kings, admired the British government, revered the hierarchy, and pos- sessed strong influence in England. His pension was forfeited by a quarrel with Pitt but he maintained some sort of a living from fictitious land sales and charity, until his death in New York in 1826 at ninety-one years of age.
The church had owned valuable lands in Vermont, and Peters had hoped, as did Nichols no doubt, and, in fact, all the church people more or less, that it might retain its ancient possessions. It was almost vital to the existence of the church in Vermont that this be allowed. A contemporary wrote that there were "no Episcopal churches in the State, but a few church people and only two or three strolling ministers who cannot get a decent support." One reason in favor of Dr. Bass was that he could continue to live at Newburyport and thereby save expense.
The Rev. Daniel Barber, Nichols' friend, clung to his glebe land when the town of Manchester brought a suit of ejectment against him and won out, but the
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THE REV. JAMES NICHOLS
State immediately legislated glebe lands away from the church and the struggle was for naught. The contest for a bishop was abandoned. Peters could not secure consecration from either the Archbishop of Canterbury or from the American bishops, and the consecration of Dr. Bass was not effected at this time. This contest, however, was the means of drawing a line between the spiritual leaders like the Rev. Bethuel Chittenden and Mr. Ogden and those more materialistically inclined like Nichols and Barber, and fortunately for Vermont the better class prevailed. Barber, who, according to Peters, was "expelled from Vermont by starvation," gamely kept up his struggle for land at Claremont, New Hamp- shire, where he formed a convention of churches detrimental to the Vermont organization. In advanced years, wearied with domestic trials, he gave up the strug- gle and in 1815 entered the Roman Catholic priesthood, being deposed from the Episcopal church in 1818.
The Rev. James Nichols was the only clergyman present at the Vermont convention in 1795, at which Colonel Graham made report of his unsuccessful trip to England to procure the consecration of Samuel Peters. The convention passed a resolution of thanks for Colonel Graham and a resolution of thanks and regret for Dr. Peters.
In 1796, 1797, and 1798, Nichols did not appear at the annual conventions. It is supposed that he con- tinued at Sandgate although there is mention at one time of his being minister at Manchester. In the convention of 1799 a letter from William Smith, secretary of the Convention of the Diocese of Connecticut, written by the order of the Bishop and Clergy of that Diocese to the Standing Committee of the Diocese of Vermont, respect-
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THE TORIES OF CHIPPENY HILL
ing the Rev. James Nichols, was read and ordered to lie on the table for consideration. When the letter was taken up, it was voted "That the Convention do disap- prove of the conduct of the Rev. James Nichols and that they do recommend to the several churches in the State not to employ him as a Clergyman until he pro- cures a Certificate from the Standing Committe that he has reformed his conduct and that he will do honor to his profession."
"Rev. James Nichols," reports Bishop Griswold, "having by his letter dated at Manchester, Vermont, July 2, 1819, declared his resolution to renounce the ministry of the Protestant Episcopal Church and in future not to exercise any of its functions, and in con- sequence, agreeable to the provisions of the 2nd canon of the General Convention of 1817, he the said James Nichols, on the 2nd day of September, 1819, in the presence of Rev. Mr. Crocker and other clergymen, was declared to be, and is, suspended from his grade of the ministry." The Rev. Carlton Chase, D. D., in Thomp- son's History of Vermont writes thus: "The writer is constrained though with sorrow to mention the names of two other individuals who for a time bore no incon- siderable part among the friends of the Church-the Rev. James Nichols, who resided at Sandgate, and the Rev. Russell Catlin who resided at Hartland. The for- mer was a man of talent and eloquence; the latter pos- sessed neither. It is painful to think of, and better not to describe, the latter days of either."
It was not until June 17, 1829, that the "designing church clergyman" of Chippeny Hill "died miserably" at the home of one of his two sons at Stafford, Genesee County, New York, aged eighty and one-half years.
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CHAPTER III THE TORY PRINCIPLES
W HATEVER may have been the degree of good- ness or of evil existing in that "designing church clergyman," the Rev. James Nichols, it is cer- tain that the principles he taught were the principles which governed the Chippeny Hill folk. How deeply they had studied them is a matter of controversy. The report of the committee at Hartford that examined the seventeen prisoners from New Cambridge states that "they were indeed grossly ignorant of the true grounds . of the present war with Great Britain." Yet there were educated men among them just as there were among the other Tories throughout the country, and it is unfair to assume that their actions were based simply on their love for their church and antipathy to its opponents, or that they were more ignorant of the grounds of the war than some of their Puritan neigh- bors. Moses Dunbar, in his life on Long Island, had had an opportunity to become acquainted with the thoughts and feelings of the Tories in New York. Rev. James Nichols at Litchfield had also been able to keep in touch with events. It was at Litchfield, by the way, that Governor Franklin of New Jersey, son of Benja- min Franklin, but a royalist governor, was kept in honorable confinement. There were many Tories in Western Connecticut, and especially about Stratford,
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THE TORIES OF CHIPPENY HILL
who were in constant communication with those of Long Island and New York, and the churchmen of Connecti- cut were all closely allied by family ties. Bishop Seabury, as he became later, was one of the leaders of the Tories near the New York State line. It is, perhaps, well to consider why these were Tories.
There were, as there are and ever will be, men who uphold government and detest lawlessness. A rebellion that succeeds is a rare thing. It is called a revolution, and he who rebels without success, or at least without good reason, is justly stamped a rebel. Ultimate suc- cess, single-handed, against Great Britain was, from a practical point of view, a mere dream. The possibility that some other nation, in warfare against the great enemy, might set up the American colonies as a weapon of offense was only a hope and did not change the condi- tions. Granting success, were the reasons sufficient? In- efficiency in the home government and taxation without representation were the reasons given for the rebellion. Were they good ones, good enough to justify civil war? Men like Seabury and Governor Franklin thought not. There was no great suffering wrong hanging upon the necks of the American colonists. They were eating, sleeping, and living in a well gov- erned country, and civil war is a horrid thing. Rotten- · ness and inefficiency in administration might exist, but there were other ways of curing it than by bloodshed.
There was also more than one side to the taxation question. Great Britain had been fighting a combina- tion of the most powerful civilized nations. One of these, France, had sought to seize the American colonies. England came to their defense and did what they could
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GRAVE OF CAPT. NATHANIEL JONES In East Plymouth Cemetery. He was the leading member of the New Cambridge (Bristol) band of Tories.
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THE TORY PRINCIPLES
not have done: saved them from a ruler of foreign tongue and detested religion. Who should pay the expense of this war if not the colonists? England was not a wealthy land, and the colonies had received the benefit. Yet when a nominal tax was imposed, the colonists became enraged, and exclaimed against "Taxation without representation!" They did not petition for representatives in Parliament. They did not offer to tax themselves. There was reason to sus- pect that taxation with representation would be as distasteful to the disgruntled ones as taxation without representation. The taxation reason for desiring in- dependence did not seem important in the eyes of the loyalists.
Three thousand miles of intervening water,-that was a good reason for independence ; difference in relig- ious belief,-that was a good reason for independence ; lack of sympathy with English life in general was a good reason for independence. But to the true church- man these reasons did not exist. England was the re- ligious center and place of pilgrimage; it was home. The mere technicality of a few cents on tea could not sever their attachment to the home government.
A good example of loyalism is the following speech delivered in September, 1776, before a large body of the inhabitants of Long Island, a speech which Moses Dunbar himself may have heard:
"Gentlemen, Friends, and Countrymen :- Being ap- pointed by his Excellency, General Howe, to raise a corps of Provincials for his Majesty's service, I readily engage in the attempt from principle, and in conse- quence of the fullest conviction that there are yet very
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many among us who still retain the most unshaken loyalty to our gracious sovereign, and zealous attach- ment to the blessings of the British constitution. Now is the time to exert our endeavors if we wish to rescue ourselves from the evils of Republican tyranny, or our country from ruin. The misrule and persecutions of committees, conventions, and Congresses are no longer to be endured; they have become insupportable-they are too enormous for description. There are none of us but what have already seen or felt the cruelty and oppression of their Republican despotism. Without affecting one salutary purpose, those self-created bodies have violated all the sacred ties of civil society, prostrated all law and government, and arbitrarily usurped an absolute control over the natural rights, the reason, and the consciences of their fellow subjects. Instead of supporting constitutional liberty, and re- dressing public grievances, the special purposes of their original associations, they have denied their fellow citizens the greatest and most valuable of all possible privileges : those of personal liberty and freedom of speech. Instead of endeavoring, by dutiful represen- tations in a constitutional method, for a reconciliation with the parent state, and thereby restoring to us the innumerable benefits and advantages of the former happy union between Great Britain and the colonies, they have most unjustifiably and perversely erected the standard of independency. That is not all. They have increased and multiplied the distresses of poverty and want among our poor. They have moreover delib- erately involved their country in all the turbulence of faction, in all the evils of monarchy and licentiousness ;
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THE TORY PRINCIPLES
and to complete the transcendent enormity of their crimes against the interest and prosperity of America, they have disregarded the liberal and benevolent declaration of his Majesty's commissioners of peace, and with the most obdurate and unfeeling dispositions for the distresses of their countrymen, obstinately and wickedly precipitated the whole British continent of America into all the guilt of rebellion, and all the horrors and calamities of a civil war. In a few words, gentlemen, they have deluded the populace, they have betrayed their trust, they have forfeited the confidence of the public, they have ruined our country. Not to oppose them and their measures were criminal. Not to join and assist the King's forces at this time would be at once unwise, unmanly, and ungrateful. Your loyalty to your King, your duty to your country, your regard for your wives and children, the cause of violated justice and of injured majesty, all call aloud for your strenuous and united endeavors in assisting the royal army and navy in re-establishing the authority of his Majesty's government in the colonies, and with it a return to America of those happier days we all have seen, when the voice of peace and plenty was heard in our land, and we experienced, under the protection and benignity of the British State, the tranquil enjoyment of such constitutional and established liberties and privileges as were equal to our wishes, and known only to British subjects."
There is a factor in war time more powerful even than reason and that is feeling. The intensity of feeling among the loyalists was kept at a white heat by the con- tinual persecutions by the patriot bands. Every
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loyalist knew how the famous printing house of their trenchant writer, James Rivington of New York, had been ruthlessly entered and the valuable type and other property carried away into Connecticut or destroyed. Such acts were resented. The following items are examples of what made the ears of the loyalists ring :
"In November a parcel of rebels in the dead of night passed the North river from the Jersey shore, landed at Bloomingdale, the seat of General DeLancey, about seven miles from the city of New York, surprised and made prisoners a guard at the landing place, broke into the house and plundered it, abused and insulted the Gen- eral's lady in a most infamous manner, struck Miss Charlotte DeLancey, a young lady of about sixteen, several times with a musket, set fire to the house, and one of the wretches attempted to wrap up Miss Eliza- beth Floyd (an intimate acquaintance of Miss DeLan- cey's, about the same age, and the daughter of Col. Richard Floyd) in a sheet all in flames, and as she ran down the stairs to avoid the fire, the brute threw it after her. (In consequence of this transaction Miss DeLancey was rewarded by the government with a pen- sion of $200 per autumn.) One of the party below of more humanity than the rest advised the young ladies to make their escape. Miss DeLancey and Miss Floyd made their flight through several fields until they reached a swamp into which they entered and there con- tinued until eight o'clock the next morning without either shoes or stockings and nothing upon them except such thin clothes as ladies use to sleep in, when they were discovered and carried to the house of Charles Ward Apthorpe, Esq., a gentleman who lived in the
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THE TORY PRINCIPLES
neighborhood and an intimate acquaintance of General DeLancey. This was in the middle of the night in the month of November when the weather is very cold in this part of America. Miss DeLancey took with her in her flight, her brother's child, an infant in arms, and held it safely in her lap the whole time. Miss Floyd's feet and legs were so torn and lacerated by the briers, brambles, and hedges that she passed, as to render her unable to walk for three weeks."
"Some days ago, the daughter of Mrs. Jonathan Knif- fin, of Rye in Connecticut*, was murdered by a party of rebels near or upon Budd's Neck. She was carry- ing some clothes to her father in company of two men who had the charge of a herd of cattle. They were fired upon by the rebels from behind a stone wall. The men escaped unhurt. They plundered her dead body of its clothes, cut one of her fingers almost off in order to take a ring, and left the corpse most indecently exposed in the highway. Such are the advocates of this cursed rebellion !"
"The following odd affair happened at Stratford in Connecticut, a few days ago :- A child of Mr. Edwards, of that place, was baptized by the Rev. Mr. - of Norwalk, and named Thomas Gage. This alarmed the neighborhood; and one hundred and seventy young ladies formed themselves into a batallion, and with solemn ceremony appointed a general and the other officers to lead them on. The petticoat army then marched in the greatest good order to pay their com- pliments to Thomas Gage, and present his mother with
*The author of this quotation apparently meant "Rye in New York."
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a suit of tar and feathers; but Thomas's sire having intelligence of their expedition, vi et armis kept them from entering the house."
News of such character travelled fast among the Tories of western Connecticut, the last two accounts being published in newspapers having a circulation about New York, and it is reasonable to suppose that these or similar stories were recited eventually at Chip- peny Hill firesides. To a man at all ready set in his convictions against Puritanism, in those days when men were "sot," such accounts as these would not tend to alleviate his state of rigidity.
There was a funny side to the American rebellion which could not but appeal to the descendants of cavaliers, and at the risk of forever losing my right to become a member of the Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, I beg leave to close this chapter with the following extract from a loyalist paper : "Thirteen is a number peculiarly belonging to the rebels. A party of naval prisoners lately returned from New Jersey say that the rations among the rebels are thirteen dried clams per day; that the titular Lord Stirling takes thirteen glasses of grog every morning, has thirteen enormous rum-bunches on his nose, and that (when duly impregnated) he always makes thirteen attempts before he can walk ; that Mr. Washington has thirteen toes on his feet (the extra ones having grown since the Declaration of Independence), and the same number of teeth in each jaw; that the Sachem Schuyler has a top knot of thirteen stiff hairs, which erect them- selves on the crown of his head when he grows mad; that Old Putnam had thirteen pounds of his posteriors bit
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THE TORY PRINCIPLES
off in an encounter with a Connecticut bear ('twas then that he lost the balance of his mind) ; that it takes thir- teen Congress paper dollars to equal one penny sterling; that Mrs. Washington had a mottled tom-cat (which she calls in a complimentary way "Hamilton"), with thirteen yellow rings around his tail, and that his flaunting it suggested to the Congress the adoption of the same number of stripes for the rebel flag."
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CHAPTER IV
THE TORY DEN
W ERE a stranger to ask me the way to the Tory Den I should tell him to seek out someone who had been there before and go with him. He could not find it alone. One hundred and thirty years ago, the patroits tried to find it and although they scoured the woods in bands, they failed utterly. So would you to- day, for the cave is a favored spot, open only to its friends. Those who were its friends then, always found it welcoming them, and so, I trust, may you learn to find it.
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