USA > New York > Warren County > Warren county : a history and guide > Part 7
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Two days after the capture of Ticonderoga and Skenesborough Colonel Romans at the head of a little company of Connecticut soldiers arrived at Fort Edward. Adding a few local patriots as reinforcements to his detail, Romans on May 12 marched against Fort George at the head of Lake George. The only Britishers there, Captain John Nordberg, inva- lided from the English army, and two assistants, who merely expedited messages and expresses between Albany and Montreal, offered no resist- ance. On this same day Crown Point fell to Seth Warner, a colleague of Ethan Allen.
According to a local tradition, Colonel Romans enlisted for his expedi- tion Daniel Parks, member of a family who owned considerable land on the Hudson River across from Hudson Falls and Glens Falls. Parks now lies buried in an almost forgotten family plot on a bluff above the river opposite Hudson Falls. A badly worn inscription on his headstone affirms "he was the man that took the key from the British officer at Lake George."
In June 1775, General Philip Schuyler was appointed by Washington to take command of the Army of the North. By possession of Fort George, Ticonderoga, and Crown Point he controlled the Great Warpath, the military trail from Albany to Montreal. But his widely scattered, undisciplined militia had little strength elsewhere along the border. Clashes between hot-tempered groups of Whigs and Tories were frequent, and daring outlaw bands roved the countryside. In one instance they even tried to disrupt court sessions at Fort Edward.
On September 4 General Richard Montgomery marched from Crown Point for an attack on Canada. About the same time an expedition of hardy frontiersmen under Benedict Arnold was organized in New Eng- land. After an incredible march up the Kennebec River and through the wilderness, they made a junction at Quebec with Montgomery. As the year 1775 came to a close the Americans captured St. Johns on the Richelieu River and took Montreal, but failed in their attack on Quebec.
While the American army lay encamped in Canada, the Continental Congress, on the suggestion of General Schuyler, sent Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Chase, and Charles Carroll as ministers to treat with our northern
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neighbor. Other members of the party were the Reverend Father John Carroll, brother of Charles, and afterward first archbishop of Baltimore who acted as the party's interpreter in Canada; Baron de Woedtke, a Prussian major on the staff of Frederick the Great, on his way to join the American army; and General John Thomas, about to become commander of the Revolutionary troops in Canada.
On April 18, 1776, the party arrived at Wing's Tavern in Queensbury on the old Military Road from Fort Edward and the next day continued their journey northward by way of Lake George. Failing in their purpose, the ministers later returned to Ticonderoga. Meanwhile, the American forces, racked by smallpox, that dread scourge of the armies of earlier days, retreated to the mouth of the Richelieu. Here General Thomas died of the fearful plague.
Faced by superior enemy forces the smallpox-shattered remnant of the American army in Canada began a masterly retreat in June under the command of General John Sullivan. In July boatloads of half-starved, vermin-infested smallpox sufferers streamed up Lake George en route to hastily erected hospitals below the outworks of Fort George. Among the hundreds of bodies at rest in unmarked graves in Battleground Park is that of Baron de Woedtke.
During the opening months of 1776 the pioneers of Warren County had begun to feel the pinch of unpaid army requisitions and to have their possessions plundered by detachments of Americans en route between frontier posts. In an affidavit made before Adiel Sherwood, justice of the peace, and lieutenant of Kingsbury and Queensbury Continental Militia, Abraham Wing sought to charge Captain Marien Lamar with "things his company stole" including "one blue Broadcloth Jactcoat. one blue quilted petticoat, 13 Dunghill fowls and one pleasure slay steel shod, painted green outside, red inside ... worth at that time in hard cash, seven pounds."
In answer the captain certified that "the slay was hired for use of my company from the 13th of March to the first of April, 1776, when, the ice breaking up, I was obliged to leave her in the care of Mr. Belton at Willsborough on Lake Champlain." Nor was this the end of Wing's losses. On July 18, by military order of Nathaniel Buell, quartermaster general at Fort George, he gave up "15 saws, with their stearups on." These, taken to Cheshire's mill near Fort Edward, aided in sawing lumber for the American forces.
General Schuyler, sent by the Continental Congress on December 30, 1775 to seize the arms and stores of the Tories in Tryon County and "to apprehend their chiefs," soon reached Johnstown with a strong armed
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force. There he paroled instead of arresting Sir John Johnson, successor to the title and estates of his illustrious father, Sir William, who had died as the storm clouds of the Revolution gathered. Whether or not Sir John had been released from his parole is a matter of controversy, but at all events, secretly warned that he was to be arrested, he fled to Canada in March 1776, with a large band of royalists and Indians.
This journey, begun in winter and ended while spring thaws swelled the streams and rendered snowshoes useless, was the first penetration by a large party of white men into the heart of the Adirondack mountains. They followed the valley of the Sacandaga to the Hudson and thence northward through what are now the towns of Luzerne, Stony Creek, Thurman and Johnsburg, then a dense, uninhabited wilderness crossed only by an Indian trail. After nineteen days of terrible toil and hardship, the party finally reached the St. Lawrence and safety in Canada. Shortly thereafter, Sir John, commissioned a colonel, organized his retainers and the Tory refugees in Canada into a regiment known as "Johnson's Greens," who later engaged in border warfare.
At this time Sir Guy Carleton made plans to advance with a powerful fleet hastily assembled, capture Ticonderoga, and wrest control of the Great Warpath from the wavering grasp of the Colonies. With almost superhuman skill and energy Benedict Arnold built and armed the first tiny vessels of the American navy at Skenesborough and Ticonderoga. At the Battle of Valcour Island, October 11, 1776, his little flotilla was almost annihilated by Carleton though most of the American soldiers got back to Ticonderoga in safety. Crown Point had to be abandoned to the British, but not before Arnold had inflicted such losses during the naval engagement that the delayed and harried Carleton postponed further southward invasion. Though they actually paved the way for Burgoyne's surrender a year later, this and other defeats suffered repeatedly in the early days of the Revolution brought gloom to Patriot militia and Whigs on the frontier, a gloom relieved little by enthusiasm over the Declara- tion of Independence.
In the spring of 1777 scouting parties of Indians allied to the British were busy along the northern border. In March a detail of eighty red men and Tories fought a bloody skirmish at Sabbath Day Point with a scouting detail of fifty Continentals. Despite loss of half their own num- ber the Indians and Loyalists captured 18 Americans, who, according to a report of Captain Alexander Baldwin of the Independent Company of Rangers, were "conducted thro' the wood to Montreal, and obliged to carry the packs of the Indians, and upon their arrival there were confined in the Recollec Church where they remained about six weeks. That while there, they were every day insulted by John Cobham, Thomas Mann,
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David Jones, Ebenezer Jessup, and divers others, all Americans who had gone over to the enemy." This was David Jones, the betrothed of Jane McCrea. Ebenezer Jessup with his brother Edward, held claim to Jessup's Patent in and around the present Luzerne.
By May the propaganda and ravages of the Tories in Warren County and vicinity became bold and open. Apparently informed by Indian run- ners that the long-awaited invasion from Canada was on its way, they welcomed the opportunity to harass frontier homes and settlements and gave free rein to such fierce hatreds as only civil wars unleash.
One of the most daring acts of violence of the Royalists resulted in the abandonment of the little settlement of Parks' Mills, located across the Hudson from Wing's Falls. The story, pieced together from history and tradition, tells of the attack on the home of Daniel Parks, Sr., 75-year old founder of Parks' Mills, by a Tory band led by Richardson, supposed to have been debtor to Parks in a land purchase, and Ferguson, a tavern keeper from the Bend, a settlement a few miles up the river. After killing the old pioneer and burning his home the Tories ambushed three of his sons who came to aid their father. Of these they mortally wounded Elisha and captured Isaac.
Daniel Parks, Jr., who had helped Colonel Romans in the capture of Fort George escaped the ambush and gathered the settlers not already made captive. With them he fled down the river to the present Fenimore, where they crossed the stream, probably on a ferry operated by the Parks family, to Sandy Hill. According to one story, several women, detached from the main party, were accosted by Indian members of the Tory band but escaped by telling the red men that a child they carried had smallpox.
The morning following the Parks Massacre, as it is called in Holden's History of Queensbury, a party of Whigs followed the trail of the Tories and Indians along the south bank of the Hudson and across the river at its confluence with the Sacandaga. However, the Loyalists, finding they were pursued, took to the bed of Stony Creek and threw off their pursu- ers. It was learned later that the Whig captives had been promised death at the hands of the Tory raiders if they were overtaken.
The chief base of operations and gathering place for the Loyalists was the colony of the politically-favored Jessup brothers on the Hudson near the present Corinth and Luzerne. Ebenezer and Edward Jessup, shrewd business men and among the sharpest and most colorful land speculators ever to live in Warren County, began their settlement west of Queensbury about 1771, building homes and mills and living in a style far above their neighbors. They spent lavishly at Wing's Tavern and filled their spacious log dwelling with elegant furniture and costly paintings, covered their tables with imported linens, and dined from massive silver plate.
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In 1774 the brothers accomplished their biggest land grab, the Totten and Crossfield Purchase, encompassing 800,000 acres in the south-central Adirondacks, for it is said that Ebenezer Jessup engineered this mammoth grant, Totten and Crossfield being merely dummies. Indeed until their lands were confiscated, the Jessups held title to practically all of what is now western and northern Warren County.
It is not strange that such land barons, enjoying the favor of the Royal Government and already living in the luxurious style of aristocrats, op- posed the changes inherent in the Revolution. Nor is it surprising that their influence and patronage brought into the Loyalist camp such noted Tories as Richardson and Ferguson, leaders in the attack on Parks' Mills; the six Lovelace brothers, descendants of Governor Lovelace, one of whom was hanged about 1780 as a spy; the numerous Fairchilds who resided on the Hudson near the present Luzerne Mountains; and many of their retainers and tenants.
On May 6, 1777, Colonel Gordon in command of the Continental Militia in the Ballston Spa district, pursued and captured 31 Tories on or near Jessup's Patent. All admitted they were on their way to join Bur- goyne and thus escape taking the oath of allegiance to Congress. Local tradition has it that at this time Edward Jessup, hotly pursued, made good his escape by leaping across a gorge in the Hudson where the stream then measured but twelve feet in width. Blasting away of rocks during the lumber era to permit passage of logs has widened it.
Jessup then made his way across Queensbury by an old road that paralleled the present route from French Mountain to Fort Ann, and thence northward through Skenesborough to Burgoyne's camp at Wills- borough Falls. Here he joined his brother, Ebenezer, who had fled Whig fury some months earlier and had received a commission in Burgoyne's regiment. After the war the Jessups received royal land grants in Canada, where their descendants became people of wealth and influence.
A little before the Battle of Saratoga, General Gates, who had replaced Schuyler in command of the Patriot army in the Northern Department, dispatched militia under Lieutenant Ellis, to raid the Jessup colony. The Loyalist leaders had long since fled, but the lieutenant's troopers destroyed their homes, burned the grain fields, and left nothing standing but the mills. The dwellings of the Jessups had previously been pillaged and their elegant and expensive fittings carried away. Soon the site of the once bustling settlement was growing up to weeds and bushes, the abandoned clearings becoming again a part of the wilderness from which they had been wrested by the toil of the pioneer followers of the Jessup brothers.
Burgoyne's invasion, designed to secure for the English control of that bloody pathway of the French and Indian War through Lakes Champlain
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and George and the Hudson River, was intended to separate New York from New England, the hotbed of the rebellion. The British commander, despite a broad strain of pomposity and overconfidence, was an able and experienced officer. His staff boasted skilled and capable leaders, several of them, including himself, members of Parliament.
Burgoyne led a force of more than 10,000 men, well armed and equipped, with at least 7,000 veteran troops, an artillery corps, Hessian mercenaries, and detachments of Canadians. To oppose this array Gen- eral Schuyler could muster at the various frontier posts, including Fort George, less than 5,000 militia, raw recruits, miserably clad and armed, some actually barefooted, and most of them ragged.
As the British sailed down Lake Champlain, the Americans retreated southward without opposing their advance. Near the mouth of the Boquet River, on June 21, Burgoyne accepted the services of 400 Indians and celebrated with a great war dance. Naturally humane, he tried "to soften their ferocity, and restrain their thirst for blood." Little acquainted with the unpredictable children of the forest, he could not foresee how they would help to encompass his ruin.
On June 26 the English occupied Crown Point and, on July 2, arrived at Ticonderoga. Here the Americans had fondly believed the invasion would be halted because the fort was impregnable. In truth it had been falling for some years into a sad state of disrepair. When, on July 5, General Arthur St. Clair, American commander, looked up into the mouths of British cannon on Mt. Defiance to the southwest overlooking the fort, an emplacement never before attempted, he knew that he must lose no time in evacuating Ticonderoga.
This he accomplished the following night under cover of darkness and his departure might not have been discovered at once, except for the burning, in direct disobedience to orders, of the commanders' headquar- ters at Mount Independence, across the floating bridge from Ticonderoga. Burgoyne promptly began to pursue the retreating Americans who split into two sections, the main body crossing the bridge to Vermont while the remainder, with the sick and the women, fled southward on Lake Champlain toward Skenesborough.
The American retreat was conducted with considerable skill. St. Clair's rear guard, frontiersmen under Colonels Warner and Francis, suffered losses in a delaying engagement at Hubbardton with the British and Hes- sians of Fraser and Riedesel. The thin line of sharp-shooting Americans broke out of the woods and did heavy execution on the close ranks of the enemy, but were driven back by sheer weight of numbers. When the victors closed in for the kill, however, frontiersmen scattered and disap-
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peared into the forests in an American military maneuver that came as a complete surprise to the European officers.
Pursued by a British flotilla on Lake Champlain, the fleeing Americans were not given time to destroy their boats under the guns of Skenes- borough before Burgoyne occupied the town, captured the guns and baggage, and dispatched Colonel Hill with the 9th British regiment in pursuit. Overtaken at Fort Anne, Colonel Long with many sick and convalescents among his untrained militia resisted desperately until his ammunition gave out. Setting fire to the fortress, he continued the retreat toward Fort Edward.
From Fort Edward, on July 9, the anxious Schuyler wrote Washington: "I have not been able to learn what is become of General St. Clair, and the army. The enemy followed the troops that came to Skenesborough as far as Fort Anne, where they were yesterday repulsed; notwithstanding which, Colonel Long, contrary to my express orders evacuated that post. I am here at the head of a handful of men, not above fifteen hundred, without provision, with little ammunition, not above five rounds to a man, having neither balls, nor lead to make any; the country in the deepest consternation; no carriages to remove the stores from Fort George, which I expect to learn every moment is attacked." Schuyler's forebod- ings were relieved somewhat on July 12 when St. Clair marched into Fort Edward with the main body of his forces intact.
In spite of these reinforcements Schuyler was still unable to give adequate protection to the countryside. Bands of Indians and Tories, operating from Skenesborough, raided far and wide, hanging and scalping suspected Whig sympathizers, burning homes, and frequently attacking neutrals. Secret Tory nests at Halfway Brook and in Kingsbury provided spies and carriers of messages between Burgoyne and Sir William Howe, who, according to plan, was to march up the Hudson Valley for a junc- tion of their forces at Albany.
Communication between the leaders of the armies to the north and south was so vital to the success of the British campaign that Schuyler at this time received instructions from the Committee of Safety to use a spy in counter-espionage against the Tory secret agents. With the aid of an ardent Whig named Fish at Old Saratoga, Schuyler got in touch with Moses Harris of Dutchess County who lived to become a Warren County patriarch, founder of Harrisena.
General Schuyler found young Moses to be a reliable man of sharp wits and a true patriot who would hesitate at nothing in the service of his country. Moreover, as a favorite nephew of the notorious leader of the Tory ring in Kingsbury, Gilbert Harris, whom he had often visited before
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the war, Moses could enter unsuspected into the enemy camp. To start his career as a double spy, Moses visited his Uncle Gil, expressed disgust with the progress of the Revolution, and pretended that he would like to join the British army if nothing better offered.
Delighted at finding in Moses so promising a Loyalist recruit, Uncle Gilbert consulted Joseph Bettys, the British espionage agent, and took Moses to the Tory underground hideout at Halfway Brook in Kingsbury. There, really acting as an American spy, Moses falsely swore loyalty to the King, and accepted dispatches for delivery to William Shepherd, a Tory living near Albany.
Now that he was accepted by both sides as a spy, Moses set off down the Hudson and at night arrived secretly at the home of Fish, his Ameri- can helper in Saratoga, now named Schuylerville. There he waited while Fish took the dispatches to General Schuyler to read, and brought them back promptly. Then Moses could deliver them to Shepherd without arousing British suspicion.
Naturally this double dealing more than doubled the dangers of the American agent. Hot-blooded young Tories, envious of his position and influence, threatened his life. When the British command scented a leak, Moses was suspected. Only stout insistence on his loyalty to the King saved him death at the hands of Tories who hauled him off to an island in a big swamp west of Queensbury for questioning.
Their confidence in him restored, the British allowed Moses to resume his duties. To reassure the Tories he was "arrested" in Albany by order of General Schuyler, lodged in jail, and after several days permitted to escape. He then fled to Canada where he was received as a hero by the Tories in exile. But since this episode convinced the Whigs also that Moses was really a British spy, it added a fresh peril. Bands of Patriots attempted to intercept him and one, Jacob Bensen, asserted that he would "put a ball through the cussed Tory" on sight.
Finally the suspicious Joseph Bettys discovered what Moses was really doing and sought to trap him. Forewarned he fled southward only to be ambushed by a patrol of Whig scouts whom he escaped by crossing the Hudson at Fort Miller. Exhausted, he stumbled into the home of Noah Payne, a Revolutionary sympathizer, to whom he revealed his role of double spy.
Payne helped Moses complete his journey to the home of Fish, whom they found seriously ill. There then was nothing for Moses to do but personally deliver the dispatches to Schuyler. In Albany he called on Shepherd, his erstwhile Tory colleague, who, aware of his duplicity, tried to poison him. Since his usefulness as a spy was obviously ended, Schuyler
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sent Moses Harris to Washington with the papers obtained on his final venture. The general offered to recommend him to the commander in chief for a safer position in the southern army. This the stubborn Harris refused with the assertion "that all the Tories this side of hell should not drive him an inch."
While Burgoyne lingered at Skenesborough and, according to tradition, indulged in "high revel and debauch, which rendered him unfit for his position, and the proper discharge of his duties," Schuyler improved the opportunity to save the cannon and powder at Fort George and destroy or carry off anything that might help the British. "If the enemy will permit me to pass unmolested three days longer to Fort George, I shall be able to bring away all the stores from thence and then draw off the few troops we have there," wrote the American commander as he pressed settlers and their wagons, horses and oxen into this service.
Schuyler's masterly withdrawal was finding little favor in the Colonies, because of the false, though wide-spread, belief that the northern frontier forts were massive works against which the British would beat in vain. Congress severely criticized both St. Clair and Schuyler, and New Eng- land members continually sought to have Gates placed in command of the Northern Department.
Even General Washington seems to have lacked adequate information on the situation. Before the Fort George abandonment he wrote Schuyler that he understood "that a spirited, brave, judicious officer with two or three hundred good men, together with the armed vessels you have built, would retard General Burgoyne's passage across the lake for a consider- able distance." Apparently irked by this misconception of the facts the northern army commander replied spiritedly:
"The fort was part of an unfinished bastion of an intended fortifica- tion. The bastion was closed at the gorge. In it was a barrack capable of containing between thirty and fifty men; without ditch, without wall, without cistern; without any picket to prevent an enemy from running over the wall; so small as not to contain over one hundred and fifty men; commanded by ground greatly overlooking it, and within point blank shot. ... Of the vessels built there, one was afloat and tolerably fitted, the other still upon the stocks; but, if the two had been upon the water, they would have been of little use without rigging or guns."
Schuyler's policy was to strip the country in the path of the enemy of everything useful to an army, leaving only burned homes and abandoned fields. To the frontiersmen of Warren County, who had trusted in Fort George and Fort Edward for protection even after Ticonderoga fell, all seemed lost, and the older settlements farther south were also demanding a firm stand and stubborn fighting instead of strategic withdrawals.
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One person of prominence who understood the desperate measures of Schuyler with his ragged little army was Gouverneur Morris, member of the New York Provincial Congress and ardently devoted to the Revolu- tionary cause. From headquarters in the field he wrote to the Committee of Safety on July 17 announcing the destruction of Fort George and the safe arrival of its garrison and stores at Fort Edward, adding, "I shall give it as my opinion to the general, whenever he asks it, to break up all the settle- ments upon our northern frontier, to drive off the cattle, secure or destroy the forage, etc., and . . . leave nothing but a wilderness to the enemy."
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