THE Fate of the Loyalists

There were plenty of warnings about Bucks and Hunterdon counties when George Washington crossed the Delaware River to save the American Revolution in 1776. Many people who lived on farms and in towns on both sides of the river were eager for Red Coats to quash the rebellion. The general wrote of his fears of the Loyalists in a letter to a committee recruiting local militiamen to join the rebel cause. “Instead of giving any assistance in repelling the enemy, the militia have not only refused to obey your general summons and that of their commanding officers, but I am told exult in the approach of the enemy and our late misfortunes. I beg leave to submit to your consideration whether such people are to be entrusted with arms in their hands? If they will not use them for us, there is the greatest reason to apprehend they will against us if opportunity offers.”

Allegiance to King George III was well embedded in the region. Prosperous farmers, gristmill operators, factory owners, and landed gentry had no issue with royalty, thank you. To them, revolution was treason. Perhaps the most famous of the Loyalists was William Franklin, illegitimate son of Benjamin and the last royal governor of New Jersey (1762-76). Yet in the end, retribution came down hard on anyone who aided the Crown or refused to take loyalty oaths to the revolutionary government. Here are their stories:

Grace Growden Galloway was the daughter of Lawrence Growden, a state Supreme Court justice who, by some accounts, came to own most of today’s Bensalem Township. When her father died, Grace inherited his 2,000-acre estate and prosperous Durham Iron Works in Upper Bucks County. Because she was married, provincial law required her to turn over her estate to her husband, Joseph Galloway. A Philadelphia lawyer, Galloway was the speaker of the General Assembly and member of the Continental Congress, where he vehemently opposed the American Revolution.

After the British Army seized Philadelphia in 1777, Joseph Galloway became city police commissioner, charged with stifling rebel activity. The revolution gained momentum however, forcing the British to abandon the city the following year. State government subsequently charged Joseph Galloway with treason. He fled the city with his teenage daughter, Betsey, and sailed for London in October 1778, leaving his wife behind to fend for herself.

The government retaliated by seizing Grace Galloway’s ancestral mansion and estate. Evicted, she took refuge in Philadelphia with a Quaker woman named Deborah Morris. She seldom heard from her husband, though she thought often of her daughter, who she would never see again. A year after her husband left for London, she wrote of her desolation. “All is cloudy and I am wrapped in impenetrable darkness.... I am like a pelican in the desert.” She lived in rented rooms for the next three years and died in 1782.

Residents of rural Hunterdon County who bore arms to fight for the king paid a great price in fines and lost property by war’s end. Among them were Christoffel Vought and his son, John, whose German Lutheran family owned a 285-acre farm in Clinton Township, along the South Branch of the Raritan River. The Voughts at the outset of the revolution convinced seventy-five Loyalists from around Princeton and Trenton to join them as volunteers in the sixth battalion of the New Jersey Volunteers to fight alongside the British.

A New Jersey audit after the war noted that thirty-nine men from Hunterdon County, including John Vought, lost their properties. Across New Jersey, Loyalists lost properties valued at $1.4 million English pounds ($40 million in today’s money). The Vought family went into exile in Nova Scotia for eight years before returning to their home near Albany, New York. Looking back, John Vought defended his actions. “We were not criminals but honest men standing for and then being arrested and fined for our principles,” he wrote in his biography. “We were fighting to support a legal government, unlike the rebels who fought against the legal government as traitors.”

On the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River, many Loyalists who had enlisted in the British Army fled to Canada. A confiscation act, passed in 1778, enabled counties to seize Loyalist property. Among those who lost everything were Gilbert Hicks and Joseph Paxson of Middletown; John Ellwood and Andrew Allen of Bristol; Samuel Biles and Walter Willett of Southampton; Richard Swanwick, John Meredith, and Owen Roberts of New Britain; Evan Thomas, Jonathan Jones, and Edward Jones of Hilltown; Peter Perlie of Durham; and John Reid and John Overholtz of Tinicum. Reid alone surrendered an estate of 1,412 acres.

Elizabeth “Betsy” Graeme Fergusson had all the advantages. Wealth. Rare beauty. Fluency in several languages. Writer and poet. An acquaintance of George Washington. But in matters of love, fate betrayed her: She married a Loyalist and lost everything.

Graeme was the daughter of wealthy Philadelphia physician Thomas Graeme, who owned a 1,400-acre Horsham estate. Through private tutors, Betsy became fluent in French, Greek, Latin, and Italian. She traveled widely and founded what many historians describe as America’s first literary salon, modeled after what she had encountered in London.

At a salon event in Philadelphia, she met Henry Fergusson, a handsome Scotsman and Loyalist. Despite her father’s opposition—Henry possessed neither wealth nor property, and he was eleven years younger than Betsy—she married him secretly in April 1772. He soon returned to Scotland on family business. At the sudden death of Thomas Graeme from a heart attack later that year, Betsy inherited her father’s estate. She wanted to sell it and move to Philadelphia. But because she was married, she had no authority to do.

In 1777, Henry Fergusson returned to Philadelphia to help the British occupation. Knowing his wife’s acquaintance with Washington, he coerced her into meeting secretly with the general, not far from Valley Forge, and give him a letter urging his surrender. Washington angrily refused, chastising Graeme for her complicity. Eight months later, the British abandoned Philadelphia. Henry Fergusson fled with them, retreating back to Scotland. The rebel government retaliated by seizing the estate and evicting his wife.

After Betsy Graeme Fergusson’s death at age 64 in 1801, Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and an esteemed Philadelphia physician, wrote a eulogy recalling her as “a woman of uncommon talents and virtues, admired, esteemed, and beloved by a numerous circle of friends.” Yet, as he put it, “An early disappointment in love, loss of all her relations, bad health, an unfortunate marriage, poverty, and finally a slow and painful death composed the ingredients that filled her cup of suffering.”

Like all Quakers, farmers on both sides of the Delaware River were known for their pacifism, a dictate of their religion. Among them were Joseph and Hester Doan of Plumstead Township in Bucks County. The couple was pressured into taking a loyalty oath to the rebel government due to suspicion they backed the British. Pennsylvania warned them that their property could be seized if they violated the new oath. Meanwhile, the rebel government taxed the Doans and seized their crops to support the rebel militia.

Five sons and a cousin of the Doans recruited and organized Loyalists to harass George Washington and his Continental Army. The gang, which eventually reached more than sixty members, terrorized the countryside, stealing horses from Patriot farmers and going so far as to rob the county treasury in Newtown in 1781, making off with hundreds of Spanish silver dollars and French crowns.

Toward the end of the revolution, a posse tracked the gang to a safehouse in Plumstead. Gunshots rang out at the rundown cabin, and Moses Doan lay dead. Most members of the gang escaped to Britishoccupied Canada. Two gang members were hung in Philadelphia and others in western Pennsylvania.

Among Quakers penalized for remaining neutral in the revolution was Thomas Watson, a tenant farmer from Buckingham in Bucks County. After harvesting a good crop of hay in the summer of 1779, Watson sold most of the crop to the army, but he retained one stack for his less fortunate neighbors. The landlord wanted to buy the entire lot with worthless Continental money. Watson refused. He offered to give the landlord a free share if he came the day the stack was opened. For refusing to accept the landlord’s offer, Watson was accused of betraying the revolution.

Lord Stirling of the Continental Army presided over Watson’s court martial in Newtown. He found the farmer guilty and sentenced him to hang. But he agreed to hear a final plea from Watson’s wife at the Newtown tavern where he was boarding. The tavern keeper, sympathetic to the Watsons, softened up Stirling’s mood with ale before the meeting. The general listened intently to Mrs. Watson’s tearful defense of her husband. Finally, he addressed her.

“Madam,” he began, “you have conquered. I must relent at the tears and supplication of so noble and so good a woman as you. Your husband is saved.”

Carl LaVO is the author of Bucks County Adventures: From William Penn and George Washington to Neil Armstrong (Open Door Publications, 2016). He writes regular history stories for the Bucks County Herald.