We had a successful presence at the Red Mill’s Revolutionary War Days on Saturday & Sunday, August 6 & 7. One of the inserts in the weekend’s program was a piece I wrote called
Who Were the Loyalists? (copied below)
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John Adams is frequently misquoted as saying a third of the population supported the revolution with an equal number opposed. Adams was actually referring to attitudes toward the French revolution during his presidency, not the American Revolution yet the notion that a third of colonists were loyalists has persisted. Of course, nearly everyone was a loyalist when the political crisis began, with the 1765 Stamp Act. A decade later the number of loyalists was far smaller but still significant. The British were also able to gain support from two groups entirely outside the political sphere of colonial America: Native Americans and African slaves.
In 1754, the French and Indian War had been ignited by Virginia militia entering the Ohio Valley in pursuit of territorial expansion. After the war, Britain replaced France as trading partner and protector to Native Americans. To maintain the peace, the royal proclamation of 1763 put lands west of the Appalachians off limits to settlers, at least temporarily. Pressure from squatters and land speculators continued. In the 1770’s Benjamin Franklin and his son William were still seeking ministry approval of their land company’s claim to a huge parcel near the Ohio. When Native Americans chose sides in the Revolution, the majority sided with the British.
The American War created opportunities for enslaved Africans to gain liberty, mostly as loyalists. About 50,000 slaves responded to British emancipation proclamations and fought as loyalists in what became the largest slave uprising in American history. After the war, tens of thousands of former slaves were resettled as free people. Since the patriots claimed them as confiscated property, a list was kept of black loyalists evacuated from New York City in 1783. This “Book of Negroes” recorded separately by British and American officers carries the names and descriptions of 3,000 former slaves, including Harry Washington “43-years-old, a fine fellow and formerly a slave belonging to General Washington.” Black loyalists who survived the war gained freedom if not equality in new lands throughout the empire, such as Nova Scotia.
Among colonials, many loyalists were Tories but not everyone who remained loyal to Britain shared Tory ideals such as an established church supporting the Christian monarch. Conflicts ranged far beyond questions of religion, to mercantilist trade policies and political representation. People with diverse interests and ideas were pushed to take either one side or the other when war erupted in 1775 at Lexington and Concord. Some who became loyalists feared mob rule, anarchy, or economic loss, some simply disliked local rebels. Many people remained neutral and some switched their allegiance based on expediency. The Society of Friends, or Quakers, were pacifists and therefore often viewed as supporting the existing order.
The Voughts were early, daring leaders of Hunterdon County loyalists. In 1759, Christopher Vought, the son of German Lutheran immigrants, bought 285 acres of limestone-rich land near the Union Iron Works on the Raritan River. The house Christopher Vought built stands on Grayrock Road, at the entrance to the Clinton Township Middle School. This impressive stone house displays this family’s status within colonial Lebanon Township and their assimilation into British American culture. This is a Germanic ‘bank house’, built into the side of a small embankment to save energy. The rare surviving ‘wattle and daub’ decorative plaster ceilings with geometric patterns also drew on the Vought family’s heritage, Germanic folk-art. Yet the gable-end chimneys and center hall are more typical of 18th Century British American homes.
An important aspect of social identity in 18th Century Jersey was religious affiliation. Christopher and Cornelia Vought’s daughter Christiana married a Lutheran minister. Their son John married Mary Grandin in an Anglican church the next year. John and Mary baptized their eight children as Anglicans. It would probably be accurate to characterize the Vought family as sharing Tory beliefs. But they might also have acted from a gratitude for the British Queen’s relocation of Protestants, including Christopher’s parents, from the war-ravaged Palatine region of Germany to these colonies. And they may have identified with the German-descended King George III and his German mercenaries. In addition to their beliefs and social identity, the family’s material interests would also have inclined them to loyalty.
The Vought family had little to gain from a political upheaval and a lot to lose: their large stone house, an excellent barn, the crops and livestock they’d worked so hard to attain and their recently expanded, now almost 500-acre plantation. But when attributing economic motives, we should remember that partisans on each side came from all levels of the social hierarchy, from urban artisans and rural farmers to the wealthy upper class. The Vought family was prosperous but many loyalists were simple farmers and others were far wealthier, like loyalists William Allen and Joseph Turner of the Union Iron Works. On the other side, almost all Revolutionary leaders were landed gentry who derived their wealth from enslaved workers or tenants on their vast estates, and a few patriot leaders were self-made men like Benjamin Franklin and John Adams.
Colonists had good reason to be alarmed, especially after 1775. The colonies were at war with the mother country, the most powerful military force in the world. Legitimate colonial governments had been displaced by extra-legal provincial congresses and committees of safety. And some patriots wanted nothing short of a social revolution, a leveling based on the liberal notion of equality. In the spring of 1776, New Jersey’s Governor Franklin, recently estranged from his patriot father, made his last attempt to squash the revolt in the Jerseys. With a peace commission and thousands of British troops on the way, he ordered the General Assembly into session. The rebel’s Provincial Congress called for the Governor’s summons to be disobeyed, calling Franklin an “enemy of the liberties of this country.” Governor Franklin appeared before the Congress, challenged their authority and said he would not cooperate “with those who presum’d to usurp the Government of the Province.” The Provincial Congress ordered the governor’s arrest, sent him to Connecticut and continued to mobilize militia units for the patriot cause.
As tensions mounted, conflicts among neighbors flared across New Jersey. The Vought family and militia captain Thomas Jones had been good neighbors. Christopher and John regularly signed license applications for Jones’ tavern, even as tensions mounted after 1773. But as New Jersey’s Congress raised militia to defend New York City, their differing views on the colony’s future erupted into violence. At first, John Vought didn’t dare voice disapproval at the turn of events in the colony. But when the militia company drawn from the nearby Union Iron Works refused to turn out for drills, he and Joseph Lee, a manager at the iron works, were blamed for the company’s refusal and were “ill-used.”
The Provincial Congress called John Vought to appear before them and account for the company’s refusal to turn out. On June 24, 1776, the day he was to appear, John Vought and about two dozen loyalists attacked Jones’s tavern. As these men beat John Shurts with clubs at the back door, Jones heard shouts and ran up the stairs with his gun. He set it aside while he tried to pull men off Shurts, “upon which John Voaght Swindle & others Struck this Deponent with Clubs.” Captain Jones then grabbed his gun and said if they did not leave he’d “blow their Brains out. They answered Gd Dam him he presents his Gun at us, & twisted it out of his hands & beat him on the head & sundry parts of his body w’ their Clubs & said Dam by whig kill him out of the way.” Jones ran into the house and hid upstairs. The mob threatened to kick his wife if she didn’t tell them where he was. They pursued his wife and children outdoors “the Children Screaming & Crying you have killed my dady (sic) don’t kill me.” After the raid, John and Christopher were arrested by the militia, held in the county jail, and fined.
In early December, as Washington’s retreating troops slipped across the Delaware in boats collected by Captain Thomas Jones, John and Christopher Vought and several dozen Hunterdon loyalists rode off to serve in the loyalist New Jersey Volunteers. In 1779, the Vought homestead was confiscated. After the war, the Vought family lived in exile for eight years before returning to land they still owned near Albany, New York. John Vought’s son, named Christopher Vought, fought for the United States in the War of 1812. The Vought family has lived in America since the 18th Century. In March 2010, Christopher Vought, another direct descendant and namesake, made his first visit to the stone house his ancestor built here some 250 years ago. He said he’d seen pictures on 1759House.org “but being here, it felt like I’m home.”
Published: Tuesday, January 24, 2012, 8:00 PM By Frank Mustac / Hunterdon County Democrat 
FUNDS NEEDED — Michael Margulies, an architect working with “The 1759 Vought House Inc” nonprofit to help restore the Christoffel Vought House, installs a sign on a fence near the house announcing a fundraising campaign called “Save the Serpent.” The historic house, which contains a rare wattle-and-daub style decorative plaster ceiling with a figure of a serpent, stands on the grounds of Clinton Township Middle School. 
