The Hudson River Valley Review

PDF Version Need Adobe Acrobat? Click Here

THE HUDSON RIVER VALLEY REVIEW A Journal of Regional Studies

SUMMER 2003

The American Revolution in the Hudson River Valley

Published by the Hudson River Valley Institute at Marist College
THE HUDSON RIVER VALLEY REVIEW
A Journal of Regional Studies

From the Director
It is with great pleasure that the Hudson River Valley Institute at Marist College,
by special agreement with Bard College, begins publishing The Hudson River
Val l e y Rev i ew. For many years, the journal was published by Bard under the
expert editorial direction of Richard C. Wiles, David C. Pierce and William
Wilson. The goal of the Review is much the same as in the past: to present
the most recent scholarship on all aspects of the Hudson River Valley's unique
history and culture. The Review will continue to publish issues twice a year, with
one issue each year built around a special theme. This premier issue focuses on
the American Revolution in the Hudson River Valley. Future special issues will be
devoted to Hudson Valley architecture and the Hudson River School of art.

Thomas S. Wermuth
Director, Hudson River Valley Institute at Marist College

Contributors
Edward Countryman is the author of several books on the American Revolution,
including the Bancroft Prize– winning A People in Revolution: The American
Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760-1790. He is a contributing author
to The Empire State and University Distinguished Professor in the Clements
Department of History at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

James M. Johnson, the author of Militiamen, Redcoats, and Loyalists, is the
Military Historian of the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area and
Executive Director of the Hudson River Valley Institute.

Barnet Schecter is the author of the critically acclaimed Battle for New York: City
at the Heart of the American Revolution. He resides in New York City.

Kenneth Shefsiek is the Museum Curator at the Huguenot Historical Society in
New Paltz, New York.

Gregory Smith is the Historic Preservation Program Analyst for the New York
State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.

Thomas S. Wermuth is the Dean of Liberal Arts at Marist College and author
of Rip Van Winkle's Neighbors: The Transformation of Rural Society in the Hudson
River Valley.

THE HUDSON RIVER VALLEY REVIEW
Vol. 20, No. 1, Summer 2003

Contents

The American Revolution in the Hudson River Valley
Split Wide and Split DeepÑ The Revolutionary Hudson Valley
Edward Countryman....................................................................... 1

The American Revolution in the Hudson River ValleyÑ An Overview
Thomas S. Wermuth & James M. Johnson .............................................. 5

Interpreting the Battle for the Hudson River Valley:
The Battle of Fort Montgomery
Gregory Smith & James M. Johnson ................................................... 15

A Suspected Loyalist in the Rural Hudson Valley:
The Revolutionary War Experience of Roeloff Josiah Eltinge
Kenneth Shefsiek .......................................................................... 27

Saratoga, Philadelphia, and the Collapse of Britain's Grand Strategy
Barnet Schecter ........................................................................... 53

"The Women! in this place have risen in a mob":
Women Rioters and the American Revolution in the Hudson River Valley
Thomas S. Wermuth ..................................................................... 65

Regional History Forum
Mount Gulian Historic Site, Beacon ................................................. 73
Commemorating the Revolution in Pawling Through the Years ................ 77

1 Split Wide and Split Deep— The Revolutionary Hudson Valley
Split Wide and Split Deep The Revolutionary Hudson Valley

Edward Countryman
The American Revolution was the real thing, fully as disruptive, painful, and
transforming as any revolution in the modern world. But despite generations of
historians' hard work, it remains difficult to convince Americans that this was
so. Somehow, we think the Founding Generation was different. They escaped all
the misery and conflict that plagued the English in the 1640s, the French in the
1790s, and twentieth-century people from China to Cuba. United and harmoni-ous,
they faced an external enemy, abandoned the monarchy, and experimented
with republicanism until they found a solution to whatever problems they faced.
What they wroughtÑ the United States Constitution has endured. A remark-able
elite led them into the conflict with Britain and then led them out. Our
revolution was unique. Or so it seems.

I certainly thought that way when I began the doctoral project that led to my
own New York book. But as I encountered the evidence that Revolutionary New
Yorkers left behind, I grew more and more puzzled. Their actual record just did not
fit this perceived image. Finally I realized that the great Cornell historian Carl
Becker had been correct all along. Writing nearly a century ago, Becker described
New York's revolution not just as a struggle for independence, but also as a pro-found
internal conflict. Becker dealt only with the period prior to independence,
and mostly with New York City. Carrying the subject through the war, the cre-ation
of the state government, the disputes about what kind of place independent
New York should be, and the movement for the U. S. Constitution as I sought
to do only bore out his insight.

I wrote then about white men. Now we can see that, one way or another,
the Revolution transformed everybody it touched: white, Native American, and
African-American; downstate and upstate; urban, rural, and frontier; female and
male. We can see as well how all these different kinds of people transformed the
Revolution as they lived through it. Their American Revolution was exhilarating
and liberating, but also profoundly frightening, very disruptive, and deeply painful.
For some, it brought great opportunity; for others, just to survive was success
enough. And for more, the Revolution meant great and permanent loss. Each of
the essays collected here addresses these themes.

Barnet Schecter tells a story that is both familiar and strange. Virtually any-body
who claims to know the Revolution's story can give the outline of General
John Burgoyne's attempt to drive down the Champlain/ Hudson corridor from
Canada toward Albany, and eventually New York City. Burgoyne's great failure
at Saratoga often is described as one of the world's truly historic battles, because
the outcome brought the French in on the American side. That may overstate
Saratoga's importance for diplomacy and alliance-making: there is good evidence
that the French already had made their decision to intervene. Like Lincoln wait-ing
for a victory over the South before he announced emancipation, Louis XIV
and his advisors were merely waiting for the right moment to act. Schecter takes
us into the backstabbing, the self-seeking, and the intrigues of the British commanders,
Sir William Howe, Sir Henry Clinton, and Burgoyne. The larger thesis
of his book, Battle for New York, is that the colony/ state was "at the heart of the
American Revolution." If it was, the Hudson Valley was the Revolution's aorta.
Both Schecter's pages and the firsthand evidence that survives from the
Val ley i n 1777 show how close that aorta came to being cut. Burgoyne's was
not the only invasion. Another expedition burst through the defenses at the
Hudson Highlands in October and plundered its way north until it captured and
burned Kingston. It stopped there, where it scattered and nearly destroyed the
newly created state government. Clinton, directing events from his headquarters
in New York City, and his field commander, General John Vaughan, may never
have intended to aid Burgoyne, who was trapped in the consequences of his own
hubris. But taken together, the expeditions of Burgoyne and Vaughan, along with
Barry St. Leger's Mohawk Valley incursion, terrified the people of New York's
shrinking Patriot zone. When Burgoyne fell into the trap that Horatio Gates laid
for him, and when St. Leger and Vaughan turned around, they had come very
close to ending New York's revolution altogether. The ruins of Fort Montgomery,
whose historic events and recovery for modern visitors are described here by James
Johnson and Gregory Smith, are mute witnesses to a terrible time.

The Valley people's sense of nearly unbearable crisis comes through most
strongly in the records of Albany County's Committee of Safety. The very phrase
"Committee of Safety" is frightening. It conjures up images of the French Terror, as
that revolution's hapless victims faced former neighbors who had become implacable
enemies. Even more frightening is the name of the Revolutionary New
York gover nment 's political police force, the Commissioners for Detecting and
Defeating Conspiracies. Their records, and those kept by the county committees,
show whole populations stripped of firearms for "disaffection," entire villages called
for interrogation, and hapless individuals arrested at midnight and exiled to the
British lines or imprisoned underground at the Simsbury mines in Connecticut.

State policy shifted from just trying to control Loyalists and neutrals to punishing
them strongly. So many anti-Loyalist statutes passed through the legislature and
the Council of Revision that they filled a good-sized volume. A London printer
assembled such a volume in 1786 to demonstrate that Revolutionary New York
had no intention of letting up on the king's friends within its borders. He did not
need to comment; just publishing the statutes was enough.

Kenneth Shefsiek's moving tale of the ordeal of Roeloff Josiah Eltinge shows
what could happen to someone who fell into the conspiracy commissioners' hands.
Eltinge does not seem to have been an outright Loyalist. He was not condemned
by name in the 1779 statute that exiled many Loyalists on pain of death and seized
their property. There is no evidence that he harbored British spies, or joined a
Tory guerrilla group. When it was all over, he did not flee to Canada or Britain (or
further away) rather than accept the Revolution's triumph, and he did not have
to plead for compensation from the British government. His initial arrest was for
nothing more than refusing Continental currency. But by refusing it, he was laying
bare something deeper within himself. Clearly, this was a man in real pain as
he faced the need to choose, one way or another. By no means was he the only
New Yorker who would have preferred to hang back.

The currency that Eltinge refused was offered to him by Esther Hasbrouck
Wirtz. Shefsiek shows that her family and Eltinge's had a long history of mutual
hostility. Perhaps, as he suggests, what came of her offer and his refusal was just
small-town nastiness, writ large. But Thomas Wermuth demonstrates that her
involvement, as a woman, had more about it than happenstance or past quarrels.
We cannot go far into her mind, but all over the northern states women were
finding political voices and roles.

In many instances, what they said and did involved their right to purchase
necessary goods like salt and bread and flour at what the community called just
prices. Wermuth describes many such events in the Hudson Valley. "Bread riots" of
this sort had a long history in the Atlantic world. We can find them in Georgian
London, in Hapsburg Vienna, and even in Bogota under the Spanish Bourbon
monarchy. There is a direct link between Esther Hasbrouck Wirtz offering Eltinge
her depreciating paper money for what she needed and the hungry women of
Paris confronting "the Baker" (Louis XVI), "the Baker's wife" (Marie-Antoinette),
and their "little boy" (the Dauphin). Eltinge's refusal of Wirtz's money directly
prefigures the Queen's contemptuous "They have no bread? Let them eat cake."
Marie-Antoinette paid by far the higher price. But Roeloff Josiah Eltinge of New
Paltz, New York, suffered enough for doing much the same thing. Though Esther
Wirtz could not have known it, she and other women of the American Revolution
were changing the course of very large human events. Like the more famous
Abigail Smith Adams, Judith Sargent Murray, and Mercy Otis Warren, she was
finding a voice of her own.

Listening to academic papers, donning eighteenth-century costume, honor-ing
the Founders great and obscure, watching the fireworks: these are how we
remember the American Revolution. We are right to do so. It does rank among
modern history's great events, and it did bring permanent change. But living
through it was not easy for anybody involved, as the record of what happened in
the Revolutionary Hudson Valley shows.

1. Edward Countryman, A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New
York, 1760-1790 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).

2. Carl Lotus Becker, The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760-1776 (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1909).

3. See Jonathan R. Dull, A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1985) and Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Diplomacy and Revolution:
The Franco-American Alliance of 1778 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1980).

4. (New York: Walker, 2002).
5. Minutes of the Albany Committee of Correspondence, 1775-1778 ed. James Sullivan (2 vols.,
Albany: University of the State of New York, 1923-1925).

6. Minutes of the Commissioners for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies in the State of New York,
Albany County Sessions, 1778-1781 ed. Victor Hugo Paltsits (Albany, 3 vols., University of
the State of New York, 1909-1910) and Minutes of the Committee and of the first Commission
for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies in the State of New York, Dec. 11, 1776-Sept. 23, 1778,
ed. Dorothy C. Barck [Collections of the New-York Historical Society, vols. 57-58] (New York:
Printed for the Society, 1924-25).

7. Laws of the Legislature of the State of New York, in Force Against the Loyalists (London: H. Reynell,
1786).

The American Revolution in the Hudson Valley An Overview
Thomas S. Wermuth & James M. Johnson
Although the "shot heard 'round the world" that ignited the American Revolution
occurred a few miles outside of Boston and the campaign that ended it took
place in Virginia, the nexus of the conflict was New York's Hudson River Valley.
Throughout the war, officers on both sides made it their top priority to gain con-trol
of the Hudson RiverÑ and to keep hold of it at any cost.

As a result, the Hudson Valley the virtual center of the coloniesÑ hosted
many key figures, battles, and political events throughout the eight years of war,
and its final drama was played out here with the British evacuation of New York
City on November 25, 1783. In the years leading up to the Revolution, the Sons
of Liberty, as active in New York as they were in Massachusetts, printed broad-sides,
encouraged boycotts, rallied, rioted, and dumped British tea into New York
Harbor. Patriot housewives throughout the Valley threw their own "tea parties" at
the expense of merchants and Loyalist neighbors. The region's social fabric was
ripped apart, first by the struggle between the powerful coalitions of DeLanceys
and Livingstons, and then by the clash between the Loyalists and Whigs (or
Patriots).

The New York Provincial Congress established itself at the courthouse in
White Plains in July 1776 and created the State of New York with its acceptance
of the Declaration of Independence on July 9. New York adopted its constitution
in Kingston on April 20, 1777, and on February 6, 1778, it ratified the Articles of
Confederation, tying its fate to the rest of the United States of America.

Prelude to War On the eve of the American Revolution, the Hudson River Valley was among the
most fertile and productive regions in North America. Its grain, flour, and dairy
products were sent all over the world. The port towns of Albany, Poughkeepsie,
and Kingston were thriving commercial entrepôts that served as regional hubs in
the vibrant agricultural trade with New York City.

The Hudson Valley had been settled primarily by the Dutch in the mid-sev-enteenth
century, and the English soon thereafter, with some French Huguenots
and Germans following. Much of the Hudson's west bank was still ethnically
and culturally Dutch, perhaps three generations removed from leaving Europe.
Dutch customs prevailed, the Dutch Reformed Church dominated, and while the
Second Continental Congress was approving the Declaration of Independence,
Dutch was spoken more regularly in many Hudson Valley towns than English.
Indeed, through 1774 the Ulster town of Kingston (a mere three years away from
being the state capital) kept its official records in Dutch.

As late as 1763, residents of the Hudson Valley still felt strong bonds to the
king of England and his empire. A typical outpouring of this affection was the
celebration in Kingston of George III's ascension to the throne in 1761. Hundreds
of residents paraded through the streets and offered toasts and cannonades to
"His most Royal and Sacred Majesty." 1 Similar celebrations were held throughout
the region.
Nevertheless, relations between England and the colonies began to sour.