Acadiensis/Volume 1/Number 1/John Grant--Loyalist History
Loyalist History—John Grant.
Much has been written, in relation to the motives, services, banishment and subsequent career of the United Empire Loyalists; more, perhaps, remains to be written. The story of their lives, in its fulness of sincere and suffering patriotism, and of its sequel of empire building, has yet to be given to the world. Its earlier chapters must, of course, recall a scene of wrecked homes, armed conflict, bitter neighbourhood strife, and cruel exile, which descendants of the victors, might well wish forgotten; but its central divisions will bring into view, new homes slowly rising in the wilderness, whence go forth, here and there, ambitious youth to figure on the high places of national life; its most recent chapter will show the Canadian Dominion, which descendants of Loyalists so largely developed, asserting herself, as a force to be reckoned with, by any power which would set itself to thwart Britain's high aims on behalf of the world. This theme awaits an historian: pen of poet has hardly yet touched it.
Any intention to discount the value of historical parts in this direction must here be disclaimed. A debt of gratitude to Lorenzo Sabine, for the vast research displayed in his two volumes on "The Loyalists of the American Revolution" is readily acknowledged ; scarcely less grateful should we be to Egerton Ryerson for the patient and loving investigation which resulted in the two volumes on "The Loyalists of America and their Times." Other volumes might be named, as worthy of generous mention, as are several monographs published by Canadian historical societies, and frequent contributions to our religious and secular press; but the fact remains that the record of Loyalist sacrifice and service is incomplete. There are sections of the Maritime Provinces where the axe swung by Loyalist hands awakened echoes which had slept since creation, the first settlers of which find no mention in the series of valuable sketches by Sabine; and many a reader of Dr. Ryerson's volumes has probably laid them down with a feeling of regret that a part of the space devoted to historical disquisition had not been given to those relations of local incident and individual experience in which the chasm of historical narrative so largely consists. Such, at least, would have been the sensation in the mind of the writer of this paper had he not learned the proposed plan from Dr. Ryerson, when that gentleman was pursuing his researches in the British Museum.
It is understood that a gentleman in New Brunswick, whose work on historical lines has already raised him above the rank of an amateur, is aiming to supply, in some measure at least, our lack of knowledge respecting the Loyalist fathers. We wish him success. For such an undertaking the period is auspicious. The comparatively recent addition to the Historical Manuscripts Department, of the Congressional Library at Washington, has brought within our reach, a collection of papers of immense value, the location of which, had, for years, been a matter for enquiry. This collection, Professor Herbert Friedenwald, till very recently, superintendent of the Historical Manuscripts Department, considers "one of the most interesting series of documents in the library." In the thirty-five volumes together with a few miscellaneous papers, are found the proceedings of the commissioners Col. Thomas Dundas and Mr. J. Pemberton for inquiring into the losses, services and claims, of the American Loyalists during the Revolutionary War, as a basis of indemnification by Act of Parliament. The notes of testimony, taken by these commissioners, during 1785, and several subsequent years, at Halifax, St. John and Montreal relate to 1,400 cases, and in many instances go so far into detail, as to afford an amount of information respecting the careers of prominent colonial figures, such as is nowhere else to be found.[1] A large number of other documents, supplementary to the above, Prof. Friedenwald has informed the writer, has quite recently been obtained, by one of the large public libraries of New York.
This important addition to our stores of Loyalist information, should not, however, be allowed to lessen private effort after further accumulation. It is true, that the circumstances of the Loyalist period were most unfavorable to the preparation, or preservation of historical data, that the defeated actors in the strife, left few songs behind them, and no harpers to chant their sorrows, but there must yet be retained on paper, or in memory, many unpublished facts and incidents, which may soon be irrecoverably lost. That is a sad sentence which constitutes the last paragraph of Napier's "History of the War in the Peninsula"—"Thus the war terminated, and with it all remembrance of the veterans' services." A similar statement should be inapplicable to the descendants of the American Loyalists. Even if but little can be added, to the facts already obtained, concerning the period of strife, we may honor them by watching their subsequent career, and by placing on record, some results of their faithful adherence to the Britain they loved.
In the list of almost unknown Loyalists, is Captain John Grant, an ancestor of the writer of this sketch. A single sentence, in the "fragments" at the end of Sabine's second volume—"Grant, John, Captain in the Royal Garrison Battalion"—may or may not have referred to him. The Dame, though less common among Scotch soldiers, than that of Donald Macdonald, which is said to have at times sadly confused the drill sergeant in his efforts to distinguish his Highland recruits from each other, is by no means rare among them.[2]
The John Grant of whom we write was the son of Alexander Grant, of Strathspey, Scotland. Born in 1729, a period at which strong military tendencies prevailed in the Highlands, he in mere boyhood entered the army. In 1730 the English government, which had long hesitated to put arms into the hands of the Scotch Highlanders, on account of the devotion of their chiefs to the cause of the Pretender, raised six companies in the Highlands, each independent of the other. These came to be known as the "Black Watch," on account perhaps, of the sombre tartans worn by them, and because of their employment in small parties, as a sort of rural police. There was no lack of high-class men. The whole country having been disarmed,—an indignity deeply felt by the men of a race, who, even in times of peace, never went forth without dirk or claymore—the youth of good families were eager to serve, if only in the ranks, because they were entitled to bear arms, and to carry a weapon was regarded as a proof that the bearer was a gentleman. In 1739 four additional companies were raised, and in 1740, near Tay Common, the several companies were formed into a regiment, known for a term as the 43rd, and later as the 42nd Highlanders, or the Black Watch, the name the men belonging to it had always loved best.
In 1741, young Grant entered one of the companies. The practice of enticing mere boys into a Highland regiment, was formerly unknown; special care was taken in selecting men of full height, well proportioned, and of handsome appearance. The acceptance of one so young, must therefore have been due to friendly influence, or the possession of unusual development. In March, 1743, when the regiment was ordered to proceed to England, he accompanied it, it is believed, as a lieutenant. The loud remonstrances from eminent Scotchmen which followed this call to general service, contrary to the terms of enlistment; the review at Finchlay Common; the rumor that the officers and men were to be transported to the King's plantations in America, diligently circulated by the adherents of the Stuarts; the attempt of the regiment to march back to Scotland: their final surrender and pardon, are matters of history. Hogarth was living at the time, and his inimitable pencil has curiously depicted one scene of this affair in his "March to Finchlay."
John Grant sailed with his regiment, in the same year, for Flanders, serving there, under Field-Marshal the Earl of Stair, and being present, under the Duke of Cumberland in 1745, at the battle of Fontenoy, in which the Black Watch took a very prominent part. It was, when alluding to that battle that a French writer said, "The British behaved well, and could be exceeded in ardor by none but our officers, who animated the troops by their example, when the Highland furies rushed in upon us, with more violence than ever did a sea driven by a tempest."
On returning from the continent, for a second time, in 1748, the Black Watch was quartered for eight years, in Ireland, whence it sailed for America, landing at New York in June, 1756. A year after its arrival in the New World, the regiment was summoned to active warfare, on the frontier. Of General Sir James Abercrombie's force of 16,000 men, directed against the French at Ticonderoga, 6,340 were British regulars, of which the 42nd Highlanders formed a part. The notice the regiment had attracted on its landing at New York, was even more marked during its march to Albany, particularly on the part of the Indians, "who flocked from all quarters to see strangers whom, from the similarity of their dress, they considered to be of the same extraction as themselves, and whom they therefore regarded as brothers."[3] It must have been at this time that an Indian chief, pleased with young Captain Grant's military bearing, made him an offer of as much land as he could travel around in three days, on the condition that he would marry the chief's daughter.
The brilliant July morning in 1758, on which the whole force was embarked on Lake George, for an attack on Fort Ticonderoga, was followed by a night and morrow of terrible disaster to the British arms. In front of a breastwork of uncommon height and thickness, which sheltered the French army, the ground had been covered with felled oak trees, with sharpened branches pointing outward, against which the English attempted in vain to advance. At last the impatient Highlanders, breaking from the rear, rushing to the front, and screaming with rage, hewed with their broadswords among the branches, struggling to get at the enemy, but in vain. The English, with their deep-toned shout, also rushed on in heavy columns, until General Abercrombie, having lost two thousand men, gave the order to retire,—an order only obeyed by the Highlanders on its second repetition, and when more than half of their men, and twenty-five of their officers, had been either killed, or desperately wounded. The English army, seized with a sudden panic, then rushed in haste to their boats, and put Lake George between them and the enemy. "The fatal lines of Ticonderoga," says Parkman, "were not soon forgotten in the provinces; and marbles in Westminster Abbey, preserve the memory of those who fell, on that disastrous day."[4]
The Black Watch, honored about this time by George II. with the designation "Royal" remained in America until 1761, when they embarked, with ten other regiments for Barbadoes, there to join the armament against Martinique, and the Havannah. Captain Grant joined that expedition, but not as an officer of his former regiment. At Brooklyn he had met Sarah, the attractive daughter of Michael and Catelyntie Bergen, lineal descendants, both of Hans Hansen Bergen, a Norwegian ship-builder, who had crossed the ocean, it is said, in that vessel of the West India Company, which had brought out to New Amsterdam, the second director-general of the colony—Wouter van Twiller, whom Washington Irving has so broadly caricatured. With the passing years, the descendants of Hans Hansen Bergen, and his wife, Sarah Rapalye, had become numerous and somewhat wealthy, and had given their names to several places in the neighbourhood of New York, a street in Brooklyn being yet known as Bergen street. In 1759, the young Scotch officer and Sarah Bergen, the latter then only sixteen, were married. On the writers' table is a piece of the dress worn on the day of the wedding, by the happy Dutch maiden, through whose mind, could not possibly have passed any thought of the future separation from relatives, and exile from home, involved by her wedding vows. Portraits of both are yet preserved by one of their descendants, but so defaced by age, and neglect, as to show few traces of the beauty, which tradition associates with their faces in early days. Their residence was on a farm, with a mill attached, which Mrs. Grant's father had purchased, on the south side of the village of Jamaica, in Queens county, and had settled upon his daughter.[5]
Military service, it has been remarked, was not ended by John Grant's retirement from the Black Watch. On April 19, 1762, the New York colonial government issued a warrant in favor of Captain John Grant, for "£957, bounty and enlisting money, for eighty-seven volunteers of the counties of Kings and Queens,"[6] and as a captain in the New York Regiment of Foot, he took part in that dangerous operation which ended in the reduction of the Havannah, and the surrender of the Spanish forces, on August 11, 1762. In 1763 he was appointed by Cadwallader Golden, Esq., lieutenant-governor and commander-in-chief of the province of New York, to take command of a company raised to protect the colonists, and keep communication open between Albany and certain outposts. During the following year, he marched his company from New York city, to Fort Herkimer on the Mohawk River. Of his services under Sir William Johnson on the frontier, it is difficult to speak with definiteness. More than one Captain Grant, served with bravery on the border of Canada at the period, and it is possible, that a descendant of the officer of whom we write, may have placed to the credit of his ancestor, deeds of daring, performed by another, but, it is certain, that his services were such, as to secure for him a grant of three thousand acres of valuable land, about midway between the head of Lake George, and the fort at Crown Point. That these services had involved serious risk of life, may be inferred, from the statement by the neighbor who prepared his body for burial, that the scars of not less than seven swords or bullet wounds were visible. And, as no reference was made to these dangers in the brief statement of active service during the Revolution, submitted to Brigadier General Fox, Commander of the Forces in Nova Scotia in 1783, it may be presumed that they had been incurred in pre-Revolutionary conflicts.
The home, which, for many years had been his pleasant headquarters, was wrecked during the Revolution. Though his father-in-law, at the beginning of the strife, had asked British protection, he and his family, were strong in their attachment to the Whigs, and used their best efforts to persuade Captain Grant to assume command of a regiment in the services of Congress—a proposition which, to use his own words, he "disdainfully spurned." Thus situated, he had to make his escape to the West Indies, but having at the end of eighteen months, learned that General Sir William Howe was at the head of the British troops on Staten Island, he returned from the south, and offered his services to that officer. At the time of the landing of the British on Long Island, he was appointed as Guide, and given command of the vanguard of the left column, under Major-General Grant, on August 27, 1776, in which capacity he so acquitted himself, as to receive the general's thanks, as a contributor to the success of the day.
The close of the war, found this Loyalist, like thousands of others, in a sad plight. Ill-health would not permit him to continue with the army; he therefore remained at Long Island with his family. The losses of the family, through the war, had been very serious. During her husband's absence in the West Indies, Mrs. Grant had had the best furniture, plate, and wearing apparel, with valuable papers, removed to a house in Hackensack, New Jersey, and these, at the time of the pursuit of the American troops by Lord Cornwallis, were all plundered or destroyed. At about the same time the property owned by Mrs. Grant was also burned. In her touching appeal for some compensation for her losses, that lady describes her property as a "plantation of about one hundred and fifty acres, lying in the town of Brookland, on Long Island, on which was a long and valuable mansion house, forty-eight by thirty-six feet, with a kitchen adjoining the same, as well as barns and other outbuildings, in good repair." This residence, with its buildings and large quantities of grain, was burned by the royal army, because of its interference with an attack on the enemy's encampment, thirty-one head of cattle, and four horses, having been driven off previously. Thus robbed and deprived of all they had possessed, they moved off, with the British, to Jamaica, and remained on Long Island, until the evacuation of New York by the King's troops.
His total losses in plate, bonds, buildings, furniture, stock and other accumulations, Captain Grant estimated at five thousand pounds. Included in this valuation, was probably his large tract of land near Crown Point, which was forfeited by him, as an adherent of the King. At an early date, this property became of great value. On a sketch of it James Abed, of New York, who on another document certifies himself to have been at the time the royal army took possession of the Heights on Long Island, a "major in the American service," wrote in May, 1781, to Mrs. Grant "This is an exact copy of a part of Metcalf's map of the Province of New York, whereby you will find your husband, John Grant, had a grant of three thousand acres of land, which land has since been regranted by the State of Vermont, who suffer none of the old grants from the Crown to be good. This is a very valuable tract and is now all settled nearly as thick as Long Island."
For the loyal Scotchman, only exile remained. Attachment to king and country, was, from the Whig point of view, an unpardonable sin. The prevalent feeling of the American people of this generation, was put into words, by Henry Ward Beecher, at a meeting, held in New York, just one hundred years from the day on which the British troops had taken their final departure from the city, when he said of the victors and their severe enactments, "They did not know any better. They had the instincts of the animal you bite me and I bite you." That was the instinct of the age. It was, if possible, worse; it was fratricidal. Hence John Grant was given clearly to understand, that to endeavor to remain in " New York Province" after the evacuation of it by his Majesty's troops, would be "very fatal," and striking illustrations of the danger were too frequent to be disregarded. Such preparations as could be made for removal, were therefore hastily made.
In the sorrow and sadness of that wonderful exodus, and in its earlier sequel on our shores, the larger share, by far, must have fallen to the lot of our Loyalist foremothers. It was so in this instance. With a sick husband, seven children accompanying her, her eldest son remaining in New York, the voyage to Nova Scotia, and the settlement of her family, and the nine slaves brought with them, on an uncultivated tract on the seashore, must have involved the former Dutch maiden, in not merely months but years of keen anxiety. Prior to his removal to Nova Scotia, John Grant had began to feel the effects of wounds and exposure in the past. On July 1st, 1783, he reached Halifax in H. M. ship "Berwich." Governor Parr having granted him three thousand acres of land, of which he was unable to make a personal selection, the Surveyor-general, Charles Morris, Esq., had it surveyed at the lower part of the township of Newport, the grant bearing date August 26, 1783. In September he visited Shelburne, and from that place returned to New York, whence on October 16, he and his family sailed on board the "Stafford" transport, Captain Westport, arriving at Halifax ten days later. On November 6, a bed was placed on a truck, and on this he was carried to Windsor, taken thence by boat to Mount Denson, and detained by serious illness at that place, until May 23, 1784, when he reached the new destination for his family, at "Loyal Hill." Home, it could not be called: it was a refuge from the Revolutionary storm.
The destruction of Captain Grant's earlier papers, has deprived us no doubt of many items of interest. The faded and torn documents on our table, were called forth by the sorrowful circumstances of the period, and index little else. In 1790, illness resulting from previous wounds and exposure, proved to Captain Grant "sickness unto death." After the fashion of the time his body was interred in his own grounds, but some years since, owing to the encroachments of a quarry, the bones were removed to a granite monument erected in the burying-ground of the Baptist church in the neighborhood. The wife, whose faithfulness to her vow, to "keep thee only unto him," involved so much unforseen sorrow, ending in exile from all her kindred, survived him some years, dying in 1808.
Of the numerous descendants of this Loyalist pair, but a comparatively small number in Nova Scotia bear the ancestral name. In the original large family, but two, were sons, one of whom early returned to the United States. The eldest son, Michael Bergen Grant, who had remained behind his parents in Long Island, came to Nova Scotia two years before his father's death, took charge of the place, and some years later married Sophia, daughter of Captain John Nutting, of the Engineers, who, as a Loyalist, had been granted a large tract of land, near that of Captain Grant, at Kempt. Their family included one son, and seven daughters, of the latter of whom it might have been said with truthfulness, as of the daughters, of Job: "In all the land were no women found so fair." It is sufficient to say that the descendants of Michael B. Grant, and of his sisters of the Loyal Hall homestead, have furnished a good proportion of the solid business, and successful professional men, of the province, to which, by Revolutionary bitterness, their ancestors were driven.
- ↑ Report of American Historical Association, 189S, p. 39. These documents, which as a matter of course, found their way to England, were procured by Major-General J. H. Lefroy, governor of Bermuda, and presented through him by his relative, Mrs. Dundas—a descendant of one of the commissioners—to the Smithsonian Institution, in 1874, as the Library of Conress is the depositary for the books, etc., of the Smithsonian Institution they naturally found their way there.
- ↑ That fine specimen of a true Scotchman, the late Major Allan McLean of the Nashwaak, used to tell of two brother Scotchmen of a disbanded regiment, an incident at once illustrative of former-day simplicity and of change in dress The one Donald Macdonald had made arrangements for marriage, but as the day approached he grew nervous. Finally he went to another Donald Macdonald in the same neighbourhood, and, making him a confidant, asked: "Noo, Donal, wull ye na tak her yirsel, an I'll gie ye the cotton goun in the baergain?"
- ↑ "A History of the Scottish Highland Clans and Regiments," by John S. Keltie, Vol. II., p. 386.
- ↑ "The Conspiracy of Pontiac" Vol. II, p. 129.
- ↑ TheBergen Family, etc. By Feunis Bergen, Albany, N. Y., 1876, pp. 259–260.
- ↑ State Documents at Albany, N. Y., as quoted in The Bergen Family p. 259.