In this issue:

  • Jacob Bailey: Loyalist Anthropologist, Part Two by Stephen Davidson UE
  • JAR: Thomas Read of Delaware, Part 3: Continental Navy Commander
  • JAR: Riflemen Run Riot: The Mutiny at Prospect Hill
  • A 1775 View of Boston by Lieutenant Richard Williams
  • Revolutionary War Battle Maps
  • Propaganda Warfare: Benjamin Franklin Fakes a Newspaper
  • How Hamilton’s Ryckman Neighbourhood became a loyalist nucleus
  • Gown: Brocaded silk with floss/fly fringe
  • Book: Mrs. Dalgairns’s Kitchen: Rediscovering ‘The Practice of Cookery’
  • Loyalist Certificates Issued in January and February
  • Events:
    • Victoria Branch”The Loyalists of Digby” Saturday 20 March @1:00PM ET @10:00AM PT
    • Kingston and District Branch”The 1786 Ernestown Project” Saturday 27 March @2:00PM ET
    • Webinar — Hobkirk’s Hill and the Siege of Fort Watson — Sat 27 Mar 2021, 9AM ET for 2 hrs.
  • From the Twittersphere and Beyond
  • Last Post: FISHER, Eleanor UE

Connect with us:

Twitter: http://twitter.com/uelac
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/UELAC

Jacob Bailey: Loyalist Anthropologist, Part Two of Two
copyright Stephen Davidson UE
As well as making detailed records of his findings during almost two decades along the Kennebec River, the Rev. Jacob Bailey also “made collections of everything curious respecting the original inhabitants”. One of his greatest regrets in fleeing Dresden, Maine to escape persecution by Patriots was the fact that he had to leave behind both his artifact collection and”most of my papers”. They were both quiet casualties of the American Revolution.
As the Bailey family made its way to sanctuary in Nova Scotia, their schooner stopped at a small Bay of Fundy island that was a week’s sea journey from Halifax. Despite being weary from his travels and suffering the trauma of being uprooted from his parish, Bailey could not help looking at the island through the eyes of an anthropologist.
He later noted,”The soil of this island is composed of dark, rich earth, intermixed with a vast profusion of clam shells, to the extent of several feet deep, which kind of composition is extremely favourable to vegetation. These appearances are a strong indication that this island was formerly a noted place of rendezvous for the Indians, who resided here in great numbers in their fishing season.”
Although his Loyalist stance cost him his job and his home in Dresden, Bailey did not let the political upheaval of his day dampen his interest in the Abenaki People. When his evacuation ship brought the Anglican minister and his family into the safety of Halifax’s harbour, it came upon a group of M’ikmaw men.
“As we sailed slowly up the harbour, the next object which invited our attention, was a large fleet of Indian canoes, coasting along the {Chebucto} shore and filled with multitudes of the native Micmacs, and at the same time we espied several of these copper-faced sons of liberty either landing on the margin of a little bay, or climbing up the stupendous precipices. We took notice upon this occasion, that artificial ways were formed up these steepy cliffs for the conveniency of ascending or conveying down timber, which is frequently cut on the summit of these ridges for the public works at Halifax.”
Bailey arrived in Halifax in July, a month when the Mi’kmaq, the local Abenaki People, situated themselves along the Atlantic coast. Here they fished and gathered shellfish throughout the summer. With the coming of the winter, they would move back inland to the shelter and game of the forests.
It is interesting that within a matter of days of his arrival in Halifax, Bailey sought out Michael Franklin, the former lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia. At this time Franklin was the superintendent of Indian affairs for the colony. Twenty-five years earlier, he had been captured by a Mi’kmaw band. During those three months, Franklin mastered his captors’ language and acquired a respect for their culture. Was it the mutual interest in Indigenous cultures that made Bailey want to introduce himself to a stranger?
When he arrived at Franklin’s home, Bailey met some Abenaki elders. Describing the encounter, the Loyalist minister provided almost photographic details of the Indigenous leaders. Bailey wrote that Franklin”had several Indians in his train, arrayed in all their tinsel finery; among the rest a Sachem belonging to the tribe of St. Johns {presumably New Brunswick’s St. John River}. This fellow, by the oddity of his appearance and the singularity of his visage, immediately struck my imagination, and I was unable to look upon him without a mixture of hilarity and wonder. He was arrayed in a long blue coat, adorned with a scarlet cape, and bound close about his loins with a girdle. He wore upon his head a narrow-brimmed flopped hat, and his face was an entire composition of wrinkles.”
At the time Bailey met this elder, the Anglican minister was dressed in rags, a consequence of his flight from Patriot persecution.”I was admitted to the honor of shaking hands with this American Monarch, who, eyeing me from head to foot, and perceiving that I had more rags than finery about me, I plainly discerned that his complaisance was mingled with a degree of contempt, for, instead of pulling off his hat, he only touched it with his fingers and nodded his head; though I remarked a few days after, when I was dressed in a new suit of clothes, he approached me with higher marks of veneration, and did not fail to take his hat wholly from his head. Thus people of all nations, both barbarous and polished, reverence and respect their fellow creatures, not for qualities, which belong to human nature, but on account of those ornaments for which they are indebted to other parts of the creation.”
Bailey was able to do what many Americans could not — look beyond physical differences to see the common humanity that Europeans and Indigenous People shared.
By August of 1782, the Rev. Jacob Bailey was assigned to the Anglican Church in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Royal. His parish duties kept him busier than he had been in Dresden, and there are no references to the Abenaki in his correspondence. However, it is interesting to see how his mind stay fixed on Indigenous People.
In a letter that he wrote in 1785, Bailey described John the Baptist, but rather than using a biblical or European simile, he said that the New Testament prophet”appeared as unadorned as a Micmac of Nova Scotia”. When reaching for a way to describe a biblical character, Bailey naturally turned to Indigenous culture for the most direct analogy.
The Rev. Jacob Bailey died in Annapolis Royal on March 22, 1818 at the age of seventy. One of the Loyalist minister’s biographers summed up Bailey’s life this way: “He strove hard to acquire knowledge, and wrote much…Without attributing to him the possession of genius, he may be said to have been a man of a fair degree of talent and of a large amount of various information.”
No small part of what Bailey explored throughout his life was the story of the Abenaki People. He is the forgotten anthropologist of Loyalist history.
To see a portrait of the Rev. Jacob Bailey, visit: <http://annapolisheritagesociety.com/community-history/history-annapolis-royal/>
To secure permission to reprint this article contact the author at stephendavids@gmail.com.

JAR: Thomas Read of Delaware, Part 3: Continental Navy Commander
by William H. J. Manthorpe, Jr. 8 March 2021
(Part 1: The Creation of the Continental Navy
Part 2: Commodore in the Pennsylvania Navy)
Thomas Read (1740-1788) began his seafaring career as a merchant captain, sailing for the Philadelphia firm of Willing and Morris in the ship Aurora, alongside his friend John Barry in Black Prince, as we read in Part 1 of this series. In the early stages of the revolution he served as de facto commodore of the Pennsylvania navy, as we learned in Part 2 of this series. In June 1776, he applied to the Marine Committee of the Continental Congress, of which his brother George was a member, and was given the rank of captain, back-dated to April 6, 1776.
In December 1775, Congress had resolved to build thirteen frigates. These thirteen ships, approved on December 13, would be the first American ships designed and built as warships. William Whipple, delegate to the congress from New Hampshire wrote that, thirty-one days after the December 13 resolution, Joshua Humphreys”laid the plans of several men-of-war” before the marine committee. Four of the ships were assigned to be built by shipyards along Philadelphia’s Delaware River front.
The only surviving plan for these warships is that of the frigate eventually named Randolph. Because it was built at the shipyard of Wharton and Humphreys, it was assuredly one of the plans Humphreys delivered and the”official plan.” The ship eventually named Washingtonwas built at the Eyre Brothers shipyard and”It is reasonable to suppose was a sister of Randolph.” Based on those plans, like Randolph,Washington was of a new design, making it bigger and faster than British frigates of the day.
The keel of Washington was laid by December 21, 1775. Construction was underway by spring, assisted by citizen volunteers. Washingtonwas launched on August 7, 1776. Unfortunately, just weeks thereafter, General George Washington’s army was defeated at the battle of Long Island. Over the summer, Manhattan was threatened and evacuated. In October, the army was defeated at White Plains. Washington was forced to retreat into New Jersey, followed by the British army. The threat to Philadelphia was on everyone’s minds.
Recognizing the need to finish the four Philadelphia frigates quickly, on October 10, 1776, the Continental congress”agreed” with the marine committee’s recommendation for the formal”rank of the Captains of the Navy of the United States” and the ships that they would command. Read more…

JAR: Riflemen Run Riot: The Mutiny at Prospect Hill
by Joshua Shepherd 9 March 2021
“They are remarkably stout and hardy men,” thought army surgeon James Thacher,”Dressed in white frocks, or rifle shirts, and round hats.” The robust constitutions and rugged appearance of the reinforcements that arrived at Boston in the summer of 1775 occasioned no small stir in the army camps ringing Boston. Dressed in a curious amalgam of European and Indian clothing, they appeared almost savage by New England standards. The newcomers, however, were valued not for their unorthodox dress but for the weapons they carried—the long rifle of the American frontier.”These men,” Thacher reported hopefully,”are remarkable for the accuracy of their aim.”
The saga of the Revolution’s riflemen is a uniquely American tale. When Congress made plans to organize a Continental Army during June 1775, one of its first acts was to authorize the enlistment of ten companies of”expert riflemen,” to be recruited from the back country of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Maryland. From the outset, the rifle companies were never intended as a substitute for regular line infantry. They were organized specifically for service as”light infantry”, and as such would be expected to perform scouting, skirmishing, and screening duties.
A rarity in New England, the rifle was far more prevalent in the back country of the southern colonies largely due to the gunsmiths of Pennsylvania and Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. While most Continental regiments, as well as militia units, were armed with smooth bore muskets, the frontier newcomers came equipped with state-of-the-art eighteenth-century arms technology.
Although standard smooth bore fire locks were far easier to load and could accommodate a socket bayonet, the American long rifle possessed a specialized barrel; spiral”lands and grooves” were cut inside the barrel during manufacture. When fired from such a rifle, a tight-fitting load consisting of a round lead ball and a greased patch would engage the rifling, emerge spinning from the muzzle, and maintain stability in flight for longer distances. Read more…

A 1775 View of Boston by Lieutenant Richard Williams
Williams served in the Royal Welch Fusiliers during the Revolution, arriving in Boston in early June 1775. He painted in watercolour and drew in pencil the landscape around him,. In his journal on June 12, he wrote”I went to the common and to Beacon Hill, where I saw all our encampments, those of the enemy. From this hill you have a view of the town and country all around it.”
Williams painted a set of five topographical views forming a 360-degree view of Boston from Beacon Hill. Read more and view the five paintings stitched together at An 18th Century View.

Revolutionary War Battle Maps
New York Historical Society
During the Revolutionary War, printed maps provided the public with the only pictorial representation of battles being fought in the American colonies. Through a powerful combination of text and image, maps conveyed precise details of battles and the geographic settings in which they took place. The majority of battle maps were printed in London where the printing trade was well-established. Printers in the colonies lacked the expertise, equipment, and supplies needed to produce maps.
The process of creating a printed map began when a trained military surveyor drew a map of a battle in North America and sent it to London. A trans-Atlantic journey took an average of seven weeks at the time. Once the hand-drawn map arrived in London, an engraver would transfer it as a reverse image onto a copper plate using tracing paper and a wax coating on the plate. Metal tools were used to scratch every last detail—text and images—into the plate. Maps were printed by inking the plate and rolling it on a sheet of damp paper through a hand-operated press. This took time and considerable physical exertion.
The demand for battle maps of the American Revolution was so great that, despite the time, cost, and effort required to produce them, London publishers profited from their sale. Because the timeliness of a map was a key selling point, publishers made a point of noting the map’s date—year, month, and day—on the map. Read more…

Propaganda Warfare: Benjamin Franklin Fakes a Newspaper
by Hugh T. Harrington in Journal of the American Revolution, 10 Nov. 2014.
“The Press, Watson, is a most valuable institution, if you only know how to use it,” said the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. Benjamin Franklin had a lifetime of experience with the Press and knew well how to use it.
In the spring of 1782, five months after Yorktown, Franklin was in Paris working on the complex diplomatic problems involved in negotiating a peace treaty among Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands and the United States. Franklin was seeking, among other things, reparations to the United States citizens who had lost their lives and property. Appealing to the British government would likely prove unsuccessful. So Franklin aimed at reaching the British citizens.
The primary article in the hoax supplement concerned wartime atrocities by Indians at the behest of the British. Read more…

How Hamilton’s Ryckman Neighbourhood became a loyalist nucleus
South Mountain community has rich history, writes Robert Williamson
Hamilton Mountain News, Wednesday, March 10, 2021
Part of our Mountain Memories mandate has been to trace the ethnic heritage of groups who pioneered the virgin expanse of the Hamilton Mountain. In the beginning it was Loyalist refugees escaping the turmoil of the American Revolutionary War, by following the Mohawk Trail to 100 acres of free land grants from the Crown. Later, it was immigrants seeking employment opportunities in a rapidly developing country. Some of the family stories previously told here are: Rymal, Hess, Terryberry, Burkholder, Binkley, Beckett, and Bull. This month the focus is on the Ryckman Corners neighborhood where the Young (Jung) and Almas families of German descent were among the first United Empire Loyalist (UEL) settlers along Rymal Road.
This story begins with Adam Young and his sons John, Daniel and Henry who were members of the Butler’s Rangers fighting alongside the First Nations in the Mohawk Valley against the American rebels in 1776. Read more…

Gown: Brocaded silk with floss/fly fringe
The John Bright Collection
Gown: Late 1770s to early 1780s. Brocaded silk trimmed with silk braid
This dress is a typical example of a formal gown of around 1780, the robe à la française, also known as a sack or sacque. Worn for special occasions, it had by this time become a somewhat fossilised version of an earlier fashion with its prominent side hoops and loose pleated back, and like many fossilised garments it lacks the visual freshness of its forebears. Its silk, much less crisp and weighty than those of preceding decades, is brocaded with sparse sprays of formulaic flowers in limited colours that are without naturalism. The robings of the skirt, the deep petticoat flounce and the neck border appear flat and lifeless compared to the vibrant Rococo trimmings of the mid century. A more up to date feature is the closed bodice, the fronts meeting in the centre with lacing, negating the need of a stomacher. Read more…

Book: Mrs. Dalgairns’s Kitchen: Rediscovering ‘The Practice of Cookery’
Editor: Mary F. Williamson UE
Hardcover, 608 pages
My book published with McGill-Queen’s University Press does have a loyalist connection. Mrs. Dalgairns’s Kitchen: Rediscovering ‘The Practice of Cookery’ includes the complete cookbook from 1830 by Catherine Emily Callbeck Dalgairns who was born (1788), raised and married in P.E.I. Her mother was Ann Coffin from the Boston Nathaniel Coffin loyalist family that emigrated to Charlottetown in the 1770s.
Mrs. Dalgairns’s father, Phillips Callbeck was Attorney General of what was then St. John’s Island, and died just two years after my author was born. Due to the serial bankruptcies of her new husband, Mrs. Dalgairns was forced to flee to London (ten years) then Dundee Scotland, and it was while she was living there that her The Practice of Cookery was published to many laudatory reviews in 16 editions from 1829 to 1861.
All these years the assumption has been that Mrs. Dalgairns was Scottish, but I trust that I have proven (in my LONG Introduction) that she was”Canadian”. An ad in the MQUP Spring catalogue gives many more details of the book.
The book is now officially available from several online sources and book stores, including Chapters/Indigo, but several people have told me that they have already received ordered copies.
Mary Williamson UE

Loyalist Certificates Issued in January and February
A report with updates until the end of February arrived early in March. We post that information in different preference places.

  • The list of certificates issued since 2012 is a sortable table and is public. The latest updates have been added.
  • The date, branch and name of the recipient are added to the directory entry for the Loyalist.
    • As the directory is frozen at the moment for new developments, these new entries have not been added there.

Events:

Victoria Branch”The Loyalists of Digby” Saturday 20 March @1:00PM ET @10:00AM PT

Presenter: Brian McConnell, UE. B.A. (Hons.), LL.B., Author & Historian
Based on Brian’s recently published book of the same name.
Please reply to membership.vic.uelac@gmail.com to let us know if you plan to attend this zoom meeting and for the link to the Zoom meeting

Kingston and District Branch “The 1786 Ernestown Project” Saturday 27 March @2:00PM ET

Kingston and District Branch UELAC invite everyone to our next meeting on Saturday, March 27 at 2:00 PM EDT on Zoom. Richard Parry will talk about”The 1786 Ernestown Project”. What is that? Come to the meeting to find out. Our website http://uelac.org/Kingston-Branch has the link to join the Zoom meeting.

Webinar — Hobkirk’s Hill and the Siege of Fort Watson — Sat 27 Mar 2021, 9AM ET for 2 hrs.

Hosted by”Tales of the Southern Campaigns” with

  • Ed Forte on Siege of Fort Watson and the the 2nd Partnership between Light Horse Harry Lee and the Swamp Fox, Francis Marion
  • Charles Baxley on the Battle of Hobkirk’s Hill, covering cover Greene’s decision to come south after Guiford Courthouse and the resulting campaign and Battle against Lord Rawdon, and
  • Wayne Lynch discussing the relationship between Nathanael Greene and The Gamecock, Thomas Sumter.

Register here

From the Twittersphere and Beyond

Last Post: FISHER, Eleanor UE
Col. John Butler (Niagara) Branch members are saddened to report the passing of Eleanor Fisher, UE, she will be truly missed.
Eleanor passed away on March 8, 2021, at the age of 98. She was predeceased by her husband Orlin Fisher, son Jerry Fisher UE, daughter Violet Fisher and son in law Arthur Charbonneau. Eleanor is survived by her dear friend Jim Edsall UE, daughter Shirley Charbonneau UE and son Larry Fisher and wife Dana. Eleanor will be missed by many grandchildren and great grandchildren.
Eleanor was a member of Col. John Butler Branch for many years and attended most meetings and events in period attire. She was very proud of her many Loyalist ancestors including: John Bradt, Robert Cook, Hart Smith, Isaac Vail, Sgt. John Wilson and her favourites – Aaron Doan and his father Joseph Doan Sr. members of the notorious”Doan Gang”.
For more details please read her obituary

Editor’s Note: Last week’s issue on Feb 28 once again hit a sour note with a couple of ISP’s who decided that it was spam resulting in about 75 people not receiving it. Those who use Cogeco made up most of those who didn’t get it – if you didn’t see it, you can read it by going to Loyalist Trails 2021-09 (February 28, 2021). …doug

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