Flora macdonald, p.19
Flora Macdonald, page 19
Days passed, and no word came. Much later Flora was to give an account of what she was later told had occurred in the lower country in the early hours of February 27: “After marching two hundred miles and driving the Enemy from two different posts [positions] they had taken,” the Highland army “made a night attack” on the patriots eighteen miles from Wilmington. Deceived into thinking that rebel militiamen, under the command of Richard Caswell, were in retreat on the far side of a bridge over miry waters known as Widow Moore’s Creek, the Scots advanced before dawn. To the beat of drums and the sound of skirling bagpipes, Captain Donald Macleod from Boston, who was in command on the day, led five hundred men roaring out “King George and Broadswords” in a charge toward the bridge. Unbeknownst to the Highlanders, however, as Flora recounts, the rebels had “cut down [removed]” the planks on the bridge, “excepting the two side beams,” which they had greased. Moreover, far from being in retreat, a thousand rebel militiamen were entrenched across the creek, and “the Enemy,” as she relates, had “three piece[s] of cannon planted in front close to the bridge.”
Struggling to find a purchase on the few and slippery planks remaining, the Highlanders fell victim to artillery or to musket fire either on the bridge or upon gaining the farther bank. Macleod himself, though hit several times by enemy fire, rose again and again from the bridge, brandishing his broadsword and shouting encouragement to those behind him before succumbing to his wounds. Before long the bridge, the water below, and both banks of Moore’s Creek were choked with corpses.
Caswell, more usually to be found in the assembly chamber, and his fellow militia commanders were triumphant. Those who remained in the depleted Highland army, in the wake of this disaster, retreated, and the force rapidly dissolved. “The men were not to be kept together, and the officers had no authority over the men,” a loyalist eyewitness account was later to state. Following a despondent council of war, Allan and the other leaders, with about “ninety followers,” retreated north, pursued all the way by enemy militia. Though they did not know it, the promised fleet, with regulars, arms, and ammunition, had still not arrived on the coast. Martin’s plan to wrest power from the patriots had failed utterly.
More than a decade later, Flora’s memory of her own sufferings in the wake of the failure of the Highland attack was to remain acute. She was, she relates in her 1789 “Memorial,” “all this time in misery and sickness at home.” No one in Cross Creek knew for some days who had been killed, who was wounded, and who was a captive in the lower country. “Being informed that her husband and friends were all killed or taken [prisoner],” the narrative continues, she “contracted a severe fever.”
In the event, none of Flora’s male relatives had been killed at Moore’s Creek. The fates of her husband and her son Sandy, however, were ignominious. They and others were surrounded by a militia force in the far north of the colony, seized, and confined in the common jail in Halifax, a town on the border with Virginia. Subsequently, on account of “his being in a low state of health,” Allan was allowed the freedom of the town. Meanwhile, Flora’s woes at Cheek’s Creek were compounded. Her “Memorial” states that she was “daily oppressed with straggling parties of plunderers from their [the patriots’] army.” Nor was that all she endured. “Night robbers,” she specifies, “more than once threatened her life wanting a confession [of] where her husband’s money was.” Flora, wracked by fever and sick with worry, yet kept her composure. No burglar succeeded in bearing off the Kingsburgh gold, such as there was. Did she wonder, though her mind was dulled by sickness, how it had come to this? She and Allan had successfully executed their plan of emigration and had bought this land only a year before. Now her husband was a prisoner, and she was prey to every passing marauder. Despite having no idea what the future might hold, Flora was not given to brooding. If she recovered from her fever, chief among her new duties would be the administration of the plantation.
15
“Almost Starved with Cold to Death”
February 1776–December 1779
hile Flora lay on her sickbed in late February 1776, two thousand patriot militiamen milled about Cross Creek, triumphant in the immediate wake of their victory over the Highland army. Some of these men were among those who, as she later wrote, “daily” pillaged the Cheek’s Creek plantation. Marauders from the western counties came calling too. Allan was later to give conflicting accounts of the Kingsburghs’ losses, in 1784 pricing “a Variety of articles plundered out of the house” at £150 and, a year later, the “books, plate and furniture plundered” at £500. Similarly, in 1784 he assessed the horses and cattle lost on either farm as being worth £250, while noting a year later that “the value of horses robbed and taken off both plantations” was £96. For all his confused accounting, the losses were real. Flora also later recorded that several of the indentured servants who labored in the house, in the fields, and at the grist mill now deserted her. “Such as stayed,” her “Memorial” states, “grew so very insolent, that they were of no service or help.” With little money, ransacked possessions, stolen farm animals, and a recalcitrant workforce, Flora can have expected, at best, to scratch a living.
She had, she was to write in 1789, “no comforter, but a young boy, her son.” James, this fourth son, was then eighteen. Taken prisoner while a volunteer with the Highland army, he had “made his escape” and, evading further arrest, succeeded in gaining Cheek’s Creek later in the spring. James did not want for courage and within a few years was to serve in an intrepid loyalist regiment, but his mother never placed great confidence in him. Earlier, while she had exerted herself for his elder and younger brothers, she had tried to interest no patron in his preferment.
On the Kenneth Black plantation in Cumberland County, Annie Macleod was no better off than her mother and brother. Her husband, Lochbay, was “a marked object of the enemy’s resentment,” as one who had played a principal role in raising the Highland army. His manservant was several times “strangled almost to death” at the Macleods’ house, “in order to discover his master’s effects [cash].” The Highlander himself was forced to hide for “six weeks in woods and swamps,” before at length joining Josiah Martin on board the Scorpion. There was no further thought of restoring order to the colony. When the fleet from England—which had belatedly arrived at Cape Fear—sailed south for Charleston in South Carolina, Lochbay and Martin went with it.
Annie Macleod, meanwhile, was helpless to prevent their home being “plundered, and destroyed to a considerable extent.” The couple lost “household furniture, looking glasses, china,” and “bedsteads, bedding, table and bed linen,” including “twenty-seven pair[s of] fine, new blankets.” Raiders drove off “twenty milch cows” and “forty young [live]stock,” later valued by Lochbay at £200. “Corn, provisions and liquors,” too, were “carried away or wantonly destroyed.”
At one point the three young Macleod children, Flora’s grandchildren, were “secreted in the woods” with their nurses. These stalwart women, Lochbay later averred, “had the humanity to persist in declaring them [their charges] their own” when robbers threatened to “carry off” the children. Annie herself, her husband recorded, was “driven for refuge to a near relation twenty-four miles distant.” The Macleods’ home lay at that remove from the homes of Armadale, of the Cuidreach Macdonalds, and of the Kingsburghs. Flora’s stepfather, however, was now aged, and Annabella Macdonald at Cameron’s Hill suffered “cruelties” that exceeded even those that her niece experienced on the Black plantation. Her husband, Cuidreach, later wrote that his wife and five children were “frequently plundered of the common necessaries of life, and at last stripped of even their body clothes, and turned out of their houses”—in Cumberland and Anson Counties—“into the woods.” A humane Continental—patriot—officer provided safe conduct for them within British lines. In all likelihood, Annie gave birth to Mary, a daughter, at the Cheek’s Creek plantation, and the elder children joined their mother and grandmother there.
Lochbay, resident in New York from the autumn of 1776, was to center his hopes on bringing his wife, children, and mother-in-law out of danger and into that city, which was under British military occupation from September. He was to find the means, as he later wrote, of “supplying my family”—in which he included Flora—“in North Carolina during my absence” to the tune of £250 over two years.
Assuming that government reimbursement would soon follow, Lochbay and Allan had both spent lavishly in their efforts to raise and provision the Highland army. The former, however, was a rich man who could afford those and future disbursements. Kingsburgh had spent way beyond his limited income. Many years would pass before the crown considered these Highlanders’ claims on the public purse. Allan had no funds with which to supply Flora, which only added to her misery at Cheek’s Creek. While the officers who had come from Boston in 1775 had appointed her husband a captain and Sandy a lieutenant, respectively, in the Royal Highland Emigrants, loyalist regiments then forming in Quebec and Nova Scotia, neither of them had any opportunity to draw back pay owed while they remained prisoners in patriot hands.
Captive at first in Halifax, North Carolina, father and son were exiled from the colony to Philadelphia on April 11, 1776, with twenty-six other Highlanders judged, by a patriot committee, “capable of doing us the Most Mischief.” The chairman of this body told the president of the Continental Congress, “We are sorry to be compelled to an Act of such severity as this.” The North Carolina Provincial Congress, now de facto government of the colony, proclaimed, “We war not with the helpless females which they left behind them.” Loyalist wives, daughters, mothers were, it was stated, “rightful pensioners upon the charity and bounty of those who have aught [anything] to spare from their own necessities [essential needs].”
Whether or not Flora and Annie received any such aid, the former was determined to offer succor to the wives of those who had been dispatched prisoner out of the state with Allan. “When she got the better of her fever,” her future memorandum detailing her misfortunes ran, “she went to visit and comfort the other poor gentlewomen.” This task proved thankless, however. Though these ladies and their families had, only weeks before, cheered on the Highland army making for the coast, now “they blamed him [Allan] as being the author of their misery, in rising the Highlanders.” If Flora felt there was some justice to these reproaches, she did not pause in what she saw as her Christian duty. To add to her troubles, on one of these “charitable visits,” she “fell from her horse and broke her right arm.” She was subsequently “confined [at home]…for months,” she wrote, because Murdoch Macleod, “the only physician in the colony [Scots country],” was a prisoner in Philadelphia. Flora, now in her mid-fifties, was growing old, and the limb, for lack of medical attention, did not mend well. Her recollections of this time later were bleak: “She remained in this deplorable condition” at the Cheek’s Creek plantation for two years “among Robbers and faithless servants.”
Allan and Sandy were at first housed in the Walnut Street jail in Philadelphia and were still in that city on July 4, when Congress adopted the declaration that “these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, Free and Independent States.” The British troops had evacuated Boston a few months earlier and sailed north to Halifax to regroup in Nova Scotia, a maritime province like Quebec still in British hands, and so named during the reign of James VI and I from the Latin for “New Scotland.” Many loyalist citizens followed them or sailed for New York, after it came under British military occupation in the autumn, or for new homes elsewhere. In the new state of Pennsylvania, Flora’s husband and son obtained their parole later that summer and took up residence with two servants in Reading, a township fifteen miles distant from Philadelphia. Ever the courtier, Kingsburgh made himself agreeable to the Continental Army general Thomas Mifflin, who had a fine country house nearby, and charmed funds out of him too. The following April Allan prevailed upon his new friend to deliver a petition to John Hancock, president of Congress, requesting his exchange and that of his son for patriot “officers of the like denomination [rank].”
“His Excellency [Mifflin] and the [local] County Committee,” Allan declared, would testify that he and Sandy had “kept close to their parole, without giving the smallest offence to any person whatever.” Nonetheless, their allowance from Congress for the last three months had not been paid, and they were living on an advance from Mifflin. Allan opined that it was but charity to allow him and Sandy to go to New York and negotiate their exchange with patriot officers of equivalent rank in conference with those recently appointed British and American commissaries of prisoners. For all his claims of penury, in May Allan requested of a tailor in Philadelphia the makings of “two summer waistcoats,” “an [sic] yard of scarlet cloth with furniture [accessories]” for another. He also required enough “wheat corded [pale yellow corduroy] or plain stuff” to provide two pairs of breeches.
After the failure of a further bid to get themselves exchanged, in July 1777 Allan petitioned Hancock for a third time. A North Carolina delegate to Congress had written in March of some of those who had come north, prisoners with Allan and Sandy: “They are incessant importuners.” None was so persistent as Flora’s husband. He asked the Congress president to consider “the dispersed and distraught state of my family.” He wrote that Flora was then “seven hundred miles from me, in a very sickly tender state of health.”
Allan was eager to make clear to Congress that he had no intention of returning to that territory where he had previously taken up arms against the nascent United States of America: “Them [Flora, Annie and her children, and James] in Carolina, I can be of no service to in my present state,” he declared. Lochbay, indeed, was their sole support. Were he exchanged, however, Allan continued: “I could be of service to the rest [his sons in America and Scotland].”
This last plea won a favorable hearing. Kingsburgh and Sandy were allowed to travel to New York and secure an exchange with Continental officers held by the British authorities there. Once that was effected, they were expected in Nova Scotia. British officers abounded in Halifax, the harbor town established in 1749 as the colony’s capital. The Second Battalion of the Royal Highland Emigrants, however, in which Allan and Sandy held commissions as, respectively, a captain and a lieutenant, were doing garrison duty at Fort Edward, Windsor, some sixty-five miles northwest, on the Bay of Fundy. Captain Alexander Macdonald of Ardnamurchan, battalion commander, told Allan, then in New York, that he anticipated the “pleasure of seeing you both soon here.” While the province was itself peaceful, the Emigrants guarded against the possibility of an attack by sea from Maine, northwest across the bay and now a maritime district of the new state of Massachusetts.
Soon after his arrival on Manhattan Island in September, Flora’s husband had called on Josiah Martin, now an idle spectator of the military scene with four other “outcast” royal governors. Where the North Carolina official had once been entranced by Kingsburgh and his fellow Highlanders, now he was sour: “The Scotch officers who have escaped from confinement,” he wrote later, had “forfeited my good opinion by their avidity for money, and the high price they put upon their short and ineffectual service in North Carolina that they really seem to compute above all reward.” Nevertheless, Martin did, over the following months, reimburse Allan for some part or all of his outlay on the 1776 Highland army.
Meanwhile, it was becoming clear that for Flora and Annie, an exit from North Carolina was, if not the only option available to them, certainly the best. In 1777 Richard Caswell became governor of the new state of North Carolina and presided over a general assembly, as he had over previous provincial congresses. An act of confiscation was passed that November, appropriating for “the use of the state…all the Lands, Tenements…and moveable Property within this State” of any who had “during the present War attached himself to, or aided or abetted, the Enemies of the United States.” This was a death knell for any hopes the two women might have had to survive the war and prosper thereafter in this southern state. As wives of two Highlanders of rank and influence, who had raised and led companies “against America,” they could hope for no clemency. Flora herself was singled out sometime before November 30, 1777, for questioning before either the general assembly or an Anson County committee. If this body had hopes that she would swear allegiance to the revolutionary state, however, it was disappointed. In her youth, Flora had successfully parried questions from authorities, including the Privy Council of the United Kingdom. Ardnamurchan in Nova Scotia was “happy to hear” from Allan in late December of “Mrs Macdonald’s…spirited behaviour, when brought before that committee of rascals.” Although admiring of Flora’s courage, the officer, who was kin to Allan and his family, was concerned for her safety: “Pray, for God’s sake, it is possible to get Mrs Macdonald and the other poor women from North Carolina.”
This question had for some time been agitating Flora’s son-in-law, with whom Allan and Sandy were now reunited in New York. Although difficulties lay in his way, early in 1778 Lochbay paid £130 for “freight and provisions of a [merchant] vessel” named the Sucky and Peggy “with a flag [of truce]” and obtained permission from naval command at New York to proceed to North Carolina. In March, Flora and Annie received dispatches at Cheek’s Creek from the latter’s husband, then in Wilmington harbor on the merchant ship, with the intelligence “of their having leave to depart the state.” Patriot officials had greeted with mistrust the earlier arrival of this known “traitor” to North Carolina. However, Richard Caswell, now governor of the state, decreed that “the paper signed by [British] Commodore [William] Hotham,” which Lochbay proffered, must be “considered as a proper flag [of truce].” Caswell added this rider: “The more expeditious he [Lochbay] is getting away [departing], the greater satisfaction he will give the State.”
