With Little Less Than Savage Fury (Fall 2010 | Volume: 60, Issue: 3)

With Little Less Than Savage Fury

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Authors: Thomas B. Allen

Historic Era: Era 3: Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s)

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Fall 2010 | Volume 60, Issue 3

On April 22, 1775, three days after a British column marched out of Boston and clashed with militiamen at Lexington and Concord, the news—and the cry of Revolution!—reached Danbury, Connecticut, where 18-year-old Stephen Maples Jarvis was working on the family farm. Over the next several days, the young man would confront the hard, consequential choice between joining the rebel patriots or staying loyal to King George. He was not alone; all across the eastern seaboard, others were wrestling with the same dilemma.

American history textbooks don’t often discuss the internal confusion and acrimony that the outbreak of revolution set off in the British American colonies. Stephen Jarvis, his family, and his town would all become caught up in a civil war within the Revolutionary War. What had begun as political conflict between politicians called Whigs and their “Tory” opponents had evolved into a war with the peculiarly brutal qualities of fraternal conflict. The “patriots” taunted, then tarred and feathered, and finally, when war came, killed their Tory neighbors and kinfolk. Americans who called themselves Tories gave themselves a proud new name: loyalists, a label that had not been needed when all Americans were subjects of the king.

Not long after taking command of the Continental Army of the South, Brigadier General Nathanael Greene wrote in 1781 to Colonel Alexander Hamilton: “The division among the people is much greater than I imagined and the Whigs and Tories persecute each other, with little less than savage fury. There is nothing but murders and devastation in every quarter.”

At that hard moment, the divided Jarvis family mirrored the parting of families and friends throughout the birthing nation. Our histories prefer to call the conflict the Revolutionary War, but many people who lived through it knew it as a terribly personal civil war.

“My father was one of those persons called Torries,” Jarvis begins his memoir, quickly veering from mention of “the first blood . . . at Lexington” to his courtship of a young woman, Amelia Glover. She was “disapproved of by my father,” and Stephen “was under the necessity of visiting the Lady only by stealth.”

With a teenager’s defiance, the young Jarvis declared that he would join the rebels’ Connecticut Militia. Enraged, his father promptly “took me by the arm and thrust me out of the door.” Jarvis would soon become one of 3,600 Connecticut men in service against the British. The militia that Stephen joined, originally formed to serve the king, was commanded by his mother’s brother, a rebel whose sons were also rebels. Stephen also had cousins on both sides. Amelia Glover’s sister was married to a loyalist who would be jailed under a Connecticut anti-Tory law. Later he would switch to the king’s side and kill fellow Americans as one of the Queen’s American Rangers.

The Revolution’s  civil war, so real to the families it sundered, would be almost forgotten in the nineteenth century when North and South came to a greater civil struggle. And perhaps thankfully lost in that particularly bloody conflict