At the start of the American Revolution, the county of Westchester was the richest and most populous of the rural counties of New York. By war’s end, most of the county, especially a twenty-mile-wide region labeled the neutral ground, would be totally devastated. Farms were abandoned and entire communities became ghost towns. Roads were vacant of traffic. Bridges destroyed and left in ruins. Most of the county’s residents eventually fled the carnage. Those who remained witnessed frequent clash of arms between British and American troops stationed in and around the borders of the county; dragoon horsemen and light infantry who left their posts to forage and gather information on their enemy’s movements. But most horrific to those who tried to continue their lives in the war-torn region were the constant threat of ‘barbarous behavior’ by bands of thugs and highwaymen who claimed loyalty to both England and America. Labeled cowboys and skinners, they professed their actions as sanctioned by passions of patriotism or loyalty to the crown. But in reality, their actions were governed by greed; often they would switch sides in a heartbeat, claiming loot and battling both American and British forces equally. It was a harsh reality that the people of Westchester County found themselves embroiled in and as such, after the guns were finally silenced, left scars that would take decades to heal.
Just north of New York City, Westchester County’s nearness to the city and port of New York made the inhabitants prosperous. Their lifestyles were the envy of other colonists and Europeans. New York City was an excellent market, not only for their perishable commodities but also for such staples as flax, wool, hides and lumber. The surplus was shipped from the port to other places along the coast and to Europe and the West Indies. At the end of the Seven Years War in 1763 (French & Indian War in America), England sought to replenish its treasury and expected the colonies to pay their fair share. After all, the war started because of a rash move by a young and inexperienced provincial officer, Colonel George Washington, costing England a fortune to protect their colonies from French intrusions. Over the next ten years, passions flared and organizations, like the Sons of Liberty and Committees of Safety, through an elaborate system of propaganda, sprang up and infiltrated local governments and artisan groups. They even gained a zealous following among the country folk – all calling themselves patriots. New England and the south expressed the most fervent objections to England’s rule, but not so the mid-colonies of New Jersey and New York. However, then as now, a person’s politics continues to be affected more often by his pocket than by moral or honorable causes.
A larger percentage of the population in New York, New Jersey, and portions of Pennsylvania (especially Philadelphia), were doing quite well financially than their neighboring provinces. The farmers and merchants throughout one of the most prosperous counties of all the colonies, Westchester, New York, were particularly happy and content with the way things were. Local and overseas trade, guaranteed by England’s wealth, gave them a decent and profitable lifestyle. Therefore, why would they want to see all that change? These residents were content with the existing order of things, and consequently took little or no part in the dissensions of the period. Their position was not pro or con when it came to the growing movement for self-government. There were no “Sons of Liberty” or “Committees of Correspondence” within the county. So long as he was let alone, the Westchester farmer was content to keep to his own business; meaning cashing in on the status quo and staying out of all that fuss rippling across the land.
To those of Westchester it was, in their opinion, all right for others to dabble in politics, if they chose, but they minded his own affairs. Farmers and landowners went about their daily work, not bothering very much nor were concerned to find out what all the agitation was about.[1] Life was good and in their conservative outlook on things, they were not about to join in any hair-schemed plan propagated by a bunch of wealthy Bostonians and Virginia Planters who did not want to pay their fair share of taxes to their mother country. They would remain neutral in all affairs of higher concerns, focusing on the family’s finances. New York, as a province, was probably the most aristocratic of the thirteen English colonies. And as such, the county of Westchester was an exact reproduction of an English county.
Westchester would remain nonpartisan. To many engulfed in the passions of change, there was no place for an impartial county that just wanted to be left alone. To the agitators of the times, this neutral, apathetic population of the County of Westchester appeared as Tories or Loyalists; perhaps on the principle that “those who are not with us are against us.” The British were also convinced of Westchester’s Tory sentiments. Once the war began and England pursued it in earnest, commanding British General William Howe was led to believe that Westchester, as a whole, remained loyal to the crown. That if he advanced into the county and drove out the Americans, then the great mass of the population would flock to the British standard. In this, however, he found that he had been misinformed, as he afterwards stated before the Parliamentary committee which investigated his conduct of the war. Soon after beginning his Westchester campaign in the fall of 1776, he realized that, while the inhabitants were unwilling to throw in their lot with the Americans, they were equally unwilling to join the British. All they wanted was to be left alone; and Howe dismissed them from his calculations as an active factor in the campaign.
The county became a target for vengeance and quick profit. At the start of the war, Westchester county, sitting snugly between fervent New Englanders and the growing threat of British invasion in New York City, quickly found themselves between the jaws of a closing vice. Because of the county’s neutral stance, New Englanders and those passionate patriots developed a growing animosity towards the region, regarding it as a “hotbed of inimicals.” It did not help Westchester’s desire to remain on the sidelines when one of its citizens played right into patriotic propagandists’ hands by printing his ‘Tory’ opinions in a well read and talked about pamphlet. “Hear me for I will speak!”, wrote Samuel Seabury in November, 1774, under the surname A. W. Farmer – A Westchester Farmer. He was rector of St. Paul’s Church in Westchester who openly proclaimed his loyalty to the crown. He penned the now famous pamphlet, Free Thoughts on the Proceedings of the Continental Congress, that attacked Congress’ October 1774 resolution to boycott British goods. It enflamed “Sons of Liberty” supporters who used the letter as clear evidence that residents of Westchester were more concerned with their bellies than the rights of her fellow citizens. Several pamphlets threw fuel on the fire by continuing a broadside against ‘Westchester Farmers’, including the growing voice and young prodigy of opposition, Alexander Hamilton.
Isaac “King” Sears was a New England sea merchant living in New York City. He discovered his claim to fame as the leader of New York’s ‘Sons of Liberty.’ He was quickly labeled the ‘Spawn of Liberty and Inquisition’ who the British derisively called him and his followers, a ‘posse of vigilantes.’ By January, 1776, he teamed up with Major General Charles Lee, former British officer, to eradicate Tories and Loyalists from all of New York City and the surrounding areas, including Long Island and particularly Westchester County. Lee convinced Washington and the Connecticut legislature to send armed volunteers into New York City to build defenses for a possible British invasion by sea. While on their way there and while doing so, they might as well round up all the Tory activists who enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle at New Englanders’ expense. By mid-January, 1776, the call went out to raise troops and militiamen to begin the construction of fortifications in the city. In doing so, they had to travel through Westchester County. Lee went right to work, ticking down his list of popular ‘Tories’ and marching them off to be incarcerated in Connecticut, including the infamous Simsbury Mine Prison. These hardy patriots trudging through an immaculate and prosperous countryside were in no mood to be gentle with the county’s inhabitants. They bought wholeheartedly into the propaganda which justified their considerable animosity towards those whose wealth, comfort, and comparative luxury they had long been envious.
Though some pillaging occurred in route to New York City, it was on the return trip that the residents of Westchester County experienced the beginning of an ordeal that would re-occur time and time again until hostilities ended with the British army vacating New York City, in November, 1783, over seven years later. When the volunteers who had worked on New York’s defenses since February, 1776, were dismissed by General Sullivan in April, they returned through Westchester County. Many saw the plundering of county farms and merchants as a form of revenge and justification for their sacrifices, however most saw it as an opportunity for self-enrichment. Furniture, goods, supplies, and live stock were pilfered and hauled back to farms throughout New England. Though early on this looting was sparse when compared to later years, it was during the clash between British and American forces in and around New York City, in which county residents felt the full blunt of what was to come.
From August through November, 1776, the Continental Army witnessed the growing pains of a new nation trying to establish an effective and well-disciplined army. Enlistments were short term. Discipline was almost non-existent. Defeat, disease, and desertion was rampant, with entire companies quitting and going home, even before their enlistments were up. These unorganized bodies of troops did not feel inclined to observe ‘military decorum’ while walking the neat country lanes between flourishing farms. They were free to practice their own martial law and justified their actions through plunder and looting, exacting a form of ‘payment’ for their hardships. Though officially, the army frowned on such activity, in actuality, little was done to prevent it.
The worst such early incident which did result in a court-martial occurred as Washington’s army was pulling back from Harlem Heights towards White Plains in mid-October. In the November 8th, 1776 General Orders, Major Jonathan Williams, militiaman from Massachusetts, was ordered to sit for trial on charges of “burning the houses at White Plains contrary to General Orders”. Austin had arrived in the White Plains region and immediately allowed his troops to plunder the local farms, including draft animals and stock. Their loot was immediately carted and sent home to western Massachusetts. Austin did not stop there, but burned several buildings including a church. He was tried and found guilty, but was only reprimanded. Ironically, General Charles Lee, whose actions earlier that year had spawned the beginning of violence towards Westchester County residents, believed that the verdict was too lenient. He ordered another court-martial with the charge of “wanton barbarous conduct” toward civilians at White Plains. Washington agreed, penning on Nov. 12th, “I hope the Trial of Majr Austin for Burning the Houses will not be forgot. Public Justice requires that it should be brought on as soon as It can.” Austin was found guilty again, but this time cashiered out of the army to face civil penalties. Though some justice was offered in Maj. Austin’s case, what occurred in 1776 was only the beginning of the county’s sufferings.
The first cowboys and skinners
In the fall of 1776, Sir William Howe, having captured New York City for winter quarters, commissioned wealthy New Yorker, Oliver De Lancey, as a brigadier to form a brigade of loyalists or refugees. Tory residents of New York City including several of the inhabitants of the county joined this partisan group. They did so for a variety of reasons including self-interest, loyalty to the king, adventurous spirits, pecuniary or material inducements, or were goaded to it by a spirit of revenge for the outrages perpetrated upon themselves and their families by the irresponsible and plundering New England militia or the border ruffians from Connecticut. One of the first of the refugee corps to be organized was the Westchester Light Horse Battalion under command of Lieutenant-Colonel James De Lancey, a nephew of Brigadier Oliver and the sheriff of the county. The work assigned to them was to furnish beef cattle to the troops in New York, and they made raids throughout the county for that purpose, rounding up and driving stolen stock to market. They were styled in derision by the patriot militiamen and Continental soldiers and labeled Cowboys, a generic term which spread to all the roving highwaymen and predatory partisan troops of the British. It was the first use of the term cowboys, decades before the referral to cattle drivers of the wild west.
So too the word Skinner become a popular term for these roving bands of foragers and plunderers who pilfered or ‘skinned’ the Westchester County residents; however only when referring to patriots who did the looting. The patriotic men who caught Major Andre (Arnold’s co-conspirator spy) were referred to as skinners. This has proven to be incorrect. Only one place of all the documents, journals, memoirs, and official correspondence does the term skinner refer to patriotic “land pirates”. Surgeon’s mate William Lawton of the 5th Mass. wrote: “More than savages; men who under the guise of patriotism prowl through the community with a thirst for plunder that is unsalable and a love of cruelty that mocks the ingenuity of the Indian—fellows whose mouths are filled with liberty and equality, and whose hearts are overflowing with cupidity and gall— gentlemen they are yclept the Skinners.” Skinners simply referred to the three battalions of British refugee or partisan volunteers raised by the fifty-year-old attorney general of New Jersey, Brigadier General Cortland Skinner. Under his Tory leadership, his “Skinners” saw partisan service for King George III in and around New York City from 1778 – 1783.[2] They, like “cowboys” foraged and pilfered the county and it was from the residents that the term was passed down. Therefore, skinners were not patriots, but another name for Tory marauders. Only one place does the term skinners appear in Revolutionary War period documents when referring to bands of roving patriot foragers.
How did skinners become associated with Whig patriots? It was the brainchild of an 1820’s popular author, James Fenimore Cooper. Having married a direct descendent of Lt. Colonel De Lancey, Susan De Lancey Cooper, he came across a publication of her ancestor’s actions during the war. He decided to write a novel based loosely on the material within. The Spy; a Tale of the Neutral Ground was published in 1821 and became a huge success, both in America and abroad, even translated into Russian. He was the first to constantly refer to those patriot marauders in Westchester County as skinners. After Cooper’s novel, skinners became so popular in use that countless authors have identified patriot ‘rouge raiders’ as skinners. Even the Merriam-Webster Dictionary joined the bandwagon identifying skinners as a “band of guerrillas and irregular cavalry claiming attachment to either British or American troops…” One may point out that Plumb Martin, who had served with Douglas’ State Militia in 1776 referred to skinners in his journal of the war. Actually, his first 1830 publication wrote “dominated Cowboys, destroyed his stores.” The 1964 edition and republication by George F. Scheer under the new title Private Yankee Doodle… he added a footnote claiming that rebel sympathizers called themselves Skinners.
Neutral Ground Established. By 1777, after Washington’s main army headed south to counter any move British General William Howe might make towards Philadelphia, Westchester County became a ‘no-man’s-land of hostilities. General Lee and later General Putnam, after Lee’s capture in New Jersey, was left with a division of troops who established a ring of outposts and stations in and around the county. During the remainder of the war, there was no systematic campaign in Westchester county, but continuous fighting. The Americans, with headquarters at Peekskill, maintained a series of posts from the mouth of the Croton river across to the Sound, at Pine’s Bridge, Sand’s Mills (or Armonk) and at other places where the enemy would be likely to break through and enter the upper part of the county. The British, with headquarters in New York, maintained a similar line of posts to the south at Kingsbridge, Morrisania and across Westchester, extending them to Yonkers, Mile Square, Eastchester, and Pell’s Manor. The great middle section of the county, about twenty miles wide, with the Hudson River on one side and the Long Island Sound on the other, came to be known as the neutral ground. It was not regularly occupied by the troops of either side. Small to large scale foraging and raiding parties from both sides frequently sallied out into the region. The Americans came to be known as the upper party, and the British as the lower.
Life in the neutral ground. Within the neutral ground, the farmers continued their pursuits as best they could. A day never went by without fear that their cattle, poultry and crops would remain their own. Foragers and roaming bands of outlaws or banditti of both armies did not hesitate to help themselves to whatever they wanted, whether the owner was patriot or loyalist. At times payments were made. Americans did so with Continental currency which proved worthless early on. The British occasionally did so with sterling which was a small beacon for some residents. Supplies of wood, forage, and food were carted to coastal ports on the Long Island Sound and shipped to New York in market sloops for the whole war. American commanders whose duty it was to patrol the region often looked the other way to the proceedings of these “bushwhackers.” The result of the forays was that the county had almost reverted back to its original condition of a wilderness, especially within the limits of the Neutral Ground; roads were obliterated, bridges were destroyed, farm-steads with their barns and outbuildings were fired, and the land, deprived of its usual careful cultivation, went back to its natural state. The population of the county decreased over thirteen thousand during the seven years that it was the field of this kind of fighting (a loss of sixty per cent on the enumeration of 1771). The Neutral Ground was almost deserted.[3]
Timothy Dwight, a chaplain in the army, and afterwards president of Yale College, wrote: “These unhappy people [the inhabitants of Westchester county] were, therefore, exposed to the depredations of both. Often, they were actually plundered; and always were liable to this calamity. They feared everybody whom they saw; and loved nobody. It was a curious fact to the philosopher, and a melancholy one to the moralist, to hear their conversation. To every one they gave such an answer as would please the enquirer; or, if they despaired of pleasing, such a one, as would not provoke him. Fear was, apparently, the only passion by which they were animated.”
Mr. Dwight continued to describe in detail the conditions in which the inhabitants had reverted to: “Their houses in the meantime, were in a great measure, scenes of desolation. Their furniture was extensively plundered, or broken in pieces. The walls, floor, and windows were injured both by violence and decay; and were not repaired, because they had not the means of repairing them, and because they were exposed to repetition of the same injuries. Their cattle were gone The fields were grown with a rank growth of weeds, and wild grass. Amid all this appearance of desolation, nothing struck my eye more forcibly than the sight of this great road [the Boston Post road]; the passage from New York to Boston. Where I had heretofore seen a continual succession of horses and carriages; and life and bustle lent a sprightness to all environing objects; not a single, solitary traveler was visible from week to week, or from month to month. The world was motionless and silent; except when one of these unhappy people ventured upon a rare, and lonely, excursion to the house of a neighbor…”
A brief rest bit from violence. Raiding and pillaging throughout Westchester County had been raging for three years when an American commander stepped in and gave the residents a period of relief, no matter how brief. He reorganized his command and beefed up patrols and saw to it that a bit of normalcy returned to the neutral ground. In December of 1778, Major General Alexander McDougall, commander of the Highlands Department, gave the command of the brigade overseeing patrols throughout Westchester to newly commissioned native New Yorker, Lt. Colonel Aaron Burr. Reportedly, Burr was not content to take over a lax command that was pressured into patrolling a region infested with roving bandits and smugglers, however he accepted and poured all his energy into seeing it was done right. For two and a half months, from January through mid-March when Burr requested leave from the army, he improved the brigade’s operations and discipline. He was not content to sit behind a desk and regularly patrolled the region, often incorporating locals to gain intelligence of roving bands of ‘cowboys.’ He broke up these lawless bands by arresting and punishing the raiders and forced them to return their plunder to their owners. He was most successful in his endeavors. According to McDougall’s aide-de-camp, Westchester was “a country, which for three years before had been a scene of robbery, cruelty, and murder, became at once the abode of security and peace.” But it was to be short lived. Bur wrote of his command as “the most fatiguing, the most difficult and most troublesome that could have been contrived.” By the end of February, he notified Washington that he was in poor health and by mid-March, he was relieved. Westchester once more fell into chaos until the end of the war, when there was little or nothing left to steal.
Last years of the War. Author Cooper wrote in 1821 that “the law of the neutral ground is the law of the strongest.” Horrific episodes of looting, even rape and murder continued unabated. The Cowboys under Lt. Colonel De Lancey proved to be the most ruthless and shockingly hideous in their actions. Colonel Christopher Greene, hero of the Battle of Redbank and commander of the first corps of African Americans, the 1st Rhode Island, was murdered by De Lancey’s men. On May 14, 1781, he, Major Ebenezer Flagg, and several black soldiers who formed a ring around their officers and fought to the death, were attacked at their headquarters on the Croton River and subsequently killed. What made the act so monstrously atrocious was the fact that Greene’s body was chopped up and disfigured in the most grotesque and unspeakable fashion. From one account “his body was found in the woods, about a mile distant from his tent, cut, and mangled in the most shocking way.” It is believed that De Lancey ordered the barbaric act as retaliation for Greene having commanded black troops.
During the last year of the war, when both sides were awaiting the news of the completion of the arrangements for peace, the operations of the regular military were suspended; and the neutral ground was given over to irresponsible bands of thieves, plunderers and cutthroats, who paid very little attention to the politics of their victims, seeking anything that could be stolen. The withdrawal of the British posts and garrisons from the territory adjacent to the Harlem River and the Long Island Sound opened up a fresh field for the operations of these plunderers among those inhabitants who had chosen to remain instead of going into the city of New York with the retiring British troops. By the end of the war, the once populous county of Westchester was an empty and depleted land, reminiscent of a battleground which had been fought over for over seven bloody years.
For Further Reading on the American Revolution in and around New York City, check out the free previews of the following books on Amazon.
Also on Revolutionary War Journal
American Light Dragoons and Partisan Corps in the Revolutionary War
Battle of White Plains – Oct. 28, 1776. Washington Draws His Foot in the Sand
SOURCE
Calkin, Homer L. “Pamphlets and Public Opinion During the American Revolution” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. Vol. 64, no. 1, January (1940) pp 22 – 42.
Daughan, George C. Revolution on the Hudson: New York City and the Hudson River Valley in the American War of Independence. 2016: W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY.
Diamant, Lincoln. Editor Johnson, James M. Patriot Friends or Loyalist Foes. Chapter 6 in Key to the Northern Country: The Hudson River Valley in the American Revolution. 2013: SUNY Press, Albany, NY.
Foley, Gerard. The Hudson River Valley Institute: The Hudson Valley Cowboys and Skinners: Separating Truth from Myth https://hudsonrivervalley.wordpress.com/2018/10/19/cowboys-and-skinners-in-the-revolution/
Jenkins, Stephen. “The Cowboys, The Skinners, And the Neutral Ground.” New York State Historical Association. Vol. IX. (1910) pp 160- Published by the New York State Historical Association, Glens Falls Publishing and Printing, Glens Falls, NY.
Martin, James “Joseph Plumb” Sullivan. A Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Dangers, and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier… 1830: Glazier, Masters & Co., Hallowell, Maine, Sheer, George F. editor. Yankee Doodle Boy: A Young Soldier’s Adventures in the American Revolution, Told by Himself. 1964: Reprint published by the editor.
Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Third New International Dictionary of the English Language. 1968: Springfield, MA.
National Archives “Founders On-Line”. General Orders 8th of October, 1776. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-07-02-0075
Salmon, Stuart. The Loyalist Regiments of the American Revolutionary War 1775-1783. 2009: Dissertation Phd Requirements for History, University of Stirling, Scotland, UK.
[1] Jenkins, pg. 160.
[2] Diamant, pg. 93.
[3] Jenkins, pg. 163.