still could not figure out what to do. Born in Virginia, Robinson had come to New York in the 1740s as an officer in a colonial regiment—along with his childhood friend and brother officer, George Washington. There he met and married a member of one of New York’s great landed families, Susanna Philipse. (Washington unsuccessfully courted Susanna’s sister, who passed him over for a future loyalist.) The marriage made Robinson one of the largest landed magnates in the region. The Robinsons lived in style in the Hudson Highlands, sixty miles north of New York City. Collecting ample rents from contented tenants, surrounded by good friends and neighbors, and raising a spirited brood of two daughters and five sons, Beverley Robinson had every reason to believe that the 1770s would be some of the best years of his life. “Since the time of the golden age there never was more perfect domestic happiness and rural life than that which he and his family enjoyed,” Robinson’s fourth son, Frederick Philipse “Phil” Robinson, glowingly recalled.39 Instead, Beverley Robinson found himself confronting the biggest decision he would ever have to make.
Would he openly declare his loyalty to the king, to whom he had sworn repeated oaths of allegiance as a militia officer and county judge? Could he continue to stay quiet? Or would he join many of his acquaintances in rejecting an imperial relationship gone sour? The stakes of his choice could not have been higher. In his heart of hearts, Robinson did not want his world to change—and why should he? As a patrician landowner he enjoyed a life as close to that of an English aristocrat as America could offer. Yet coming out as a loyalist would carry substantial risks for himself, his family, and his property. Besides, he cared deeply for his country and its future. If the colonies won the war and the United States became independent, he was not necessarily prepared to abandon New York in consequence.
Robinson was lucky that the rebels did not show up on his doorstep, as they had at Thomas Brown’s. But in February 1777, matters came to a head when Robinson was summoned before a “Committee to Detect Conspiracies” and interrogated about his neutrality. One of the examiners was Robinson’s old friend John Jay, the New York lawyer and congressman. “Sir,” Jay told him soberly, “we have crossed the Rubicon and it is now necessary for every man [to] Take his part, Cast off all allegiance to the King of Great Britain and take an oath of allegiance to the States of America or go over to the Enemy for we have Declared our Selves Independent.”40 The dilemma cut Robinson to the core. “I cannot yet think of forfeiting my allegiance to the King,” he wrote to Jay in distress after their meeting, and yet “I am as unwilling to remove myself or family from this place.” He would take counsel one last time with his friends, he said, “on the unhappy & distracted state of my poor Bleeding Country.” “If I am convinced that a Reconciliation cannot be had upon just & reasonable terms,” Robinson concluded, “I will . . . content myself to share the same state as my Country. Nothing shall ever tempt or force me to do any thing, that I think . . . will be prejudicial to my Country.”41
Robinson’s struggle was agonizing for Jay too. Jay had long hoped for peaceful reconciliation with Britain himself—hence his support of Galloway’s plan of union. Facing the Rubicon of independence, he crossed; but several close friends stayed back.42 Hoping to prevent another ruptured friendship, Jay addressed a heartfelt appeal to Susanna Robinson, entreating her to persuade her husband to back down from declaring his loyalism. “Mr. Robinson has put his own & the Happiness of his Family & Posterity at Hazard—and for what? For the Sake of a fanciful Regard to an Ideal Obligation to a Prince . . . who with his Parliament . . . claim a Right to bind you & your Children in all Cases whatsoever.” He invited her to consider what would become of the Robinsons if they remained loyal. “Remember that should you carry your numerous Family to New York Famine may meet you & incessant anxiety banish your Peace,” he warned:
Picture to your Imagination a City besieged, yourself & Children mixt with contending Armies—Should it be evacuated, where, with whom & in what Manner are you next to fly? Can you think of living under the restless wings of an Army? Should Heaven determine that America shall be free, In what Country are you prepared to spend the Remainder of your Days & how provide for your Children? These Things it is true may not happen, but dont forget that they may.43
Jay’s warnings proved astonishingly prescient. But such visions could not change his friends’ ultimate refusal, even in the face of civil war, to renounce the king. In March 1777, Beverley Robinson took his stand and joined the British outright. Though the Robinsons had long sat on the sidelines of the conflict, the family now threw themselves into war. Robinson raised a new provincial regiment (one of the brigades of loyalist soldiers attached to the British army), called the Loyal American Regiment, and served as its colonel. His eldest son, Beverley Robinson Jr., acted as the regiment’s lieutenant colonel, and his second son as a captain.44 When his fourth son Phil Robinson reached fighting age—thirteen—the youth took up a commission in a British infantry unit. Susanna Robinson and the other children retreated into occupied New York City for safety. There, at a small ceremony performed by Charles Inglis, the younger Beverley married Anna Barclay, the sister of another Loyal American officer. While the Robinson family fought to preserve their vision of imperial America, the state of New York confiscated Robinson’s estates in the name of independence. In later years, Washington and his officers used the Robinson house as a headquarters, directing offensives against the British from the very same rooms in which he had dined and drunk as his loyal friend’s guest.45
AS BEVERLEY ROBINSON wavered over whether to take a stand in the war, a neighboring population of New Yorkers was already actively engaged in the British cause. They were Mohawk Indians, one of the many indigenous nations drawn into the American Revolution. For all that their experiences manifestly differed from those of colonists and slaves, they belong in the same frame as white and black loyalists for several reasons. Not least, Indian participation in the war loomed large in colonists’ perceptions, and had some influence on their own choice of sides.46 But this was not just a civil war among whites. It aligned and divided North America’s native peoples too. For the Mohawks among others, fighting with the British led to outcomes that resembled and intersected with those of white and black loyalists—and ultimately pulled them, too, into the ranks of loyalist refugees.
On the frontiers of white settlement, the American Revolution did not look like a war about taxation and representation. This was a war about access to land, and it was triggered less by revenue-raising measures such as the Stamp Act than by the Proclamation of 1763, by which Britain banned colonial settlement west of the Appalachians.47 British officials passed the measure in part to stave off the inevitable violence between whites and Indians that accompanied expansion. To land-hungry settlers nothing could be more noxious. Decades of warfare between colonists and Indian “savages” had produced excruciatingly savage forms of warfare in turn—epitomized, for whites, by the practice of scalping.48 (When Thomas Brown described “my head scalped in 3 or 4 places” on that August day in 1775, he deployed the worst slur available to colonial Americans: he likened his attackers to Indians.)49 The violent history of Indian-white relations had important repercussions for frontier colonists’ decisions about loyalty. One of the reasons Brown and his neighbors stayed loyal was because they counted on the British government to protect them from Indians. Yet one of the grounds patriots cited for rebellion was that the British had failed to protect them.
The coming of revolution presented Indians, too, with a choice. European powers had long relied on Indians to fight alongside them in colonial wars, and this was no exception. Both British and patriot agents worked to recruit Indians into their service, leaving Indians to weigh up their own questions of belief, conscience, and collective interest. Which side would enable them to protect