The Camp
Colour of the 3rd Company of the Royal Highland Emmigrants is
the only artifact in the exhibition that was actually
present at the siege. This extract from an
eighteenth-century military handbook describes the function
of camp colours:
When the regiment is to march
into camp the quartermaster is sent on before with the
camp-colour-men to receive from the quartermaster-general the
space of ground marked out for the regiment. He is there to
plant the camp colours, to mark the streets for the different
companies ... and to lay out the whole distribution of the
regimental incampment.
Jeremiah French
Jeremiah French was a
New York farmer and Loyalist who served with the British
army during the American Revolution. When he fled to Canada
in 1777, French was hunted by rebel Committees of Safety,
who issued this wanted notice.
THIRTY DOLLARS REWARD
ESCAPED from the guards the 21st of April last, one Jerah FRENCH
of Manchester, who was prov'd to be a notorious TORY and was
confined therefore.
Whoever will seize the said
FRENCH and return him to the commanding officer at Ticonderoga
shall be entitled to the above reward.
Every friend of liberty is hereby requested to take him dead or
alive.
Per order,
JOSEPH BRADLEY, chairman of the committee of several towns
assembled at Dorset,
Dorset 21st April
1777
Jeremiah French was perhaps not
a typical Loyalist. Safe in Canada, he joined the Queen's Loyal
Rangers as a lieutenant in 1777. According to the charges in his
court martial in 1781, French immediately embarked upon a second
career of fraud and embezzlement. The Loyalist lieutenant, said
his commanding officer, had stolen and sold barrels of beef and
flour that should have been issued to his troops. Acquitted,
French nonetheless left the Queen's Loyal Rangers and joined the
King's Royal Regiment of New York in November of 1781. A new
regiment meant a new uniform, which French purchased in
Montreal. The French family preserved this uniform for
generations, until they donated it to the Canadian War Museum in
1983.
Hannah Ingraham
In the
mid-nineteenth century, Hannah Ingraham dictated her
reminiscences to a neighbour, Cornelia Tippet, who
“wrote it down as nearly as possible in the language
of the narrator.” The result was a powerful memoir
that allows us to see the Loyalist experience in the
American Revolution through the eyes of a frightened
child.
On the map of Hannah's travels,
her journey begins at the Ingraham farm
in New Concord, New York, where her parents, Benjamin and
Jerusha Barrit Ingraham, were committed Loyalists. In June of
1776, when local rebels began a round-up of politically suspect
adult males, Benjamin fled to join first a band of Loyalist
partisans, then the King's American Regiment.
While Benjamin served, the
persecution of the Ingraham family continued. Superbly organized
at the local level, the rebels formed “District
Committees” or “Committees of Safety,”
empowered to take any action necessary to suppress dissent,
including arbitrary arrest and confiscation of property. The
“Committee men” of King’s District confiscated
the Ingraham farm and livestock and forced Hannah's mother to
pay rent.
When the fighting ended, there
was no place for Hannah and her family in the new United States.
The soldiers of the King’s American Regiment and their
families were evacuated from New York on the William and King
George, part of the “Fall Fleet” that reached Saint
John on October 4, 1783. From there, the Ingraham family made
their way up the Saint John River to the site of Fredericton,
where they settled down to live in peace for the first time in
seven years.
Canadian War
Museum
1 Vimy Place
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0M8
1-800-555-5621
The Camp
Colour of the 3rd Company of the Royal Highland Emmigrants is
the only artifact in the exhibition that was actually
present at the siege. This extract from an
eighteenth-century military handbook describes the function
of camp colours:
Jeremiah French was a
New York farmer and Loyalist who served with the British
army during the American Revolution. When he fled to Canada
in 1777, French was hunted by rebel Committees of Safety,
who issued this wanted notice.
In the
mid-nineteenth century, Hannah Ingraham dictated her
reminiscences to a neighbour, Cornelia Tippet, who
“wrote it down as nearly as possible in the language
of the narrator.” The result was a powerful memoir
that allows us to see the Loyalist experience in the
American Revolution through the eyes of a frightened
child.