Monmouth County's Ill-Fated Loyalist Militia and the Fall of George Taylor

As discussed in a prior article, the newly-mustered Loyalist militia of Monmouth County was defeated outside of Freehold by Pennsylvania Flying Camp under Lt. Colonel Francis Gurney, January 2, 1777. Throughout January 1777, the Pennsylvanians scattered groups of armed Loyalists at Middletown and Shrewsbury. But this did not end British attempts to marshal Loyalists and disaffected in Monmouth County into a militia.

George Taylor Attempts to Build a Loyalist Militia

On January 10, as Gurney was moving against Loyalists in Middletown, Courtland Skinner, the General of New Jersey Volunteers, assigned George Taylor to lead Monmouth County’s Loyalist militia:

I have ordered Coll. Morris [John Morris] and Coll. Lawrence [Elisha Lawrence] to advance towards this place [Amboy] directly and bring the Volunteers here; You are therefore to muster the militia and take such part as will prevent small parties from entering the County and distressing the people.

George Taylor was the former senior Colonel of the Monmouth County militia. In November 1776, his cousin, William Taylor, led a Loyalist association that was discovered and rounded up. His uncle, John Taylor, served as a Commissioner for administering British loyalty oaths. When George Taylor was pressured to sign a Continental loyalty oath, he refused and went behind British lines. With the order above, Skinner pulled his troops out of Monmouth County and sent Taylor into Monmouth County.

However, there is no evidence that Taylor re-entered Monmouth County as a consequence of Skinner’s order. It is probable that Taylor had few, if any, men. And Gurney’s troops were proving themselves superior to any armed Loyalist resistance inside the county. Taylor also lacked a formal officer’s commission and may have been reluctant to re-enter Monmouth County without one. Skinner addressed this concern on February 26:

It will give me great pleasure to enable you to enter the County of Monmouth once more, [but] all I can do at present is to give you the authority, which I cheerfully do by a commission which I enclose. It will be very proper, upon entering the County, to summon the inhabitants without distinction to renew their oaths and fidelity, and form them into such companies for the purpose of expelling the enemy and afterwards keeping the County.

Still, Taylor hesitated. He may have been deterred by the capture of Robert Morris of Shrewsbury. Morris was a Loyalist who helped recruit for the New Jersey Volunteers during the Loyalist insurrection of December 1776. Morris left Shrewsbury with the New Jersey Volunteers in January and returned in February. On February 19, Morris’s band of Loyalist recruits, while waiting for a ship to carry them off, was attacked and captured by a Stafford and Dover township militia force led by Captain Reuben Randolph. Morris was jailed in the overcrowded Philadelphia prison.

In April 1777, small armed parties of Monmouth Loyalist refugees began returning to the county. On April 2, the Middletown militia skirmished with Loyalists. One militiaman, Elijah Clayton, was captured. On April 14, Colonel David Forman reported to Governor William Livingston that his men had skirmished with and chased off a different Loyalist recruiting party. Forman called for depriving the Loyalists of recruits by drafting the disaffected into the Continental Army. These early Loyalist recruiting activities soon gave way to violent raids.

George Taylor was involved in some of these activities, and led at least two early incursions, though it is impossible to know the connection between these actions and Taylor’s Loyalist militia. As for the Loyalist militia, there is no reason to believe that many men mustered for it.

Taylor spent much of 1777 at Sandy Hook seeking to recruit and organize the Loyalist refugees and London traders who arrived there. But Taylor continued to have no effective fighting force under his command. In October 1777, while at Sandy Hook, he observed boats gathering at Point Comfort (Keansburg). Lacking his own force, he wrote Courtland Skinner to request a force to attack the boats. Skinner declined:

I have for some time had intelligence that a number of [rebel] boats were at the Point [Comfort], and of their designs, but I believe they will hardly amount to anything. I wish I could send you the reinforcement you wish for; I am sure if it could be effected it would be worth attempting, but at present I cannot.

In April 1778, Taylor was again at Sandy Hook. Courtland Skinner directed him to circulate pamphlets among the people of Monmouth County and deliver sealed letters to specific disaffected men living inside the county.

You will endeavor to have them circulated as much as you can. Those sealed [letters] you may direct to such as you think will be best... let those in opposition have a good share, by this means we will be more at liberty.

Spreading the literature did not lead to new Loyalist insurrections or a surge of Loyalist recruits.

George Taylor’s Later Military Career

By the middle years of the war, the Loyalist militia of Monmouth County ceased to exist. The British understood this and, in June 1779, commissioned Taylor to raise a company of Loyalist partisans that would, effectively, compete for recruits with the New Jersey Volunteers. Taylor’s order read:

I do hereby authorize and empower you to raise for his Majesty's service a company of able bodied men, to consist of one Captain, one Lieutenant, one Ensign, three Sergeants, three Corporals, one Drummer, and fifty three privates, who will engage for two years, or the continuance of the rebellion in North America, in the defence of Sandy Hook and places adjacent, to receive the same pay, bounty and every other emolument, and to be under the same discipline as his Majesty's other Provincial Corps. With respect to your pay & appointment by Commission as Captain, these depend upon your success recruiting. The first will be issued to you as General Orders direct, and the latter you will be entitled to when you raise thirty two able-bodied men.

Taylor’s company never reached 32 men; by his own account he raised only twenty.

Despite continued setbacks, Taylor remained active at Sandy Hook. A note from Major John Andre that October gave him permission to board British vessels back and forth to Sandy Hook without needing to state his purpose. In 1780, Taylor and Andrew Skinner prepared a map for the British titled "the Refugee Posts: July 21, 1780", showing 21 Loyalist bases throughout New York and New Jersey. In fall 1780, Taylor and a handful of other prominent Monmouth County Loyalists were captured after landing in Monmouth County with a large quantity of counterfeit Continental money.

Taylor described his service this way:

Your memorialist, in December 1776, received a commission from Brigadier General Skinner, by authority of Governor Franklin, to command the militia of the County of Monmouth, and did actually prevent that part of the country from espousing the cause of rebellion until the arrival of the King's troops in 1777, when your memorialist joined them with a number of other active Loyalists, at the head of whom he frequently made excursions into rebel country, and captured a great number of officers and soldiers, who were exchanged for British of the same rank. That your memorialist in June 1779 did actually raise twenty effective men, and would have soon embodied many more had he not been taken prisoner and kept a long time in captivity.

Taylor petitioned the British for a captain’s pension after the war. It was not granted. However, the Loyalist general, Oliver DeLancey, summed up his service: "Mr. George Taylor rendered very essential services to the Army in America, but I do not think they were of a nature to entitle him to Provincial half-pay."

Taylor’s wartime trajectory—from leading the county militia, to leading an ill-fated Loyalist militia, to raising a single company, to performing ad hoc partisan activities—well illustrates the fall of a pre-war leader who chose the losing side. Even within the Loyalist ranks, Taylor’s restraint was increasingly anachronistic as the local war grew brutal. By the middle years of the war, bolder and crueler Loyalist raiders based at Sandy Hook were taking actions that likely made Taylor look mild-mannered and ineffectual.

Related Historic Site: Sandy Hook Lighthouse

Sources: Cortland Skinner to George Taylor, Great Britain, Public Record Office, Treasury, Class 1, vol 634, folio 186; Great Britain, Public Record Office, Treasury, Class 1, vol 634, folio 186; Peter W. Coldham, comp., American Loyalist Claims (Washington, D.C.: National Genealogical Society, 1980), pp. 357-8. Rutgers University Library Special Collections, Great Britain Public Record Office, Loyalist Application Claims, D96, AO 13/110, reel 10; David Forman to William Livingston, New Jersey State Archives, Dept. of Defense, Revolutionary War, Numbered Manuscripts, #4097; Hendrick Smock, Note, National Archives, Collection 881, R 593; David Forman to William Livingston, Mark Lender, “The Enlisted Line: The Continental Soldiers of New Jersey”(Ph.D. diss., Rutgers University, 1975) p 94; Courtland Skinner to George Taylor, Great Britain, Public Record Office, Treasury, Class 1, vol 634, folio 186; Courtland Skinner to George Taylor, Great Britain, Public Record Office, Treasury, Class 1, vol 634, folio 187; General H. Rooke to George Taylor, Great Britain, Public Record Office, Treasury, Class 1, vol 634, folio 187; William Smith, Historical Memoirs of William Smith: From 26 August 1778 to 12 November 1783 (New York: Arno, 1971) p 308 note.  Harlow McMillen, “Green and Red, and a Little Blue: The Story of Staten Island in the American Revolution, Part 5,” Staten Island History, 1st ser., vol. 32 (1976), p 49; George Taylor’s petition, Great Britain, Public Record Office, Treasury, Class 1, vol 634, folio 184-5