War Comes to Westchester: The Killing of William Lounsbury

Abstract

War Comes to WestchesterThe Killing of William Lounsbury Dillon Streifeneder (bio) On the morning of August 29, 1776, Pvt. Samuel Miller awoke to marching orders. An informant had come in during the night, and Miller learned that a group of Tories were enlisting men for the "royal cause" near the village of Mamaroneck. By the summer of 1776, Miller was used to such reports, but this one had added gravity. Eight days prior, nearly twenty-thousand soldiers of William Howe's invasion force had come ashore in neighboring King's County. While Miller might not have known it when he awoke on that morning, Howe's army had defeated George Washington's forces on Long Island, and the American Army was in retreat. The war had come to New York.1 After having volunteered in the winter of 1775 in Capt. Micah Townsend's company of "rangers," Miller had, since the end of June 1776, been working closely with the Westchester County Committee of Safety at White Plains, "taking up and disbanding the Tories and disaffected who were Engaged in collecting together and concerting measures to destroy the said Committee and opposing the cause of Revolution."2 While similar to previous intelligence gained from informants, the Committee responded to this report with particular urgency. With the British advancing on Long Island and having already called out the militia in response to British warships menacing the shoreline, the possibility of internal enemies acting in concert with an external invasion force threatened the entire revolutionary movement.3 The Committee was determined to suppress the threat immediately and called on its quick reaction force—Townsend's company of rangers—to apprehend the Loyalists. Before daylight, Townsend, together with Miller and about twenty others, headed southeast from [End Page 339] White Plains, following the informant toward an area of dense woods and rocks known as the Great Lots, just north of Mamaroneck.4 Finding the Loyalist hiding place, Capt. Townsend's men encircled the encampment. Aroused, Loyalist leader William Lounsbury fired his musket at the approaching militia.5 In the smoke and confusion that ensued, Lounsbury escaped and fled to a nearby cave; he then collapsed, wounded. Refusing to surrender to the pursuing militia, he tried to fend them off, wielding his musket as a club. In this turmoil, a handful of Patriots closed in and finished him off with a bayonet.6 As a local resident recalled nearly seventy years later, "Lounsberry was the first person killed in Westchester county" during the American Revolution.7 He was also, in a sense, the last casualty of the battle of Long Island. His death marked the coming of war to Westchester; it also marked a key moment of transition for the engine of the Revolution, the local committee system.8 While scholars have noted the importance of the Revolutionary committees, there are few studies that closely examine the evolution of committee activity at the local level outside of New England.9 This is problematic for two reasons. First, it has led to two starkly [End Page 340] different portrayals of the committees. One group of historians views the committees primarily as "schools of revolution," that "seldom allowed the policing of popular ideology to get out of hand."10 A second group of historians has asserted that committees were at their core "an apparatus of oppression and terror."11 The second concern is one of time and change. While not exclusively tied to the peaceable portrayal of the committees, most of these works examining the role of committees conclude their studies prior to 1776. The committees that have been studied acted as a political network, playing their role from the Stamp Act crisis until 1775, after which they lost their relevance as American Revolution transitioned into Revolutionary War. Another [End Page 341] body of work on committees has a similar problem. This second group of studies either begins their look at committees amid full-scale war after the British military invasion in 1776 or does not acknowledge that any change occurred in how people and institutions acted when war came to the neighborhood. Both interpretations are tied to a larger problem of historians not engaging...