The United Empire Loyalists: A Chronicle of the Great Migration [1920 ed.]Wallace, W. Stewart (William Stewart)
History
The United Empire Loyalists: A Chronicle of the Great Migration [1920 ed.]
Wallace, W. Stewart (William Stewart)
American loyalists; United Empire loyalists
The task of transporting the settlers from their camping-places at Sorel,
Machiche, and St Johns to their new homes up the St Lawrence was one
of some magnitude. General Haldimand was not able himself to oversee
the work; but he appointed Sir John Johnson as superintendent, and the
work of settlement went on under Johnson’s care. On a given day the
Loyalists were ordered to strike camp, and proceed in a body to the new
settlements. Any who remained behind without sufficient excuse had their
rations stopped. Bateaux took the settlers up the St Lawrence, and the
various detachments were disembarked at their respective destinations. It
had been decided that the settlers should be placed on the land as far as
possible according to the corps in which they had served during the war,
and that care should be taken to have the Protestant and Roman Catholic
members of a corps settled separately. It was this arrangement which
brought about the grouping of Protestant and Roman Catholic Scottish
Highlanders in Glengarry. The first battalion of the King’s Royal
Regiment of New York was settled on the first five townships west of the
provincial boundary. This was Sir John Johnson’s regiment, and most of
its members were his Scottish dependants from the Mohawk valley. The next
three townships were settled by part of Jessup’s Corps, an offshoot of
Sir John Johnson’s regiment. Of the Cataraqui townships the first was
settled by a band of New York Loyalists, many of them of Dutch or German
extraction, commanded by Captain Michael Grass. On the second were part
of Jessup’s Corps; on the third and fourth were a detachment of the
second battalion of the King’s Royal Regiment of New York, which had been
stationed at Oswego across the lake at the close of the war, a detachment
of Rogers’s Rangers, and a party of New York Loyalists under Major Van
Alstine. The parties commanded by Grass and Van Alstine had come by ship
from New York to Quebec after the evacuation of New York in 1783. On the
fifth township were various detachments of disbanded regular troops, and
even a handful of disbanded German mercenaries.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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