It Happened Here -- Two Tory Families

It is widely held that the American Revolution was America's first civil war.  Somewhere between 30-40% of the population expressed active support for the British at one time or another.
For American loyalists the consequences of rebel victory ranged from extremely difficult to disastrous.
 

In what would become Columbia County, the closely intertwined families of Van Buren, Van Schaak, Van Alen, Hoes (or Goes*) and Van Ness took sides. Martin Van Buren's uncle, for whom the future President was named, was condemned as a Tory. The elder Martin Van Buren was banished to the British lines in 1778.  The future President's grandfather's brother, on his mother's side of the family,  John Dirk Hoes became aligned with a group of important men from Kinderhook who supported the British ministerial government. He too was condemned but avoided banishment by first being named as a witness in a murder trial that dragged on for many months, and then by going into hiding, among sympathetic family members. His daughter, Hannah Hoes, would be born in 1783 while he was still in hiding.  Eventually, with the war over, he could come out from hiding and be accepted back into the community. His daughter's marriage to Martin Van Buren, the future president would go along way toward completing his re-acceptance back into the community. Van Buren would marry his first cousin, once removed, in 1807.

Hoes House, Mill St., Vlatie

Site of the Van Burens' wedding, West Main St., Catskill

Simon Fraser was born two years after his parents,  Simon Fraser (Sr.) and Isabella (Grant) Fraser settled in Mapletown in the town of Hoosick on the border between New York and the Hampshire Grants (Vermont).  The Fraser family had arrived on the Pearl, a boat loaded with Catholic Highland Scots, like themselves, and after a year in Albany, they purchased a 160 acre farm. But the title to that land was not secure and within a few years, 60 acres was lost to claimants from Vermont. Simon Fraser (Sr.) came from a military family with long years of service to the Crown. He had two brothers that served in the 78th Highland (Fraser) Regiment throughout Wolfe's campaign to capture Quebec in the French and Indian War. As soon as the opportunity arose in 1777 he and his eldest son William headed north to enlist in Loyalist forces, marching south with Burgoyne.

On Rensselaer County Rte 102

Bennington Battlefield marker, NYS Rte 67, Waloomsac

Following the Battle of Bennington the elder Fraser was captured, while his son escaped with the surviving members of Lt.Colonel Francis Van Phisters Loyal Volunteers.  Captain Fraser was jailed in Albany under what one biographer euphemistically called "rigorous" conditions. The treatment of prisoners was often appalling on both sides in the American War for Independence. For "dangerous" prisoners or incorrigible Tories their treatment could be every bit as inhumane as the treatment meted out to Rebel prisoners on British prison ships or in the infamous "sugar house", a densely packed windowless warehouse in New York. Without adequate food or clothing prisoners often faced endless days in damp subterranean cells or cold, drafty windowless attics.

 Isabella's friends petitioned the "Commission for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies in the State of New York", the Committee that oversaw the Tory threat in New York. They begged for his release 'due to the suffering of his wife and her numerous young family.'  But on July 30, 1778 a John Patan wrote the committee that he and others 'were uneasy about this effort' and asked that the family be 'driven off'!  A grand jury was summoned on July 31, 1778. Isabella's petition has been lost and any transcript/summary of the proceedings has never come to light. (Probably both were destroyed in the New York Capitol and Library fire of 1911.) But the Committee failed to act on the petition and in January 1779 Simon Fraser (Sr.) died in prison.

 Isabella and her family continued to be ostracized and harassed, even as the war in the North wound down and the peace treaty was signed in  September 1783.  As the older boys came of age (Simon, Jr. had two older brothers in America) the family was repeatedly fined, and their cattle confiscated, for the boys non-participation in militia musters.  Finally in 1784  John Fraser, Simon's brother arranged for the family to emigrate to Quebec, where they were finally reunited with Isabella's son William who had bought a farm at Coteau-du-Lac, west of Montreal.

Eight year old Simon Fraser (Jr.) grew up and eventually became a partner in the Northwest Company,  a fur trading company organized in 1792.  Employed in developing the fur trade in the far Canadian west, he explored much of what became the Province of British Columbia, about the same time Lewis and Clark made their journey of discovery in the American West. Searching out better trade routes to bring furs to the Pacific he made a harrowing journey down a river he thought was the Columbia River. Before he reached the Pacific he realized he was too far north for that river to be the Columbia. His companions named it the Fraser River. 

                                                                   

*In the archaic Dutch of colonial New York the G and H sounds were intermingled and the Hoes surname was often written as Goes.