A BRIEF HISTORY OF HILLFIELD (Pt. 3)

3 - The Redcoats Are Coming!

            When open warfare finally erupted in April, 1775 between the nascent United States and the still-waxing British Empire, Hillfield came to a standstill as it debated whether to declare themselves Loyalists or take up the Patriot cause. The town's population was still predominantly Quaker and generally considered the violent revolution advocated by the Patriots anathema. On the other hand, the town's citizens found the British to be insufferably snotty and exceptionally annoying. Perhaps predictably the town fathers ultimately settled on a policy of unofficial neutrality. Hillfield would not openly declare for either their fellow Americans nor for their English overlords. It was also decided that in the event a contingent from either army was to enter the town or otherwise make demands of the citizenry, each situation would be dealt with on an individual basis.

            Isolated deep in the wooded tangle of the Pine Barrens, Hillfield remained untouched by the fires of the Revolution for the first four years of the war's hostilities. During that time life in the small town continued uninterrupted, the town's residents only peripherally aware of the conflict over their future. But on August 4, 1779, Colonel Tye brought the war to Hillfield's doorstep.

            The escaped slave had been born (or branded, rather) Titus Cornelius by his former owner, a Quaker from Monmouth County, northwest of Hillfield. Prone to drink and eschewing the Quaker practice of educating their slaves and freeing them upon their twenty-first birthdays, Tye's owner had been known as an especially unforgiving slaveholder. Shortly after Lexington and Concord Virginia's last royal governor offered freedom to all slaves who escaped and took up arms under the Loyalist banner. Tye wasted no time. He quickly escaped to Virginia and was soon back in New Jersey, armed and uniformed with the intent of crushing the colonists' rebellion. While Tye's exact date of birth is unknown, it is believed that he was still in his mid-twenties by 1778. By that point he been granted the honorific of "Colonel" for his tactical ingenuity and charismatic leadership, despite the prohibition of blacks as commissioned officers in the British Army, and been given the command of one of the most dreaded Loyalist units in the country. The Black Brigade was an elite guerilla unit of two dozen former slaves committed to supply seizures, hit-and-run attacks on Patriot outposts and detachments, and assassinations of important American leaders.

            However, when his British commanders had not given him specific missions, Tye regarded the Black Brigade's standing orders to be the liberation of slaves, particularly if those slaves belonged to Quakers, and to do so with extreme prejudice.

            On August 6, 1779, two days after Tye arrived at the secluded hamlet of Hillfield, Filman Hazelworth, a tanner, recorded the eventy of the 4th in his diary:

The Black Brigade - twenty-three ink-black negroes on twenty-three ink-black horses - rode slowly, almost sleepily, down the thoroughfare. At the head of this obsidiun (sic) mass rode a single bright eye. It was he - the Colonel Tye - astride a steed white as milk. Of a paler complection (sic) than his fellows, the Colonel was the embodiment of patrician class and command. His carriage was that of Cornwallis himself. His likeness would not be misplaced were it displayed in Charring Cross, such was his austere comportment and stentorian resolve. His compatriots, meanwhile, seemed freshly plucked from the deepest jungles of the Dark Continent, for if they be any indication, Africa is as dark of soul as it is of skin.

The Colonel, the picture of gentlemanly eloquence informed us, the townsfolk, of his identity and that of his brigands. He requested, with utmost politeness and as a fully-authorized representative of the English Crown, a litany of provisions that, were we to acquiese (sic) to their requisition, would leave our settlement on a rather frightening brink. We relented, of course, with little argument for fear of raising the ire of the Colonel's savages.

Once the provisions were delivered in full, the Colonel demanded the town's entirety of slaves and indentured servants be brought forthwith. This we did with far greater consternation. The Colonel addressed our negroes sweetly as a governess, inviting them to cast off their shackles - they were not shackled at all - and join his Brigade. Our blacks, having grown accustomed to our munificence and having been well trained, did not move or make an utterance. It was then the Colonel, betraying the primitivity of his race, ordered his men to go forth and assault our women, which they proceeded to do with ferine abandon. With the rapine concluded, the Slave Colonel demanded we free our slaves before his return in September. If we had not done so upon his arrival, he swore to raze Hillfield to the ground.

            Tye and the Black Brigade wheeled around and rode out of town, carrying their requisitions back to the Loyalist keep in Monmouth County.

            The people of Hillfield trembled at Colonel Tye's promised wrath. But they were a proud and stubborn and not altogether intelligent people and were loath to bend to a man they considered to be little more than a dark-skinned terrorist. Their deeply-prized neutrality had been violated alongside their women. They determined to violate with equal violence the vengeance of Tye and his savages.

            It was then that Hillfield turned to the only man they believed could exact that violation.

Next:

Let the Red Flow Freely

A BRIEF HISTORY OF HILLFIELD (Pt. 2)

2 – The Indigenous in Dutch

            The great powers of Europe began to colonize the New World. The Dutch founded New Netherland in the land that became the states of New York and New Jersey. New Sweden was founded in the area now known as the Delaware Valley. The Dutch then seized New Sweden, and the English followed suit in their seizure of New Netherland. The Duke of York quickly divested himself of New Jersey in 1665, selling the eastern half to Sir George Cartaret and the western half to Lord John Berkeley. After several unprofitable years’ attempt to promote settlement and collect tribute from the few who loped after the Lords Proprietors’ carrots and sticks, Berkeley sold his half to the Quakers in 1674.

            Throughout these lean, strife-riven years the Hillfield Lenape remained isolated on their hunched patch of land nestled amongst the pines and bogs that swamped the southern half of the colony. In 1675, however, the Quakers first set eyes upon them. As the settlers migrated east from Philadelphia to the Atlantic Ocean, they came upon the Lenape, now numbering no more than two hundred, on their large open field blanketing a hill of almost negligible elevation. The Quakers had always gone to great lengths to live peaceably with the indigenous populations. But these natives – stunted, deformed, and mumbling gibberish unintelligible even by the standards of the other Algonquin tribes – frightened the Quakers. Of no mind to slaughter other human beings, the Quakers proceeded to ignore them and settle the surrounding environs. The area thus became a series of small farms and cabins inhabited by white Quakers surrounding a field full of disfigured and slow-witted American Indians. The Hillfield Lenape remained inviolate.

But in 1695 their isolation came to a swift and violent end when three concurrent events conspired to change the course of Hillfield forever.

            As the Quakers had originally fled England in search of religious freedom, one wealthy Quaker named Faulk Madrigal sought to establish a settlement in New Jersey that welcomed those who believed in his particular iteration of the Quaker faith. Most of the details of Madrigal’s beliefs have been lost, but the specifics with which we are familiar – Jesus’ ministry in the New World, the corruption of Christian doctrine by Greco-Roman culture, undergarments imbued with supernatural powers – bare an uncanny resemblance to Joseph Smith’s Church of Mormon (pre-dating Smith’s religion by one-hundred twenty years, some, such as Hillfieldologist Mark Krasker, speculate as to the influence Madrigal’s beliefs may have had on Smith). Faulk Madrigal believed that the land occupied by the Hillfield Lenape would be perfect if he could convince the Lenape to leave on their own accord.

            Around this time a strange Dutchman began roaming the area and terrorizing the people. He claimed to be not only the last survivor of the drowned city of Saeftinghe, but also the bastard offspring of the mermaid who warned of Saeftinghe’s impending doom and the fisherman who caught her in his net. Initially the Quakers considered this aspect of Saeftinghe’s destruction to be mere folklore and the Dutchman to be a harmless kook. Soon, however, he began avowing himself to be an agent of divine retribution and proceeded to frighten crops, curse livestock, and scream incomprehensibly at children.

            Madrigal recognized the superstitious nature of the Hillfield Lenape and concocted a plan that would net him both the land he coveted and the respect of the Quaker community at large. He convinced the Saeftinghe Dutchman that a local mother of twelve known to us only as “the Woman Leeds” was to be the mother of the Anti-Christ unless he, the Dutchman, seeded her first. The Dutchman reportedly bound her to her bed, stripped her, and flung his ejaculations at her for several hours. The Woman Leeds’ screams and bloodcurdling prayers were eventually heeded when her neighbors found themselves unable to sleep through the caterwauling. The Saeftinghe Dutchman was dragged from the house and presumably killed somewhere in the nearby woods.

            The Woman Leeds soon found herself pregnant with her thirteenth child, but was traumatized by her experience with the Dutchman. Under the guise of comforting her, Madrigal preyed upon her piety, expressing fear as to what a baby conceived in such sin would be. Prayer services were conducted almost continuously, but the Woman Leeds repeatedly proclaimed, “Let it be the devil!” Meanwhile, Madrigal, feigning neighborly relations with the Lenape, stoked fear throughout the tribe with each new appraisal of the developing situation. On the night of the baby’s birth, Madrigal ran to the Lenape and told them that the Woman Leeds had indeed given birth to a monstrous demon with the head of a goat and wings like a bat. The Lenape were so terrified they immediately evacuated their land and disappeared toward the Atlantic.

            Madrigal promptly swooped in and bought the land. His plan had been a complete success, but his fortune would be short-lived. Soon after, a riot erupted at a meeting of the new settlement’s residents. Everyone agreed on the name of the new settlement – Hillfield – but they could not come to an accord as to whether it should be so named because it comprised a hill located in a field or a field located on a hill. Tempers flared and Madrigal was killed in the ensuing brouhaha.

            Hillfield was born.

Next:

The Redcoats Are Coming!