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was the Baroness Riedesel, along with the couple’s three children.
Although Burgoyne and Gates had agreed to a convention after the surrender of the British that would allow Burgoyne’s troops to return home, this was subsequently revoked and his men were taken prisoner.
The citizens of Great Barrington had only just heard of the British surrender to General Gates when Laura Ingersoll’s hometown found itself the scene of an encampment for the prisoners of war.
Elizabeth Ingersoll would have been accustomed to the sight and sound of the men of the militia tramping past her Main Street house, as they made their way to and from the various skirmishes. Perhaps she also witnessed, with two-year-old Laura clinging to her skirts, the spectacle of General Burgoyne and thousands of captured British and allied soldiers being led down the main thoroughfare of town.
The American officers and their long line of captives had followed an old trail from Saratoga, New York, through Kinderhook, and down into Great Barrington, where they would camp en route to Virginia and prison.
General Burgoyne would eventually return to England to defend his conduct. He never received the trial he had hoped for, and he was deprived of his regiment. Baron Riedesel, his wife, and their three daughters, along with the army of British and allied troops captured after the Battle of Saratoga, were imprisoned in Charlottesville, Virginia, where they engaged in subsistence farming. The Riedesels were later allowed to move to New York City, and finally, in 1781, they were permitted to journey to Canada and subsequently return home to Germany.
When Washington’s army besieged the British under the command of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia, and the French fleet cut off his escape, Cornwallis surrendered in October 1781. He tried to get a promise of protection for those Loyalists who had been part of his army. When that failed, he secured an armed ship for their escape.
Negotiations for peace began. After an eight-year struggle, the Treaty of Paris in 1783 recognized the independence of the United States and set out its boundaries.
Fifteen months after the death of his wife Elizabeth in 1784 and the departure of baby Abigail, Thomas Ingersoll provided his young family with a new mother. On May 26, 1785, he married Mercy Smith, widow of Josiah Smith who had been killed in the American War of Independence.
It was said of Laura’s second mother that she taught Thomas’s daughters to read and introduced the fine art of needlework and drawing into a home that had been filled with too much sadness. But the joy was to be short-lived. Four years later Mercy would die of tuberculosis, and once again the three Ingersoll girls would be motherless.
Although Massachusetts had, as early as 1647, mandated that every town with a population of more than fifty families support elementary schools, Laura most likely received what education she had at home. One source suggests that Thomas had hoped to send her to a boarding school for young ladies in Boston, one of the few large towns where secondary education was available. No doubt he was aware how quick she was to learn. But by the time Laura might have been of an age to attend a boarding school, conditions in the state were so out of control that it was unwise for her to leave home.
Family members later described Laura Ingersoll as having a fair complexion, dark eyes, and masses of light brown hair. She was a delicate-looking young girl with a slim build. But she was far from fragile. At thirteen, she was already capable of looking after her younger sisters and managing the Ingersoll household in her father’s absence, providing direction to the two family servants who tended to the more menial tasks.
Now that the war was over, Thomas, who had risen through the ranks of the state militia, was appointed magistrate upon his return to Great Barrington. There had been no children from his marriage to Mercy Smith, and four months after her death, on September 20, 1789, he married Sarah (Sally) Backus, daughter of Lieutenant Gamaliel Whiting and the sister of General John Whiting. Sally, a widow, already had one daughter, and Harriet quickly became part of the Ingersoll family. At ten, she was the same age as her stepsister Elizabeth.
Sally and Thomas Ingersoll subsequently had seven more children, four boys and three girls. The first, Charles Fortescue, was born in Great Barrington on September 27, 1791. Laura had just turned sixteen.
Although Laura may well have missed Mother Mercy’s art instruction, there were new babies to look after, and Sally proved to be a robust and cheerful ally, more like an older sister than a parent.
Times were hard after the war ended. Many people were destitute, and there was no work to be had. The United States was gripped by a severe depression. English merchants were dumping goods in America, but allowing Americans to sell in Britain only those goods the English couldn’t get anywhere else.
The colonists’ paper money was useless, and even law-abiding citizens were jailed for lack of funds to pay their taxes. The editor of one Massachusetts newspaper, the Worcester Spy, accepted salt pork for subscriptions. When Thomas Ingersoll had difficulty collecting the fees due him for his magisterial duties he took feed and grain for his horses as payment. Massachusetts was close to bankruptcy.
Shay’s Rebellion, a citizens’ revolt against these difficult conditions, broke out in the state in 1786, led by Daniel Shay, a veteran of the war. Thomas helped to put down the rebellion, and it was at this point that he was promoted to the rank of major. Although the revolt had been a failure, it had caused more and more people to recognize the need for stronger government.
The Loyalists, having lost the American War of Independence, found themselves aliens in their own country, with no jobs and their land and possessions confiscated. Those Loyalists who didn’t flee the country were at risk of being tortured or even murdered.
With the Treaty of Paris, signed in 1783, the British had been generous to the Americans in terms of settlement, with the understanding that the individual states would return the Loyalists’ land or compensate them for it. Congress had no power to force the states to do right by the Loyalists, however, and except in the case of South Carolina, where some compensation was made, it didn’t happen. Wagonloads of Loyalist women and children left their homeland, moving north through New York State to find refuge in settlements at Cataraqui (Kingston) or Niagara.
Thomas Ingersoll was disgusted by the continued persecution of the Loyalists after the war was over and the fact that such criminal behaviour went unpunished by the American courts. In better times he had borrowed heavily, hoping to grow his business, but by that time he had realized that no matter how hard he worked, he would never be as prosperous as he once was. He heard there was land available on generous terms in Upper Canada and, deeply in debt, he began to think of leaving the country.
2
Departure for Upper Canada
Prior to the American War of Independence there had been no white settlement west of the Niagara River. By the time that war ended in 1783, the population of Niagara had grown to ten thousand. Those early settlers were the Loyalists, who’d fought on the side of the British and had fled the tyranny of the colonies south of the border. Settlement at that point was largely along a narrow frontier bordering the Niagara River.
In 1791 the Constitutional Act divided the province of Quebec into Upper and Lower Canada. Colonel John Graves Simcoe, once a commander of Loyalist troops himself (the Queen’s Rangers) was appointed the first lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada.
Simcoe recognized the need for more settlers if the young province was to thrive. He issued a proclamation inviting Americans to move to Upper Canada — Americans who were British at heart, who were fed up with the lawlessness and corruption that was rampant in the United States at the time — Americans like Thomas Ingersoll. Although some Loyalists and members of his government warned against it, Simcoe was confident that he was on the right track.
Lured by glowing reports of fertile land, abundant forests, and teeming rivers in Canada, Thomas Ingersoll felt ready to return to the pioneering life his ancestors had led 150 years earlier, even if it meant living under British rule again and swearing allegiance