This Day in History: December 30

The New York loyalists' open defiance of Clinton's ruling was published in the Royal Gazette of December 30, 1779. It announced that all goods captured by loyalists should become their own property and that rebel prisoners taken by loyalist bands would be exchanged only for loyalists who had been members of their organization. Enlistment in those predatory bands proved nevertheless to be smaller and the bands less helpful than ardent loyalists had predicted and Lord George Germain had hoped. But meanwhile the loyalists were contributing affectively to the British secret service in America under loyalist adjutant general Major Oliver Delancey of New York. [More]