Postscripts

Loyalists eventually became a burden to British strategic planning.When Howe abandoned Boston for New York City, his ships first had to sail for Halifax with Tories evacuated from Boston. Howe became overextended and had to post garrisons in Trenton, Princeton, Bordentown and Brunswick on the winter of 1776 in order to protect the Tories of New Jersey.

Political scientists have long debated what would have happened to the patriots had the Revolution failed and Loyalists returned to power. Britain was firm in its determination to extinguish the colonial rebellion. Similarly, loyalists' were outspoken in their desire for vengeance and retaliation. Historian Sydney George Fisher concluded, "America would have become an enormous Ireland."

Peter Corne
Over the years, the Kennedy House in Montrose house also has been known by the names of the successive families that owned it. It has been called the Henry House, the Tate House, the Mackey House and the Johnson House.

It should properly have been called the Corne House, having been built for Peter Corne, openly a loyalist during the Revolution, probably in the 1750's. The Corne name was pronounced locally as "Cor-ney" and sometimes written with an accented final letter--the French accent aigu (é).

Born in the English port city of Hull in 1722, Corne, already “a master mariner," came to New York as a young man and entered into partnership with merchants Anthony and Isaac Van Dam. Not content with the dull routines of commerce, Corne sailed the company's ships to the West African coast. Here he bought slaves and transported them to the island of St. Eustatius in the Dutch Antilles, a center for contraband. High mortality among the workers on sugar plantations made slaves a desirable cargo. Emptied of their human freight, his ships then loaded Caribbean sugar and rum for transport to the North American colonies.

Between 1740 and 1748, during the American phase of Britain's War of the Austrian Succession, with a commission from the colony of New York, Corne became part owner of several privateers. Armed with eight cannon, his brig Nebuchadnezzar wreaked havoc on Dutch and French merchant vessels.

Peter Corne was soon wealthy. He owned town houses in New York City, a summer mansion north of the city that he called Greenwich House (it lent its name to the neighborhood) and homes on Long Island and near the King's Ferry, where he had a farm and a gristmill near Peekskill.

In 1751, he married Elizabeth Henderson, affluent in her own right. Her mother, Thysie Benson, was the daughter of Derrick Benson, a well-to-do New Jersey landowner. Her Scottish-born father, wealthy physician and merchant Dr. James Henderson, owned houses and land in New York City and extensive acreage in the Mohawk Valley.

Peter and Elizabeth Henderson Corne had three daughters. Without her father's consent, on Sunday, June 23, 1773, Letitia, the eldest, married Dennis Kennedy, "a gentleman of New York," in Manhattan's Lutheran Church. Built in 1729 on Broadway at Rector Street, the church would be gutted in the disastrous fire that consumed a third of New York after American troops evacuated he city in 1776. As the father of States Morris Dyckman's wife, Dennis Kennedy is an important figure in the Dyckman family history and the Boscobel story.

The second Corne daughter, Elizabeth, married a lieutenant of artillery and deputy quartermaster general of Hessian troops with an imposing name: Baron Charles August de Girancourt de Vourecourt. Peter Corne roundly disliked the groom. The third, Margaret, married successful New York merchant George Douglas.

A stubborn, die-hard Tory, Peter Corne's name appears frequently in records during the Revolution. British headquarters files, conspiracy committee minutes and newspapers all contain references to him, including three jail sentences served because of his "passionate allegiance to George III in the faces of Rebel committeemen."

Family legend has it that Peter Corne once took the Kennedy children to the cellar of his home. Opening a curtain covering a portrait of British King George III, he commanded them, "Down on your knees to your Master!"

His wife Elizabeth Henderson Corne died in Bushwick, Long Island, on August 30, 1780. Five years later, Peter Corne married his partner Isaac Van Dam's widow, Sara. The relationship soon soured. Toward the end of his life he promised Sara anything in return for a legal separation. Peter Corne died in New York City on July 18, 1807.

Dennis Kennedy
Facts about Peter Corne's son-in law, States Morris Dyckman's father-in-law and Betsey Dyckman's father Dennis Kennedy are elusive, and he remains a person of interest but also a person of mystery. From public records of the years following his 1773 marriage to Letitia Corne Kennedy, however, we can glean a few details. We know that the couple had a daughter named Elizabeth, born May 1, 1776. She was called Betsey--although she always signed herself Elizabeth.

The Corne family brought Betsey with them when they left Westchester to take refuge behind the British lines, and she became the ward of Peter Corne. Dennis Kennedy remained behind. No further mention of Betsey's mother appears; she seems to have died within a few years.

There also may have been other Kennedy children, including at least one older brother. A male child named Peter Cornel Kennedy was baptized at Christ Church in Poughkeepsie on August 28, 1774, probably the son of Dennis and Letitia. His sponsors were listed as Peter Cornel, his wife, and John Barnes. Two infants were buried at New York's Trinity Church for P. or Capt. Corney: a child of 1 yr. 3 mos. in June of 1779 and another of 1 yr. 6 mos. on November 12, 1780. These appear to have been children of Dennis and Letitia Kennedy. Peter Corne and his wife were too old for them to be theirs, and their younger daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret, had not yet married.

How Dennis Kennedy acquired the house that came to be known as the Kennedy House is unclear. By turning it over to his son-in-law, Peter Crone may have been attempting to keep his Westchester property from being confiscated under anti-Tory laws. Eventually, the Corne farm and mill were seized by the Commissioners of Sequestration and sold to a Patriot.

Was Dennis Kennedy a loyal Patriot? Or was he a covert Tory? We may never know the answers to these questions. He served in the American forces, yet he moved to Canada after the Revolution. On April 12, 1774, Dennis Kennedy subscribed 10 shillings toward a glebe farm and house for St. Philip's Episcopal Church in the Highlands in Garrison, N.Y., where Peter Corne was a vestryman. [A glebe farm was land donated to a parish, whose rent went to support the church.] The church strongly supported the Crown.

In White Plains, on April 13, 1775, Peter Corne and Dennis Kennedy joined 297 others in signing their names to a document protesting the selection of delegates to represent the colony of New York at the second Continental Congress in Philadelphia. They declared their "allegiance to their gracious and merciful sovereign, King George the Third." Paul Revere's fateful ride was only five days away.

Because Corne later refused to take the oath of allegiance to the revolutionary government, the Fishkill Committee on March 20, 1777, ordered him to go "with his Family, apparel & household furniture" behind the British lines within 20 days. Corne owned the large house near King's Ferry and asked that "his Son in Law Dennis Kennedy" be allowed to live on his [Corne's] farm to care for his property until its disposition could be decided.

By then Kennedy had taken the oath of allegiance and was grinding flour for the American army. The committee offered no objection. The Kennedy family, then living in Dutchess County, "moved down there," according to the minutes of the First Commission for Detecting and Defeating Conspiracies in the State of New York. What Dennis Kennedy found shocked him.

The Commissioners of Sequestration had sold "every moveable Thing," including the livestock Corne had left to Kennedy "by way of recompense for two years service I did him and never rec'd 6 pence before." This information comes from his petition to the Council of Safety, dated May 24, 1777, on file in the archives at Albany. It asks for the return of is personal effects and a Negro man named York.

Not only had Dennis Kennedy taken the oath of allegiance before moving to Corne's house in Cortlandt, he enlisted in the militia. On February 17, 1777, he joined Capt. James Stewart's Company of Col. Lewis Dubois's 5th New York Regiment of the Line for three years. His name remained on the muster rolls until November 3rd. On October 6 of that year, the record shows that military pay was due him. Under "Remarks" is the notation, "Prisn or dead." October 6 was the date British and Hessian troops seized lightly defended Forts Clinton and Montgomery near Bear Mountain in a surprise attack on American positions from which some defenders escaped across the Hudson. This diversionary attack by Sir Henry Clinton was intended to assist Burgoyne's thrust from the north toward Albany, but was already too little and too late.

He obviously survived that debacle. By 1778, Dennis Kennedy was serving as a sergeant in the 3rd Regiment of Westchester County Militia organized by Col. Samuel Drake of Bedford. On February 27, 1779, he was commissioned an ensign [an intermediate rank between sergeant and lieutenant] in the same regiment.

During this period, Kennedy continued to occupy the Corne house. In the New York Packet and Advertiser for June 4, 1777, he advertised for a button lost from his bearskin coat and noted that he was "living near Peekskill." As late as November 29, 1779, a small package was addressed to him and delivered at the house on King's Ferry Road frequented by Continental officers and known as the "Kennedy House."

Friend or Foe?
After 1779, Dennis Kennedy's trail grows faint. His name does not turn up again until after the Revolutionary War. Lorenzo Sabine's Loyalists of the American Revolution, published in Boston in 1864, lists him as having been a "Loyalist Associator" in 1782, and settling in Shelburne, Nova Scotia.

But from other sources we learn that he and his family (one male, one female, two children, one servant) did not embark with the main body of loyalists. A search of Nova Scotia archives reveals no grant of land in Shelburne, although a Dennis Kennedy was reported as the joint owner of a 400-acre grant in Chester Township. Because he did not file a petition, however, the land reverted to the province.

Perhaps Kennedy had seen a letter published in the Boston Gazette for September 12, 1783, describing refugees in the Shelburne area as "the most miserable set of beings that it is possible to conceive of" and "cursing both King and Congress." Shelburne, a boomtown of ten thousand inhabitants in 1783, had dwindled to a few hundred only two or three years later. Shelburne had a good harbor but it froze in winter. The soil was infertile and not conducive to farming, and the land had to be cleared of trees.

By January 24, 1786, a Dennis Kennedy was in Ontario helping former Dutchess County farmers Daniel Hammel (or Haumel) and Thomas Robbler file their claims against the British Crown for compensation as Loyalists. Kennedy had known both men before the Revolution. In Hammel's claim, Kennedy is identified as a "witness from Ontario." Yet no record of any grant of land to Dennis Kennedy exists in that province's archives. Nor is he listed among the United Empire Loyalists in Ontario. The trail of Dennis Kennedy effectively ends here.

Betsey Kennedy Marries
The Daily Advertiser, a New York City newspaper, reported the marriage on February 1, 1794, of "States Morris Dyckman, Esq., of King's Grange, Westchester Co., to Miss Kennedy, grand daughter of Peter Corne, Esq., of Mansfield in the same Co." The bride, "Miss Kennedy," of course, was Elizabeth Kennedy, daughter of Dennis and Letitia Corne Kennedy. At the time, she was the ward of Peter Corne.

The ceremony was performed in Manhattan’s Trinity Church, the structure completed in 1790 as a replacement for the original building burned out in the huge fire of 1776. Officiating was the Rev. Benjamin Moore, whose wartime Loyalist leanings had initially prevented him from elevation to rector."He preached and prayed against us during the war," :recalled Robert Livingston. He was also the father of Clement Clark Moore, who would claim authorship of "Twas the Night Before Christmas." Witnesses included States Morris Dyckman's widowed sister, Mrs. John Vredenburgh, his sister Caty, her son William.

Peter Corne had not been pleased at the prospect of the marriage. Dyckman, a longtime bachelor, was 39 or 40 and suffered from severe bouts of gout. Betsey was not yet 18, maling him more than twice her age. Peter Corne did not want his young granddaughter to marry a much older man who was not only ailing but whose finances were shaky.

Corne and Dyckman had one quality in common: States Morris Dyckman had been an openly avowed Loyalist during the Revolution. Forced to seek refuge in New York City, he found work with the British as a trusted quartermaster's clerk there and in England.

In 1804, States Morris Dyckman began the construction of the Boscobel mansion located on what would later be the grounds of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Veterans Hospital. Built by William Vermilye, Dyckman's cousin, a builder by trade, no formal plans have been found.

Dyckman did not live to occupy Boscobel. Death came suddenly on August 11, 1806, while he was visiting his cousin Jacobus Dyckman at the Dyckman House in upper Manhattan. Jacobus was the oldest son of William Dyckman, who had fled to Cortlandt during the war.

The exquisite architectural gem that is Boscobel was completed under the direction of Betsey, Dennis Kennedy's daughter, who showed remarkable skill in managing her husband's properties. Betsey Kennedy Dyckman died in Boscobel June 20, 1823.

Like their 13-month-old daughter, Letitia Catalina, who died of scarlet fever July 20, 1800, States Morris Dyckman and Betsey were buried in the Nagle-Dyckman burial ground near the original Dyckman farm in upper Manhattan. They were later reinterred in the Cedar Hill Cemetery of the Reformed Church of Cortlandtown on the Albany Post Road, joining dozens of other Dyckman ancestors and descendants. Considered too expensive to repair, the original church, built between 1795 and 1799, was replaced with a modern structure in 1971.

With the decline of the family fortune, Boscobel fell into disrepair and was repeatedly threatened with destruction. Sold by the federal government to a house wrecker for $35, it was rescued dramatically from the wrecker's ball and carefully dismantled. The pieces were transported 15 miles to the north and painstakingly reassembled in Garrison, N.Y., where it stands today in all its glory, still overlooking the picturesque Hudson.

Dennis Kennedy's Descendants
Only one of Betsey's two children survived to adulthood: a son, Peter Corne Dyckman, born in 1797 and sickly as a youth. He married Susan Matilda Whetten in 1819 and died five years later at Boscobel, only 27 years old.

Their daughter, Elizabeth Letitia Corne Dyckman, was born at Boscobel September 10, 1822. Often called Eliza, a name she preferred, she was Dennis Kennedy's great-granddaughter and Betsey Kennedy's only granddaughter.

Peter Corne Dyckman's will left Boscobel to his widow, Betsey, and $10,000 to daughter Eliza when she reached 21--or upon her marriage. Not yet 16, Eliza was married to John Peach Cruger at Boscobel on Christmas Day in 1837. Between 1838 and 1869, she gave birth there to 15 children. Some Crugers buried in Cedar Hill Cemetery thus are descendants of Dennis Kennedy. Other descendants may be living in the area, unaware of the Kennedy connection.

The past guards its secrets well and yields them up reluctantly. Two nagging questions still remain: Where did Dennis Kennedy's loyalties really lie? And where did he end his years? Perhaps a lonely, moss-covered headstone in some forgotten Canadian graveyard holds the answer.

Labels: Boscobel, Dennis Kennedy, Dyckman Family, Lower Hudson Valley

Posted by Notorc @ 6/24/2010 06:57:00 AM