CAPTAIN ABRAHAM MAYBEE - U.E.L.
The following account of
the life of Capt. Abraham Maybee is taken from the notes of the late Ralph
D. Maybee.
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Abraham Maybee was one of
the twin sons of Pieter and Jannetje (Hogenkamp) Mabie. He was born 24
Jan. 1748 in Tappan, NY, baptized 21 Feb. 1748 in the Tappan Dutch Reform
Church, and he died 17 June 1832 in Adolphustown, Upper Canada. On Dec
5, 1773 an intention to marry was recorded for Abraham Mebie and Gerritje
Hogenkamp of the Tappan Dutch Reform Church where their two oldest sons
Pieter and Abraham were also baptized.
There is evidence to indicate
that Abraham acted as a British spy during the Revolutionary War. Leiby,
in his Revolutionary War in the Hackensack Valley gives the following account:
Abraham, twenty-seven years
old when the war began, seems to have joined the Orange County Rangers
like any patriotic Orange Dutchman and shared the rigors of the cold, rainy
1776 campaign, marching night after night when British raiders threatened
lower Orange County; Abraham Mabie seems also, as part of his arduous service
as a militiaman, to have found himself one of the several hundred militiamen
captured and thrown into prison in New York City when General Vaughan made
his surprise attack on Fort Montgomery in October, 1777. Perhaps some old
friend from Tappan , now a refugee in New York, intimated to his captors
that Mabie was no ranting patriot and that he might be useful to the British.
Perhaps Mabie decided to join the British without any suggestion
from the outside.
In any case, a year after
his capture at Fort Montgomery, Mabie was out of prison. Henceforth the
former private soldier in the Orange County militia was to be a British
irregular and spy, worth ten militiamen to the British, perhaps a hundred.
The men who recruited Mabie seem to have sensed that Mabie was no ordinary
turncoat of indifferent sympathies, but a first - rate addition to the
espionage service, doubly welcome because his home was in the center of
the usual American campsite south of the Highlands and they set about at
once to get him back within the American lines.
To the somewhat naive Governor
George Clinto [rebel], Sir Henry Clinton [loyalist] offered a cartel of
three American prisoners in exchange for three not very distinguished Tories.
He baited the offer with a prisoner Clinton could hardly refuse, Major
Stephen Bush, who had been the Governor's aide before the fall of Fort
Montgomery, and Clinton, no more suspicious of Henry than he had been of
the young horse traders, hardly waited for the British Messenger to dismount
before sending off a letter to General Washington, dated Sept. 19, 1778
asking him to approve the exchange:
"Dear Sir,
By the last flag which
arrived from N. York, I received certificates from Commiss'y Genl. of Prisoners
there with proposals for exchanging Stephen Bush (late my Brigade Major
and taken at Fort Montgomery) for Henry Cuyler, Corn's Van Tassel for Alex'r
White and James Dole for Ab'm Maybie. As I conceive the Exchanges advantageous,
I mean to agree to the proposals."
The exchange was effected
on or just before Oct. 8, 1778.
Governor Clinton's acceptance
of the proposed exchange went in to General Washington on September 19,
1778.
By hiding British soldiers
in his neighbours' Dutch sandstone farmhouses , Mabie was partly responsible
for the surprise and destruction of a regiment of Virginia Light Horse
at Old Tappan on September 28, 1778 by a British detachment under General
Charles Grey.
After this event, Abraham
apparently left the area. In the journal of Major Andre, British intelligence
officer, it is stated that "Mabie left the neutral ground after the raid
and went into New York City. He apparently made various excursions on behalf
of the British. He reported to Major Andre, presumably from the Highlands,
on his successful attempts to bring three of Butler's men (Butler's Rangers)
through the highlands. He was one of four spies sent out in January 1781,
to try to estimate the seriousness of the mutiny of the Jersey line when
the British thought that the revolution might collapse."
In this connection, the following
is the contents of a letter written by the British officer named Stapleton
to Major Delansey contained in the papers of Sir Henry Clinton bearing
the date 12 Jan. 1781.
"Abraham Mabie, sent out
last Sunday has been at Saddle River and Ramapo (New Jersey). He heard
of the Pennsylvanians having marched towards Philadelphia with five field
pieces. . . . ."
(Continued in Issue #3 of
the Maybee Newsletter)
