This is the second of a series of posts introducing the five-part historical fiction novel Unbowed, which will be published in November 2026. All five parts are based on true events and real people – my ancestors. The first post described the outcome of the Battle of Dunbar in 1650 and one of its survivors, Malcolm MacCallum, ending with the Salem Witch Trials. The second post described the raid on Saratoga in 1745 and how John MacClure eventually managed to forge a new life with his family in New France prior to the Seven Year Wars / French and Indian War.
When we picture the American Revolution in New York, we often imagine a clear-cut battle between liberty-loving colonists and oppressive British redcoats. If we think about ethnic rivalries, we assume the local Dutch colonists were the ones leading the charge. After all, the Dutch had a historic axe to grind: a century earlier, the British military had sailed into New York harbor and seized New Netherland from their ancestors. For the majority of Dutch families in the Hudson and Mohawk valleys, the Revolution was an eager opportunity to finally throw off the British yoke.
But if you look closer at the muster rolls of Saratoga and Claverack, a much darker, internal tragedy emerges.
The deepest, most bitter fractures of the Revolutionary War didn’t happen between different ethnic groups. They happened within communities of Palatine German immigrants. These families had fled religious devastation in Europe, only to find themselves caught in a brutal, neighbor-against-neighbor civil war on the New York frontier—a conflict that tore brothers, cousins, and lifelong friends apart at the roots.
The Refugee Inheritance
The Palatine Germans arrived in New York in the early 1700s as impoverished refugees. Fleeing the scorched-earth campaigns of Louis XIV in the Rhineland, they had been rescued by Queen Anne of England, who granted them passage and settlement lands in exchange for their labor.
Because of this history, the Palatines viewed the escalating conflict of the 1770s through a completely different lens than their Dutch neighbors. To many Palatines, the British Crown wasn’t a distant tyrant; it was the imperial shield that had saved their grandparents from starvation and absolute annihilation in Europe.
When the local Rebel Committees of Safety began forcing citizens to sign the “Articles of Association”—an explicit oath of rebellion against the King—the Palatine communities fractured down the middle. To sign meant betraying the Crown that had given them refuge. To refuse meant being branded a traitor, facing imprisonment, and watching your farm be seized or burned.
The Ghost March of Claverack
In Part III of Unbowed, this agonizing choice falls squarely on Henry Simmons (originally Johann Hendrich Simon). A proud Palatine farmer, Henry refuses to sign the rebel test. As the shadow of the gallows creeps closer, he makes a desperate, dangerous decision.
In the dead of night, Henry leads twenty-seven of his unarmed Palatine neighbors on an grueling, seventy-five-mile “ghost march” through the wilderness to reach the safety of the advancing British forces.
When they finally arrive at the British camps, condescending regular British officers hand them cast-off weapons and form them into provincial volunteer units. When the opposing armies finally collide at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777, the true horror of the conflict is realized: Henry’s loyalist volunteers find themselves trading deadly volleys across the fields of Freeman’s Farm with their own Palatine kin—including members of the Bohnenstiehl family, later written as Bonesteel—who had enlisted under the rebel banner in the Albany Militia.
Scorched Earth and Scattered Seeds
While the men slaughtered one another on the battlefields, the women and children bore the brunt of the home-front terror. Anna Margreda Simmons stayed behind on the family farm, navigating starvation and the constant threat of rebel reprisals. When the British military launched a scorched-earth campaign that burned Kingston and surrounding farmlands to ash, the sky turned black with the smoke of a dying world.
Following General Burgoyne’s catastrophic surrender at Saratoga, the fracture in the families became permanent. Henry was forced to lead a caravan of four hundred desperate Loyalist refugees across a frozen Lake Champlain into a bitter Canadian exile.
But his nine-year-old son David chose to stay behind in New York with his rebel uncle. In a single generation, the family’s roots were violently severed.
The Dutch colonists won their long-awaited vengeance against the British Crown, but the Bonesteels and Simmons paid the price in blood and exile.
Part III of UNBOWED resurrects this forgotten civil war, reminding us that the birth of America was not a clean ideological triumph, but a deeply human tragedy of divided loyalties and fractured bloodlines.
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