76 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
later, he was instrumental in securing over 300 men for this corps 
alone, having obtained their promises to join before he left home. 
He claimed also that he had raised 500 others; but the record of his 
testimony is so brief that we are left in the dark as to the geographical 
extent of his activities and the names of the regiments which filled 
their ranks by the secret and dangerous methods of such agents as he. 
Dr. Joseph Clarke of Stratford also gathered men for the Prince of 
Wales regiment, thirty-three recruits being the number claimed by 
him; while the widow of Josiah Wheeler of Fairfield made affirmation 
that her husband had raised men for a lieutenancy in the same corps, 
his commission, which she produced, being dated April, 1777.1 Another 
inhabitant of Fairfield, Joseph Dickson, identified himself with the 
Queen's Rangers, a Tory regiment in which his brother was an officer, 
and for which he secured enlistments, bringing in he tells us “a good 
many men.” Redding, a centre of loyalism lying sixteen or seventeen 
miles inland, furnished another agent for this corps in the person of 
John Lyon, who obtained twenty-two recruits for it in Fairfield County 
under the warrant of Colonel Robert Rogers, as he relates. 
A third Loyalist corps which drew a considerable proportion of 
its men from Connecticut was Colonel Edmund Fanning’s King’s 
American Regiment. Fanning was a native of Long Island and a 
graduate of Yale College who, after serving for some years in an official 
capacity in North Carolina, came to New York at the commencement 
of the Revolution. On the arrival of the British troops at the metrop- 
olis Fanning proposed to raise a corps of provincials in support of the 
royal cause, and was aided in his undertaking by liberal subscriptions 
from the local Tories, those of New York City giving £2,000, while 
the sum of £500 was subscribed on Staten Island, £310 in King’s 
County, and £219 in the town of Jamaica. Receiving his commission 
before the end of the year (that is, on December 11), Fanning was busy 
securing recruits by the following spring, many of these coming from 
the mainland of Connecticut. We get a suggestion of what was going 
on in an old document dated at New York, April 27, 1779, which s ates 
that Thomas Chapman of Stratford, recruited a number of men for 
the King’s service before he left Connecticut, and brought them off 
with him early in the spring of 1777. Captain Chapman and his 
company were carried across the sound to Long Island by the sloop 
Gull, of which John (or Jonathan) Ketchum of Norwalk was the 
master, and promptly enlisted in the King’s American Regiment. 
Other men who collected Loyalists for this corps were Captain Peter 
Clements, who lived at the time on the banks of the Hudson and 
1Sec. Rep., Bur. of Arch., Ont., Pt. I, 1904, 209, 251, 238; Bates, Kingston and 
The Loyalists of 1783 (pamphlet; St. John, N.B., 1889), 8. 

