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Descendants of Abraham Maybee

Generation No. 1

1. ABRAHAM⁷ MAYBEE (PETER PIETERSE⁶ MABIE II, PIETER⁵, CASPAR PIETERSZEN⁴, PETER CASPERSZEN MABIE³ VAN NAERDEN, CASPAR² MABILLE, PIERRE¹) was born January 24, 1747/48 in Tappan NY, and died June 17, 1832 in Adolphustown Tp. Con 1, Lot 21. He married (1) GERRITJE HOGENKAMP December 5, 1773. He married (2) ANN HUFF ACKERMAN April 19, 1781.

Notes
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.

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 irregular congregation of the Tappan Dutch Reform Dutch Church where their two oldestt 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 rigiurs of the cold, rainy 1776 campaign, marching night after night whern 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 additiion 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 Messanger 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 CuylerCorn'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." (Despite the reversal of Tory and Patriot names, Dole was clearly the prisoner in American hands and Mabie was the prisoner in the hands of the British.)

He hastily added a postscript that he had forgotten to mention that any flag of truce would have to go by land, unless previous notice was given that they were to go by water.

The postscript was a trouble which he could have spared himself for if "Ab'm Maybie" was Abraham P. Mabie, there is every reason to believe that Sir Henry was waiting for his flag and would have accepted it by water land or air: some of Sir Henry's intelligence officers were most anxious to return at least one American to his hearth and home at the edge of the Hudson Highlands as quickly as possible. Important plans depended on it. 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; three days later, Cornwallis and Grey moved into New Jersey on the invasion that culminated in the massacre at Haring's. Six more days ensued before the massacre itself, in total nine unfortunate days which may well have enabled Mabie to get back to his home, survey the American positions in and around Tappan and carry the details to the British for their night attack. Not even the most brilliant intelligence officer could have planned to have Colonel Baylor walk into a trap at the home of a close family friend of the Mabies on the very road leading from Mabie's house to the British camp. If Abraham Mabie was responsible for the intelligence, it was fate, not a British officer or Abraham Mabie that made it possible to bring the word of Baylor's exposed position to the oncoming British army and to do so after the march had started. But fate and jealous men have often joined forces. Mabie need never have apologised for that.

Few British agents indeed earned their pay with the lives of half an American brigade. Perhaps Mabie did not, but no one knowing Abraham Mabie's later history can see the marvellously detailed map that Captain Andre drew of that Sunday night expidition without observing that he did not fail to note a place a little north of Perry's Mills which he marked "Mabie's".

One thing is sure; no Virginian who died at Haring's had the slightest notion that the Dutch sandstone farmhouses so unlike the white mansions and log cabins of his native Virginia, held men as ruthless and determined as any Virginian frontiersman, men who were fighting a revolution and a war of neighbours at the same time. None suspected that Virginians were in mortal danger in the barns of Cornelius Abraham Haing because men like Haring and Abraham Mabie had been fighting a religious war long before the Revolution. The minds and passions of these seemingly stolid Dutchmen were by no means as quaint as their stone houses.

The above refers to 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, the British intelligence officer exicuted at Tappan for the part he played in the defection of Benedict Arnold, 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. The militia to rendezvous at Hackensack this day. Every fourth man is ordered on this occasion. His brother saw six soldiers last Wednesday on their way from West Point to Pompton. They told him that no part of the army is to move down. There are two Jersey regiments at Pompton. They have a picket of a Captain and fifty at Wynachy Bridge. The soldiers told his brother that if any of the army at West Point was marched down, they would desert to the Pennsylvanians. There is a company at Sydmen's in the Clove of fifty. Some of the wagons which the Pennsylvanians took with them are returned."

On Dec. 6, 1779, Major Gaetschius at Schraalenburgh asked General Wayne for a pass to send Abraham's wife Gerritje and her two children into New York where she undoubtedly joined Abraham. These children would have been Peter and Abraham aged four and two, respectively, at the time.

Apparently Gerritje died in New York sometime prior to April 1781, perhaps at the birth of the daughter Jane. In April 1781, Abraham married Ann Ackerman, a widow whom he may have married twice, once by license and once in a church, or they changed their minds after obtaining the license. In an Index of Marriages by License in the State of New York prior to 1784, the date of the license appears as 19 April, 1781. In the "inserted records" of the Dutch Reform Church, the record is shown as "22 April 1781, married Abraham Mabie, bootman (boatman) and Ann Ackerman, widow, living at Hoboken". It is assumed that Ackerman was the name of Ann's first husband. Little is known of her earlier history. She may have been the widow Ackerman living on "the road between the Paramus Church and the New Bridge, New Jersey" in February 1780 and later removed to Hoboken, and / or she may have been Antje Storr/Starr born July 10, 1754 and baptized July 28, 1754 at Paramus, daughter of Jacob Storr and Gerritje who married Albert G Ackerman of Paramus by license dated Jan. 22, 1771; or she may have been Antje Demsen who married John Ackerman of Bergen, New Jersey. Royal Maybee's records state that Captain Abvraham Maybee married Ann Huff, widow of Ackerman.

Ann is believed to have been the mother of Abraham's youngest children, Robert McDowal and Elizabeth, being born in New York, Isaac being born in Adolphustown after the arrival of the refugees in 1784. According to a muster roll of "Disbanded Troops and Loyalists Settled in Township #4 (Cataraqui)" dated Oct 5, 1784, Abraham, at that time had a family of his wife, one son over ten, two sons under ten, one daughter over ten, and a daughter under ten. The three boys were still "in the States, expected in that fall". At that time, Peter would have been aged nine years, seven months; Abraham, six years, eleven months; Jane, about five years; Robert McDowal, about two and Elizabeth, one.
Perhaps Peter and Jane were tall for their age and undoubtedly out of sight when the roll was called since children over ten years of age drew full rations. It is believed that Robert McDowal Maybee was named after the first missionary sent to Adolphustown by the Dutch Reform Church in New York. Therefore Capt. Abraham and McDowal must have been close friends before the great exodus but no birth records of other proof has been found.

Abraham was made a Captain of the Associated Loyalists in New York City at the close of hostilities in 1783. This was a loosely knit organization formed to facilitate evacuation of the refugees. He was selected by Captain Michael Grass to accompany him to Canada that year.

       Children of Abraham Maybee and Gerritje Hogenkamp are:

2.	i.	PETER⁸ MAYBEE, b. February 26, 1775, Tappan, NY; d. Abt January 9, 1834, Murray Ontario.
3.	ii.	ABRAHAM MAYBEE, JR., b. November 15, 1777; d. Abt 1862.
4.	iii.	JANE MAYBEE, b. 1779.

Children of Abraham Maybee and Ann Ackerman are:

	iv.	ROBERT MCDOWAL⁸ MAYBEE, b. Abt 1782; d. Aft 1834.
5.	v.	ELIZABETH MAYBEE, b. Abt 1783; d. Bef 1852.
	vi.	ISAAC MAYBEE, b. Aft 1788; d. Abt 1813.

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