All these have been told, over and over again, with more or less of precision and particularity, and with mechanical uniformity of order and general statements; but all these various writers, from Gordon and Ramsey to the younger Bolton and Ridpath, have successively and uniformly belittled the history of that community of industrious and peaceful and prosperous and conservative farmers, who occupied what was known, geographically, as the County of Westchester, during the ten years which are now under consideration, a history which consisted, in truth, of vastly more than a series of military movements and the providential detection of a military defection and plot ; and it has consequently been left to other hands and to other pens, to do, with greater labor and less satisfaction, what should have been done, many years since, while the material was more abundant and more procurable, and while some, at least, of the actors in that great drama were here, to afford their more intelligent assistance.

An attempt has been made, in this work, to do a small portion of what has been, thus, hitherto, neglected ; and if we shall have succeeded in the little which we have earnestly and laboriously attempted to do, the reader will find, therein, a brief, but honestly told, record of those influences, obtruded from beyond the County itself, without invitation from and in known opposition to the inclinations of those who were within the County, which, during the earlier revolutionary era, transformed a well-cultivated and highly productive agricultural region into one over which, without the baleful assistance of a foreign enemy, were spread, by fellow-colonists and fellow-subjects, the sickening evidences of obtruded and unwelcome partisan bitterness and relentlessness, presented in the devastation and waste and desolation which, everywhere throughout the County, then prevailed -- of those influences, wielded by those who are unduly claimed to have been patriotic and virtuous, which carried with them, into the quiet and peaceful homesteads of agricultural Westchestercounty, persecution and outrage and barbarism, such as the world has seldom seen, since the restraining power of Christianity has prevailed over those who, if left to themselves, as in the instances of those of whom we write, would have been only ruthless barbarians, notwithstanding the habiliments of civilization in which they sometimes appeared.