Indeed, there had been no good reason for those farmers, comfortably situated on their inland homesteads, to take any particular interest in those struggles which, from an early period, the Boston, the Salem, the New York, or, any other Ship masters and Merchants had been waging, for the protection of that long-continued and profitable " illicit trade," from which no benefit had ever accrued to any one beyond those who were thus noisily defying the wellknown and reasonable Laws of the Country ; and, in the more recently and more generally created political excitement, it had mattered very little to the thrifty housewives, in Westchester-county, from whose warehouses -- whether from those of John Hancock and the revolutionary Merchants of Boston and New York, or from those of the Agents of the East India Company, in those ports -- their teacups should be supplied, since the Tea which had been smuggled into the Colonies, in violation of law, by the former, was quite as expensive, and not always as well-flavored, as that which had been imported, legally and legitimately, by the latter. Now and then, it is true, those of these farmers who were Freeholders, had been engaged, among themselves, in a political contest between the friends of the De Lanceys and those of the Morrises, or between the supporters of the Van Cortlandts and those of the Philipses, all of them Westchester-county Landlords, for seats in the General Assembly of the Colony * or for some local object; but, beyond such merely local contests, they had never gone -- the "Sons of Liberty" were not represented and had no correspondents, within that County. It will be evident to every one, from what has been stated concerning Colonial Westchester-county and those who occupied it, that the purposes of this work, which is devoted especially to the history of that purely agricultural community, do not require us to notice the long-continued and ably-conducted struggle of parties, throughout the Colony, in which the Livingstons and the Morrises had been pitted against the De Lanceys and the Colonial and Home Governments ; nor will it be necessary, for those purposes, that we shall present, in all their different phases, the antagonism of " the Merchants and Traders " of every