Westchester County, New York, During the American Revolution
The suspension of their business, by the aristocracy of America, who could sustain the present strain in order to ensure the receipt of an ultimate advantage, was, we say, no less severe in New York than the similar suspension of her business, by the aristocracy of Great Britain, had been in Boston; and the sufFerngs of of the working classes were, undoubtedly, quite as keenly felt in the one case as in the other ; but, in the instance of New York, there was neither an appeal for help nor an ostentatious display of "patriotic" sympathy, extending help ; and if the sufferings of the lowly victims, in New York, were noticed at all, by those "patriotic"' aristocrats who had produced those distresses, it was only in those congratulatory remarks, not unfrequently seen in the published correspondence of the not distant later period, that the necessities of the working-classes were compelling them to enlist in the Armies, in order to obtain even a portion of the food which was needed to keep their dependent wives and little ones from, starvation, and that "for the " Rights of man and of Englishmen."
The " determination " of the Continental Congress of 1774, to appoint Committees "in every County, " City, and Town," " whose business it should be at- " tentively to observe the conduct of all persons, " touching the Association," which that Congress also enacted, and with extraordinary powers for persecuting and bringing ruin on whomsoever those local Committees should determine to put under a ban, had not yet become as well-seated, in the Colony of New York, as in some of the other Colonies ; l but the