Notwithstanding all the inducements which the Provincial Congress and its various office-seeking recruiting agents could offer, however, the staid and conservative farmers of Westchester-county were slow to enlist into the Continental service -- there had been much discontentment among those who were in the service, under Colonel Holmes, in the preceding year ; 2 and on the return of those malcontents, they had undoubtedly told the story of their respective grievances to their surprised and sympathetic neighbors; besides which hindrance, the conservatism of the County had been too barbarously treated by those who were in rebellion, to permit it to extend to that "common cause" the slightest favor, while the wounds which it had thus received were yet bleeding. It was, indeed, true that Warrants had been sent with the Circular Letter, in February ; and it is undoubtedly true, also, that the favored ones, throughout the County, Warrants in hand and Offices in prospective, had employed all their powers of conciliation and persuasion to ensure

1 Journal of the Provincial Congress, •1776."

2 Vide pages 100, l'l, ante.

'Die Solis, P.M., Feb. 18,

a successful enlistment of the quota and the consequent reward to themselves ; but Westchester-county would not be conciliated far enough to send her wellto-do sons into the Army ; and the Warrants were returned to the Congress and the proffered Offices were not secured by those who had hankered for them. The prospect for the four Battalions, as far as Westchester-county was concerned in it, was not promising ; and the Committee of Safety was already entertaining the proposal to call back the Warrants which had been sent into the County, more than two months previously, when a letter was received by that body, from Gilbert Drake, the Chairman of the Committee of the Couuty, stating that one, Ezekiel Hyatt, or Haight, with his associates, had enlisted seventy men in Westchester-county, for a Connecticut Regiment ; but was inclined to take them, as a portion of the quota of that County, into a New York Regiment, if Commissions could be assured to those who were designated as their Officers. 3