Westchester County, New York, During the American Revolution
That disappointment was expressed to the Hume Government, in the General's despatch of the twenty-fifth of September, 1776, in these words : " We muBt also have recruits from Europe, not finding the Americans disposed to serve with arms, notwithstanding the hopes held out "to me, upon my arrival at this post." In his Speech before a Committee of the House of Commons, on the twenty-ninth of April, 1779, the General repeated the expression of his disappointment, on that subject, in these emphatic words: "I must, here, add, that I found the Americans " not so well-disposed to join us, and to serve, as I had been taught to "expect." The careful student of the history of that period will also bear testimony, in confirmation of what General Howe thus wrote and said, that the Americans, those who had been persecuted and outraged because of " suspicions " that they were " disaffected," notwithstanding the very reasonable reasons which they had for thus transferring their strength to the Royal Army, generally remained at their homes, with their families, without voluntarily taking up arms, in either Army ; and that the Loyal Battalions were composed, almost exclusively, of the floating population, largely men of foreign birth or Americans whose immoralities or necessities had induced them to enter (he service. They were relatively few in numbers ; and but for the personal respectability of those who led them, their services would have been only nominal.
"We are not unmindful, in what we have thus said, of the great use of that loyal element which Joseph Galloway made in his very lawyer-like publications; but we have also borne in mind, that those publications were made for personal and partisan purposes ; and that, like his earlier associates in duplicity and treachery, he was capable of resorting to unsavory means for the accomplishment of any given end in which he was personally interested, justifying the employment of those means by the character of the proposed end, and boldly and unreservedly doing evil in order that what he was pleased to regard as good might, therefrom, be secured.