with recitals of dangers from the "disaffected" who, singular as it appeared to those local despots, were not inclined to submit, passively, to whatever of insult or of injury those in revolution should be inclined to impose on them -- only in very exceptional instances, however, did that "disaffection" extend beyond a disinclination to approve, in formal words, all which the Congresses had done, while the inclination to approve the Colonial policy of Great Britain was no stronger ; and the general disinclination to leave their homes and their families and to resort to arms, or to render any assistance whatever, which the "disaffected," everywhere, presented, was as productive of disappointment to the commanders of the Boyal Army as it was to General Washington. Neither General Howe nor General Washington understood of what that " disaffection " was generally composed ; and partisan writers and partisan orators, from that day to this, have delighted to make that " disaffection" something else than it really was, and to invest the " disaffected," as a class, with characteristics and aims to which, unless in exceptional instances, they were strangers. Had the conservative farmers of Westchester-county -- and these were not unlike the great bodies of the farmers, in all the Colonies -- been permitted to dissent, quietly, from the policies of both the Home Government and the Continental Congress, and to have approved, quietly, of the spirited opposition to the Colonial policy of the Home Government and of the almost audacious demands for a redress of the grievances of the Colonies, which were made by the General Assembly of the Colony of New York, as they were certainly and generally inclined to do ; and had not the aristocratic and haughty leaders of the revolutionary faction, in New York, attempted to secure uniformity of merely political opinions -- and those to be only such opinions as they should dictate, by the methods which characterized the bigoted and relentless Clergy, in cases of religious dissent from their Calvinistic Congregationalism, in puritannic Massachusetts and Connecticut -- as the those high-toned leaders persistently attempted, it is doubtful if" disaffection " would have been heard of, unless in some individual instances, which would have been harmless because of their insignificance ; and it is morally certain that, if the love of home and the sense of wrongs inflicted by the Mother Country and the respect for those bearing authority, which everywhere prevailed, had been permitted to exercise the influences which they would have surely exercised, especially if they had been supported by that forbearance and by that respect for freedom of conscience, in political affairs, and by those appeals for harmony which every Christian man would have employed and none but civilized savages would have declined to employ, New York, if not the entire Continent, would have appeared, in the Autumn of 1776, as she had appeared in the Spring of 1774, before the spirit of factional strife had blighted the hopes of patriots, united, as one man, regardless of family feuds and ecclesiatical differences and social inequalities, demanding and, if needs be, supporting in arms, the Eights and the honor of the Colony and of the Continent.