scarcely any of the inhabitants joined the American retreating army,
while numbers were daily flocking to the royal army. But within twelve
months, when that royal army passed through the same country, on the
evacuation of Philadelphia by Sir Henry Clinton (Sir William Howe having
returned to England), the inhabitants were universally hostile, instead
of being universally loyal, as the year before. The royal historian
says:

"In setting out on this dangerous retreat, the British general clearly
perceived that it would be indispensably necessary to provide for all
possible contingencies. _His way lay entirely through an enemy's
country, where everything was hostile in the extreme, and from whence no
assistance or help of any sort was to be expected._"[407]

The causes of this change in the feelings of the inhabitants of the
Jerseys, in the space of a few months, in regard to the British army and
mother country, will be a subject of future inquiry; but, in the
meantime, the manifest failure of the revolutionary army to maintain its
position during the twelve months following the Declaration of
Independence, its declining numbers, and the difficulty of recruiting
its ranks, show that the act of violent severance from the mother
country did not spring from the heart and intellect of the colonists,
but from a portion of them which had obtained all the resources of
material and military power, under the profession of defending their
rights as British subjects, with a view to ultimate reconciliation and
union with the mother country; but had used their advantages to declare
severance from the mother country, to excite hatred against it, and
establish themselves in sovereignty over America. Referring to the state
of the colonies toward the close of 1777, the latest American historian,
Mr. Frothingham, says:

"This was a period of great political languor. The burden of the war was
severely felt. The blaze of freedom, it was said, that burst forth at
the beginning had gone down, and numbers, in the thirst for riches, lost
sight of the original object. (Independent Chronicle, March 12, 1778.)
'Where,' wrote Henry Laurens (successor to John Hancock as the President
of the Congress) to Washington, 'where is virtue, where is patriotism
now, when almost every man has turned his thoughts and attention to gain
and pleasures?'" (Letter, November 20, 1778.)[408]

VI. The Declaration of Independence was the avowed expedient and prelud