present work admits of but brief allusions to them.
However honest this class of the population may have been in taking
sides with the British, and whatever sympathy may be expressed for
them in their trials, losses, and enforced dispersion during and at
the end of the war, there was obviously no course left to the
Americans, then in the midst of a deadly struggle, but to treat them
as a dangerous and obstructive set. The New York Provincial Congress,
in the fall of the year and later, dealt with them unsparingly; and no
man wished to see the element rooted out more than John Jay--a fact to
be borne in mind by those who condemn Lee and other American officers
for attempting to banish the Long Island Tories, as a military
precaution, in the early part of the year.]

While Lee was in command he saw no solution of the problem other than
to remove the entire Tory population to some other quarter where they
could do less mischief in the event of active operations; but
Congress, to the regret of Washington, could not sanction so radical a
method. Greene did his best to root out this element, but we may
imagine that it was uncongenial work, and that he took far more
interest in the progress of his redoubts than in chasing suspected
persons on the island.[52]

[Footnote 52: What General Greene thought of the Tories, and what
treatment he proposed in certain cases, appears from a report on the
subject signed by Generals Heath, Spencer, Greene, and Stirling, and
submitted to Washington towards the close of June: "With regard to the
disaffected inhabitants who have lately been apprehended," say these
officers, "we think that the method at present adopted by the County
Committee, of discharging them on their giving bonds as a security for
their good behavior, is very improper and ineffectual, and therefore
recommend it to your Excellency to apply to the Congress of this
province to take some more effectual method of securing the good
behavior of those people, and in the mean time that your Excellency
will order the officers in whose custody they are to discharge no more
of them until the sense of the Congress be had thereon."--_Journals of
the N.Y. Prov. Congress_, vol. ii.

On this subject Colonel Huntington wrote to Governor Trumbull, June
6th, as follows: "Long Island has the greatest proportion of Tories,
both of its own growth and of adventitious ones, of any part of this
colony; from whence some conjecture that the attack