recommendation of Congress, and acting in accordance
with the spirit of the treaty; and these humane and sensible views were
shared by Gadsden and Marion in South Carolina, by Theodore Sedgwick in
Massachusetts, and by Greene, Hamilton, and Jay. But any man who held
such opinions, no matter how conspicuous his services had been, ran the
risk of being accused of Tory sympathies. "Time-serving Whigs" and
"trimmers" were the strangely inappropriate epithets hurled at men who,
had they been in the slightest degree time-servers, would have shrunk
from the thankless task of upholding good sense and humanity in the
teeth of popular prejudice.

[Sidenote: The Trespass Act of New York, 1784.]

In none of the states did the loyalists receive severer treatment than
in New York, and for obvious reasons. Throughout the war the frontier
had been the scene of atrocities such as no other state, save perhaps
South Carolina, had witnessed. Cherry Valley and Minisink were names of
horror not easily forgotten, and the fate of Lieutenant Boyd and
countless other victims called loudly for vengeance. The sins of the
Butlers and their bloodthirsty followers were visited in robbery and
insult upon unoffending men, who were like them in nothing but in being
labelled with the epithet "Tory." During the seven years that the city
of New York had been occupied by the British army, many of these
loyalists had found shelter there. The Whig citizens, on the other hand,
had been driven off the island, to shift as best they might in New
Jersey, while their comfortable homes were seized and assigned by
military orders to these very Tories. For seven years the refugee Whigs
from across the Hudson had looked upon New York with feelings like those
with which the mediaeval exile from Florence or Pisa was wont to regard
his native city. They saw in it the home of enemies who had robbed them,
the prison-house of gallant friends penned up to die of wanton ill-usage
in foul ships' holds in the harbour. When at last the king's troops left
the city, it was felt that a great day of reckoning had arrived. In
September, 1783, two months before the evacuation, more than twelve
thousand men, women, and children embarked for the Bahamas or for Nova
Scotia, rather than stay and face the troubles that were coming. Many of
these were refined and cultivated persons, and not all had been actively
hostile to the American cause; many had simply accepted British
protection. Ag