oppressive in the aristocratic city of New York than in the democratic town of Boston, or in Philadelphia. Thus, it was the so-called Sons of Liberty that had led in the agitation which made the Stamp Act a dead letter, so far as this colony was concerned, and a decade later prevented the landing of taxed tea on New York wharves. And their demonstrative radicalism found little response in the minds of some of the ablest civil and military leaders contributed by this colony to the work of liberation and reconstruction. But the violence of the mob could not blind such men to the essential justice of the American cause, and the actual beginning of the war found a large majority of the best people of the colony definitely committed to a patriotic course. So when Washington and his army were driven hither from Brooklyn and hence to New Jersey, in 1776, New York was no longer the populous place it had been before their sympathizers fled from the terrors of hostile military rule.
For the next seven years this remained the chief British stronghold in America. If the eastern and southern colonies could be split apart by English control of the Hudson, the
