Plundered himself, he
could plunder his enemies, and this too he did both by land and
sea. In the autumn of 1778 ships manned chiefly by Loyalist
refugees were terrorizing the coast from Massachusetts to New
Jersey. They plundered Martha's Vineyard, burned some lesser
towns, such as New Bedford, and showed no quarter to small
parties of American troops whom they managed to intercept.
What happened on the coast happened also in the interior. At
Wyoming in the northeastern part of Pennsylvania, in July, 1778,
during a raid of Loyalists, aided by Indians, there was a brutal
massacre, the horrors of which long served to inspire hate for
the British. A little later in the same year similar events took
place at Cherry Valley, in central New York. Burning houses, the
dead bodies not only of men but of women and children scalped by
the savage allies of the Loyalists, desolation and ruin in scenes
once peaceful and happy such horrors American patriotism learned
to associate with the Loyalists. These in their turn remembered
the slow martyrdom of their lives as social outcasts, the threats
and plunder which in the end forced them to fly, the hardships,
starvation, and death to their loved ones which were wont to
follow.
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