George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 10

[175] aiming at the power and emoluments to be derived

Chap. VII.} 1778.

from an appointment as the head of a separate organization of loyalists, proposed as no difficult task to reduce and retain one of the middle provinces, by hanging or exiling all its rebels, and confiscating their estates to the benefit of the friends to government. Wiser partisans of Great Britain reprobated ‘the desire of continuing the war for the sake of war,’ and foretold that, should ‘the mode of devastation be adopted, the friends of government must bid adieu to all hopes of ever again living in America.’

While it was no longer possible for the Americans to keep up their army by enlistments, the British gained numerous recruits from immigrants. In Philadelphia Howe had formed a regiment of Roman Catholics. With still better success Clinton courted the Irish. They had fled from the prosecutions of inexorable landlords to a country which offered them freeholds. By flattering their nationality and their sense of the importance attached to their numbers, Clinton allured them to a combination directly averse to their own interests, and raised for Lord Rawdon a large regiment in which officers and men were exclusively Irish. Among them were nearly five hundred deserters from the American army.

Yet the British general lagged far behind the requirements of Germain, who counted upon ten thousand provincial levies, and wished ‘that the war should be carried on in a manner better calculated to make the people feel their distresses.’ The king believed in the ‘hourly declension of the rebellion,’ and that ‘the colonies must soon sue to the mother ’