There were two special causes which made the hard lot of the Loyalists harder than it might otherwise have been. The first was the unfortunate action of the English in occupying cities or tracts of country and then again abandoning them. When Howe evacuated Boston, over 900 Loyalists are said to have left with him for Halifax. When the British army was withdrawn from Philadelphia in June, 1778, 3,000 Loyalists followed in its train. But the misery caused by the uncertain policy of the British Government or the British generals cannot be measured merely by the actual number of refugees on each occasion. A very large proportion of the American population was at heart neutral, and they suffered from not knowing whom to trust and whom to obey at a given time and place. In the autumn of 1776 New Jersey was brought under complete British control. The disaster at Trenton supervened, and in about six months the whole country was given up. Much the same happened in the southern states; at one time the English, at another the Americans were masters of this or that district. The result was that bitterness was intensified by prolonged uncertainty and suspicion. Numbers of citizens, who only asked which master they should serve, suffered at the hands of both. There would have been far less misery and far better feeling if from the beginning to the end of the war certain areas and no more had always remained in British occupation, instead of towns and provinces being bandied about from one side to the other. [Sidenote: and by the separate action of the several States.] The second special cause of suffering to the Loyalists was the separate action of the several states. England was not fighting one nation but thirteen different communities; and it may be said that in each of the thirteen there was civil war. The smaller the area in which there is strife, the meaner and more bitter the strife will be. With a great national struggle were intertwined petty rivalries, local jealousies, family dissensions. Men remembered old grudges, paid off old scores, reproduced in the worst forms the features which in quieter times had disfigured the narrow provincial life of the separate states. Had the states been one instead of many, there would have been a wider patriotism and a broader outlook, for Congress with all its faults was a larger minded body than a state legislature. Had they again been all one, there would not have been a series of unwholesome precedents for persecution of the minority. As it was, each state passed law after law against the Loyalists, and each in its turn could point to what its neighbour had done, in the hope of making a further exhibition of patriotism, more extravagant and more unjust. [Sidenote: Powerlessness of Congress in the matter.]