Some fled to other colonies, but found that, “like Cain, they had some discouraging mark upon them.” In exile they learned that the patriot wrath visited their property: their private coaches were burned or pulled in pieces. A rich importer’s goods were destroyed or stolen, and his effigy was hung up in sight of his house during the day and burned at night. Beautiful estates, where was “every beauty of art or nature, every elegance, which it cost years of care and toil in bringing to perfection,” were laid waste. Looking upon this work of ruin, a despairing loyalist cried that the Americans were “as blind and mad as Samson, bent upon pulling the edifice down upon their heads to perish in the ruins.” The violence of the patriots’ attack upon the loyalists seemed for a time to eliminate the latter from the struggle. The friends of royal power in America expected too much, and while the king’s enemies were organizing they waited for him to crush the rising rebellion. They looked on with wonder as the signal flew from one local committee to another over thirteen colonies, who now needed only a glowing fact like Lexington to fuse them into one defensive whole. The news reached Putnam’s Connecticut farm in a day; Arnold, at New Haven, had it the next day, and in four days it had reached New York.[82] Unknown messengers carried it through Philadelphia, past the Chesapeake, on to Charleston, and within twenty days the news in many garbled forms was evoking a common spirit of patriotism from Maine to Georgia. It was commonly believed that America must be saved from “abject slavery” by the bands of patriots encompassing Boston. The farmers and mechanics who had hurried from their work to drive the British from Concord into Boston were not an army. They settled down in a great half-circle around the port with a common purpose of compelling Gage to take to his ships, but with no definite plan. Confusion was everywhere. Men were coming and going, and there were no regular enlistments.[83] A few natural leaders were doing wonders in holding them together.[84] Among them the brave and courteous Joseph Warren, the warm friend of Samuel Adams and zealous comrade in the recent work of agitation, was conquering insubordination by the manly modesty and gentleness of his character. Others who were old campaigners of the French and Indian wars worked ceaselessly to bring order out of chaos.