And, as the motives which impelled men were different, so also their actions differed when the rupture came between the king and the colonies. Some were active favorers of the cause of the king, doing whatever they could to assist it and to injure the cause of their rebellious neighbors. Others sadly left their homes at the outbreak of the war and took refuge in England or in some of the English provinces, suffering want, anxiety, and despair, snubbed and despised by the insular English, compelled to hear America and Americans insulted, dragging along a miserable existence, like that of the shades whom Virgil found upon the bank of the infernal river, not allowed to return to earth or to enter either Elysium or Tartarus. Others attempted to live in peaceful neutrality in America, experiencing the usual fate of neutrals, animals like the bat neither beast nor bird but plundered and persecuted by both. Such betook themselves usually to the protection of the British arms, and were to be found in the greatest numbers at or near the headquarters of the British generals in Savannah or Charlestown, Newport or New York. Some American writers have been extremely severe upon the Americans who served in the royal armies; such condemnation is certainly illogical and unjust. They were fighting, they might have reasoned, to save their country from mob rule, from the dominion of demagogues and traitors, and to preserve to it what, until then, all had agreed to be the greatest of blessings--the connection with Great Britain, the privilege and honor of being Englishmen, heirs of all the free institutions which were embodied in the “great and glorious constitution.”