If the loyalists of New York, Georgia, and the Carolinas reasoned in this manner, we cannot blame them, unless we are ready to maintain the proposition that the cause of every revolution is necessarily so sacred that those who do not sympathize with it should at least abstain from forcibly opposing it. The further charge is made that the worst outrages of the war were committed by Tories, and the ill-doings of Brant and Butler at Wyoming and Cherry Valley, together with the raids of Tryon and Arnold, are held up to the execration of posterity as being something exceptionally brutal and cruel, unparalleled by any similar actions on the part of the Whig militia or the regular forces of either army, Sullivan’s campaign through the Indian country being conveniently forgotten.[161] Impartial history will not palliate the barbarities that were committed by either party; but there can be no doubt that the Tory wrong-doings have been grossly exaggerated, or at least have been dwelt upon as dreadful scenes of depravity to form a background for the heroism and fortitude of the patriotic party whose misdeeds are passed over very lightly. The methods of the growth of popular mythology have been the same in America as elsewhere; the gods of one party have become the devils of the other. The haze of distance has thrown a halo around the American leaders, softening their outlines, obscuring their faults, while the misdeeds of Tories and Hessians have grown with the growth of years. But it is an undoubted fact that there were outrages upon both sides, brutal officers on both sides, bad treatment of prisoners on both sides, guerilla warfare with all its evil concomitants on both sides, and in these respects the Tories were no worse than the Whigs. There was not much to choose between a Cowboy and a Skinner, very little difference between Major Ferguson’s command and that of Marion and Sumter. There was no more orderly or better-behaved troop in either army than Simcoe’s Queen’s Rangers;[162] possibly there was none on either side as bad as the mixture of Iroquois Indians and Tory half-breeds who were concerned in the massacres at Wyoming and Cherry Valley.