Besides being inefficient in the field, the British commanders alienated their friends and weakened the attachment of the loyalists to the cause of the king by their extremely impolitic treatment of the American provinces within their occupation. The regular officers made no secret of their contempt for the colonists, and plundered them without mercy, making little, if any, distinction between loyalist or rebel, Tory or Whig. Judge Thomas Jones, a New Yorker of prominence and position, who was a devoted loyalist and one of the number especially singled out by name in the Act of Confiscation and Attainder passed by his native state, has left us his record of the way in which the British officers and officials exasperated rather than conciliated the Americans, and punished rather than rewarded the loyal for their attachment to the king and the integrity of the empire. He writes: “In 1780, part of the army went into winter quarters upon the westernmost end of the island, where they robbed, plundered, and pillaged the inhabitants of their cattle, hogs, sheep, poultry, and, in short, of anything they could lay their hands upon. It was no uncommon thing of an afternoon to see a farmer driving a flock of turkeys, geese, ducks, or dunghill fowls and locking them up in his cellar for security at night.... It was no uncommon thing for a farmer, his wife and children to sleep in one room, while his sheep were bleating in the room adjoining, his hogs grunting in the kitchen, and the cocks crowing, hens cackling, ducks quacking, and geese hissing in the cellar.... This robbing was done by people sent to America to protect loyalists against the persecutions and depredations of rebels. To complain was needless; the officers shared in the plunder.” In Newtown, a Hessian soldier opened a butcher’s shop, where he undersold all competitors, because while they had to pay for their meat he had no such outlay. In 1781, when the troops left Flushing, a resident of that place wrote, “There was not a four-footed animal (a few dogs excepted) left in Flushing, nor a wooden fence.”