Affairs moved on toward peace, and on April 19, just eight years after Lord Percy had set out on his expedition to Concord and Lexington, Washington proclaimed an armistice. But joy in the victory was tempered for thoughtful men: if it had cost England a hundred million pounds and fifty thousand men to lose her colonies, the relative price they paid for independence was far greater. The currency was practically worthless, the soldiers and their families were destitute, the salaries of public officers and clergy but a pittance. Each State wanted to secure its revenue to its own use, which ensured conflict with the Federal Government; the individual, in his meagre circumstances, grudged any contribution to such revenue, which ensured conflict between the State and its citizens. That the general unrest was present in Barnstable County is evident from a proclamation of the Government calling upon “the good people of said county for their aid and assistance” in handling a rumored attempt to “obstruct the sitting of the Court at Barnstable.” But in the main the people who had broken the might of Britain now, war ended, applied themselves with like energy to recovering from its effects. And in spite of war and threatened ruin the Cape had continued its healthy growth. In 1793 Dennis, which had long functioned as a separate town, was incorporated; its name derived from that of the first minister of the East Precinct of Yarmouth, the Reverend Josiah Dennis. In 1797 Orleans was set off from Eastham; and in 1803 the North Parish of Harwich, the older in point of settlement, became Brewster. It was then that argument for and against division hit upon the extraordinary compromise that irreconcilables of the North Parish, “together with such widows as live therein and request it, have liberty to remain, with their families and estates, to the town of Harwich.” No less than sixty-five persons, including two widows, stiff-necked old conservatives we may guess, filed such request with the town clerk and the Secretary of the Commonwealth. Here was an arrangement well calculated to nourish old animosities, which, in the natural course of things, had to be abandoned. Nor was the new town slow in making her voice heard: in 1810 she was remonstrating against the appointment of a certain postmaster, “he being a foreigner and in the opinion of the inhabitants an alien.” A little later she was petitioning “the Postmaster General, praying him to fix the day of the week and the hour of the day in which the post-rider shall arrive at Brewster on his way down the Cape, and also on his return, and that the Committee of Safety attend to this matter.” And she was one of the loudest to protest against the Embargo Act of 1807.