United States -- History -- War of 1812 -- Personal narratives
Among these good, kind, simple people, I spent a month or six weeks very
pleasantly. Loyal and warmly attached to the British Crown, they
followed our standard in the Revolutionary War, and obtained from
government settlements in Canada when driven from their homes on the
banks of the Hudson. From what I could learn from them, the Americans
had persecuted them and their families with a rancour they displayed to
no other race of mankind. When prisoners were taken in action, while the
British were treated by them with respect, and even with kindness, the
Dutch were deliberately murdered in cold blood. Men without arms in
their hands, but suspected of favouring the British cause, were shot
before their own doors, or hanged on the apple trees of their own
orchards, in presence of their wives and families, who without regard to
age or sex, were turned from their homes without remorse or pity. And
one old dame told me that she was for six weeks in the woods between
Utica and Niagara, unaccompanied by any one but her two infant children,
looking for her husband, who she luckily found in the fort of the latter
place; at one time she and her poor babes must have perished from
hunger, but for some Mohawk Indians, who came up and delivered them, and
conducted them to the Fort. The Dutch themselves ascribe this very
different treatment of the two races to the fear of the Americans that
the British would retaliate in case they were ill used, while the Dutch
could not.
This, however, could not have been the case, for had the Americans
feared vengeance on the part of the British for the wrongs they
inflicted on their countrymen, they must have equally feared that they
would not quietly submit to injuries inflicted on men who were their
loyal and faithful fellow subjects. I therefore suspect, that, so far as
their statements were correct, and they must have been so in the main,
for I have the same stories from the Dutch of the Niagara District, who
had no communication whatever with their compatriots of Williamsburg,
and though we must allow great latitude for exaggeration in a people who
were, no doubt, deeply injured, and had been brooding over their wrongs
for a period of upwards of thirty years, during all which time their
wrath had gathered force as it went, and their stories having no one to
contradict them, must have increased with each subsequent narrator, till
they had obtained all the credence of time-honoured truth--allowing for
all this, but insisting that the stories had a strong foundation in
fact, the rigor of their persecution must be attributed to another
feeling, and must have, I should think, arisen from this, that the
Americans considered that a British subject born within the realm, and
fighting for what he believed to be the rights of his country, was only
doing what they themselves were doing; whereas, a North American born,
whatever his extraction, fighting against what they considered the
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