The Treaty of 1783 provided that Congress would "earnestly recommend" to the various States that the Loyalists be granted amnesty and restitution. This pious resolution proved not worth the paper on which it was written. In State after State the property of the Loyalists was withheld or confiscated anew. Yet this ungenerous treatment of the defeated by the victors is not hard to understand. The struggle had been waged with all the bitterness of civil war. The smallness of the field of combat had intensified personal ill-will. Both sides had practiced cruelties in guerrilla warfare; but the Patriots forgot Marion's raids, Simsbury mines, and the drumhead hangings, and remembered only Hessian brutalities, Indian scalpings, Tarleton's harryings, and the infamous prison ships of New York. The war had been a long one. The tide of battle had ebbed and flowed. A district that was Patriot one year was frequently Loyalist the next. These circumstances engendered fear and suspicion and led to nervous reprisals. At least a third, if not a half, of the people of the old colonies had been opposed to revolution. New York was strongly Loyalist, with Pennsylvania, Georgia, and the Carolinas closely following. In the end some fifty or sixty thousand Loyalists abandoned their homes or suffered expulsion rather than submit to the new order. They counted in their ranks many of the men who had held first place in their old communities, men of wealth, of education, and of standing, as well as thousands who had nothing to give but their fidelity to the old order. Many, especially of the well-to-do, went to England; a few found refuge in the West Indies; but the great majority, over fifty thousand in all, sought new homes in the northern wilderness. Over thirty thousand, including many of the most influential of the whole number (with about three thousand negro slaves, afterwards freed and deported to Sierra Leone) were carried by ship to Nova Scotia. They found homes chiefly in that part of the province which in 1784 became New Brunswick. Others, trekking overland or sailing around by the Gulf and up the River, settled in the upper valley of the St. Lawrence--on Lake St. Francis, on the Cataraqui and the Bay of Quinte, and in the Niagara District.