If the Loyalists were really a majority, as they claimed to be, the disunionists were determined to break them up. Loyalists were tarred and feathered and carried on rails, gagged and bound for days at a time; stoned, fastened in a room with a fire and the chimney stopped on top; advertised as public enemies, so that they would be cut off from all dealings with their neighbors; they had bullets shot into their bedrooms, their horses poisoned or mutilated; money or valuable plate extorted from them to save them from violence, and on pretence of taking security for their good behavior; their houses and ships burned; they were compelled to pay the guards who watched them in their houses, and when carted about for the mob to stare at and abuse, they were compelled to pay something at every town. For the three months of July, August and September of the year 1776, one can find in the American archives alone over thirty descriptions of outrages of this kind, and all this done by so-called "patriots" in the name of liberty! In short, lynch law prevailed for many years during the Revolution, and the habit became so fixed that it has never been given up. It was taken from the name of the brother of the man who founded Lynchburgh, Virginia. Wherever the disunionists were most successful with this reign of terror, they drove all the judges from the bench, and abolished the courts, and for a long time there were no courts or public administration of the law, notably in New England. To the mind of the Loyalists, all this lynching proceeding were an irrefragible proof not only that the disunionist party were wicked, but that their idea of independence of a country free from British control and British law were silly delusions, dangerous to all good order and civilization. That such a people could ever govern a country of their own and have in it that thing they were crying so much about, "liberty," was in their opinion beyond the bounds of intelligent belief. A recent American writer says: "The revolution was not by any means the pretty social event that the ladies of the so-called 'patriotic' societies suppose it to have been. It was, on the contrary, a rank and riotous rebellion against the long-established authority of a nation which had saved us from France, built us up into prosperity, and if she was ruling us today would, I am entirely willing to admit, abolish lynch-law, negro burning, municipal and legislative corruption, and all the other evils about which reformers fret." The same writer also says: "All that saved this country from complete annihilation was the assistance after 1778 of the French army, fleet, provisions, clothes, and loans of money, followed by assistance from Spain, and, at the last moment, by the alliance of Holland, and even with all this assistance the cause was, even as late as the year 1780, generally believed to be a hopeless one."[53] "In fact, Washington, at this time, was prepared to