I think that, take it all in all, New York met and withstood every
separate horror that war can bring, save actual assault and sack.
Greater hardships fell to the lot of no other city in America, for we
lost more than a half of our population, more than a fourth of the city
by the two great fires. Want, with the rich, meant famine for the poor
and sad privation for the well-to-do; smallpox and typhus swept us;
commerce by water died, and slowly our loneliness became a maddening
isolation, when his Excellency flung out his blue dragoons to the very
edges of the river there at Harlem Bridge.

I often think it strange that New York town remained so loyal to the
cause, for loyalty to the king was inherent among the better classes.
Many had vast estates, farms, acres on acres of game parks, and lived
like the landed gentry of old England. Yet, save for the DeLanceys, the
Crugers, their kinsmen, the Fannings, kin to the Tryons, Frederick
Rhinelander, the Waltons, and others too tedious to mention, the
gentlemen who had the most to lose through friendliness to the cause of
liberty, chose to espouse that cause.

As for the British residents there, they remained in blameless loyalty
to their King, and I, for one, have never said one word to cast a doubt
upon the purity of their sentiments.

But with all this, knowing what must come, no other city in America so
gaily set forth upon the road to ruin as did patriotic New York. And
from that dreadful hour when, through the cannon smoke on Brooklyn
Heights, she beheld the ghastly face of ruin leering at her across the
foggy water--from that heart-breaking hour when the British drums
rolled from the east, and the tall war-ships covered themselves with
smoke, and the last flag flying was hacked from the halyards, and the
tramp of the grenadiers awoke the silence of Broadway, she never
faltered in her allegiance, never doubted, never failed throughout
those seven years the while she lay beneath the British heel, a
rattlesnake, stunned only, but deadly still while the last spark of
life remained.

Were I to tell a tithe of all I know of what took place during the
great siege, the incidents might shame the wildest fancies of
romance--how intrigue swayed with intrigue there, struggling hilt to
hilt; how plot and plot were thwarted by the counterplot; how all trust
in man was destroyed in that dark year that Arnold died, and a fiend
took his fair shape to scandalize two hemispheres!