Said Gov. Livingston, in his message to our Legislature in 1777:
"The Royalists have plundered friends as well as foes; effects capable of division they have divided; such as were not, they have destroyed. They have warred on decrepid old age and upon defenceless youth; they have committed hostilities against the professors of literature and against ministers of religion; against public records and private monuments, books of improvements and papers of curiosity, and against the arts and sciences. They have butchered the wounded when asking for quarter, mangled the dead while weltering in their blood, refused to the dead their right of sepulture, suffered prisoners to perish for want of sustenance, violated the chastity of women, disfigured private dwellings of taste and elegance, and in the rage of impiety and barbarism profaned edifices dedicated to Almighty God."
The following is the testimony of Gallaway, a Pennsylvania Tory of wealth and position, who at first was a Whig and afterwards turned Tory, and had property confiscated to the amount of £40,000 sterling. Speaking of Refugee outrages he says:
"Respecting indiscriminate plunder, it is known to thousands."
"In respect to the rapes, a solemn inquiry was made, and affidavits taken by which it appears that no less than twenty-three were committed in one neighborhood in New Jersey, some of them on married women in presence of their husbands, and others on daughters, while the unhappy parents with unavailing tears and cries could only deplore their savage brutality."
After reading such authoritative statements of the character of these wretches, who will wonder that our ancestors were aroused, determined to drive them from the soil they polluted.
Our ancestors in old Monmouth did all that was possible for brave men to do to bring these villains to justice. Besides those hanged and killed at other places, thirteen were hanged on one gallows near Freehold Court House.
The particulars of the capture, etc., of several of these villains in Monmouth is extant, but not necessary to introduce here, as they are given in some modern works.
At the close of the war the Refugees generally went to Nova Scotia, but some went to the Bahamas by invitation of General Browne. In September and October, 1782, many left New York for Halifax and the Bahamas by his invitation.