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THE PARTISAN.

their several military attributes—had not yet properly risen in arms, though both of them had been engaged already in active and successful service. Their places of retreat were at this time unknown; and certainly, they were not then looked to, as at an after period, with that anxious reliance which their valour subsequently taught their countrymen to entertain. Nothing, indeed, could be more deplorably prostrate than were the energies of the colony. Here and there only did some little partisan squad make a stand, or offer a show of resistance to the incursive British or the marauding and malignant tory—disbanding, if not defeated, most usually after the temporary object had been obtained, and retreating for security into shelter and inaction. There was no sort of concert, save in feeling, among the many who were still not unwilling for the fight: they doubted or they dreaded one another; they knew not whom to trust. The next door neighbour of the staunch whig was not unfrequently a furious loyalist—as devoted to George the Third as the other could have been to the intrinsic beauty of human liberty. The contest of the Revolution, as far as it had gone, had confirmed and made tenacious this spirit of hostility and opposition, until, in the end, patriot and loyalist had drawn the sword against one another, and rebel and tory were the degrading epithets by which they severally distinguished the individual whose throat they strove to cut. When the metropolis fell into the hands of the British, and their arms extended through the State, the tories alone were active and formidable. These, hitherto outlawed in all the provinces, had mostly sought shelter in Florida; whence they emerged as soon as the British arms had established their ascendency in Georgia and Carolina. They now took satisfaction for their own previous trials; and crime was never so dreadful a monster as when they ministered to its appetites. Mingled in with the regular troops of the British, or forming separate bodies of their own, and officered from among themselves, they penetrated the well known recesses which gave shelter to the fugitives. If the rebel resisted, they slew him without quarter; if he submitted, they hung him without benefit of clergy: they spoiled his children of their possessions, and not unfrequently slew them also. But few sections of the low and middle country escaped their search. It was only in the bald regions of