The Crisis of the Revolution

              27
weeds and wild grass. Their world was motionless and silent, except when one of these
unhappy people went upon a rare and lonely excursion to the house of a neighbor no less
unhappy, or a scouting party alarmed the inhabitants with expectations of new injuries
and sufferings. The very tracks of the carriage roads were obliterated by disuse, and
when discernable resembled the faint impressions of chariot wheels said to be left on the
pavements of Herculaneum. The grass was of full height for the scythe, and strongly
realized to my own mind, for the first time, the proper import of that picturesque allusion
in the Song of Deborah : ' In the days of Shamgar, the son of Anath, in the days of Jael,
the highways were unoccupied, and the travellers walked through by-ways. The inhab-
itants of the villages ceased, they ceased in Israel.' "    {Judges V., 6, 7.)
It was through, this very region, and among a people thus harried and ruined
that Clinton's Adjutant-General was now making his way—and it was to the
recent brutalities of a party of Cowboys that he was indirectly to owe his
capture, within an hour of the time he left Hammond's house.
At about one o'clock in the afternoon of the previous day—Friday, the
twenty-second—John Dean, John Paulding, James Romer, Isaac See, Isaac Van
Wart, Abraham Williams and John Yerks,1 all young men,2 left Salem on a
"scout" or errand of more or less independent and irregular warfare, having for its
object the capture of any Cowboys or others who might drive cattle towards New
York. As they passed the house of Joseph Benedict, where David Williams was at
work, he recognized them, asked their errand and volunteered to join them. His
personal aim was to revenge the death of a neighbor named Pelham, killed by Cow-
boys the day before, and his property stolen. All of Yerks' party were militiamen,8
and had secured, through Paulding, leave of absence from their officers to take part
in the scout. Sleeping that night in John Andrews' hay barn at Pleasantville,4
they reached Tarry town Saturday morning, at about half-past seven, and went to
the house of Jacob Romer, father of James, which has now disappeared. It stood
close to the present reservoir, near the Tarrytown station of the New York and
Putnam road. Here they had breakfast, and Mrs. Romer put up dinner for them
in a basket.6   They went next to Isaac Reed's house, borrowed a pack of playing
1 Yerks originated the scout, having proposed it to Paulding.
2 David Williams, the oldest, was not quite twenty-three.   Van Wart and Paulding were cousins; also, apparently,
Romer and Paulding.   Yerks was a cousin of Dean's on his mother's side.
To Williams, more than anyone else, history is indebted for many minute details about the capture and the
events immediately preceding it. He only it is that has given the particulars about the party of Cowboys
of which Boyd, Foote and—later—Jameson and Washington himself, were apprehensive. He says the
band had raided Pound ridge (the easternmost town in the county, lying next to Connecticut) the night
before his party started (Thursday the twenty-first) and that they were led by a noted Tory named Smith.
Tory Smiths were numerous, and three were noted bandits—Claudius, of Orange County, the greatest
villain of the three, had been hanged in 1778, and a second's head was cut off, in Schoharie County, by
infuriated Whigs in 1779, so the son of Claudius, Richard, is the one probably meant. While they were
on Pelham's farm, driving off his live-stock, the unfortunate owner had run out in his nightshirt to save
his horse, when the ruffians killed him.
What a graphic picture of a midnight foray on a defenceless homestead in the Neutral Ground this brief
statement gives!
8 The First Westchester.
4 Paulding says Pleasantville; Williams, Salem.   It was a few yards from the present Methodist church at
Pleasantville.
5 The pewter basin accompanying it is now in the possession of Colonel J. C. L. Hamilton, of Elmsford, N. Y.