Page:The Hessians and the other German auxiliaries of Great Britain in the revolutionary war.djvu/280

 256 to the island through the floating ice of the harbor. At the end of this month and early in February the British made expeditions against Elizabethtown, Newark, and Young's House, and took a number of prisoners.

Before the year 1780 a new spirit was brought into the conduct of the war, Howe and Burgoyne had hoped not only to conquer, but to conciliate. The homes and property of non-combatants had been spared, at least to some extent. Clinton and Cornwallis, acting under the instructions of Lord George Germaine, abandoned this conciliatory policy. Expeditions were undertaken with no other purpose than robbery and destruction. In these, also, the Hessians were employed. On the evening of the 22d of March, 1780, for instance, a body of four hundred men, British and German, was set across the Hudson. About three in the morning they reached Hackensack, then a beautiful and rich village. No resistance was made. Not an American soldier was in the place. There was no one to withstand the barbarities that were committed. The British and Germans broke into the houses and loaded themselves with spoil. They made prisoners of all the male inhabitants they could lay hands on, and having completed their robbery, they set fire to the Town-house and to some of the principal dwellings. At daybreak five or six hundred Americans came to the rescue from Pollingtown, and it might have gone hard with the invaders had not another detachment of about four hundred men, under the partisan Emmerich, advanced to support them. As it was, they were chased back to the Hudson. From