At this home in Frederickstown the children of Henry and Abigail Ludington, or all of them but the eldest, were born. These children, with the dates of their births, were as follows, as recorded by Henry Ludington in his Family Register, which was inscribed on a fly-leaf of the ledger already quoted:

Of these it is further recorded in the same register that Sibyl was married to Edward Ogden (the name is elsewhere given as Edmund or Henry Ogden) on October 21, 1784; that Mary was married to David Travis on September 12, 1785; that Archibald was married to Elizabeth ⸺ on September 23, 1790; and that Rebecca was married to Harry Pratt on May 7, 1794.

CHAPTER III
THE BEGINNING OF THE REVOLUTION

In order justly to appreciate the circumstances in which Henry Ludington and his young family found themselves about fifteen years after his return from the French and Indian war, it will be desirable to recall briefly the political and social conditions generally prevailing throughout the Colonies at that time, which were nowhere more marked than in New York City and the rural counties lying just north of it. During the two or three years before the actual declaration of American independence, or secession from England, the people of the Colonies were divided into two parties, the Patriots and the Loyalists or Tories. The latter maintained the right of England to govern the Colonies as she pleased, and regarded even a protest against the maladministration of George III’s ministers as little short of sacrilege. The former were by no means as yet committed to the idea of American separation from the mother country, but they were most resolute in their demand for local self-government, and for government according to the needs of the Colonies rather than the caprices of English ministers. When they first placed the legend “Liberty and Union” upon their colonial flag, and called it the “Grand Union Flag,” they had in mind liberty under the British constitution and continued union with England. Nevertheless, antagonism between the two parties became as bitter as ever it was between Roundhead and Cavalier in Stuart days; and while in some respects Boston and Philadelphia figured more conspicuously in the pre-revolutionary agitation and operations than did New York, there was probably no place in all the Colonies where the people were more evenly and generally divided between the two parties, or where passions rose higher or were more strongly maintained, than in and about the last-named city. No ties of neighborliness, friendship, or even family relationship sufficed to prevent or to quell the animosities which arose over the political interests of the Colonies. Nowhere had the Patriots a more ardent or persuasive leader than young Alexander Hamilton, or the Tories a more uncompromising champion than Rivington, the printer, whose office was at last sacked and gutted by wrathful Patriots. An illuminating side-light is thrown upon the New York state of mind by an item in the New York “Journal” of February 9, 1775, as follows:

A company of gentlemen were dining at a house in New York. One of them used the word Tory several times. His host asked him, “Pray, Mr. ⸺, what is a Tory?” He replied, “A Tory is a thing whose head is in England, and its body in America, and its neck ought to be stretched!”

Nor were these passions by any means confined to the urban but not always urbane community on Manhattan Island. They prevailed with equal force in the rural regions of Westchester and Dutchess counties. During the Revolutionary War that border region, between the British garrison on Manhattan Island and the American strongholds in the Highlands of the Hudson, was the fighting ground of the belligerents, and was also unmercifully harried and ravaged by the irregular succors of both sides, the “Cow Boys” and “Skinners,” and others, celebrated in the unhappy André’s whimsical ballad of “The Cow Chase.” Patriots from Westchester County were foremost among those who wrecked Rivington’s Tory printing shop, and an aggravated sequel to the item just cited from the New York “Journal” is provided in the annals of Dutchess County a little later in the same year. At that time a County Committee, or Committee of Safety—of which we shall presently hear much more—had been formed in that county, for the purpose of holding the Tories in check, and it had forcibly deprived some men of their arms and ammunition. The despoiled Tories made appeal to the Court of Common Pleas for redress, and James Smith, a justice of that court, according to a contemporary narrative, “undertook to sue for and recover the arms taken from the Tories by order of said committee, and actually committed one of the committee who assisted at disarming the Tories; which enraged the people so much that they rose and rescued the prisoner, and poured out their resentment on this villanous retailer of the law.” The “resentment” seems to have been poured out of buckets and pillows, for we are told that Justice Smith and his relative, Coen Smith, were “very handsomely tarred and feathered, for acting in open contempt of the resolves of the County Committee!”

In or near that part of Dutchess County in which Henry Ludington lived a third small but not insignificant factor was involved in the problem. This was provided by the members of the Society of Friends, who were settled at Quaker Hill, near Pawling, in The Oblong. This was the first community in America to abolish negro slavery, in 1775, and on that account it was probably regarded with some suspicion. But worse still was the regard given to it in the strife between Patriots and Tories. There can be little doubt that the sentiments and wishes of the Quakers were largely with the Patriots. Yet their religious principle of non-resistance forbade them to take up arms or to engage in forcible conflict of any kind. They were therefore generally looked upon by the Patriots as Tories, and were on that account sometimes fined and otherwise punished, while on the other hand, the Tories made themselves free to quarter troops upon them and to demand aid of them at will. On the whole, however, they appear to have commanded the respect of the Patriots, for their sincerity, and thus to have been far more leniently dealt with than were the more militant Tories outside the Society of Friends.