136 Life of Count Rumford. 



subsistence by the apprehension that a surplus would be wrested 

 from them, either by the military authority of the purveyor or 

 by the ruffian hand of the plunderer. 



" Besides these violations of the rights of person and property, 

 the .British officers did many acts of barbarity for which there 

 could be no apology. They made garrisons, storehouses, or 

 stables of the houses of public worship in several towns, and 

 particularly of such as belonged to the Presbyterians. In the 

 fall of 1782, at the conclusion of the war, about the time the 

 provisional articles of the treaty of peace were signed in Europe, 

 Colonel Thompson (since said to be Count Rumford), who 

 commanded the troops then stationed at Huntington, without 

 any assignable purpose except that of filling his own pockets, by 

 its furnishing him with a pretended claim on the British treasury 

 for the expense, caused a fort to be erected in Huntington, and 

 without any possible motive, except to gratify a malignant dis- 

 position by vexing the people of Huntington, he placed it in 

 the centre of the public burying-ground, in defiance of a re- 

 monstrance of the trustees of the town against the sacrilege of 

 disturbing the ashes and destroying the monuments of the dead." 



The historian proceeds to show how much more of 

 " cruelty and oppression " the people of the island, 

 after the peace, had to suffer from their own Legisla- 

 ture, by legal inflictions and fines, and the denial of. 

 their claims for damages, for what they had done 

 through compulsion of the British military force, in- 

 cluding the imposition upon them of a tax of 37,000 

 " for not having been in a condition to take an active 

 part in the war against the enemy ! " These latter 

 charges, however, are aside from our present purpose, 

 except as they illustrate the miseries of war, and show, 

 as the historian pleads, " that an abuse of power was 

 not peculiar to the British Parliament." 



The next historical annalist of Long Island, bearing 

 a name very nearly the same as that of the subject of 



