330 HISTORY OF BROOKLYN.

“Father and mother, do not mourn
Over your only son;
He never did you any good,
And now he gets his doom—doom—doom—doom.”

The officers often treated their men cruelly. General Johnson remembered to have seen Captain Westerhauge and Lieutenant Conrady beat a corporal with their swords on his back, over his waistcoat, so that he died the next clay. They beat the man about two in the afternoon. He was standing: the captain first gave him a number of blows, and then the lieutenant commenced; but before he had finished, the man was too feeble to stand, and the captain stood before him and held him up. The man then laid down on the grass, while the surgeon’s mate examined his body, which was a mass of bruised and blistered flesh. His back was roughly scarified by the surgeon’s mate, and he was then removed to a barn, where he died the next day—never having uttered a word from the moment of the first blow.1

Among the patriotic deeds of the adherents of the American cause in Kings County, we must not fail to record the loans of money furnished to the State Government by them. It was effected in the following manner. Lieutenant Samuel Dodge and Captains Gilleland and Mott, of the American army, had been captured at Fort Montgomery, and were confined as prisoners, under a British guard, at the residence of Barent Johnson, in the Wallabout. Dodge was exchanged in the course of a month, and reported the practicability of borrowing specie from Whigs in Kings County, mentioning Johnson as one who would risk all. in the undertaking. It was therefore agreed that confidential officers should be exchanged, who were to act as agents in these transactions. Colonel William Ellison was fixed upon to receive the loan. He was exchanged in November, 1777,

1 It may be worthy of note that Mrs. Peter Wyckoff, mother of Mr. Nicholas Wyckoff, President of the City Bank of Brooklyn, and a daughter of Lambert Suydam a brave officer in the Continental Army, informed the author, in 1861, that she distinctly remembers, when a school-girl at Bedford, having seen British soldiers tied up to a tree, in front of the house of Judge Lefferts, and flogged. She also remembers to have seen the troops encamped in shanties and tents, between Rem Lefferts’ and Peter Vandervoort's, now the house of James Debevoise, on Bedford, near Gates avenue. The officers were. billeted on those families.