The red-coated soldiers found themselves well nourished and welcome on American soil in a way they had never been

From 1776 by David McCulough. Page 141.

 The red-coated soldiers found themselves well nourished and welcome on American soil in a way they had never been—indeed, openly greeted “with greatest joy.”

“We have now a very good supply of salt provisions,” summarized still another officer, “a great quantity of rum, an immense quantity of ammunition of all kinds, and what is best of all, the very people who we suspected would oppose us are coming over to us in great numbers.” Hardly a day passed without distraught Loyalists or American deserters turning up, filled with tales of woe, many of them having crossed at night by boat from Long Island or New York.

Ambrose Serle, a patriotic young Englishman and fluent writer who served as a civilian secretary to Admiral Howe, recorded in his journal how his heart went out to the Loyalists. “It excited one’s sympathy to see their poor meager faces,” he wrote of several who had escaped from Long Island, “and to hear their complaints of being hunted for their lives like game into the woods and swamps, only because they would not renounce their allegiance to their King and affection for their country.”

For deserters there was considerably less sympathy and little or no trust. There was “no believing these poor deluded wretches,” wrote Colonel Charles Stuart, summing up what most British officers felt. General James Grant thought no American could be trusted, Loyalists any more than the rest. “The inhabitants of this island,” Grant concluded from his observations, “hate the rebel army because they have been oppressed by them…. But from the confession and conversation of our most loyal subjects of Staten Island, I am quite confirmed in my opinion that we have not a friend in America.”