The Americans of 1776 enjoyed a higher standard of living than any people in the world.

From 1776 by David McCulough. Page 157.

It all made a picturesque scene, wrote Ambrose Serle—

15,000 troops upon a fine beach…[then] forming upon the adjacent plain…. Ships and vessels with their sails spread open to dry, the sun shining clear upon them, the green hills and meadows after the rain…. Add to all this, the vast importance of the business…and the mind feels itself wonderfully engaged.

British sailors who came ashore “regaled themselves with the fine apples, which hung everywhere upon the trees in great abundance,” Serle continued. “It was really diverting to see sailors and apples tumbling from the trees together.”

But other aspects of the scene were anything but picturesque. A Hessian officer, Lieutenant Johann Heinrich von Bardeleben, described burned-out houses, fields in ashes, roads lined with dead cattle, and old people looking with sadness at what “appeared previously to have been a paradise standing in blooming abundance.”

Our regiment was camped amidst orchards of apple and pear trees…. Here, too, the picture of destruction was to be seen on all sides. Almost everywhere there were chests of drawers, chairs, mirrors with gold-gilded frames, porcelain, and all sorts of items of the best and most expensive manufacture.

The Hessian and British troops alike were astonished to find Americans blessed with such abundance—substantial farmhouses and fine furnishings. “In all the fields the finest fruit is to be found,” Lieutenant von Bardeleben wrote after taking a walk on his own, away from the path of destruction. “The peach and apple trees are especially numerous…. The houses, in part, are made only of wood and the furnishing in them are excellent. Comfort, beauty, and cleanliness are readily apparent.”

To many of the English, such affluence as they saw on Long Island was proof that America had indeed grown rich at the expense of Great Britain.

In fact, the Americans of 1776 enjoyed a higher standard of living than any people in the world. Their material wealth was considerably less than it would become in time, still it was a great deal more than others had elsewhere. How people with so much, living on their own land, would ever choose to rebel against the ruler God had put over them and thereby bring down such devastation upon themselves was for the invaders incomprehensible.