1. Balthazar De Hart, a lawyer from Orange County, N.Y., who recently had spent some time at Shrewsbury in Monmouth County, N.J., was examined by a committee that the convention appointed for that purpose on 25 July (N.Y. Prov. Congress Journals description begins Journals of the Provincial Congress, Provincial Convention, Committee of Safety, and Council of Safety of the State of New-York, 1775–1776–1777. 2 vols. Albany, 1842. (Microfilm Collection of Early State Records). description ends , 1:541, 543–44). “When he left Shrewsbury,” De Hart says in his undated deposition, “far the greatest part of that place was Inhabited or rather Infested with Tories or persons disaffected to the common cause of America, and that he has understood from Information that their disaffection has been greatly Increased by a number of persons who have gone from the City of New York there and as he has understood secretly labour to deceive the lower set of people, the higher being almost all disaffected.” De Hart also names three supposedly disaffected men who recently went to the British camp on Staten Island to recover runaway blacks, and he alleges that the inhabitants of Deal, N.J., were communicating with British warships off the coast (DLC:GW). De Hart, who had served as a first lieutenant in the 3d New York Regiment during 1775, requested the convention on 25 July to employ him again “in some military capacity,” but he apparently received no appointment in the army.