general.

In war, as in politics, nice balancing of merit or defect in an
enemy would destroy the main purpose which is to defeat him. Each
side exaggerates any weak point in the other in order to
stimulate the fighting passions. Judgment is distorted. The
Baroness Riedesel, the wife of one of Burgoyne's generals, who
was in Boston in 1777, says that the people were all dressed
alike in a peasant costume with a leather strap round the waist,
that they were of very low and insignificant stature, and that
only one in ten of them could read or write. She pictures New
Englanders as tarring and feathering cultivated English ladies.
When educated people believed every evil of the enemy the
ignorant had no restraint to their credulity. New England had
long regarded the native savages as a pest. In 1776 New Hampshire
offered seventy pounds for each scalp of a hostile male Indian
and thirty-seven pounds and ten shillings for each scalp of a
woman or of a child under twelve years of age. Now it was
reported that the British were offering bounties for American
scalps. Benjamin Franklin satirized British ignorance when he
described whales leaping Niagara Falls and he did not expect to
be taken seriously when, at a later date, he pictured George III
as gloating over the scalps of his subjects in America. The
Seneca Indians alone, wrote Franklin, sent to the King many bales
of scalps. Some bales were captured by the Americans and they
found the scalps of 43 soldiers, 297 farmers, some of them burned
alive, and 67 old people, 88 women, 193 boys, 211 girls, 29
infants, and others unclassified. Exact figures bring conviction.
Franklin was not wanting in exactness nor did he fail, albeit it
was unwittingly, to intensify burning resentment of which we have