Neighbor Against Neighbor: The Civil War in Bergen County

The raid came at night, as raids in Bergen County usually did. A party of men — some in uniforms, others in ordinary farm clothes — crossed from the British-held zone into patriot territory, moving along roads they knew by heart because they had traveled them their entire lives. They were not strangers. They were neighbors.

Bergen County during the American Revolution was a landscape of intimate violence. The men who conducted Loyalist raids against patriot farms and homesteads were not foreign soldiers who had crossed an ocean; they were men who had grown up in the same towns, attended the same churches, and worked the same fields as their targets. They knew which families had taken the patriot side, where those families kept their livestock, which roads the militia patrols followed, and when the households would be most vulnerable. This knowledge made their raids devastatingly effective — and devastatingly personal.

The patriot militia responded in kind. When intelligence reached the Committee of Safety that a particular family was harboring Loyalist sympathies or providing information to the British, militia companies would descend on the homestead to confiscate weapons, livestock, and supplies. Sometimes they arrested the head of the household. Sometimes they burned the barn. The justification was military necessity — the suppression of an internal enemy — but the reality was that these operations were conducted by men who knew their targets socially, commercially, and often by blood.

The Dutch community of Bergen County had been intermarried for generations. Families named Zabriskie, Van Buskirk, Banta, Demarest, and Hopper were linked by networks of kinship so dense that virtually everyone in the county was related to everyone else. When the Revolution forced these families to choose sides, it did not divide them along neat lines. One branch of a family might support independence while another remained loyal. Brothers took opposite sides. Cousins who had grown up together found themselves in opposing militias.

The consequences were brutal. Homes were burned. Livestock were driven off. Men were dragged from their beds in the middle of the night and marched to prison in New York or to patriot jails in Morristown. Women and children were left to fend for themselves on farms stripped of their animals and crops. The violence was not impersonal — it was carried out by people who knew exactly what they were taking and from whom.

Judge John Fell's capture in April 1777 was one of the more prominent examples, but it was far from unique. Throughout the war, Loyalist raiders conducted kidnappings of patriot leaders, and patriot militia retaliated with arrests and confiscations targeting known Loyalists. The cycle of violence fed on itself. Each raid generated a counter-raid, each arrest a reprisal, each burned barn a desire for revenge. There was no front line, no safe zone, no place where a family could retreat from the conflict. The war was in their neighborhoods, on their roads, at their doors.

The neutral ground — the term used to describe the contested zone between British-held territory and patriot-controlled areas — was neutral in name only. It was, in practice, a no-man's-land where both sides operated freely and where the civilian population was subject to depredation from patriot, Loyalist, and outright criminal bands alike. Farmers who tried to bring their crops to market risked having them confiscated by whichever armed party they encountered first. Families who tried to stay out of the conflict found that neutrality itself was treated as a form of disloyalty by both sides.

When the war ended, the people of Bergen County did not celebrate with the uncomplicated joy that patriotic narratives suggest. The Loyalist families who remained faced confiscation of their property and social ostracism. The patriot families who had endured years of raids and deprivation were exhausted and embittered. The bonds of community that had held the county together before the war — the church affiliations, the kinship networks, the commercial relationships — had been strained beyond recognition.

Rebuilding took decades, and the scars never fully healed. Families that had been on the losing side lost their property, their social standing, and in many cases their presence in the community altogether. Those who remained carried memories of what their neighbors had done during the war — memories that were passed down through generations and that colored local relationships long after the political questions of the Revolution had been settled.

Bergen County's experience is a reminder that the American Revolution was, in many places, a civil war. It was fought not between distant armies but between people who shared a language, a landscape, and a history. The cost of independence was measured not only in battles won and lost but in the destruction of the social bonds that held communities together. In Hackensack and across Bergen County, the Revolution left wounds that no treaty could heal.