Part 21

That famous exploit afforded them an opportunity of clearing their warehouses, which they prudently resolved to do as soon as possible, lest the reception of the Company’s tea in other provinces, or other possible circumstances, should afterwards put it out of their power. An idea began to prevail that a non-importation of tea was an advisable measure upon the present occasion; accordingly, they advertised that, after disposing of their present stock, they would not import or have any further dealings in tea for two years. This at once tended to fill their pockets, and exalt their characters as patriots.

The people, ignorant of the extent of such stock, and apprehensive of being deprived of an article they were so passionately fond of, eagerly furnished themselves with quantities sufficient for that time, mostly of about thirty, forty, and fifty pounds, notwithstanding the prices were advanced one shilling per pound, upon the pretence of raising money to pay for the tea destroyed, in order to secure the religion and liberty of America, which, under that idea, it was generally acknowledged ought to be done. When the tea was mostly disposed of, the people found that the extra price they had given for it was designed for the venders, instead of for the East-India Company, whose tea at the bottom of the harbour was not to be paid for. They murmured; whereupon the smugglers voted that they would not drink any more tea, but burn on the Common what they had left. Some tea was disposed of, and the public-spirited transaction blazoned in the newspapers. But this was not all: the smugglers sent letters to the leaders of mobs in the country, enjoining them to wait upon the purchasers of their tea, and compel them to burn it, as a proof of their patriotism. Those honourable instructions were obeyed, to the real grievance of the holders of the tea. “Let Mr. Handcock,” said they, “and the other merchant-smugglers, return us our money, and then you shall be welcome to burn the tea according to their orders.”

But it signified nothing to dispute the equity of the requisition; the cry was, “Join, or die!” Nor would the Sons of Liberty be satisfied with anything less than that each owner of tea should with his own hands bring forth the same and burn it, and then sign a declaration that he had acted in this affair voluntarily and without any compulsion, and, moreover, pay the printer for inserting it in the newspapers.

An act of Parliament for shutting up the port of Boston was the immediate consequence of the destruction of the East-India Company’s tea. It took place in June, 1774, and was considered by the Americans as designed to reduce the Bostonians “to the most servile and mean compliance ever attempted to be imposed on a free people, and allowed to be infinitely more alarming and dangerous to their common liberties than even the hydra, the Stamp Act.”

Due care had been taken to enforce it, by sending General Gage, as Governor, to Boston, where he arrived the preceding month with a number of troops. Determined, however, as Parliament seemed, on compulsion, the colonists were equally bent on resistance, and resolved on a Continental Congress to direct their operations. In the mean time, contributions for relieving the distressed people in Boston were voted by the colonies; and Connecticut, through the officiousness of Jonathan Trumbull, its Governor, had the honour of first setting the example, by having a meeting called in Hebron, the inhabitants of which remained loyal and refused to vote for the collection. Governor Trumbull imputed this to the influence of the Rev. Samuel Peters (of whom more will be said hereafter) and his family. Many were the attempts made to ruin his character, but unsuccessfully; he was too well beloved and befriended in the town.

Falsehoods and seditions had now for some time been every day increasing in the province; and men who were secret propagators of traitorous opinions, pretended in public to look up to the Consociation, the great focus of Divine illumination, for direction. After much fasting and praying, that holy leaven discovered an admirable method of advancing the blessed work of protestant liberty. The doors of prisons were opened, and prisoners became leaders of mobs composed of negroes, vagabonds, and thieves, who had much to gain and nothing to lose. The besom of destruction first cleared away the creditors of the renegades, and then the Sandemanians, presbyterians, and episcopalians. The unfortunate complained to the Governor and magistrates of the outrages of the banditti, begging the protection of the laws. The following was the best answer returned by the magistrates:

“The proceedings of which you complain are like the acts of Parliament; but be this as it may, we are only servants of the people, in whom all power centres, and who have assumed their natural right to judge and act for themselves.”

The loyalists armed, to defend themselves and property against the public thieves; but the Liberty Boys were instantly honoured by the ministers, deacons, and justices, who caused the Grand Jury to indict, as tories and rioters, those who presumed to defend their houses, and the courts fined and imprisoned them.

Thus horridly, by night and day, were the mobs driven on by the hopes of plunder and the pleasure of domineering over their superiors. Having sent terror and lamentation through their own colony, the incarnate fiends paid a visit to the episcopalians of Great Barrington, whose numbers exceeded that of the _Sober Dissenters_. Their wrath chiefly fell upon the Rev. Mr. Bostwick and David Ingersoll, Esq. The former was lashed with his back to a tree, and almost killed; but on account of the fits of his wife and mother, and the screamings of the women and children, the mob released him upon his signing the eighteen articles, or their League or Covenant, as they called it, (which without doubt was the same as that drawn up and written by Governor Trumbull, which will be referred to hereafter.) As to Mr. Ingersoll, after demolishing his house and stealing his goods, they brought him almost naked into Connecticut upon the bare back of a horse, in spite of the distresses of his mother and sister, which were enough to melt the heart of a savage, though producing in the _Sober Dissenters_ but peals of laughter that rent the skies.

Treatment so extremely barbarous did Mr. Ingersoll receive at their hands, that the sheriff of Litchfield County could not withhold his interposition, by which means he was set at liberty, after signing the league and covenant. The Grand Jury indicted some of the leaders in this riot, but the Court dismissed them, upon receiving information from Boston that Ingersoll had seceded from the House of Representatives, and declared for the King of England.

What caused this irruption of the mob into Great Barrington, follows: The laws of Massachusets-Bay gave each town a power to vote a tax for the support of the ministry, schools, poor, &c. The money, when collected, was deposited with the town treasurer, who is obliged to pay it according to the determination of the majority of the voters. The _Sober Dissenters_, for many years, had been the majority in Barrington, and had annually voted about two hundred pounds sterling for the ministry, above half of which was taken from the Churchmen and Lutherans, whose ministers could have no part of it, because separately the greatest number of voters were _Sober Dissenters_, who gave the whole to their minister. This was deemed liberty and gospel in New-England; but mark the sequel. The Lutherans and some other sects having joined the Church party, the Church gained the majority. Next year the town voted the money, as usual, for the ministry, &c.; but the majority voted that the treasurer should pay the share appointed for the ministry to the Church clergyman, which was accordingly done; whereupon the _Sober Dissenters_ cried out, “Tyranny and persecution!” and applied to Governor Hutchinson, then the idol and protector of the Independents, for relief. His Excellency, ever willing to leave “Paul bound,” found a method of reversing the vote of the majority of the freemen of Barrington in favour of the Churchmen, calling it “a vote obtained by wrong and fraud.” The Governor, by law or without law, appointed Mayor Hawley, of Northampton, to be Moderator of the town-meeting in Barrington. The Mayor accordingly attended, but, after exerting himself for three days in behalf of his oppressed brethren, was obliged to declare that the episcopalians had a great majority of legal voters; he then went home, leaving matters as he found them.

The _Sober Dissenters_ were always so poor in Barrington that they could not have supported their minister without taxing their neighbours; and when they lost that power, their minister departed from them, “because,” as he said, “the Lord had called him to Rhode-Island.” To overthrow the majority of the Church, and to establish the American Vine upon its old foundation, was the main intention of the _Sober Dissenters_ of Connecticut in visiting Great Barrington at this time.

The warlike preparations throughout the colonies, and the intelligence obtained from certain credible refugees of a secret design, formed in Connecticut and Massachusets-Bay, to attack the royal army, induced General Gage to make some fortifications upon Boston-Neck for their security. These, of course, gave offence; but much more the excursion of a body of troops, on the 19th of April, 1775, to destroy a magazine of stores at Concord, and the skirmishes which ensued. In a letter of the 28th of April from Mr. Trumbull, the Governor of Connecticut, to General Gage, after speaking of the “very just and general alarm” given the “good people” of that province by his arrival at Boston with troops, and subsequent fortifications, he tells the General that “the late hostile and secret inroads of some of the troops under his command into the heart of the country, and the violence they had committed, had driven them almost into a state of desperation.” Certain it is, that the populace were then so maddened by false representations and aggravations of events, unfortunate and lamentable enough in themselves, as to be quite ripe for the rebellion the Governor and Assembly were on the point of commencing, though they had the effrontery to remonstrate against the defensive proceedings of the General, in order to conceal their own treachery. Further on, in the same letter, Mr. Trumbull writes thus: “The people of this colony, you may rely upon it, abhor the idea of taking up arms against the troops of their sovereign, and dread nothing so much as the horrors of civil war; but, at the same time, we beg leave to assure your Excellency that, as they apprehend themselves justified by the principles of self-defence, so they are most firmly resolved to defend their rights and privileges to the last extremity; nor will they be restrained from giving aid to their brethren, if an unjustifiable attack is made upon them. Is there no way to prevent this unhappy dispute from coming to extremities? Is there no alternative but absolute submission or the desolations of war? By that humanity which constitutes so amiable a part of your character, for the honour of our sovereign, and by the glory of the British empire, we entreat you to prevent it, if it be possible. Surely, it is to be hoped that the temperate wisdom of the empire might, even yet, find expedients to restore peace, that so all parts of the empire may enjoy their particular rights, honours, and immunities. Certainly this is an event most devoutly to be wished for; and will it not be consistent with your duty to suspend the operations of war, on your part, and enable us, on ours, to quiet the minds of the people, at least till the result of some further deliberations may be known?” &c. &c.

From this letter, written, as it was, from the Governor of a province at the desire of its General Assembly, the people of England might have learned to think of the American as they did of the French sincerity. It is almost past credit that, amidst the earnest protestations it contains of a peaceable disposition in Mr. Trumbull and the rest of his coadjutors in the Government of Connecticut, they were meditating and actually taking measures for the capture of certain of the King’s forts, and the destruction of General Gage and his whole army, instead of quieting the minds of the people! Yet such was the fact. They had commissioned Motte and Phelps to draft men from the militia, if volunteers should not readily appear, for a secret expedition, which proved to be against Ticonderoga and Crown Point; and the treasurer of the colony, by order of the Governor and Council, had paid 1500_l._ to bear their expenses. Nay, even before the date of the above amiable epistle, Motte and Phelps had left Hertford on that treasonable undertaking, in which they were joined on the way by Colonels Allen and Easton. Nor was this the only insidious enterprise that they had to cover. The “good people” throughout the province, to the number of nearly 20,000, were secretly arming themselves, and filing off, to avoid suspicion, in small parties of ten and a dozen, to meet “their brethren” the Massachusets; not, however, with the view of “giving aid, should any unjustifiable able attack be made upon them,” but to “surprise” Boston by storm. In addition to the Governor’s letter, the mock-peacemakers, the General Assembly, had deputed Dr. Samuel Johnson, son of the Rev. Dr. Johnson, spoken of in this work, and Oliver Wolcott, Esq. both of the Council, which had ordered the 1500_l._ for the adventurers to Ticonderoga, to wait upon General Gage, the more effectually to amuse and deceive him into confidence and inaction. But happily, at a critical time, just before the intended storm and slaughter at Boston, the news of the success of the secret expedition reached the town, which fully discovered the true character and business of the two Connecticut ambassadors, and rendered it necessary for them, _sans cérémonie_, to retire from Boston, and General Gage immediately to render the fortifications at the Neck impregnable.

The _Sober Dissenters_, chagrined at being disappointed in their hostile project against Boston, readily embraced the opportunities which afforded of wreaking their vengeance upon New-York. At the instance of the rebel party there, who found themselves too weak to effect their purpose of subverting the Constitution of the province, a large body immediately posted to their assistance, delivered “their brethren” from the slavery of regal government, and invested them with the liberty of doing that which was fit in their own eyes, under the democratic administration of the immaculate Livingstons, Morris, Schuyler, &c. As seemed necessary to the furtherance of their pacific views, frequent irruptions were made afterwards, in which many loyalists were disarmed and plundered, and some of them taken prisoners. Among these last were the Rev. Dr. Seabury and the Mayor of New-York. Governor Tryon happily escaped their fury; as also did the Rev. Miles Cooper, LL.D., who was leaving his house through a back window when a party of ruffians burst into his chamber and thrust their bayonets into the bed he had just quitted. Mr. Rivington was one of the sufferers by the loss of his property.

These “good people” of Governor Trumbull’s, who dreaded nothing so much as a civil war, with the reverse of reluctance, plundered his house of all printing materials and furniture, and carried the type to Newhaven, where they were used in the service of Congress.

The King’s statue, however, maintained its ground till after General Washington, with the Continental army, had taken possession of the city; when it was indicted for high treason against the Dominions of America, found guilty, and received a quaint sentence of this kind, viz. That it should undergo the act of decollation; and, inasmuch as it had no bowels, its legs should be broken, and that the lead of it should be run into bullets, for the destruction of the English bloody-backs, and the refuse cast into the sea. The sentence was immediately carried into execution, amidst the huzzas and vociferations of “Praise ye the Lord!”

This insult upon his Majesty, General Washington, to his credit, thought proper thus to notice in his general orders of the next day. He was sorry, he said, that his soldiers should in a riotous manner pull down the statue of the King of Great Britain.

While General Washington remained in possession of New-York, Connecticut served as a prison for those persons who had the misfortune to fall under his suspicion as disaffected to the cause of freedom. He was himself, however, at length obliged to evacuate it by General Howe, to the great relief of such royalists as remained.

In April, 1777, some magazines having been formed by the Americans at Danbury and Ridgfield, Major-General Tryon was sent with 1800 men to carry off or destroy them.

They reached the places of their destination with little opposition; but the whole force of the country being collected to obstruct their return, the General was obliged to set the stores on fire, by which means those towns were unavoidably burnt. David Wooster, the rebel general, Benedict Arnold’s old friend and acquaintance, and mobbing confederate, received a fatal ball through his bladder as he was harassing the rear of the royal troops, of which, after being carried forty miles to Newhaven, he died, and was buried by the side of the grave of David Dixwell, one of the Judges of Charles the First.

In the summer of 1779 Sir Henry Clinton sent General Tryon, with a large party of soldiers, for the relief of the loyalists in Connecticut. They landed at Newhaven after much opposition, and, having accomplished their object, sailed to Fairfield, which town they were necessitated, by the opposition of the rebels, to set fire to, before the loyalists could be released from prison. General Tryon then repaired to Norwalk, where, having by proclamation enjoined the inhabitants to keep within their houses, he ordered sentinels to be stationed at every door to prevent disorders--a tenderness, however, they insulted, by firing upon the very men thus appointed to guard them. The consequence was, destruction to themselves, and the whole town, which was laid in ashes.

I have now mentioned the principal proceedings by which the people of Connecticut had distinguished themselves in bringing on and supporting the rebellion in America, and that, I believe, in a manner sufficiently particular to show their violence and deceit.

It is very observable that a peculiar characteristic resolution appeared to possess the people of Connecticut. As, on the one hand, rebellion had erected her crest in that province with more insolence and vigour than in the rest, so, on the other hand, loyalty had there exhibited proofs of zeal, attachment, perseverance, and fortitude, far beyond example elsewhere to be found in America. In particular, the episcopal clergy had acquired immortal honour by their steady adherence to their oaths and firmness under the “assaults of their enemies;” not a man among them all, in this fiery trial, having dishonoured either the King or Church of England by apostacy. The sufferings of some of them I cannot pass over in silence.

Among the greatest enemies to the cause of the _Sober Dissenters_, and among the greatest friends to that of the Church of England, the Rev. Samuel Peters stood conspicuous. A descendant of one of the first settlers in the colony, greatly venerated and beloved by the inhabitants of Hebron, where he was born in 1735, and being a man of such truth and integrity as to command great weight in all that concerned the benefits of the colony, it may not be out of place to give a slight sketch of the treatment he received at the commencement of the war, and the cause that drove him from his native country.[42]

In the year 1758 Dr. Peters went to England for the purpose of being ordained. He had been in ill health for some time previous to this, but was most anxious for his ordination on account of the church in Hebron being vacant. He remained in England, very feeble, for some time, and refused a living there because he wished to return to his numerous relations and friends in New-England, and especially to Hebron, where he had left his mother, whom he highly loved and venerated for her maternal tenderness, wisdom, and piety, and for the sake of the episcopal church in that town, erected in 1785, which never had a resident clergyman, though they had sent four candidates to London for holy orders, and all perished in going or returning, viz. The Rev. B. Dean, in returning, the ship and crew were lost in a storm; the Rev. Jonathan Cotton, returning, died at sea with the smallpox; the Rev. ---- Feveryear, died on returning in the West-Indies; Mr. James Usher, A. M., in going out, was taken by the French and carried into Bayonne, dying there with the smallpox.

These four deaths manifested the want of a bishop in North-America, which was owing to bad policy, and not religion, and was one great reason of the separation of the two countries, as clearly now appears by bishops being now established in many States without any offence to other protestant sects of christians.

His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord-Bishop of London willingly gratified the wish of Dr. Peters, appointing him Rector of Hebron and Hertford. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts appointed him their itinerant missionary in New-England, and his Majesty George the Second granted him his letters-patent of protection to all governors, admirals, generals, and officers by sea and land, to protect him against all insults and abuse, and to support him at all times in his sacred office.

Dr. Peters returned to Hebron in 1760, and was received with much joy and gratitude by the people of all denominations, with whom he had lived fourteen years in love, peace, and harmony, without knowing an enemy, until the tea belonging to the East-India Company was destroyed in Boston. The news, reaching Hertford, caused great surprise and sorrow, and the people condemned the illegal and violent action of the mob in Boston.

The news soon reached England, and the Government sent General Gage and Admiral Graves to block up the harbour of Boston and demand payment for the teas destroyed. Soon after their arrival at Boston a report was spread through the country that General Gage had shut up the town of Boston, and the people must perish with hunger; whereupon Jonathan Trumbull, Governor of Connecticut, pretending to credit the report, sent his circular letter to every clergyman in the colony, requiring it to be read on the Sabbath-day to their respective congregations, and to urge the selectmen to warn town-meetings to appoint a general contribution for the support of the poor people in Boston, shut up to starve by General Gage and Admiral Graves.

The Governor’s letter was obeyed. Hebron held the first meeting. Deacon John Phelps was chosen Moderator, and explained the business of the meeting, giving leave to all persons to speak their minds on the subject. Capt. Ben. Buell was the first who spoke in favour of passing a vote for a general collection. Col. Alex. Phelps next spoke against having any collection. The Rev. Elijah Lathrop made the third speech, in favour of a general collection. The Rev. Dr. Samuel Peters made the fourth speech, against having any vote or collection, for the reasons following: