s were conquered and slain, Hampden died
in the field, Sidney on the scaffold, Harrington in jail. This is
cold comfort." (Morse's Adams, pp. 54, 60.)

Your ancestor had still other difficulties to face of which it may be
well to remind you. Long before actual fighting began in our revolution
the rebel party, or perhaps I should say, the rougher elements of it,
created by means of tar and feathers and other methods, a reign of
terror throughout the whole country. They went about in parties taking
weapons of all kinds out of loyalists' houses, although they have since
put a clause in the National and all state constitutions that "the right
to keep and bear arms shall never be infringed." Those documents also
without exception, I believe, contain a clause guaranteeing freedom of
speech and of the press; but the rebel party of your ancestor
extinguished completely and utterly both of these rights; so completely
that Rivington, the principal publisher of loyalist pamphlets, fled for
his life to a British man-of-war; and loyalists scarcely dared refer to
politics even indirectly in private letters.

If the loyalists were really a majority, as they professed to be, the
rebels were determined to break them up. Loyalists were ridden and
tossed on fence rails, gagged and bound for days at a time, stoned,
fastened in rooms with a fire and the chimney stopped on top, advertised
as public enemies so that they would be cut off from all dealings with
their neighbors; they had bullets shot into their bedrooms, their horses
poisoned or mutilated; money or valuable plate extorted from them to
save them from violence and on pretence of taking security for their
good behavior; their houses and ships were burnt; they were compelled to
pay the guards who watched them in their houses; and when carted about
for the mob to stare at and abuse they were compelled to pay something
at every town. For the three months of July, August and September of the
year 1774, one can find in the American Archives alone, over thirty
descriptions of outrages of this kind.

In short, lynch law prevailed for many years during the revolution, and
the habit became so fixed that we have never given it up. As has been
recently shown the term lynch law originated during the revolution and
was taken from the name of the brother of the man who founded Lynchburgh
in Virginia.

The revolution was not by any means the pretty social event that the
ladies of th