, such a policy quickly
aroused every inherited and cultivated prejudice against the British,
strengthening the belief that the Federalists, as a party, were
willing to suppress the patriotic utterances of their own countrymen
rather than injure the feelings of America's hereditary foe.

When DeWitt Clinton, therefore, charged the party of Jonas Platt with
taking the side of the British against their own country, the debate
revived old tales of cruelty and massacre, growing out of England's
alliance with the Indians in the early days of the Revolution; and it
gave John Taylor opportunity to recount the horrors which he had
witnessed in the days of his country's extreme peril. Taylor was
sixty-eight years old. For nearly twenty years he had been a member of
the Legislature, and was soon to be lieutenant-governor for nearly ten
years more. Before the Revolutionary war, he served in the Provincial
Congress; and in Arnold's expedition to Canada, in 1775, he had
superintended the commissary department, contributing to the comfort
of the shattered remnant who stood with Montgomery on the Plains of
Abraham on that ill-fated last day of the year.

Taylor was a man of undoubted integrity and great political sagacity.
His character suffered, perhaps, because a fondness for money kept
growing with his growing years. "For a good old gentlemanly vice,"
says Byron, "I think I must take up with avarice." Taylor did not wait
to be an old gentleman before adopting "the good old gentlemanly
vice," but it did not seem to hurt him with the people, for he kept on
getting rich and getting office. He was formed to please. His tall,
slender form, rising above the heads of those about him, made his
agreeable manners and easy conversation the more noticeable, gaining
him the affection of men while challenging their admiration for his
ability.

In 1760, Taylor had followed the British army to Oswego, and there
acquired a knowledge of the Indian language. He knew of the alliance
between the British and Indians in 1776, and had witnessed the
horrible massacres growing out of these treaty relations. The most
tragic stories of Indian atrocities begin with the payment of bounties
by the British for the scalps of women and children, and for the
capture of men and boys who would make soldiers. Often guided by
Tories, the fierce Mohawks sought out the solitary farmhouse, scalped
the helpless, and, with a few prisoners, started back on their lonely
re