" Sopteniber !), 1775."

With this menacing (laper Iwfore one, it is not difflcuU to make one's self believe that the " poor reptiles " hail really some thoughts of " biting," as Gouver»eur Morris had foreseen a few months previously.

HISTORY OF WESTCHESTER COUNTY.

sometimes with warrants of "impressment," nominally for the equipment of Regiments, in garrison or elsewhere; sometimes with arbitrary orders for seizing them, on ex parte assumptions of the disaffection to the Rebellion, of those who owned them; and sometimes, not unfrequently, by inroads of organized bodies of thieves, from Connecticut or elsewhere, who, without even a shadow of legal or local authority and only on the shallow pretext of superior "pa- " triotism," overpowered the isolated and peaceful farmers, and retired with well-supplied stocks of lawlessly acquired plunder.

The Provincial Congress, like similar Congresses in other Colonies, and as was foretold of this, by those who had opposed the creation of it, was not long in existence and in possession of its usurped authority, when, as has been already stated, it commenced to arrest those, strangers and residents, who ventured to differ from it and to s|)eak and to act in accordance with existing Laws and with their own convictions of duty ; ' and it did not hesitate to throw into prison - or to send into exile,' those whom it had arrested. It waited for no verified complaint : it made no pretence that a breach of any written Law or of any other enactment was necessary, to warrant an arrest: it received secret, e.v parte "information" as all which was needed to authorize the arrest, the confinement, and the infliction of punishment on its victims, not unfreiiuently xyithout a hearing or an examination: and it held those who were accused, and tried them in secret Sessions, and passed judgments on them, not unfrequently without permitting them to confront their accusers or to see and read the papers on wliich they liad been arrested, and held, and tried -- in one notable instance, the accused was not permitted to xee the fifteen affidavits, which had been trumi)e(l up against him, after he had been arrested and thrown into a jail, nor to know their contents nor the nature of the accusation, until he was brought out for trial when they were only read to him ; and copies of those affidavits were withheld from him, by a formal vote of tlie Congress, when they were asked for and wheji the cost of copying them was tendered, only because the publication of those several pa|)ers would have exposed the fifteen partisan tools and the eminently genteel hand who had guided them in a shameless