Home / Scharf, J. Thomas, ed. History of Westchester County, New York, including Morrisania, Kings Bridge, and West Farms, which have been annexed to New York City, Vol. I. Philadelphia: L.E. Preston & Co., 1886. / Passage

History of Westchester County, New York, Vol. I

Scharf, J. Thomas, ed. History of Westchester County, New York, including Morrisania, Kings Bridge, and West Farms, which have been annexed to New York City, Vol. I. Philadelphia: L.E. Preston & Co., 1886. 327 words

" Made with his farmer, Don A. W." (Trumbull's Origin of MoVimjul, 31, 32 ;) and within six months after Trumbull's publication, Samuel Seabury, in that portion of his Memorial to the Ocnei^al Anst'iitblt/ of Coiutectivut which is now under notice, added his very clear, very precise, and very unequivocal testimony, on the same interesting question. With these two independent pieces of evidence before him, the reader may easily ascertain with how much of accuracy that early judgment was formed.

We are not unacquainted, also, with a paper, entitled The Westchester Farmer, written by D. Williams, and published in The Magazine of Afnerlean Histi>rij, viii., 117-- February, 1882. It contains what purports to have been an unsigned draft of a Memorial supposed to have been addressed, or intended to have been addressed, by Samuel Seabury, several years after the occurrences now under consideration, to the Cummissioners fcr atijusting the losses of the Loyal llefugees, in which draft of a Memorial he claimed, if the paper is not something else than what it purports to have been, to have been the sole author of the "A. W. "Farmer" tracts, as well as of various other tracts and publications. But we are constrained to say that, whether the paper is what it purports to have been or not, and whether it was copied and delivered to the Commissioners or not, of both of which we have grave doubts, there are evidences within itself of its entire untrustworthiness, in its recital of known facts ; that we do not believe, therefore, that it was written by Samuel Seabury, carefully and deliberately, if he really wrote it ; and that we need more evidence than we have yet seen, that he was capable of deliberately and understandingly telling or writing unqualified falsehoods, for any purpose, either while he was in New Haven, in 1775-6, or in Lond n, after he had received his Doctor's degree from Oxford University, several yeare afterwards.