The excitement and bitterness of factional strife, not always of a purely political character, with which the City of New York had been unceasingly afflicted, during several years preceding the period now under consideration, had tended to the serious disturbance of the individual and social relations of many of those who lived in that City ; and the political annals of that period afford ample testimony to the fact that terrorism, there, one of the reasonable results of the existing excitement, was prevalent, audacious, and unchecked by those in authority. The County of Westchester, in her rural contentment, as has been seen in other portions of this narrative, had continued, during the entire period of that earlier revolutionary era, in the City of New York, to enjoy peace and good-will among her inhabitants ; but .the Meeting at the White Plains, on the eleventh of April,

1 Proceedings of the Committee of One hundred, Adjourned Meeting, May 3, 1775 ; Leake's Memoir of General John Lamb, 103 ; etc.

and the military Expedition to Concord, on the nineteenth of that month, with their respective trains of discord and malevolence, appear to have rapidly disturbed that quiet and neighborly feeling which had previously prevailed, and to have originated that reign of terror, throughout that County, which, subsequently, distinguished it so highly in the annals of partisan strife. History has recorded two notable instances of that rapidly developed, so called, " pub- "lic opinion," among the new-born and, consequently, unnaturally zealous " fire-eaters " of that ancient and orderly County ; and they may properly find attention, at this time, not only as portions of the history of Westchester-county, during the era of the American Revolution, but as instances of the dangers which attend an unchecked zeal, even when exercised in behalf of what may be regarded as purely commendable purposes.