" I counted two hundred and eighty pieces of Cannon, from twenty- " four to three poundera, at Kingsbridge, which the Committee had se- " cured for the use of the Colonies," {Doctor Benjamin Church's treasonable letter, intercepted in July, 1775.)

^Stephen Ward to the Provincial Congress, " March 6, 1776."

* Journal of the Committee of Safety, " Die Mercurii, 10 ho., A.M., "Jany. .11,1776."

soon made known, however ; and, as may be reasonably supposed, not ooly Westchester-county, but the Committee of Safety, in the City of New York, the Provincial Congress having taken a recess on the twenty-second of December preceding, was thrown into the greatest excitement.

The local Committee of the County of Westchester, amply endowed, by its own lawless zeal and by the equally lawless grace of the Provincial Congress, with entire authority to arrest anybody and everybody on whom its whims or its animosities might rest, very promptly exercised its ill-founded prerogatives ; and a large number of the residents of the three Towns of Westchester, Eastchester, and Mamaroneck, and some of those of Yonkers, was seized, and carried before it, and examined. Many of these were evidently discharged, because nothing was shown to sustain the suspicions or antipathies which had prompted those who had seized them ; but there were othersj a considerable number, who were filtered out from the great mass of the suspected, because of their seeming or construed connection with the spiking of the guns, and sent down to the City of New York, to be disposed of, by the generally relentless Committee of Safety, agreeably to the dictates of its stern, imperious will. Among those who were thus selected to face the ordeal of that Committee, in which the great professional experience of John Morin Scott was combined with the savage coldness of Alexander McDougal and John Brasher, were John Fowler, Peter Valentine, William Lounsberry, James Lounsberry, Joseph Purdy, William Armstrong, William Sutton, John Flood, Isaac Purdy, John Gedney, John Haines, Joshua Gedney, Josiah Burrell, William Haines, James Haines, Junior, Thomas Haines, Isaac Gedney, Isaac Valentine, William Dicken, Isaac Valentine, Junior, and Cornelius McCartney -- the latter a schoolmaster, in Yonkers-- and several of these were subjected to great hardships and cruel ty ( in the confinement to which they were subjected. 5