Verplanck, and several others were prosecuted for riot in the Mayor's
Court. DeWitt Clinton was then Mayor of New York. In his charge to the
jury he inveighed with great severity against the accused, particularly
Verplanck, of whose conduct he spoke as a piece of matchless impudence,
and declared the disturbance to be one of the grossest and most shameless
outrages he had ever known. They were found guilty; Maxwell, Verplanck,
and Stevenson were fined two hundred dollars each, and several others
less. An appeal was entered by the accused but afterwards withdrawn. I
have heard one of our judges express a doubt whether this disturbance
could properly be considered as a riot, but they did not choose to avail
themselves of the doubt, if there was any, and submitted.

There is this extenuation of the rashness of these young men, that Dr.
Mason, to whom was attributed the attempt to suppress certain passages in
Stevenson's oration, was himself in the habit of giving free expression to
his political sentiments in the pulpit. He belonged to the federal party,
Stevenson to the party then called republican.

I have said the accused submitted; but the phrase is scarcely accurate.
Verplanck took his own way of obtaining redress, and annoyed Clinton with
satirical attacks for several years afterward. Some of these appeared in a
newspaper called the _Corrector_, but those which attracted the most
attention, were the pamphlets styled Letters of Abimelech Coody, Ladies'
Shoemaker, the first of which was published in 1811, addressed to Dr.
Samuel Latham Mitchell.

The war went on until Clinton or some friend was provoked to answer in a
pamphlet entitled An Account of Abimelech Coody and other celebrated
Worthies of New York, in a Letter from a Traveller. The writer saterizes
not only Verplanck, but James K. Paulding and Washington Irving, of whose