corrupt self-seekers, there were also of the Revolutionary party blatant
demagogues and bigoted partisans. The logic of success, though a success
made possible at last only by exterior aid, justified the appeal to arms
begun in Massachusetts before revolt was prepared or thought imminent
elsewhere. Now, to the careful student of the situation, it seems among
the most premature and rash of all the rebellions in history. But for
the precipitancy of the uprising, and the patriotic frenzy that fired
the public heart at news of the first bloodshed, many ripe scholars,
many soldiers of experience, might have been saved to aid and honor the
republic, instead of being driven into ignominious exile by fear of mob
violence and imprisonment, and scourged through the century as enemies
of their country. In and about Lancaster, then the largest town in
Worcester County, the royalist party was an eminently respectable
minority. At first, indeed, not only those naturally conservative by
reason of wealth, or pride of birthright, but nearly all the
intellectual leaders, both ecclesiastic and civilian, deprecated revolt
as downright suicide. They denounced the Stamp Act as earnestly, they
loved their country in which their all was at stake as sincerely, as did
their radical neighbors. Some of them, after the bloody nineteenth of
April, acquiesced with such grace as they could in what they now saw to
be inevitable, and tempered with prudent counsel the blind zeal of
partisanship: thus ably serving their country in her need. Others would
have awaited the issue of events as neutrals; but such the committees of
safety, or a mob, not unnaturally treated as enemies.

On the highest rounds of the social ladder stood the great-grandsons of
Major Simon Willard, the Puritan commander in the war of 1675. These
three gentlemen had large possessions in land, were widely known
throughout the Province, and were held in deserved esteem for their
probity and ability. They were all royalists at heart, and all connected