can answer no
good one. It opens so wide a door for partiality and prejudice to the
different congresses and committees on the continent, that much
discord and animosity will probably ensue; it being next to impossible
to distinguish who are, and who are not the most dangerous. The plan
of explaining to these deluded people the justice and merits of the
American cause is certainly generous and humane, but I am afraid, will
be fruitless. They are so riveted in their opinions, that I am
persuaded should an angel descend from heaven with his golden trumpet,
and ring in their ears that their conduct was criminal, he would be
disregarded. I had lately myself an instance of their infatuation
which, if it is not impertinent, I will relate. At Newport I took the
liberty, without any authority but the conviction of necessity, to
administer a very strong oath to some of the leading tories, for which
liberty I humbly ask pardon of the congress. One article of this oath
was to take arms in defence of their country, if called upon by the
voice of the congress. To this Colonel Wanton and others flatly
refused their assent; to take arms against their sovereign, they said,
was too monstrous an impiety. I asked them if they had lived at the
time of the revolution whether they would have been
revolutionists--their answers were at first evasive, circuitous, and
unintelligible, but, by fixing them down precisely to the question, I
at length drew from them a positive confession that no violence, no
provocation on the part of the court, could prevail upon them to act
with the continent. Such, I am afraid, is the creed and principles of
the whole party great and small.--Sense, reason, argument, and
eloquence, have been expended in vain; and in vain you may still argue
and reason to the end of time. Even the common feelings and
resentments of humanity have not aroused them, but rather with a
malignant pleasure they have beheld the destruction of their
fellow-citizens and relations. But I am running into declamation,
perhaps impertinent and presuming, when I ought to confine myself to
the scheme I submit to your consideration. It is, sir, in the first
place, to disarm all the manifestly disaffected, as well of the lower
as the higher class, not on the principle of putting them in a state
of impotence (for this I observed before will not be the case) but to
supply our troops with arms of which they stand in too great need.
Secondly, to appraise