whom was lodged the powder taken last winter from Fort William and Mary, take an account of what is now in their custody respectively, and request of them forthwith to convey the whole to Colonel Nicholas Gilman at Exeter.

By order of the Committee.

NEW-HAMPSHIRE COMMITTEE OF SAFETY TO COMMITTEE OF SUPPLIES.

In Committee of Safety, Exeter, August 7, 1775.

SIR: By Deacon Brooks we have sent you five hundred Pounds lawful money, which is all we can spare at present. As we understand that the Continental Congress have appointed a Commissary-General for the whole united American Army, we conceive there will be no further necessity for concerning yourselves with supplying our forces; therefore, we judge it most prudent that you close all your accounts as speedily as possible, and desire that you would let us know what further sums will be wanting to pay off all the debts you have contracted on account and for the benefit of this Colony, and we shall endeavour to send the amount in a very short time.

PROCLAMATION BY GOVERNOUR MARTIN.

NORTH-CAROLINA, ss.

By His Excellency JOSIAH MARTIN, Esq., His Majesty’s Captain-General, Governour, and Commander-in-Chief, in and over the said Province:

A PROCLAMATION.

Whereas, I have seen a publication in the Cape Fear Mercury, which appears to be Proceedings of a general meeting of people styling themselves Committees of the District of Wilmington, signed Richard Quince, Sen., Chairman, in which the well known and incontestible facts set forth in my Proclamation, bearing date the 16th day of June last, are most daringly and impudently contradicted, and the basest and most scandalous falsehoods are asserted, evidently calculated to impose upon and mislead the people of this Province, and to alienate their affections from His Majesty and his Government, and concluding, in the true spirit of licentiousness and malignity that characterises the productions of these seditious combinations, with a Resolve declaring me an enemy to the interests of this Province in particular, and of America in general—an impotent and stale device that the malice and falsehood of these unprincipled censors have suggested, and which is their last contemptible artifice constantly resorted to and employed to calumniate and traduce every man in every rank and station of life, who oppose their infamous and traitorous proceedings:

And whereas, by the evil, pernicious, and traitorous counsels and influence of the well known leaders of these seditious Committees, a body of men was assembled in arms at Wilmington, on the 16th or 17th of July last, for the purpose, as was professed in a letter sent me on the night of the 18th of the same month, (signed The People) by a certain John Ashe, (who presumed insidiously to employ the more respectable name of the people to cover his own flagitious designs,) of removing the King’s artillery from Fort Johnston, under pretence of preserving and securing the same for the use and service of His Majesty; and prefacing this declaration with sundry complaints of violence and misbehaviour on the part of John Collet, Esq., Governour and Captain of the said Fort Johnston, many of which it was in my power, and it would have been my duty to have redressed, if they had been represented to me, which letter, signed The People, I thought it proper to answer, and dissuade the deluded multitude from involving themselves in the criminal enterprise of removing the King’s artillery, which had been dismounted by my authority and not by Captain Collet’s, as had been pretended in order to deceive the people into a violence so dangerous and unwarrantable; and I am to lament that my said letter, in answer to The People, produced no better or other effect than to prevent the execution of their criminal intention of removing the King’s artillery, which was all that their letter to me avowed; and that they proceeded under the lead of the said John Ashe, and the other evil-minded conspirators against the peace and welfare of this Province, to the said Fort Johnsion, and wantonly, in the dead hour of the night, set on fire and reduced to ashes the houses and buildings within His Majesty’s said Fort, that had been evacuated and disarmed, and was entirely defenceless; and that they returned next day and completed, before my face, the destruction of the wooden defences of the Fort, to which the fire of the night had not extended, burning the houses and desolating every thing in the neighbourhood of the place, with a degree of wanton barbarity that would disgrace human nature in the most savage state, and was an overt act of high treason against His Majesty, which justified my immediate vengeance, restrained by pity for the innocent, misguided, and deluded people, whom I considered as the blind instruments of their atrocious leaders; who, defeated in the still more flagitious designs they meditated, (of which I have the fullest evidence,) and already involved in guilt of the blackest dye themselves, it might be presumed urged on the people to every enormity that might make them appear principals in their own treasons, instead of blind instruments thereof, and by extending the guilt among many, screen themselves from the penalties which they had wantonly incurred; nothing doubting at the same time, that cool and sober reflection would justly turn the resentment and indignation of the people against the wicked contrivers and promoters of the violences into which they have been betrayed, to the disgrace of their Country and humanity; and that they would expiate their own guilt by delivering up their leaders to receive the condign punishment that the laws inflict on such atrocious offenders. But having seen with astonishment a publication in the Cape-Fear Mercury, of the 28th clay of last month, in which a set of people styling themselves a Committee for the Town of Wilmington, and County of New-Hanover, have, to obviate the just effects that I expected from the return of reason and reflection to the people, most falsely, seditiously, and traitorously asserted, “that Captain Collet was, under my auspices, preparing Fort Johnston for the reception of a promised re-enforcement, which was to be employed in reducing the good people of this Province to a slavish submission to the will of a wicked and tyrannick Minister, and for this diabolical purpose had collected several abandoned profligates, whose crimes had rendered them unworthy of civil society,” &c., intending by various false pretences therein set forth, to justify the enormities into which they had plunged the innocent people, who I am confident were for the most part strangers to all the ostensible motives to the outrages they were hurried on to commit, and which, according to the acknowledgment of this despicable seditious meeting, had no better foundation than resentment to Captain Collet, an individual whose offences the law’s powers, and that which I derive from His Majesty, were competent to correct in a legal way; and seeing that the said Committee, as it is called, have artfully, by insidious compliments and flattery, and by their contemptible applause of the outrages and violences perpetrated in and about Fort Johnston, endeavoured to reconcile the minds of the people to treason and rebellion in order to avert from their own heads the just wrath with which a due sense of those crimes would naturally inspire the people against the infamous persons who had basely betrayed them into offences of so dangerous and heinous a nature.

And whereas, I have also seen a most infamous publication in the Cape-Fear Mercury, importing to be Resolves of a set of people styling themselves a Committee for the County of Mecklenburgh, most traitorously declaring the entire dissolution of the Laws, Government, and Constitution of this Country, and setting up a system of rule and regulation repugnant to the laws, and subversive of His Majesty’s Government; and another publication in the Cape-Fear Mercury of the fourteenth of last month, addressed “To the Committees of the several Towns and Counties of North-Carolina, appointed for the purpose of carrying into execution the Resolves of the Continental Congress,” bearing date at Philadelphia, June 19th, 1775, and signed William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, and Richard Caswell, the preposterous enormity of which cannot be adequately described and abhorred. It marks the Assembly, from whose members it comes, to be the genuine source of those foul streams of sedition which, through the channels of Committees, have overflowed this price happy land, and at this moment threaten it with every species of misery, ruin, and destruction. This publication begins with a