an endeavour to destroy the Continental Association, but also to overturn the power and authority of the Committee, they left it to their constituents to determine what punishment such traitors and enemies to their Country deserved, being thoroughly convinced that the whole of their future power to execute the laws of the Congress depended on the spirit with which the publick resented such audacity. But Mr. Hunt, fearing the publick would not he fully sensible with how much contempt he treated the Committee, as soon as he knew they were about to publish his case, and before he saw what they intended to publish, sent a note to the printer, wherein he not only ridicules, plays with, and contemns their proceedings, but indirectly gives them the lie, by hinting to the publick that his state of the matter would differ greatly from theirs.

Thus stood the affair with Mr. Hunt, whose attempt was considered as having the most dangerous tendency, and it was therefore expected that he would have been taken into custody by the commanding officer of some of the Battalions, or by the Committee of Safety, and expelled the Province forever; for as the crime was committed against the Committee of Observation and Execution, it would have been improper for them to have done any thing further in the affair. But several of the freemen of the City, men of prudence and discretion, seeing the inactivity of those who ought to have stepped forward on the occasion, and the ruin to which the cause and the Committee would be exposed if Mr. Hunt should escape the publick resentment, which he so amply merited, met on the evening of the 5th instant, consulted with coolness and deliberation on the matter, and agreed that it was necessary to bring Mr. Hunt before the publick to receive such punishment as his crime deserved, and to recommend it as their opinion that be ought to receive an American coat of tar and feathers, laid on with decency, without further injury to his person, and then to be expelled the Province forever. They appointed a number of sober, spirited men, to seize on his person, and a guard of men under arms, to surround and protect him from injury and insult, until he had received his doom. This was in part executed: he was taken by the gentlemen appointed to that service, and the guard did their duty, but they met with such opposition from some who ought to have stood foremost in support of the Committee, and from whom they expected such conduct, that to avoid all confusion and riot, which some men of fortune laboured hard to excite, they agreed for the present only to cart him round the Town, and then to dismiss him in safety. In performing this they thought it proper to halt before the door of Dr. John Kearsley, who is known to every one to be a violent enemy to the cause, and one of Mr. Hunt’s principal associates and advisers, in order that he, seeing the fate of his friend and fellow-advocate in the cause of opposition, might be induced to behave so as to give no further offence to his fellow-citizens by his toryism; but they had it not so much as in contemplation to touch his house or person. What happened to him arose from his own madness and folly.

While the cart stood before his door, to give Mr. Hunt an opportunity of publishing his recantation, a lad who followed the cart knocked at the Doctor’s door, upon which the Captain of the guard called to him to desist, requesting that no insult might be offered to the house; another lad, one of the crowd, took hold of one of the window shutters and partly opened it, upon which the Doctor threw up the sash and pushed wide open the shutters, and taking up a pair of loaded pistols, cocked, presented, and snapped one of them. The crowd then gave way, and one of the guard seeing the Doctor determined to take away some lives, advanced with a charged bayonet, and making a pass at his breast he wounded the Doctor in the left hand. Another of the guard advanced immediately, and the Doctor snapped a second pistol at him as he came up; he then seized the pistol, and the Doctor snapped it a second time against his breast, while in his hand. This second person in attempting to wrest the pistol out of his hand, brought the Doctor down upon the pavement. He was instantly twisted into the cart with Mr. Hunt, and the people gave a loud huzza, and the Doctor to show his contempt of the people, took his wig in his wounded hand and swinging it around his head huzzaed louder and longer than the rest: when his wig was put on it appeared all bloody from the wound in his hand, which made many believe he was wounded in the head. He was then carted to the Coffee-House, and thence round the City, with a determined resolution to tar and feather him, if it could be done with safety to his life; but the people flocked together in such numbers, and were so exasperated at the insolence of his behaviour, that the men under arms were afraid to proceed to the operation, lest the violence of the people should put it out of their power to protect his person, which they were determined to do at the risk of their lives: they therefore conducted him safely into his house. This so enraged the people who followed the cart, and marked his behaviour, that they fell to, with the utmost violence, and broke his windows and doors with stones and brickbats. But it ought to be recorded to the honour of the associators, that as far as the men under arms know or can find, not one of them offered the last violence to the house. This was done by a number of hearty jolly tars, market people, and others out of the crowd, who were enraged that he escaped from them without tarring and feathering. The gentlemen who planned the affair, and those who conducted it, are far from being mobbish or mobbishly inclined: it was conducted with sobriety, decency and decorum on their part, and with the utmost safety to the persons of the Doctor and Mr. Hunt, as is evident from the repeated thanks which they received from both for their kind protection; and notwithstanding men who ought to have behaved differently, acted as they did, it was carried through with great calmness and solemnity. What happened to the Doctor’s house, Was wholly owing to this circumstance; for had the people been suffered to take revenge on his person for his insolent behaviour, the house would in all probability have escaped.

The design of those who conducted this affair was to bring a publick and notorious offender to publick disgrace without danger to his person or life. They did so: the wound the Doctor received, and the carting which followed, were brought on by his own conduct, and after he had attempted what would have justified their putting him to death on the spot, which it is probable the person who wounded him at first intended. The pistols he attempted to discharge against them, without the least violence being offered on their part, were loaded with a ball and two buck shot in each; wherefore we are exceedingly surprised at the conduct of some gentlemen on the occasion, especially of him who threatened to use his influence to have four, of us whipped at the cart’s tail, and of him also who laboured so indefatigably to bring a battalion to fire upon us. We appeal to the world, and to those very gentlemen, whether we have ever attempted to exhibit any one as a publick spectacle, but such as were regularly convicted of guilt; and now, notwithstanding our zeal in the cause of our Country, we defy any one to point out the man who has suffered as much as his crimes deserve. Mr. Hunt’s crime was of such a nature as deserved the utmost resentment of the publick: the consequences which it involved in it, were much more dangerous to our liberties than the crime for which Mr. Christie is fined in five hundred pounds sterling, and banished the Province of Maryland forever. We therefore waited two days, to see if the Field-Officers of the Battalions, or the Committee of Safety, would undertake the matter; while Mr. Hunt and his associates were triumphing in the success of their measures, declaring publickly, that the Committee had rendered itself ridiculous by attempting to interfere with Mr. Hunt’s proceedings, and that he despised what they or the publick could do—he was not to be intimidated. Even the Congress did not escape their insulting triumph: but they even expected to gain a victory over that honourable body, and rejoiced in the prospect of their future success.

In this exigency a number, we repeat it again, a number of sober, prudent men, determined to step forward, and teach all such enemies to their Country, that the man who should attempt to contravene the measures of the Congress, despise the authority of the Committee, or attempt to turn the laws of the land against our liberties, should find Philadelphia too hot for him.

It gives the people of the City but an indifferent opinion of the virtue and love for the freedom of America of those persons who are loud in their lamentations for the fate of Messrs. Hunt and Kearsley. Our brethren may be sacrificed by thousands on the plains of New-England; the best