|
Gentlemen, I am with much respect, your most obedient servant,
JOHN SULLIVAN.
To the Honourable General Assembly of New-Hampshire.
WILLIAM WATSON TO GENERAL WASHINGTON.
Plymouth, January 26, 1776.
SIR: This, per express, comes to inform your Excellency that Commodore Manly took, yesterday, off Cohasset-Rocks, after an hour's engagement, (having one man wounded in the breast, not dangerous,) two ships from While-Haven, bound for Boston,* laden with sea-coal, potatoes, &c., enclosed are bills of lading.
Your Excellency will please to direct in what manner I shall conduct with these vessels. The prisoners will be treated with kindness, and will be sent forward to-morrow. I am getting the ships to the wharf, and shall secure the small articles from pilferers, who frequently infest vessels in these circumstances, I congratulate your Excellency on this reiterated instance of Commodore Manly's success, and wish sincerely that all the servants of the American Republick were equally industrious with Manly.
I am, most respectfully, your Excellency's most obedient, much obliged, very humble servant,
WILLIAMWATSON.
To His Excellency General Washington.
N. B. The express brings all the papers taken in the ships.
P S I would acquaint your Excellency that the engagement referred to in my letter, was with a tender of eight guns, and full of men, which had these ships under convoy, which circumstance I forgot to mention through hurry. Yours as before,
WILLIAM WATSON.
To His Excellency General Washington.
COSMOPOLITAN, NO. VI.
To the Inhabitants of the AMERICAN Colonies:
It has been asked, "What was become of Cosmopolitan?" What of his promise, that a further catalogue of vices, which blackens the escutcheons of an Hutchinson, and gives him a plenitude of infamy, should be the subject of some future number? The reasons of that engagement, and the motives for its present performance, are of a similar nature. Truth is his object, freedom his wishes, and seasonable, manly exertions the scope of all his lucubrations. I shall not attempt to trace the vestiges that mark the character of our hero from early to more advanced life: this would be both tedious and useless. As a child of ambition, and tainted with avarice, I might describe him a wretched compound of plausibility and hypocrisy, shrewdness and weakness, cordiality and deceit, extravagancy and rapacity/artifice and sophistry, in those very Departments in which he was placed by the mistake of his countrymen, and in which he dazzled his friends by a blaze of counterfeit virtues. But the event has proved what many suspected, that he was then cankered at heart. From a vain conceit, and an arrogant superciliousness, they suspected the dark, crafty, and designing inhabitant within, and presaged that great duplicity and treachery lurked in an uncommon complaisant, simpering phiz. His abilities, to do him justice, though not of the greatest size, were sufficiently ample. Had they been employed in the service of his country, the cause of virtue, and the support of liberty, lie had been respected, and raised monuments to his memory. But a prostitution of the faculties of the head has rendered the qualities of his heart the more formidable, the more to be hated and despised. His perversion of private confidence and abuses of publick trust are what every man of honour despises, and every lover of his country is bound to execrate. I doubt whether those who have been the most distinguished by the sunny beams of his beneficence, and drank the largest from the cup of servility, have any reason for benedictions. His talent were well calculated to take hold on minds cast in the mould of an easy credulity, and of those of a grasping and grappling complexion. By the insinuation of address, by a feigned sanctity of manners, and an hypocritical gravity of deportment, he practised upon those who could not fathom the dark train of his laboured dissimulations. By the proffered charms of the insolence of office, and the sweets of increasing emolument, he fettered the souls of the aspiring and the avaricious, and chained them fast to his measures. Thus had he paved the way for opening that tragical scene in which all America is interested. Pollution, and the expanded influence of the venal, were his means, and slavery his object.
In my third number, to which this is an appendix, I asserted that America had for several years been trembling under the rod of oppression; that her neck had been galled by the yoke, and her spirits greatly depressed; that the shackles have been forged, and even put upon our hands, though unriveted; that we have enjoyed little more than the formality, without the real essence of liberty; that under the habits of regularity, real anarchy, confusion, and concealed abominable tyranny, had made an amazing progress; that the condition of wav, the consequence of an independency, that no situation can be more depressing to the spirits of freemen, than the state we have been in. Instances were then adduced to evince the assertions. In obedience to the voice of the publick, the calls from the Congress, I now add to their number, and ask once more for the attention, patience, and candour of my abused, wretchedly abused, countrymen.
When riches and lawless domination are made the standard of good and evil, the object of pursuit, and the idol of the times, the Prince and his Court are seized with the infection. The strength of Government, the force of the Treasury, and the arts of minions, are perverted to turn subjects into property, and to command their possessions for profit or for pleasure. Military force is employed to extort, ingenuity, policy, and fraud to decoy and seduce, or the hire of the venal, the wages of prostitution, to buy an accession to their interest. Hence is (says a great Court writer) the speedy change of Governours, which obliges those temporary tyrants to be more expeditious and rapacious, that they may accumulate sufficient wealth before they give place to their hungry successors. Made by their master with a separate interest, they have been strangers to the checks of the governed, the direction of law, the restrictions of justice, the confidence of the people, and the welfare of the community. Rapacity and instructions have been their predominant motives. Nor is it strange that, under the sway of a needy dependant, whose errand is the reparation of a ruined, or the acquisition of a needed fortune, a quarrel for the extension of prerogatives, and a pilfering of rights, the oppressor and the oppressed should form the only division in the State. We might illustrate this by the petty tyranny of a Barnard, influenced by his plotting insidious successor. The then polity was the mere practice of rapine to enrich individuals; chartered prerogatives the forms of peculation to rob the publick; commerce too much a system of snares and impositions; legislation, by turns, feeble and divided, cruel and oppressive; and the meetings of the Assemblies little more than a quarrel between their several branches, and the mere conception of necessary law, which, by the barbarity of the instructed Egyptian, was sure to die a foetus. The bridle of despotism was put into our jaws, and a military force threatened to chill our feelings and benumb our spirits. Restrictions and impositions on trade, with fines and forfeitures, were multiplied for the emolument of a Governour and Admiralty-Judge, a Commissioner, or a wretched informer: and even these profits accumulated, and plunder, increased by compositions, bribery, and intrigue. These animals have been the incessant drains to our wealth and plagues to our Provinces.
|