Lebanon was exposed to such incursions from the sea. Spy boats were on the waters, and these might land men on the highway to Lebanon and seize the Governor and bear him away.
The biographer of Governor Trumbull (Stuart) thus relates an incident that illustrates the perils to which the Governor was exposed:
“A traveler, in the garb of a mendicant—of exceedingly suspicious appearance—came into his house one evening when he was unwell and had retired to bed. The stranger, though denied the opportunity of seeing him, yet insisted upon an interview so pertinaciously that at last the Governor’s wary housekeeper—Mrs. Hyde—alarmed and disgusted at his conduct, seized the shovel and tongs from the fireplace and drove him out of the house. At the same time she called loudly for the guard; but the intruder suddenly disappeared, and, though careful search was made, eluded pursuit, and never appeared in that quarter again.”
One of the reasons that made Lebanon a perilous place and that invited plots and spies was that magazines of powder from the West Indies were thought to be hidden here, as well as at New London and along the Connecticut main and river. Powder was the necessity of the war; to explode a powder magazine was to retard the cause.
Lebanon was like a secret fortress to the cause. Prisoners of war were sent to Governor Trumbull. It was thought that they could not be rescued here. But their detention here by the wise, firm Governor invited new plots. The thirteen colonies sent their State prisoners here. Among these prisoners was the Tory son of Benjamin Franklin, a disgrace to the great patriot, that led him to carry a heavy heart amid all of his honors as the ambassador to the French court. Dr. Benjamin Church, a classmate of Trumbull at college, was sent to him among these prisoners.
Trumbull became universally hated by the Tories. They saw in him the silent captain of the world’s movement for liberty. The condition became so alarming that in November, 1779, Washington sent a message to him to seize all Tories. “They are preying upon the vitals of the country,” he said. The Continental Congress demanded of him to “arrest every person that endangered the safety of the colony.” The condition that became so alarming, then, was beginning now.
What a position was that that was held by this brave, clear-headed, conscience-free man!
Strangers were coming and going; any one of them might have a cunning plot against the Governor in his heart. The way to him was easy. Express-wagons with provisions started from Lebanon; drivers of cattle came there; people who had cases of casuistry; men desiring public appointment in the army; peddlers, wayfarers, seamen, the captains of privateers.
But he walked among them—amid these accumulating perils—as one who had a “guard invisible.” He had. He knew that his own people were loyal to him, that they believed him as one directed by the Supreme Power for the supreme good, and that they loved him as a father.
Dennis guarded the good old man as though he had had a commission from the skies to do so. He gave to him the strength of his great heart. He caused a tower—“the alarm-post”—over his head, one secret room, to protect him—“a room over the gate”—and the room must have seemed to the man whose brain directed all like the outstretched wing of a guardian divine. The Governor was an old man when the war began. Born in 1710, he was at the time of the Declaration of Independence sixty-six years old.