The traitor, of course, proved to be Doctor Church. One of his students who kept his books and knew of his money embarrassment first mistrusted him. Only treachery, he felt, could account for his master's sudden acquisition of some hundreds of new British guineas.
The doctor was called before a council of war consisting of all the major-generals and brigadiers of the army, beside the adjutant-general, Washington himself presiding. This tribunal decided that Church's acts had been criminal, but remanded him for the decision of the General Court, of which he was a member. He was taken in a chaise, escorted by General Gates and a guard of twenty men, to the music of fife and drum, to Watertown meeting-house, where the court sat. "The galleries," says an old writer, "were thronged with people of all ranks. The bar was placed in the middle of the broad aisle, and the doctor arraigned." His defence at the trial was very ingenious and able:—that the fatal letter was designed for his brother, but that since it was not sent he had communicated no intelligence; that there was nothing in the letter but notorious facts; that his exaggerations of the American force could only be designed to favour the cause of his country; and that his object was purely patriotic. He added, in a burst of sounding though unconvincing oratory: "The warmest bosom here does not flame with a brighter zeal for the security, happiness, and liberties of America than mine."
These eloquent professions did not avail him, however. He was adjudged guilty, and expelled from the House of Representatives of Massachusetts. By order of the General Congress, he was condemned to close confinement in Norwich jail in Connecticut, "and debarred from the use of pen, ink, and paper," but his health failing, he was allowed (in 1776) to leave the country. He sailed for the West Indies,—and the vessel that bore him was never afterward heard from.
Some people in Church's time, as well as our own, have been disposed to doubt the man's treachery, but Paul Revere was firmly convinced that the doctor was in the pay of General Gage. Revere's statement runs in part as follows:
"The same day I met Doctor Warren. He was president of the Committee of Safety. He engaged me as a messenger to do the out-of-doors business for that committee; which gave me an opportunity of being frequently with them. The Friday evening after, about sunset, I was sitting with some or near all that committee in their room, which was at Mr. Hastings's house in Cambridge. Doctor Church all at once started up. 'Doctor Warren,' said he, 'I am determined to go into Boston to-morrow.' (It set them all a-staring.) Doctor Warren replied, 'Are you serious, Doctor Church? They will hang you if they catch you in Boston.' He replied, 'I am serious, and am determined to go at all adventures.' After a considerable conversation, Doctor Warren said, 'If you are determined, let us make some business for you.' They agreed that he should go to get medicine for their and our wounded officers."
Naturally, Paul Revere, who was an ardent patriot as well as an exceedingly straightforward man, had little sympathy with Church's weakness, but to-day as one looks at the initials scratched by the prisoner on the door of his cell, one's heart expands with pity for the man, and one wonders long and long whether the vessel on which he sailed was really lost, or whether he escaped on it to foreign shores, there to expiate as best he could his sin against himself and his country.
A VICTIM OF TWO REVOLUTIONS
In the life of Colonel James Swan, as in that of Doctor Benjamin Church, money was the root of all evil. Swan was almost a fool because of his pig-headedness in financial adversity, and Church was ever a knave, plausible even when proved guilty. Yet both fell from the same cause, utter inability to keep money and avoid debt.
Colonel Swan's history reads very like a romance. He was born in Fifeshire, Scotland, in 1754, and came to America in 1765. He found employment in Boston, and devoted all his spare time to books. While a clerk of eighteen, in a counting-house near Faneuil Hall, he published a work on the African slave trade, entitled, "A Discussion of Great Britain and Her Colonies from the Slave Trade," a copy of which, preserved in the Boston Public Library, is well worth reading for its flavour and wit.