The Cape was drawn into the great sweep of events. Town meetings were held to consider the alarming conditions; yet, even in the general pinch for money, maintenance was steadily voted for schools and clergy, though it was suggested that a minister might abate his salary “because of the scarcity of money and the difficulties of the times; or wait for the balance.” And one parson, we know, did give up fifty pounds of his stipend. Business was at a standstill, and many persons, for financial rather than political reasons as yet, left Harwich, Chatham, and other towns for Nova Scotia, the better there to trade and carry on the fisheries. “Sons of Liberty” were organized everywhere; each town must report its strength “on the side of liberty.” Yarmouth would have no tea brought into the town; in Chatham “a large number signed against tea”; Wellfleet pledged itself to the “defence of liberty”; Barnstable, Sandwich, Eastham had their resolutions of protest. Falmouth, in 1774, ordered every man from sixteen to sixty years of age to be given arms. Harwich voted to buy arms; Truro voted sympathy with the common cause. And Chatham, in 1772, had declared “civil and religious principles to be the sweetest and essential part of their lives, without which the remainder was scarcely worth preserving.”
England had gone beyond unjust taxation and had dared meddle with the courts—the trial by jury, the appointees to the bench—which was held to vitiate their function. “I argue in favor of British liberties,” had been James Otis’s clarion call; and at Barnstable, in September, 1774, a fine comedy was played out with the connivance, it was suspected, of James Otis, senior, who was chief justice of the Court of Common Pleas. He was to be charged with “holding office during the king’s pleasure” and receiving pay from revenue derived by an “edict of foreign despotism.” On the day preceding the opening of the court men from as far away as Middleborough came flooding into Sandwich; and next morning a small army marched thence to Barnstable to make their protest to the court. At their head was Doctor Nathaniel Freeman, a young hot-head of a Whig, who was leader in many a demonstration against the Tories, and later was to put his martial spirit to good use as brigadier-general in the Federal Army. He was a gallant figure, an eye-witness of the day’s doings remembered, in “a handsome black-lapelled coat, a tied wig as white as snow, a set-up hat with the point a little to the right: in short, he had the very appearance of fortitude personified.” Joined now by Barnstable men, the patriots took their stand in front of the courthouse. They improved the interval of waiting for the court to receive the recantations of several Tories who had been arrested by the Commissioners and when it came to a public declaration of sentiment were disposed, for the most part, as a current doggerel had it, to
“... renounce the Pope, the Turk,
The King, the Devil, and all his work;
And if you will set me at ease,
Turn Whig or Christian—what you please.”
Now, behold, the court: Otis, Winslow, Bacon, led by the sheriff with a white staff in his left hand and a drawn sword in his right. “Gentlemen,” demanded Otis, “what is the purpose for which this vast assemblage is collected here?” Whereupon Freeman, from the steps of the courthouse, replied in a fine speech, the upshot of which was that they proposed to prevent their honors from holding court to the end, particularly, that there should be no appeals to the hated higher court of the king’s council, “well knowing if they have no business, they can do no harm.”
“Sirs, you obstruct the law,” thundered Otis. Then, more mildly, “Why do you leap before you come to the hedge?” He ordered them to disperse, and cited his “duty.” “We shall continue to do ours,” countered Freeman. “And never,” cries one who saw the play, “never have I seen any man whatever who felt quite so cleverly as did Doctor Freeman during the whole of this business.”
The court withdrew, and, waited upon later by a committee, signed an agreement not to accept any commission or do any business dependent on those acts of Parliament that tend “to change our constitution into a state of slavery.” The protestants crowned their work by calling upon all justices and sheriffs of the county to sign the agreement, and by adjuring all military officers to refuse service under the captain-general “who is appointed to reduce us to obedience to the late unconstitutional acts and who has actually besieged the capital of this province with a fleet and army.” Barnstable and Yarmouth, having been interrogated as to whether they had dropped the legislators voting against the Continental Congress, their affirmation was received with cheers. That night some damage was done the new Liberty Pole, which was surmounted by a gilt ball, one of the “miscreants” blazoning thereon:
“Your liberty pole