When DeWitt Clinton, therefore, charged the party of Jonas Platt with taking the side of the British against their own country, the debate revived old tales of cruelty and massacre, growing out of England's alliance with the Indians in the early days of the Revolution; and it gave John Taylor opportunity to recount the horrors which he had witnessed in the days of his country's extreme peril. Taylor was sixty-eight years old. For nearly twenty years he had been a member of the Legislature, and was soon to be lieutenant-governor for nearly ten years more. Before the Revolutionary war, he served in the Provincial Congress; and in Arnold's expedition to Canada, in 1775, he had superintended the commissary department, contributing to the comfort of the shattered remnant who stood with Montgomery on the Plains of Abraham on that ill-fated last day of the year. Taylor was a man of undoubted integrity and great political sagacity. His character suffered, perhaps, because a fondness for money kept growing with his growing years. "For a good old gentlemanly vice," says Byron, "I think I must take up with avarice." Taylor did not wait to be an old gentleman before adopting "the good old gentlemanly vice," but it did not seem to hurt him with the people, for he kept on getting rich and getting office. He was formed to please. His tall, slender form, rising above the heads of those about him, made his agreeable manners and easy conversation the more noticeable, gaining him the affection of men while challenging their admiration for his ability.