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