As the militia had marched down the county road, an old farmer halted them. “God be with you all, my friends,” said he as one who would consecrate their enterprise. “And John, my son, if you are called into battle, take care that you behave like a man or else let me never see your face again.” A Harwich father, when he had heard of the first blood spilled, cried out to his son: “Eben, you’re the only one can be spared. Take your gun and go. Fight for religion and liberty.” And that boy and others who joined on the instant were ready to fight at Bunker Hill. Yet there had been no open declaration of cutting loose from the mother country; and the colonists seem to have had no more deliberate intention of founding a nation than had the Pilgrims of declaring a new principle of government. The second Continental Congress had recommended a day of prayer and humiliation “to implore the blessings of Heaven on our sovereign the King of England and the interposition of divine aid to remove the grievances of the people and restore harmony.” The Cape, a sturdy inheritor of the Pilgrim spirit, seems to have been an early advocate of state rights. In 1778 Barnstable appointed a committee to pass upon the proposed union. “It appears to us,” said Barnstable, “that the power of congress is too great.... But if during the present arduous conflict with Great Britain it may be judged necessary to vest such extra powers in a continental congress, we trust that you will use your endeavors that the same shall be but temporary.” “The Plymouth spirit, which nearly a century before had been shy of a union with Massachusetts,” writes Palfrey, “was now equally averse to a consolidated government which should implicate the concerns of Massachusetts too much with those of other states.” Bunker Hill was fought, and by July Washington, as commander-in-chief, was in residence at Cambridge. When he called for troops to man Dorchester Heights, Captain Joshua Gray marched through Yarmouth with a drummer, calling for volunteers, and eighty-one men responded. The night was spent in preparation, the women moulding bullets and making cartridges, and by dawn the little company, equipped for war, was ready to take the road. As was natural, fishermen and sailors, when they could, enlisted in the infant navy. But the call for men pressed until even Joseph Otis protested: “We have more men in the land and sea service than our proportion,” and “there is scarcely a day that the enemy is not within gun-shot of some part of our coast. It is like dragging men from home when their houses are on fire, but I will do my best to comply.” An additional grievance lay in the fact that the Cape troops seem to have been sent largely to Rhode Island. And Otis added that it was unreasonable “to detach men from their property, wives and children to protect the town of Providence in the heart of the State of Rhode Island.”