At the commencement of the Revolution Samuel Curwin was Judge of Admiralty and had been in the commission of the peace for thirty years. He was one of the signers of the address to Governor Hutchinson when he went to England. This gave great offence to the disunionists, they attempted to compel him to make public recantations in the newspapers. This he refused to do, saying that the prescribed recantation contained more than in conscience he could own, and that to live under the character of reproach, which the fury of the mob might throw upon him, was too painful a reflection to suffer for a moment. He therefore resolved to withdraw from the impending storm. He accordingly embarked for Philadelphia on the 23rd of April, 1775, and thence to London on the 13th of the following month. While in exile he kept a journal, which has been published. No work extant contains so much information of the unfortunate Loyalists while abroad. The journal commences at Philadelphia, May 4th, 1775, and says: "Since the unhappy affairs at Concord and Lexington, finding the spirit of the people to rise on every fresh alarm, (which has been almost hourly) and their temper to get more and more soured and malevolent against all moderate men, who they see fit to reproach as enemies of their country by the name of tories, among whom I am unhappily (although unjustly) ranked, and unable longer to bear their undeserved reproaches and menace, hourly denounced against myself, and others, I think it a duly I owe to myself to withdraw for a while from the storm, which to my foreboding mind is approaching. Having in vain endeavored to persuade my wife to accompany me, her apprehensions of danger from an incensed soldiery, a people licentious, and enthusiastically mad, and broke loose from all the restraints of law or religion, being less terrible to her than a short passage on the ocean, and being moreover encouraged by her, I left my late peaceful home (in my sixtieth year) in search of personal security, and those rights which by the laws of God I ought to have enjoyed undisturbed there, and embarked at Beverly on board the schooner Lively, Captain Johnson, bound hither, on Sunday the 23rd ultimo, and have just arrived. Hoping to find an asylum among quakers and Dutchmen, who I presume from former experience have too great a regard for ease and property to sacrifice either at this time of doubtful disputation on the altar of an unknown goddess or rather doubtful divinity."