Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 10.djvu/109

 Stephen Pea body.

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��Stephen Peabody was one of the most ardent of patriots, and made himself heard and understood as arrayed with the lovers of liberty against the despotic exercise of the power of King George the III. Nor could he be bribed or kept silent by any appointment or com.raission under the king, and when the call for troops came to march for Bunker Hill, he was enrolled in the regiment of Col. James Reed, and was appointed its adjutant. In 1776 he was major in Col. Wy man's regiment, raised for the Canada expedition. At the Bat- tle of Bennington he was upon the staff of Gen. Stark, and in the Rhode Island campaign of 1778 he was lieutenant colonel commanding in Gen. Whipple's brigade. Col. Pea- bod}' died in 1779, just in the midst of a most useful career. In his death the cause of the patriots lost one of its most able defenders.

The undisguised political senti- ments of Mr. Peabody during those pre-revolutionary movements would have been sufficient cause in the mind of the royal governor for the revok- ing of any official commission in the hands of others than friends of the royal cause. But how did the ear of Gov. Wentworth catch the discordant ntterings of his distant commissioned subordinates?

The sheriff of the county was the notorious tory, Benjamin Whiting, of

��Hollis, whose obnoxious methods, odious deportment, and offensive ut- terances called for his examination by the Committee of Safety at Am- herst in July, 1775. He was sum- moned, but did not appear, to answer the charges of "being inimical to the Rights and Liberties of the United Colonies," or, in other words, a tory ; but he was found guilty, and shortly afterward he left the state and his family, and a few years thereafter died in exile. He was one of the illustrious seventy-six who were em- braced in the "Act of Banishment" passed by the General Court in No- vember, 1778. Whiting's property was confiscated, and he was forbidden to return to the country under penalty of transportation.

The two individuals thus noticed, both officers commissioned by the king, and brought often together in the discharge of their official duties, — one an outspoken tory, and the other an ardent patriot, diverse in charac- ter, and socially and politically op- posed ; the one having the ear of the royal governor, and the other the confidence of the people, — it is easily deducible how Gov. Wentworth should thus have concluded it "no longer consistent with Our Honor and the good of Our Subjects of our said county that the said Stephen Peabody should any longer be continued in the said office."

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