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d 125 six The Price of an Oath Judge Jonathan Bowman and Sheriff Charles Cushing still had to discover the means by which to coerce their annoying and dangerous college classmate to repudiate his oath of fidelity to the king and accept the new revolutionary order. The tenacity on both sides was religious, political , and personal. The magistrates finally obtained the legal tools they needed to identify and proceed against “inimical persons” when, in 1777, the Massachusetts General Court enacted several Tory laws. A new seditious speech act ensnared Jacob Bailey’s ward and household servant, John McNamara, virtually a member of the Bailey family. For the offense of speaking approvingly of the king and Parliament and disrespectfully of the Continental Congress, the American army, and independence , McNamara was sentenced to five days in jail and a fine of twenty dollars.1 But Bowman and Cushing were after the master, not the servant. For that they had a more effective weapon in the so-called Transportation Act, designed to secure the state “Against the Dangers to Which They Are Exposed by the Internal Enemies Thereof.” By the terms of this law, selectmen of each town were required to present to their town meeting a list of those whose loyalties were suspect. Persons whom the town agreed were unsympathetic to the American cause were to be arrested and tried before a special county court. For those convicted under this act the penalties were severe in the extreme. They would suffer imprisonment until they had paid the legal costs of their own prosecution, then be conveyed to Boston carrying only personal possessions and imprisoned aboard a rotting hulk of a prison ship in Boston harbor until, at the convenience of the state government, they could be 126 Chapter Six shipped off to a life of banishment in some British possession. The loyalists ’ families would be left behind without support of any kind. To be sure, most of those convicted under this law escaped so grim a fate, but very threat of the law hung heavily over those accused.2 Towns throughout Massachusetts interpreted the Transportation Act largely as they saw fit, some ignoring it completely. But in Pownalborough , Bowman and Cushing must have thought it an admirable tool for dealing with Jacob Bailey and other disaffected persons. Identifying loyalists, however, proved as controversial then as it is today. How does one define “loyalism”? By speech? By deed, or by a whispered accusation from a personal enemy? On July 15, 1777, in accordance with the law, a town meeting in Pownalborough convened to review a list of the “disaffected ” submitted by the selectmen. It must have been a huge frustration to Bowman and Cushing when they produced a list of only six suspects, from which the town meeting then deleted the names of five, the sixth having already fled to Nova Scotia. Among the five listed and then removed were Bailey’s ward, John McNamara, and Jacob Bailey himself.3 Clearly, Bailey’s sympathizers and his parishioners must have packed the town meeting; or, more possibly, the town simply found Bailey, despite his Church of England affiliation and persistent praying for the king, more useful than dangerous as the west side’s only settled and ordained preacher. Who else could preach and perform the Christian rites of baptism , marriage, and burial? Whatever the reason, the town obviously did not feel threatened by loyalism. Research carried out by a modern historian , Edward C. Cass, tends to justify that sentiment. In his analysis of loyalism as one aspect of Pownalborough’s social history, Cass revised a list originally compiled by Bailey himself in 1779 and computed the percentage of loyalists in Pownalborough at a mere 1 percent of heads of households or, by another standard, 4 percent of the town’s total population of 1,470.4 Pownalborough’s townsmen could afford to be lenient with the likes of Parson Bailey, but not his unrelenting adversaries, determined as they were to force him publicly to recant his allegiance to the crown. The same Transportation Act provided Judge Bowman and Sheriff Cushing with yet another weapon. The legislators who had first framed the act anticipated that some towns might not take appropriate action against their local tories or that some “inimical” persons might be excluded from the initial list. Consequently, the law provided that, on the complaint of any private individual, two justices could issue a warrant for the arrest and trial of a person accused...

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