414 Professor Ti^ndall [May 3, 10, and 17, 



the meeting house on the 18th of May. The committee met, but 

 findinty nothing against the accused, they adjourned the meeting. He 

 then addressed a petition to the Committee of Safety for tlie colony 

 of Massachusetts Bay, in which he begged for a full and searching 

 trial, relying od an acquittal commensurate with the thoroughness of 

 the examination. The jietition was not attended to. On the 29tli of 

 May, 1775, he was examined at Woburn, where he conducted his own 

 defence. He was acquitted by the committee, who recommended him 

 to the " protection of all good people in this and the neighbouring 

 provinces." The committee, however, refused to make this acquittal 

 a public one, lest, it was alleged, it should offend those who were 

 opposed to Thompson. 



Despair and disgust took possession of him more and more. In a 

 long letter addressed to his father-in-law from Woburu, he defends 

 his entire course of conduct. His principal oflence was probably 

 negative ; for silence at the time was deemed tantamount to antag- 

 onism. During his brief period of farming, he had working for him 

 some deserters from the liritish army in Boston. These he persuaded 

 to go back, and this was urged as a crime against him. He defended 

 himself with spirit, declaring, after he had explained his motives, 

 that if his action were a crime, he gloried in being a criminal. He 

 made up his mind to quit the country, expressing the devout wish 

 " that the happy time may soon come when I may return to my 

 family in peace and safety, and when every individual in America 

 may sit down under his own vino and under his own fig-tree, and have 

 none to make him afraid." 



On this letter, and on the circumstances of the time, Dr. Ellis 

 makes the following pertinent remarks : " Major Thompson was not 

 the only person in those troubled times that had occasion to charge 

 upon those espousing the championship of public liberty a tyrannical 

 treatment of individuals who did not accord witli their schemes or 

 views. Probably in our late war of rebellion his case was paralleled 

 by those of hundreds in both sections of our country, who with 

 halting and divided minds or unsatisfied judgments, were arrested in 

 the process of decision by treatment from others which put them under 

 the lead of passion. The choice of a great many Royalists in our 

 revolution would have been wiser and more satisfactory to themselves, 

 had they been allowed to make it deliberately." On October 18th, 

 1775, Thompson quitted Woburn, reached the shore of Narragansett 

 Bay and went on board a British frigate. In this vessel he was 

 conveyed to Boston, where he remained until the town was evacuated 

 by the British troops. The news of this catastrojihe he carried to 

 England. Henceforward, till the close of the war, he was on the 

 English side. As a matter of course he was proscribed by his country- 

 men, and his property confiscated. 



Thompson was not only a man of great cajiacity, but, in early days, 

 of a social pliancy and teachableness which enabled him with extreme 

 rapidity to learn the manners and fall into the ways of great people. 



