90 Life of Count Rumford. 



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 tyran- 

 nical treatment of individuals who did not accord with 

 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 loyalists in our Revolution would have been 

 wiser and more satisfactory to themselves had they been 

 allowed to make it deliberately, an impossibility un- 

 der the circumstances. So far as I have means of know- 

 ing, this letter was the last communication which 

 Thompson ever made to his father-in-law or to his 

 wife, directly or indirectly. This statement, however, 

 and the inferences which might be drawn from it, are 

 to be accepted only as negative evidence, for letters 

 may have been written and received of which there is 

 no record or tradition, and letters may have been writ- 

 ten which were never received by the parties to whom 

 they were respectively addressed. It was comparatively 

 easy, during the war, for persons in England and in this 

 country who belonged to the same side in interest and 

 sympathy to correspond with each other, taking the 

 risks of the sea, of privateering, and of capture. But 

 for those who belonged to the contending parties, sepa- 

 rated by the ocean, correspondence was more em- 

 barrassed. 



Certainly all the claims and promptings of natural 

 love are fully and tenderly indulged in that heart- 

 written letter. Filial gratitude and veneration, and a 



