Swear it or be jailed

What happened

Newport swarmed with Loyalists, and by the autumn of 1775 it was a town under siege. Captain James Wallace's warships lay in the lower bay, plundering Rhode Island's shipping and threatening to burn Newport, and nearly half its people had fled. Rhode Island's government, fearful of the Tories and of a British attack from Boston, begged Washington for help, and he sent General Charles Lee. Lee marched into Newport on Christmas Day with a small party from Cambridge and a Providence cadet company. That evening he summoned the town's leading Loyalists to the Parade before the Colony House and demanded they swear an oath he had written, including a promise to take up arms if Congress called. Three refused. Lee gave them until morning, and when they would not swear he had them arrested and sent under guard to Providence. By his own letter to Congress he had done it "without any authority," because he held it necessary. Rothbard sees the beginning of something new: months earlier Rhode Island had made it a capital crime to betray the cause, and at the year's end Connecticut became the first colony to declare that serving the king was a crime. Newport's Tories were cowed. Congress, uneasy, would not order the same oath elsewhere.