Adams’s estimation. “Humbling the Tories” had become a blood sport in Massachusetts Bay, with excrement smeared on houses or dumped through open windows, with severed sheep’s heads tossed into open chaises, or with loyalists locked in smokehouses—the chimney flues obstructed—until they renounced the Crown. A tavern keeper in South Danvers was forced to recite in public, “I, Isaac Wilson, a Tory I be, / I, Isaac Wilson, I sells tea.” A radical Presbyterian cleric thanked God from the pulpit for “sufficient hemp in the colonies to hang all the Tories,” while a loyalist woman hoped someday soon
