sembly having been won over to the side of the crown, numerous attacks were made upon it, among them a printed handbill accusing its members of treachery. A reward was offered for information as to the author, with the result that James Parker, who had printed it, and who was threatened with the loss of the small political position he held, gave information that Alexander McDougall was the author.
"The method lately used in New York to post up inflammatory handbills," states a contemporary of this particularly famous one, "was the same as used in England at the time of the Pretender. It was done by a man who carried a little boy in a box like a magic lantern, and while he leaned against the wall, as if to rest himself, the boy drew back the slide, pasted on the paper, and shutting himself up again, the man took the proper occasion to walk off to another resting-place."
Concerning McDougall's activities during the war, his short biographies are explicit, but of his career up to that time, it is to the unfriendly Jones that we must turn. He was the son of a poor milkman, we are told, who had taken up seafaring as a vocation, finally becoming the captain of a privateer.
The Tory historian pays him an unusual tribute: "He was a principal promoter and encourager of the unhappy disputes which raged with such violence in the colony for many years, terminated in a rebellion, in a dismemberment of the empire, in almost a total destruction of thirteen valuable provinces and in the loss of not less than 100,000 brave men.[1]
Surely such a man is worthy of our attention, especially in view of the fact that he was, if not one of the editors, at least one of the principal contributors to Holt's
- ↑ Jones, History of New York, i, 26.
