lands. “This is a season,” he adds, “when most or all farmers have their barns or stock yards filled with the produce of their plantations.”
John Ross, the celebrated Philadelphia lawyer, noted in his private docket, in November, 1765, that a case in which he represented some young Quakers, accused of a criminal charge, had been adjourned three times by Moore without cause, though seventeen witnesses were present; “the first instance of that kind of oppression that ever happened in this province,” and that is was supposed to have occurred, “from his great love to Quakers.” At the time of the outbreak of the Revolutionary war he was an old man of about seventy-six years, and much troubled with the gout. He was, however, keenly alive to the importance of the struggle, and his sympathies, like those of the greater number of men who had secured wealth, position and reputation under the old order of things, were entirely on the side of the crown. The rebels he regarded as a rude rabble. Jacob Smith, a sort of political eavesdropper, made an affidavit that he heard Moore say, at Moore Hall, on the 7th of May, 1775, that the people of Boston were a “vile set of rebels,” and that “he was determined to commit every man to prison who would associate or muster.” There was much excitement abroad, and it was the way of the new men who were coming into power to compel by force those who were suspected of Toryism to recant. On June 6th, the committee of Chester county, of which Anthony Wayne was chairman, visited Moore Hall for this purpose. Broken in strength and ill in health, the Judge was brought to bay, confronted with a power which Great Britain, in eight years of war, was unable to subdue. The spirit, however, with which two decades earlier he had defied the Assembly and suffered imprisonment was still undaunted,
