Some of the Connecticut militia collected volunteers from area towns in 1775 to subdue the Tories. They went to Newtown where the Episcopal Rev. John Beach was forced to sign a bond promising not to take up arms against the Revolutionary effort.
    "They used greater severity in other places where they visited, and fixed upon the first week in December to disarm the loyalists in Derby, and annihilate their influence. With a view of checking such violent proceedings, a number of his most respectable parishioners waited upon Mr. Mansfield at that critical juncture, and requested him to send to Governor Tryon of New York an account of the sufferings of the Loyalists in Connecticut, and a list of the names of those who were known to be such in his Mission. He complied with their request, and added some suggestions of  his own about the manner of reducing the colony to subjection and obedience. The day after his letter was dispatched, a friend, to whom he had communicated the knowledge of it, was seized and carried before the Committee of Inspection, who compelled him to disclose the contests, and thus Mr. Mansfield was criminated in a way that he least expected. To escape outrage, imprisonment, or death, which was meditated against him, he fled from his churches, his family and his home, and found a temporary asylum in the Town of Hempstead, on Long Island. His own narrative of his misfortunes is very touching, especially the part which relates to his domestic affairs. 'At a somewhat advanced stage of life,' said he, 'being fifty-two years old, when I hoped to have spent the remaining years in an agreeable manner, in peace and tranquility with my family, parishioners and friends, and vainly imagined that death only would make any lasting separation, I was forced to flee from home, leaving behind a virtuous, good wife, with one small child newly weaned from the breast; four other children which are small and not of sufficient age to support themselves; and four others which are adults, and all of them overwhelmed with grief, and bathed in tears and but very slenderly provided with the means of support.
    What was in this letter which Mansfield sent to Tryon, and suffered so greatly for? Besides the complaints about the treatment being received by the Loyalists, Mansfield said it was his opinion that if the King's troops were present to protect