Before the first flourish of the first trumpets had died away, those whose positions afterwards required them to conduct the prosecutions had gone too far to retract. The false and distorted statements which had found their way into the public prints, before the real truth had been ascertained, were republished and believed throughout the country; and the Quixottic expedition of U. S. troops and their impromptu associates in Lancaster county were thought by many, as well in the State of Pennsylvania as at a distance, to have been undertaken against a dangerous and resolute host of genuine traitors. The affair happening upon the eve of a popular election in our own State, and at a time when the “fire eating” party in the South was exerting its utmost to disseminate discord and dissatisfaction, furnished ambitious and unprincipled men with fuel for the flames they were striving to kindle. What wonder then if the timid and uninformed at first foresaw in this first alarm a conflagration that was to devastate the whole country?
To allay public excitement it was necessary to prove _publicly_ that these exaggerated reports of traitorous combinations were merely the result of vain boasting and a desire for notoriety on the part of a few silly men, who had not wit enough to foresee the lamentable consequences of abusing the authority with which they had been imprudently entrusted. Whether the course pursued to gain this end was the most judicious, is somewhat questionable, though it seems to have been sanctioned by the very _highest_ authority in the country. The parties implicated by the miserable management of those who took the initiative measures, had rights, and, though the prerogatives of office gave the _power_, it is doubtful whether a due regard to the public welfare justified the Federal authorities in imprisoning for months innocent men, subjecting them and their friends to the inconvenience and expense of such investigations.
To prove to the nation that its bungling agents had arrested the wrong men, cost the Government nearly Fifty Thousand Dollars. It excited between the authorities of neighboring States bitter animosities and unjust recriminations, where before had existed the best feeling and undisturbed harmony. It, for a time at least, inflamed sectional prejudices and caused renewed agitation of a question whose difficulties the greatest men of the nation had for years been striving to adjust peaceably. It cost the parties who were to be subjected to this ordeal, their liberty for months, the total abandonment, and, in some cases, the utter ruin of their business; to a few the loss of health, to all the entire privation, until the trial, of those comforts and sources of enjoyment upon which we are all so much dependent for happiness, and an expenditure of money in preparing for their defence that some were totally unable to meet, and that robbed a few of the entire earnings of industry and frugality. It cost their families many bitter tears and hours of anguish, depriving them for a protracted and severe winter of their natural protectors, upon whose exertions many of them were dependant for daily sustenance.