On this day 250 years ago in Plymouth, Massachusetts a crowd of Patriots accosted merchants from nearby Marshfield who had travelled to Plymouth to attend an auction of hemp and other commodities. The Marshfield merchants were members of an association that had pledged loyalty to the King and Parliament. Members of the Plymouth crowd shouted that “No Damned Tory Should bid” there and that hemp was “very Good to make halters for the Torys” and that the leading Marshfield merchant should have “sum of it abot his neck.” The Patriot crowd then seized the horses of the Marshfield merchants and made them sign statements withdrawing from the association of loyalists before allowing them to retrieve their horses and return to Marshfield.

Source: Norton, Mary Beth, 1774 the Long Year of Revolution, New York: Vintage Books, 2021 at p. 287.

Also on that day in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Scottish immigrant Robert Aitken, a printer and owner of the Pennsylvania Magazine, or American Monthly Museum hired newly-arrived English immigrant Thomas Paine as the editor of his new publication.

Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40244868?read-now=1&seq=3#page_scan_tab_contents