August [1?] '12 P Anne
My dear husband
It is impossible to express the horror of my mind on receiving the dreadful accounts of the late riot in B_____e. Gracious god! Is it not the commencement of a Civil War? Was ever anything equal to this last outrage on the liberty of a free nation. Liberty! A free nation! We are no longer free. We are the slaves of the worst of tyrants. A Mob! And this is but a foretaste [of] the more systematic subjection to the tyrant Bonaparte. My blood curdles. Horror seizes every nerve, for turn which way [words obscured] may! It is either Bonaparte, and his detestable foreign dominion, or the more horrible prospect of civil war at home. I am irrevocably impress’d that either the one or the other or both is our miserable fate and that, closely impending. Where were you amidst this uproar? Safe I hope, for surely you had too much prudence to risk your safety in a hopeless contest.
Poor Hanson1 has smarted severely for his [fair]ness in support of the right of speech, and the right cause. Daniel Murray Esqr. too we are told is wounded. His brother James I hear has left town with an intention of seeing him