On January 24, 1779, Joseph Maddock, leader of the Quaker community of Wrightsborough, Georgia, must have anguished over how close he came to violating his commitment to the pacifist, non-partisan, anti-military principles of the Society of Friends. On that day, he visited the home of John Moore where he met with Moore and other neighbors William Millen and James Bryan. They had gathered to meet with a man whom Millen later identified as a James Boyd, a man who had arrived from Savannah, the capitol of the province that had fallen to a British army on the previous December 29. This covert agent produced a proclamation of January 10 that called for all Americans to return to the king's standard and also instructions from a Lieutenant Colonel Archibald Campbell for Boyd to reach the South Carolina frontier on a secret mission to assemble the Americans who had remained loyal to the king and to bring them on February 9 to Augusta, Georgia, only hours from Wrightsborough. Maddock had been called to the meeting for, in Millen's words, "[Boyd] knowed the King's Heart was in his [Maddock's] Bosome."1 Other local residents James Coates, Joshua Ryal, Thomas Ansley, and David Baldwin who, like the others mentioned above, were not Quakers, also came to Moore's house to hear Boyd's message. Of this assemblage, Millen only mentioned Ansley as having any problem, and that not stated, with the terms presented by the king's agent.2