In 1757, a full generation before the American Revolution, British soldiers in Albany, New York—the main military staging area for the French and Indian War—demanded that the local sheriff open up his jail to detain a town farmer accused of harassing nearby troops.
The sheriff, a physically unimpressive shoemaker in his early 30s named Abraham Yates, refused on the grounds that they had no legal writ. Yates complained about the marauding ways of the occupying forces to John Campbell, Fourth Earl of Loudoun, who had recently been installed as England's commander in chief for all of North America. After Lord Loudoun imperiously retorted that there was a war on, Yates filed a complaint against the commander to New York's lieutenant governor, James De Lancey. That's when things got spicy.
