Bancroft's Jlistory of the United i<tat€s, original edition, vii., 40, correctly yii-Mf the honor of having originated the Congres-s, to New Y'ork ; but, unaccountably, it assigns it, in New Y'ork, sometimes to an imaginary " old committee," whicli had ceased to exist when the Stanip-,\ct, which had called it into existence and to which its operations had been limited, Wiis repealed, eight years previously, and sometimes to the eight or t-in men who styled themselves and who were known as ' tlie Sons of I^ib- "erty," all of wlmm who were members of the Committee of Correspondence, appointed at the Coffee-house, were notoriously in accord with the men of Boston, who advocated an immediate suspension of the Commerce of the Continent and opposed the proposition to call a Congress for the general relief of all the Colonies.
It is also well known, concerning those " Sons of Liberty " that, after 17()6, they made no pretension that a permanent Committee existed ; that their correspondence was conducted in their individual capacities, and not officially, as a Committee ; that none of their correspondence, as far as it is now known, alluded to a Congress of the Colonies, for any purpose ; and that their especially careful historian and eulogist, Isaac (J. Leake, not only made no such claim, in their behalf, but expressly and in unmistakable words, gave that honor to the Committee of Corresiwndence w liich had been appointed by the body of the inhabitants, at the Coffee-house. (Meinoir of the Life and Times of General John Lamb, Albany: 1857, 88.) In the same author's centenary edition of that History of the United iitates, Boston: 1876, iv., 326, the same statement was made, without the slightest change ; and Lodge's //istori/ o/ (/le English Colonial, New Y'ork : 1881, 489, without Bancroft's airy rhetoric, in a far more historical style than that historian employs, in some of his words, and without the slightest change in its substance, perpet\iated the error.