History of Westchester County, New York, Vol. I
The fii-st-named portion of the members, was, evidently, determined to force the Assembly into the line of the radical portion of the party of the Opposition, for no ofher purpose, however, than that of increasing the moral weight of that particular faction of the party, in its desperate struggle for the possession of the controlling power, in political affairs, within the Colony ; and this, too, notwithstanding that success in such determined effort could only result in destroying the one remaining body, legally constituted and entirely unsmirched by any association with any less legally constituted body, through which the Home Government could be reached, officially, in whatever action should be taken in behalf of " the common cause ;" ' and notwithstanding, also, that the supporters of the Congress, in the event of their success, would, thereby, destroy a most powerfiil instrumentality, then preparing to labor, independently, in a line which whilst parallel to that already occupied by the Congress itself, was, nevertheless, for the accomplishment of the great purposes for securing which that Congress had been originally proposed and was subsequently organized, and was, then, among other less desirable purjjoses, through its own appointed instrumentalities, apparently laboring. The last-named portion of the members, not less determined than the other, resolutely maintained that the Assembly should remain entirely independent from all those popular Committees and Congresses which had been moving and laboring, during the preceding year, in lines of action which they had respectively approved, each for itself, for the common purposes ;