Descriptions of that Provincial Congress and of its remarkable methods and still more remarkable doings, may be seen in Ramsay's History of the Itevolution in tiiwth Carolina, i., 23-25; Drayton's Memoirs of the American lierolution as relating to South Oirolina, i., 166-180 ; etc.

See, also, Journal of the Congress, re-printed in Force's American Arehires, Fourth Series, i., 1100-1118.

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, 1774-1783.

which reference has been made in connection with the call for a Provincial Congress, was greatly strengthened, immediately after the receipt of the intelligence of the military expedition to Concord, and in the midst of the intense excitement which then prevailed throughout the City, by the inroad into the County of Westchester and the City of New York, of a large number of men, from Connecticut, who had come on their own motion, unsolicited b}' any one in ; New York or elsewhere ; without the slightest authority from the Government of their own Colony ; and, evidently, bent on nothing else than to be present to share in the distribution of the booty which an evi- j dently expected general overturning of the homes j and the business-othces and warehouses of that City would have placed within their reach. They lived, on their way through Westchester-county as well as while they were within the City, entirely on their wits and on the products of their wits, professing to have come only " with a view of aiding and assisting " us in preijaring for our defense ;" but their reckless arrogance and audacity, in their assumption of authority in local afiairs as well as in other matters, in which they were evidently sustained by some of the more desperate of the leaders of the revolutionary faction, in the City of New York, which were made matters of record, had they not been only earlier specimens of the peculiarly "New England ideas " i which, subsequently, became so common and so well known, would have been regarded, by those of later periods, as unaccountable, if not impossible.* Thoughtful men, therefore, had abundant reason for reflection ; and men of property needed to provide for the security of their possessions ; and peaceful men and heads of families did well, when they sought shelter in distant parts of the country, while there were so many and such portentous warnings of the ills which were so evidently and so rapidly approaching, i The excitement and bitterness of factional strife, j not always of a purely political character, with which j the City of New York had been unceasingly afflicted, j during several years preceding the period now under consideration, had tended to the serious disturbance of the individual and social relations of many of those who lived in that City ; and the political annals of that period afford ample testimony to the fact that | terrorism, there, one of the reasonable results of the existing excitement, was prevalent, audacious, and unchecked by those in authority.