The organization of the Provincial Congress, on the twenty-third of May, 1775, has been already mentioned and described : ' a more particular description of the membership of that body which, in the interest of those who were in rebellion, was to take places beside the several departments of the legally constituted Colonial (fovernment, in the government of tlie Colony, and which was to wield so important an influence over all who were within the Colony, seems to be incumbent on us, in this place.

Of the fourteen Counties of which the Colony of New York was then composed, thirteen were properly designated " the Counties," or " the country Counties," since they were mainly occupii'd by conununitics of farmers, unless iji the instances of the frontier Counties, in which hunters and trappers and surveying parties and, not unfrequently, families and villages of the aborigines, aflbrded considerable portions of their continually changing i)opulations. Of these thirteen rural Counties, some of the inhabitants of Albany and Duchess and Westchester and Queens made pretensions to something of social superiority, somewhat akin to the aristocracy of the City of New York ; but, in none of them, unless in Albany-county, was there any j)retension to a controlling local aristocracy; and in all of them, the actual tillers of the soil largely outnumbered all other classes, on the Census-lists. From such widely dissimilar constituencies, in town and country, therefore, even from those who were not widely separated and differently situated, there could not be expected Delegations to the Provincial Congress who were homogeneous in their characters and dispositions and inclinations; and as all those rural Delegations ])Ossessed more or less of the elements which [jrevailed among those who were nominally their respective constituencies, it was to be a work of time and patience and skill, in partisan and factional discipline, to bring all of them into " working order,'' in the interest ol' the controlling, or revolutionary, faction of the aristocracy -- a work of which notice will be taken, hereafter.