The message which the letter of Edmund Pendleton had conveyed to the Provincial Congress was the celebrated and well-known Resolutions of that Convention, adopted on the fifteenth of May preceding, through which the Delegation from Virginia, in the Continental Congress, was t««/?-MC^e(/ " to declare the " United Colonies free and independent States, ab- " solved from all allegiance to or dependence upon "the Crown and Parliament of Great Britain; and " that it give the assent of this Colony to such Decla- " ration, and to whatever measures maybe thought " ])roper and necessary, by the Congress, for forming " foreign alliances and a Confederation of the Colonies, " at such time and in the manner as to them shall seem " best ; Provided, That the power of forming Go?ern- " ment for and the regulation of the internal concerns "of each Colony be left to the respective Colonial " Legislatures ; " ^ and the Provincial Congress ordered

1 This admirable Reply to the Answer of the Provincial Clongress, which was more especially devoted to the proposal of that body to impose a uew form of Government on the Colony or State, without having submitted it to the body uf the People, for ratification or rejection, was in these words :

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2 Journal of a Convention of DeUgates from the Counties and Corporations in the Colony of Virijinia, Jield ai the Capitol, in tlie City of WiUianvsburgb, " Wednesday May 15, 177U."

" that John Jay and Gouverneur Morris be a Commit- "tee to prepare a draft of an answer to it, and to "report the same'" -- without the usual injunction, " with all convenient speed," however, since the Provincial Congress was not in a hurry to consider the subject of Independence ; and it would not be so, at least until what it evidently preferred, the question of Reconciliation, should have been met and finally disposed of