History of Westchester County, New York, Vol. I
Doctor Sparks erroneously stated, ( Wriliiigs of George M'lKhiiigtoii, iii., 470, note,) that that change in the title of the Provincial Congress was made on the iiiiUh of July, and cited the Manuscript Jounml of the Oangren, of the ninth of July, as his authority : we have preferred to depend on the official copy of that Juunuil, as it was printed by order of the Legislature, in 1842, which clearly indicates that the change was made on the following day.
'John Adams was either a very poor judge of human nature or a very besotted and haughty aristocrat, regarding the masses as unworthy of his sympathy or respect, or both, when he wrote of these people, then
nothing else than a continued and a more than ever before besotted haughtiness, utterly unmindful of the Rights of those who were assumed to be subject to their authority, and a continued and more than ever before mulish stubbornness, in their continued determination to reduce every one who opposed them, no matter how slightly, to an unconditional and absolute submission of thought, word, and deed, to their oligarchic authority, regardless of any and every consequence to others or to the country at large -- only such a haughtiness and such a stubbornness, indeed, as had characterized the Colonial policy and the administration of Lord Bute and Lord North and Lord George Germaine and their Tory associates, in England; the same as those which had controlled the three Congresses which had preceded it, after the members of the first of them had been induced to wander into the green pastures of the revolutionary faction -- could have induced the master-spirits of this new Provincial Congress, under the peculiar circumstances which had recently arisen, to disregard the significant teachings of their earlier policy, and to create disaffection and to raise up enemies when harmony and a concert of action, in the cause of their common country, had become so vitally necessary.