When the great popular issue arose in 1733 on the Van Dam salary question he was a zealous supporter of his father's cause. Cosby, in his denunciatory communications to the Lords of Trade respecting the attitude of Chief Justice Morris, speaks with savage resentment of the son also, who, he says, having "got himself elected an assemblyman for a borough, gave all the opposition he could to the measures the house took to make the government easy." With this wanton behavior of the junior Morris, Cosby continues, the father was well pleased, " wherein without

HISTORY

WESTCHESTER

COUNTY

doubt he had an eye on the Boston assembly,1 whose spirit begins to diffuse itself too much amongst the other provinces." During the absence of the deposed chief justice in England (1734-36) the son took his place here in public leadership. After Cosby's death, early in 1730, an animated controversy sprang up concerning the legality of the accession of Clarke, at that time president of the council, to the position of lieutenant-governor, the popular faction declaring his assumption of power to be irregular. This was the occasion of numerous official letters of complaint by the unhappy lieutenant-governor. He related how Morris and his son, Van Dam, Smith, and Alexander had by their long-continued acts " wrought the people to a pitch of rebellion." " These are the men," he said, " who declaim against the king's prerogative, who poison the minds of the people, who libel the governor and all in authority in weekly printed papers, and who have endeavored to distress the governor in his just administration." Hewent so far as to recommend, as a drastic remedy, that the younger Morris and others be sent to England for sedition, a thing which he regretted he could not venture to do without orders, because " forbidden by His Majesty's instructions to send any prisoners to England without sufficient proof of their crimes to be transmitted with them." They were a worrisome set, these Morrises, to royal governors having a fancy for arbitrary power and a strong distaste for popular interference with their executive ease.