Writing on the 21st of February, 1770, soon after the Golden Hill conflict, he said: ,( The persons who appear on these occasions are of inferior rank, but it is not doubted that they are directed by some persons of distinction in this place. It is likewise thought they are encouraged bysome persons of note1 in England. They consist chiefly of dissenters, who are very numerous, especially in the country, and have a great influence over the country members of the assembly. The most active among them are independents from New England, or educated there, and of republican principles." On the other hand, said Governor ('olden, " the friends of government are of the Church

HISTORY

WESTCHESTER

COUNTY

of England, the Lutherans, and the old Dutch congregation, with several Presbyterians." From this classification the great preponderance ofaggressive sentiment in the province is a very manifest fact. The "dissenters" were, indeed, overwhelmingly in the majority. Even in our County of Westchester, where powerful influences were arrayed on the side of the Church of England, its adherents did not compare in numbers with those of other denominations. According to a list compiled by the Rev. W. S. Coffey, of Mount Vernon, of the church edifices erected in this comity previously to the Revolution, only seven of those structures belonged to the Church of England, while nineteen were built by other congregations, including "Independents," Friends, Presbyterians, Huguenots, Reformed Dutch, and Reformed Protestant. Governor Colden's enumeration of the Lutherans, the old Dutch, and "several Presbyterians" among the "friends of government" is merely a recognition that Toryism did not wholly depend for support upon the aristocratic church. The Lutherans, or Germans, and the "old Dutch," belonging to an alien race, deliberate, slow, easily satisfied with moderately free institutions, accustomed by all their traditions to live under authority without very jealously scrutinizing its nature or limiting its bounds, had ways of thinking quite foreign to those of the restless propagandists of American liberty, whom, indeed, they neither understood nor desired to understand.