Dawson's reputation as a minute and entirely well-meaning historical writer -- a reputation appreciated especially by his many surviving friends in Westchester County, -- his study of our Revolutionary period can not, in a work on the general history of the county, escape the passing criticism which its spirit merits, as, on the other hand, the abundant historical data that we owe to his researches can not escape grateful recognition. It is greatly to be regretted that to an essay prepared with so much painstaking he should, on grounds not only the most unjustified but the most trivial, have given a general tendency of such extreme unaccept ability to American readers. We have characterized his performance as astonishing, and we know of no other fitting term to be applied to a cynically pro-Tory account by an American historian, more than a century after the Revolutionary War, of the course of that struggle in a county distinguished for prompt acceptance and unfaltering and self-sacrificing support of the issue of liberty under the most difficult and menacing circumstances imaginable. During the ten years from the passage of the Stamp Act, in 1705, to the end of the provincial assembly, in 1775, the county (including the Manor of Cortlandt and the borough Town of Westchester) was

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represented in the assembly, for longer or briefer periods, by Colonel Frederick Philipse (3d), Peter de Lancey and John, his brother, Judge John Thomas, Philip Verplanck, Pierre Van Cortlandt, Isaac Wilkins, and Colonel Lewis Morris (3d). Philipse and Thomas served continuously throughout that period, both sitting for the county. Van Cortlandt succeeded Verplanck as member from Cortlandt Manor. Morris was a delegate for only one year. The de Lanceys and Wilkins were from Westchester Borough, Wilkins being assemblyman during the four closing years (1772-75*.