Home / Dawson, Henry B. Westchester County, New York, During the American Revolution. Morrisania, NY: (privately printed by the author), 1886. / Passage

Westchester County, New York, During the American Revolution

Dawson, Henry B. Westchester County, New York, During the American Revolution. Morrisania, NY: (privately printed by the author), 1886. 294 words

ciliation between the Colonies and the Mother Country might be effected ; but it also maintained, in opposition to the minority of the House and more consistently with the uniform profession of loyalty to the Sovereign and of respect for the fundamental principles of the Constitution, in both of which all, the minority as well as the majority, professed to be in harmony, that a removal of the causes of the disaffection and a restoration of harmony between the excited disputants could not be secured by the use of such means as the Congress had recommended and authorized, no matter by whom organized and controlled ; and that, for those well-defined purposes, it would be preferable to adopt and employ only those means which would give offence to no one, and only those instrumentalities concerning which there could not be raised any question of their legitimacy nor of their entire fitness, within the law, for the due promotion of the great ends for which, alone, all professed

"■ to be contending. The first-named portion of the members, was, evidently, determined to force the Assembly into the line of the radical portion of the party of the Opposition, for no other purpose, however, than that of increasing the moral weight of that particular faction of the party, in its desperate struggle for the possession of the controlling power, in political affairs, within the Colony; and this, too, notwithstanding that success in such determined effort could only result in destroying the one remaining body, legally constituted and entirely unsmirched by any association with any less legally constituted body, through which the Home Government could be reached, officially, in whatever action should be taken in behalf of " the common cause ; " ' and notwithstanding, also,