that rejection of Colonel Ten Broeck's Resolution was only the prelude, that Vote of the Assembly has supplied a theme on which those who have seemed to play the part of historians of that portion of America's history, have based much of what they have said, unduly commendatory of Massachusetts and Virginia and quite as unduly denunciatory of everything which pertained to New York, unless of some of the men of New York, of that early period, whose characters, for fidelity to the truth and uprightness in the discharge of public duties, were no better than their own. '

The lesson which the defeat of its dishonorable movement, under Colonel Ten Broeck, had given to

1 Gordon {History of American Revolution, i., 471) led off, in the work of detraction, by saying " The Massachusetts Congress were displeased with ' ' the proceedings of the General Assembly of New York," for this Vote, among others, as if the approval of any merely insurrectionary body were necessary to ensure the respectability, in history, of any General Assembly, legally elected, legally convened, and acting in conformity with law. Ramsay (History of (he American Revolution, i., 143) insinuated, in the absence of sufficient authority to assert, that "the party for " Royal Government,' 1 -- although there was not a member of that party within the Assembly, and although the Colonial Government was confessedly without influence enough to be made acquainted with its intentions--led the Assembly to reject the Resolution. Grahame (History of the United States, iv., 360) following Ramsey, and, generally, in his n«- vredited words, repeated the slander which that early writer insinuated. Leake (Memoir of General Lamb, 97) regarded the Vote as unpatriotic and " an important ministerial triumph." Lo3sing (Field Book of the Revolution, ii., 793) made " fifteen of the twenty-four Members of the Assembly, Loyalists ;" and he attributed the Vote to that unduly assumed cause, although, in fact, every member professed to have been equally loyal to the Sovereign.