It is not, now, known, beyond a peradventure, just what means were thus employed ; but the copies of that insidious Circular Letter which were intended for residents of Westchester-county were evidently sent to a leading Westchester-county politician ; and, by him, whomsoever he may have been, they were so manipulated that they reached only those residents of the County who would most surely promote the political purposes of that particular Westchesterian who had been thus entrusted with the delivery of them. 1

1 We have preferred to consider that there was an intermediate agency, between the Chairman of the New York Committee and the several Westchester-county gentlemen into whose hands his Circular Letters eventually fell, because those gentlemen were mainly residents of the town of Westchester and of the neighboring village of New Rochelle ; because there was nothing, in that Circular Letter, which designated any time or place of meeting, for any Caucus or other Assemblage which might be considered necessary, for the particular purposes mentioned in that Circular Letter ; because, only on the warrant of that particular Circular Letter, explicitly stated by them, a dozen men, from at least four different Towns, spontaneously came together, at the same time, in a distant Town in which none of them lived, and on the same errand. Not one of the number was from Towns lying northward from the White Plains ; not one had come from all the country lying westward from the Bronx-river ; there was not present either a Van Cortlandt or a Thomas, already well-known popular leaders, either of whom would have been formidable, as a rival, against any new aspirant for the leadership of the movement and the spoils of office to which that movement tended. There was present, however, one who had, previously, been politically dormant ; by whom the machinery of the movement was evidently run ; and by whom, subsequently, as will be hereafter seen, entirely through its instrumentality, a place was secured for himself, in the Congress of the Continent, and an opening made for the accession to office and aristocratic consequence and influence, of others of his wide-spread family.