Freeholders and others ; and there is evidence that quite as large a number, Freeholders and others, walked down to the Courthouse, from Captain Hatfield's Tavern, and stripped all the novelty and all there was of what was said to have been integrity from the exposed and unsuccessful coup-de-main. 1 The individual respectability of none of these, of either faction, appears to have been impeached by any one ; but Colonel Morris subsequently attempted to depreciate the political standing of some of those who were

1 From the fact that the Meeting had been organized and "had already "entered upon the business of the day,' 1 before it was known to those who were at Hatfield's Tavern, that any movement toward such an organization had been made -- a fact which was openly stated in the Protest of the one faction without having been controverted in the elaborate reply of the Chairman of the Meeting --the secrecy of the movement is established, beyond a question. The motives of those who contrived that particular mode of operations, will be manifest to all who are acquainted with the facts and with the practices of unscrupulous politicians, in Westchester-county as often as elsewhere.

2 In the narrative which the Chairman of the Meeting prepared, immediately after the adjournment of that Meeting, he stated that " a very " numerous body of the Freeholders of the County assembled at the "Court House;" and that "an inconsiderable number of Persons "( among whom were many tenants not entitled to a vote) with Isaac " Wilkins, Esq. , and Col. Philipse at their head, then appeared." In the Protest of the Inhabitants and Freeholders, subsequently published, it is stated, specifically, that when those from Captain Hatfield's Tavern entered the Courthouse, ",the numbers on each side seemed to be nearly " equal ; and both together might amount to two hundred or, at most, ' ' two hundred and fifty. ' ' Nearly a month after the publication of that Protest, and after he had secured the seat in the Continental Congress for which ho had so earnestly hankered -- his half-brother, Gouverneur, being then an aspirant to a seat in the proposed Provincial Congress, to which he was elected, on the following day -- Lewis Morris published an elaborate and very minute reply to that Protest, in which, although nearly every feature of the latter was bitterly controverted, he conveniently said nothing whatever of the number of those, of either faction, who were at the Plains ; and, therein, he emphatically acquiesced in what was said, on that subject, with so much precision, in the Protest.